_____Essay___________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________

 Liturgy as a Gift to Posterity

By Leila Marie Lawler

My only comment is one I have made before, and that I think has a parallel with my thinking at least about the whole birth-control issue. (In a lot of ways there are analogies between marriage and liturgy, contraception and creeping “Elvis-ism.”)

My comment is this: This question isn’t just about how you and I and a million other Catholics feel about whether the Mass is or is not authentic. It isn’t just about how comfortable or uncomfortable we find it, how horrifying the horror stories or how hopeful the signs of hope are to us. It’s about whether or not the Catholic faith will be passed on to another generation, and whether or not there will be enough forward motion to keep it alive for generations to come. In other words, the criteria for liturgical celebration must be whether it is capable of engendering growth, of captivating a new generation, of offering the possibility of being something one’s children will want to pass on to their children. Paradoxically, it can only be that if it does that wordless thing that we have jettisoned: if it is sign and not explanation. There is too much talking now to be anything much.

The parallel I see with birth control is the fixation on the relationship between the man and the woman, how will they express their love. Meanwhile, they are getting older and missing their opportunities for building a family: having children, sacrificing, suffering. One day, they realize that they may have expressed their feelings, but they have nothing to show for it: no faces around the table, no one to visit them, no grandchildren. It really hits you when you realize that you are not only having children; you are having generations of children, or making them possible. And at some point, it becomes of paramount importance whether the vision that we have will be passed along to those generations we will never see. They won’t know our names, or us, but something of us, our affirmation, will be in them.

Likewise, in the Mass, we are not just pleasing ourselves but offering, preserving, keeping something for our children—something that will sustain them when we are no longer there. If it’s all just entertainment, and if we have conditioned them to look for entertainment in all things, then they will undoubtedly move on when they are no longer entertained. But if the Mass is the Mass, and its timelessness, transcendence, and “otherness” are allowed to remain, then our children will have something to turn to. I would rather have them disaffected at 16 or 17, but knowing where to go when they are 35, than singing and swaying as teenagers and “moving on” when they are older.

Making memories
Here is another aspect of this point: Older people have memories, and so to them it doesn’t matter so much if things aren’t done a certain way today. They have cousins, they remember the incense, they had a dozen aunts. But when they don’t have more than two children, or when they tamper with the Mass, their children have very different memories, or none at all. They—the children—have no memories of cousins, or incense, or a priest intoning words in a low voice.

My daughter recently made an interesting observation about the way Mass is celebrated at the Benedictine abbey near our home: “Mom, you feel as if it would go on without you.” I find that a very telling point, especially when you realize that she—and the other kids—are very moved by that quality. They feel closer to God when the Mass is celebrated without what you call “being starved for affection.” What the monks have has been passed down through the ages. What about the parishes? The “disconnect” is fatal.

So that is my point. We are, as a culture, pretty oblivious to the demographics of our situation. Economically, culturally, and spiritually we are on the brink of the abyss. But we will only see it in another 25 years, when all the older folks have died off—taking their memories with them—and suddenly the world will be revealed as an empty place, a place where there are few children, and the ones there are will know nothing of the ancient things, because it wasn’t passed all along to them—it wasn’t lived and passed along, by us.

Back to Catholic World Report January 2002 Table of Contents