There was something inexplicably moving about all those feet shuffling up the aisles of the church, those softly intoned words, “The body of Christ,” repeated over and over again until everybody had been fed.
Dailiness, however, was bound to take its toll, and eventually the old tug to do things my own way began reasserting itself.
I noticed a certain peevishness setting in, an impatience with freeform homilies or a tremulous, slightly-off-key cantor. I became increasingly irritated with signs of slovenliness in the congregation, especially with those who slouched up for communion in T-shirts with Harley Davidson symbols on the back. I even found myself taking mental note of how many buttermilk donuts disappeared down the hatches of my fellow parishioners during hospitality hour.
In short, I became a critic, more focused on my high standards and how they were being violated than on the Mass itself. The temptation to stop going — it was all getting so frustrating! — became so strong that I wondered if I’d made a mistake in coming back at all. Couldn’t I just go back to worshipping God on my own?
Unfortunately, I could not — not if I took Christ’s last instructions to his disciples seriously. “This is my command: love one another as I love you,” he said in John 15:12, and all through the Gospels, the same urgent message is repeated: we cannot love God without loving each other. My inability to attend church without becoming incensed at the people kneeling around me was a symptom I could not afford to ignore.
The Benedictine directory The Monastic Hours says, “We shall truly see God in the Work of God, that is, we shall receive the revelation of his agape-love, only if we are joined with our brothers and sisters in genuine communion.” According to Josef Jungmann, “In the Christian religion it is the assembled community, the gathering of the congregation, that is the main thing . . . . Not the holy place, not the lifeless walls, not the gold and silver of its decoration . . . . No, it is rather the holy community, the plebs sancta, the gathering of the new people of God, who worship the Father in spirit and in truth.”
In communal worship, says St. Paul, we become “the temple of the living God” (2 Cor. 6:16). More, we are meant to experience the great split between ourselves and others, ourselves and nature, as momentarily healed, for as Paul De Latte explains, “creation as a whole possesses in a true and special way a liturgical character” that only we gathered-together human beings can begin to put into words.
I thought back to my early, ecstatic experiences during Mass, the tears that once sprang naturally to my eyes during the Eucharist. What had been different then?
Perhaps, I thought, I’d been so swept up in what was happening around me that I’d forgotten completely about checking in with “headquarters.” I’d had no time to draw back, assess, judge, or dismiss; no time to dig trenches, fortify the barricades, boil the oil. By the time I realized I was exposed and vulnerable to the immense flow of love that filled the room, it was over: my naked and shivering little self had surrendered, and, for a moment, I was seeing through brand-new eyes.
The notorious existential loneliness of the contemporary individual cannot withstand such an experience, which is perhaps why we fear it so. It is far easier to remain a critic, perched at a comfortable distance from others. Yet, as St. Paul reminds the beleaguered young church at Ephesus, if we do so, we will miss out on one of the great messages of Christ, which is that we are no longer “strangers and sojourners. . . but fellow citizens with the holy ones and members of the household of God” (Eph. 2:19).
St. Basil the Great says that “divine beauty blaze[s] like lightning; neither word can express it nor ear receive it.” True — but joined together in communal worship, we can give it our best try.
Paula Huston’s most recent book is The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life (Loyola, 2003). She is also co-editor and a contributing essayist for Signatures of Grace: Catholic Writers on the Sacraments (Dutton, 2000). A National Endowment of the Arts Fellow in Creative Writing, she is the author of a novel, Daughters of Song (Random House, 1995) and numerous short stories. She is married, has four children, and is a Camaldolese Benedictine oblate. For more information, visit her website at www.paulahuston.com.
(This article was excerpted from The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life by Paula Huston (Loyola Press, 2003). Reprinted with permission of Loyola Press. To order copies of this book, call 1-800-621-1008 or visit www.loyolabooks.org.)
