Dear priests who improvise at Mass: Please don’t. At least not in gauche way. But if you have inspiration to pass on, go ahead. Huh?
May 03, 2019
Brother Joe Hoover, S.J., America Magazine poetry editor, has been doing more than showing up at mass.
“O priests, who improv prayers at Mass!” he writes. “Who give opening monologues to start the show!
“Who deliver closing arguments before the dismissal!
“Who make meaningful statements in between the ‘Lord have mercy’s’! (Lord, when we are not our best selves, when others do not receive the totality of all that we could be.... Lord have mercy.”)
Or “deliver closing arguments before the dismissal! . . . make meaningful statements in between the ‘Lord have mercy’s’! (Lord, when we are not our best selves, when others do not receive the totality of all that we could be.... Lord have mercy.)”
You know who are. . .
You “feel the need to make Mass personal or interesting or more spiritual than it appears on the surface to be . . . suddenly put the sign of peace at a different part of the Mass or change up in some fashion the standing and kneeling and sitting.”
You “do not want to appear . . . cold, officious church functionaries just rattling off words handed to them by a hyper-literal worship committee in some cold cellar of the Vatican.”
Are you listening?
O priests, trust yourselves! Trust that you are interesting and personal and spiritual as you are. [But what if you’re not?]
Trust that the energy you exude, your presence, your physicality, your posture, your voice is spiritual enough. [You’ve got it, show it.]
Trust that, and just say the words! Do the gestures! They are enough! It is like the old actor’s maxim: “Don’t just do something, stand there!”
It’s you he’s talking to.
Joe accuses, but he also advises:
Even if parts of the liturgical script have been changed (some of it quite tragically—when you lose good poetry you lose good theology), even if it is not as lovely anymore, even then: Adding more words will not make Mass “better.”
No sir!
What you do is this:
“. . . cleanly speak the words as they are . . . let them flow through you, [and] the people in the pews may hear the Mass as they have never heard it before. “
Can you do that?
Yes you can!
“The Mass will . . . become interesting and personal and new. You do not need to do more. It’s not about you,” Brother Joe says.
Well maybe Joe would like to adjust that last sentence, in that the whole business seems to be about these priests . . .
Forget that. He means the congregation. As for himself, he can say all this because he’s a brother, not a priest, no “student of . . . the negotiables and non-negotiables of Mass-saying.” He has “no canonical agenda.”
He better not, of course, even if he were a priest — or a bishop for that matter. Trouble could become his middle name.
No, he’s “an actor, a playwright and someone who sits in the pews watching priests who feel that to follow the script is to essentially slice their brains out of their body and hand it over to Holy Mother Church.”
Can’t stand it, have to improvise, apparently.
Whatever. Joe is not all that opposed to improvising. Depends how it’s done.
Seeing the priest as an actor, he urges him “not simply to speak the text,” but also to give his audience “an experience,” as one “on stage” portraying his “spontaneous reactions,” keeping in mind that the point of it all is to help people “to pray.”
In pursuit of which he can do the opposite of what Joe’s been saying, “make comments during Mass.”
“Something falls and you acknowledge it; an altar server yawns dramatically, a baby cries with some kind of perfect timing, respond! Be human!” Joe urges.
Yes and no, Joe. He’s more than a functionary but he’s also more than — what? — an entertainer. And he owes it to pew-sitters to reflect his divine office, referring here not to the once-required daily prayers of the priest but to his unique role in re-enacting Calvary.
Joe has something else in mind. It’s the performance that counts.
He knows a priest who “during a chapel Mass, after holding his hands over the bread and wine and reciting ‘Make holy these gifts,’ then gestured to [his] small congregation,” adding “and these gifts.” Joe found it a “stunning” moment.
This man “could bring it off,” he says.
“Liturgy is not a science,” he explains. “If prayer were to become math, God help us all.”
“So yes,” he says, “if in some inspired moment at Mass you let go with something beautiful or funny or timely—unforced, not cloying, not ingratiating—fine. Pay attention. Live within the context. Don’t be rote and unaware.”
Let the spirit (of the moment) move you, but do it tastefully. And with your audience in mind.
I’ve been there for that sort of thing gone wild, and been appalled, amazed at the sacrilege involved, flip commentary and the like. And feel certain that’s not what Joe has in mind.