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Contents © 1999
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

To Pay Attention At Mass

by Broderick Barker

During our Easter family reunion, my dad, a man who spends up to an hour in prayer each morning, admitted that he was having a terrible time with distraction during Mass. It had gotten to the point where he sometimes missed the consecration. He asked for advice. I suggested kneeling without the kneeler, letting the pain of marble against knees serve to alert him to the matter at hand.

Distraction is a familiar bugbear for me. As a teenager, I was plagued with impure thoughts during Mass -- such temptation without occasion is a powerful argument for the existence of the devil. To counter it, I imagined the evil phantasm occupying the space between my skull and my brain, which had contracted as it was distracted from its proper object, the Mass. I then pictured my brain swelling with renewed vigor and attention, spattering the phantasm against the inside of my skull, leaving flesh-toned splotches of color as it slid down and away.

Now, I contend with less obvious monsters, thoughts not evil in themselves, but out of place during worship. I don't think Dad and I are alone in this. When I was about seven, I remember noticing that at the beginning of Mass, my grandmother would take out her Rosary beads, wrap them tightly around her hand, and recite the Rosary in silence. I thought this curious. Mom had told me in somber tones that I should never look toward the back of the church during Mass, never turn my back on the priest. I should pay attention to what was going on on the altar. Was my grandmother paying attention to the Mass or her Rosary?

Years later, in college, I found myself in the midst of a lively debate between devotees of the old Tridentine Mass and those supporting the "Novus Ordo," the new rite that had allegedly been born amid a storm of controversy, dark dealing, and Protestant midwifery during the Second Vatican Council. This was all news to me -- the Novus Ordo was all I knew -- but I soon got swept into the fray, along with many others. I remember a normally taciturn classmate of mine once arguing, with considerable emotion, "The current Order of Mass was instituted for a reason. Things weren't perfect in the old days. A lot of times, people would say their Rosaries during Mass instead of paying attention, because it was so hard to follow." The Order changed, but my grandmother didn't.

That same year, I obtained a little book at a Catholic book sale on campus: "Devotions for Holy Communion." I liked the pious illustrations, the meditations from the saints, the crinkly onion-skin pages. The book exuded oldness, and offered what I took to be an old piece of advice: it opened by saying that while the Mass was a communal prayer and should be attended to by the faithful, sometimes, it might be helpful to read books like this one instead. The tacit admission was that the Tridentine rite was indeed hard to follow. There were sacred mysteries to be celebrated, but perhaps they proved for some to be too mysterious, too obscure, to engage the soul properly.

I am often pained at what looks like the sacrifice of the sacrificial aspect of the Mass for the sake of the communal aspect. An architect who designed a church in the round, one which allowed parishoners to gaze across the altar at one another, once told me that people got tired of all sitting and looking in the same direction as if they were on an airplane. This begs the question of what they were looking at, whether the Mass ought to direct our attention towards one another or towards something greater than ourselves, something divine. But that does not mean that the communal aspect has no place. I like that the congregation joins in some of the prayers -- the act of contrition, the Gloria, the profession of faith, the Our Father. The community is speaking with one voice in a way that one voice might not convey.

A fellow student at my college once said that the garbled roar of the faithful during Mass sounded like the droning of the wretched crowds on Good Friday. I admit it may be less than harmonious, less than beautiful, but I think there is value in it. There are times when the priest acts and speaks as only he can, and those times must be preserved inviolate. But I wouldn't want him to shoulder the entire liturgical burden. I might get to feeling as if I had nothing to do with it, as if it was not "our sacrifice of praise" that was being offered, but only the priest's. This would work on a lurking belief that matters spiritual are the business of spiritual men -- men who make holiness their business, as it were. It would play on my spiritual sloth. I might drift, not even into the pious recitation of the Rosary, but into my own reverie.

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