Dispensations for All
Some said yes, because the Mass took place after 12:00 noon; some said no, because the Mass took place before sunset; some wanted to ask the priest whether it counted, and, if not, whether he’d give everyone a dispensation.
I, a Lutheran at the time, was disgusted, and told my Catholic girlfriend about it. Sunday worship is a way of giving thanks, I explained. It should be an act of appreciation and love, not a burdensome chore that we try to dispatch as quickly as possible. She and her relatives, I told her, had the entirely wrong attitude.
Since becoming Catholic ten years ago, I have, against my will, increasingly adopted the “Does it count?” attitude. The Sunday “do or spiritually die” Mass requirement seems to foster it because you are required to attend, even at great inconvenience (as when on vacation — something I never did as a Lutheran, unless I was visiting my grandparents). Consequently, it starts to become something that must be accomplished every week, regardless of circumstances.
One time, for instance, I was in charge of my three young children for a weekend. My children were ages four, three, and twenty months. A reverential and awe-invoking Mass wasn’t going to happen for me (if I was going to shed any tears, it wouldn’t be from compunction). So I took the easiest way out and attended another parish’s Mass — a “quick and dirty” Mass with no singing, a five-minute homily, and a priest with a fast liturgical deliverance. Elapsed time: About thirty-five minutes (my friends call it the “drive-through” Mass). Without even breaking a sweat or losing my temper in the pew, I was back in the park, toddlers swinging and laughing, and my sanity intact.
I simply dreaded the idea of going to Mass, but I went. Under such circumstances, the “Does it count?” attitude starts to creep into a person’s thinking. Mass becomes an obligation and little more because little more comes of it. It’s understandable.
The “Does it count?” attitude also avoids an odd “all or nothing” attitude prevalent in many forms of Protestantism. There is a tendency to believe that Christians must undertake holy endeavors with great eagerness: Come with 100% sincerity or don’t come at all. This, no doubt, is somewhat laudatory, but let’s face it: Sometimes it’s not possible. In fact, it’s frequently not possible. Prayer, including the prayer of the liturgy, is difficult and we usually undertake it with grudging effort. In the words of Romano Guardini: “Man, on the whole, does not enjoy prayer.” C.S. Lewis admitted the same thing to a friend: “Well, let’s now at any rate come clean. Prayer is irksome. An excuse to omit it is never unwelcome. When it is over, this casts a feeling of relief and holiday over the rest of the day. We are reluctant to begin. We are delighted to finish. While we are at prayer … any trifle is enough to distract us.”
Acceptance and Submission
If we reserve holy practices to times when we “feel up to it,” we’ll find ourselves not feeling up to it very often. The “all or nothing” approach is mentally and emotionally burdensome, reserving religious practice to the already-sainted and producing an immense sense of guilt when we undertake a religious pursuit less than perfectly. As a general rule, the result is not more attentive religious practices, but avoidance of religious practices.
Finally, and least importantly, the “Does it count?” attitude also has the advantage of efficiency. Before I became Catholic, on Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings I would off and on consider whether I should go to church. The issue hung over my head for a twelve-hour block every week (and if I didn’t go, the guilt quietly hung over my head for additional hours or days). Today, I hear couples bantering back and forth about whether to go to church, wasting more time discussing it than it would take to attend. From a practical standpoint, either decide to attend weekly or don’t attend at all. Anything in the middle is a sheer waste of time and energy.
The “Does it count?” attitude has severe shortcomings, no doubt about it. But the seeds of obedience are there, it brings us to God and the Eucharist, and the possibility of growth is immense. Before condemning it, we would do better to commend it with the reservation that something better ought to replace it. And that, quite frankly, is the attitude we should take toward all spiritual endeavors: commendation with reservation. For all such endeavors are good, but all of them, given our status as fallen beings, are limited. But from those limited endeavors issue unlimited, eternal, possibilities.
A person with St. Therese’s mindset can pretty much accept anything that is thrown at him during the day — or during the Mass. He does not grow irritated or overly distracted by any surroundings or circumstances, because he doesn’t think much about them. If his kids are unruly, he will attend to them, without thinking about the benefits of the Mass he’s missing, then return to the Mass, without thinking about the benefits he’s going to get. He just accepts his surroundings, allowing grace to work where it will, but with no thought of the grace.
It may seem awfully simple or even common-sensical, but it’s an approach that I suspect eludes most young parents. I know it eluded me for the first few years of fatherhood as I sweated through the Mass, trying to get as much out of it as I could and despairing when I was distracted for prolonged periods. I have found it a highly beneficial approach to worship under trying circumstances.
Whether we struggle or not, the weekly Mass is a requirement that is ignored only at the price of grave (and potentially mortal) sin. Whether you approach Mass with reverence and awe, or as an existentialist, or among rushing children, you must attend.
It may seem harsh, but it isn’t. It’s the bare minimum you need to do as a Christian. If it’s too hard for you, then I suspect you need to ask yourself a serious question about your faith: Does your faith mean anything to you?
Does it count?
This article originally appeared in Envoy Magazine.
Reconsidering One's Approach
But it’s still not right. The “Does it Count?” attitude is problematical. The Sunday Mass obligation should not be something that we approach as drudgery, an obligation imposed on us by a sadistic God who demands our attendance as a gangster demands protection money.
It should be a joyous occasion. It is, in the words of the Catechism, a “weekly celebration of the Creator and Redeemer of his people.” In his Apostolic Letter, On Keeping the Lord’s Day Holy, Pope John Paul II described the Sunday Mass in glowing words: “At Sunday Mass, Christians relive with particular intensity the experience of the Apostles on the evening of Easter when the Risen Lord appeared to them as they were gathered together …. In celebrating the Eucharist, the community opens itself to communion with the universal Church … until love is brought to perfection.” It should have a “festive character” with songs that “express a joyful heart, accentuating the solemnity of the celebration and fostering the sense of a common faith and a shared love.”
This description stands a far distance from the “Does it count?” attitude, and I think it’s safe to say that those with that attitude should reconsider their approach to Mass.
But I’m still not willing to concede that the “Does it count?” attitude is all bad. It has a few important virtues.
First and foremost, it evidences a deep, or intuitive, sense of obedience (especially in light of some of the wretched liturgies found in American parishes these days), and obedience is a great virtue because it’s a sign of humility, the first among the virtues. The obedient person doesn’t think about himself or his opinion or his inconvenience, he just does what he is told to do.
The Magisterium demands weekly attendance of Mass, and the ordinary Catholic complies, without really even thinking about it. He doesn’t contrive reasons not to attend, thereby quietly and disingenuously disobeying, such as (my favorite) “the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath, and going to Mass in these circumstances is too much of a hassle.” When a person rationalizes like this, he is asserting his own opinions over the Church’s teaching — an especially dastardly undertaking because it is arrogance bolstered by ignorance, which is a nearly-impossible thing to break apart. The ordinary Catholic’s obedience helps him to avoid these all-too-common modern tendencies.
This type of obedience is also good because it forces attendance at Mass, regardless of whether we will feel the awe of its mysteries. This, in turn, can produce spiritual benefits even if we don’t notice them. In response to the objection to attending Mass, “I don’t feel anything,” Peter Kreeft explains: “So what? You may not feel anything when you eat bread or take vitamins either. But they really nourish you. ‘For our life is a matter of faith, not of sight’ (2 Cor 5:7). We believe vitamins help us because doctors tell us so. If we believe our human doctors, why not believe the divine doctor of our souls?” Although it seems little, if anything, comes from the Mass, more may be at work than you think. On the surface, it may seem a waste of time, but the grace bestowed through the Eucharist and participation in the Mass, even when distracted by a handful of children or other exigencies, can’t be measured.
The Existentialist Approach
I have a suggestion for people who attend Mass out of obligation even though they doubt they’ll get much from attending (such as a person with small children). It’s difficult to explain because it requires an approach that is largely at odds with conventional thinking. I call it an “existentialist” approach to Mass in order to contrast it with an “essentialist” approach. An essentialist approach would concentrate on our essence (i.e., our souls) and think about the spiritual benefits bestowed on our souls by the liturgy and Mass.
This existentialist approach, on the other hand, does the opposite. It basically says, “I will go and take in what I can, but I won’t worry about it or think about what the Mass is doing for me. I will just be there, accepting what comes and not thinking about what could be coming if I could be more attentive.” The surroundings or circumstances don’t matter with this approach because the person is not at all concentrated on himself: He is simply “looking outward” and taking in what he can and not worrying if he can’t take it all in.
This type of approach played a large part in St. Therese of Lisieux’s “Little Way.” St. Therese would have been a saint in any time or any setting because she simply existed without reference to her separate soul, becoming, in her words, a drop of water in the mighty ocean of divinity. She, for instance, delighted in the trappings and petty joys of her shallow bourgeois surroundings (a fact that has disturbed many of her readers). It wouldn’t have occurred to her to hate such petty things, for her surroundings were secondary — and therefore couldn’t be elevated to the level of something to be hated — to her act of simply existing with no thought to herself. In the words of the twentieth-century monk Thomas Merton:
She became a saint, not by running away from the middle class, not by abjuring and despising and cursing the middle class, or the environment in which she had grown up: on the contrary, she clung to it in so far as one could cling to such a thing and be a good Carmelite. She kept everything that was bourgeois about her and was still not incompatible with her vocation … To her, it would have been incomprehensible that anyone should think these things were ugly or strange, and it never even occurred to her that she might be expected to give them up, or hate them, or curse them, or bury them under a pile of anathemas.
Likewise, Pope Benedict XV said of her Little Way: “There is a call to the faithful of every nation, no matter what may be their age, sex, or state of life, to enter wholeheartedly into the Little Way which led Sister Therese to the summit of heroic virtue.”
