How Can We Make the Mass Relevant to People?

Universality is an essential feature of Christian worship. It is the worship of an open heaven. It is never just an event in the life of a community that finds itself in a particular place.

No, to celebrate the Eucharist means to enter into the openness of a glorification of God that embraces both heaven and earth, an openness effected by the Cross and Resurrection. Christian liturgy is never just an event organized by a particular group or set of people or even by a particular local Church.

Mankind’s movement toward Christ meets Christ’s movement toward men. He wants to unite mankind and bring about the one Church the one divine assembly, of all men.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy

Reflection – One more day of ‘Ratzinger blogging’, and then we’ll be on to something different next week. It seemed appropriate on Sunday, the day of the Lord’s resurrection when the whole Body of Christ throughout the world is gathering together to worship the Risen Lord, to have this excerpt from Spirit of the Liturgy.

Liturgy in Roman Catholic culture in the past 50 years has suffered deeply from the loss of this universal perspective. Far too often we are locked into our own immediate community, our own immediate parish or culture or situation, and the liturgy becomes a mere expression of communal solidarity or identity.

The worst examples of this are seen, of course, in youth ministry, when efforts to make the Mass ‘relevant’ to teenagers or children lead perhaps well-meaning priests and youth workers to introduce such novelties as rock bands, rap, superhero vestments, and so forth. When the focus of the liturgy becomes the assembly and not God, the people and not the Person, fellowship and not Communion, then we are badly off course.

This is why fidelity to the rubrics matters so much. We are not just a little group doing our own thing at St. Soandso Parish, and so able to edit, add, delete, and modify the rite according to what works for us. What really works for us is to celebrate the liturgy exactly as it is given to us, to ‘say the black and do the red’ and in this to know ourselves to be part of a bigger body, a larger reality, a Church that extends to the ends of the earth and in fact transcends the earthly realm to extend to the worship of the Church Triumphant before the throne of God.

In fact, I would argue in a Chestertonian style that the liturgy is most relevant to us, most meeting us where we are, precisely when it is incomprehensible, obscure. It is most meaningful precisely where it is ‘meaningless’. Because we moderns need more than anything to be shaken out of our narrow provincialism, our conviction that the world begins and ends with us, that all reality is to conform itself to our little ideas and our little prejudices, rather than we conforming ourselves to the reality of God which is vastly greater than us.

When we are pushed beyond our immediate understanding and resonance with a liturgical moment, we are actually touching upon the fact, which goes way beyond liturgy and extends to every aspect of spiritual and moral life, that God is continually calling us well out of our comfort zones, well beyond what is easy or feels natural or corresponds to our notions about life.

The simple act of conforming ourselves to the liturgy that the Church gives us, rather than demanding continually that the liturgy conform itself to our likes and dislikes, is a deep act of spiritual humility that genuinely helps us to be conditioned for all the acts of discipleship, obedience, surrender, abandonment that the Lord will most certainly ask of all of us in our lives.

And that we do this act of conformation as a body, a community, signals then that this is the true identity of our community: we are the people the Lord calls together (the original meaning of ecclesia) to be his people, the ones he fashions and shapes according to his good purposes and not ours, his truth and meaning and not ours, his Death and Resurrection and glorification in heaven, and not our little and poor ideas about human happiness and flourishing.

Liturgical obedience is a powerful means, expression, and symbolic realization of the basic stance of faith and discipleship, and we in the Western Church need desperately to recover that sense of faith regarding the liturgy, both for our own selves, and for our task of evangelizing the world.

In Which I Take My Stand on Suitable Church Music

The writings of Plato and Aristotle on music show that the Greek world in their time was faced with a choice between two kinds of worship, two different images of god and man… one the one hand, there is the music that Plato ascribes, in line with mythology, to Apollo, the god of light and reason. 

This is the music that draws senses into spirit and so brings man to wholeness. It does not abolish the senses, but inserts them into the unity of this creature that is man. It elevates the spirit precisely by wedding it to the sense, and it elevates the senses by uniting them with the spirit. Thus this kind of music is an expression of man’s special place in the general structure of being. 

But then there is the music… which we might describe as ‘Dionysian’. It drags man into the intoxication of the sense, crushes rationality, and subjects the spirit to the senses….
The Apollonian/Dionysian alternative runs through the whole history of religion and confronts us again today. Not every kind of music can have a place in Christian worship. It has its standards, and that standard is the Logos.

Joseph Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy

Reflection – This final reflection (for now) on the subject of liturgical music and worship shows that Ratzinger is, indeed, aiming his sights at the use of rock music in liturgy here. I would hesitate to describe the oeuvre of Marty Haugen as a Dionysian crushing of rationality and an intoxication of the senses. I would also hesitate to place that composer and his confreres and soeurs in the camp of Apollo, either – there is little elevation of sense or spirit that occurs in a rousing rendition of ‘Gather Us In.’ 

No, Ratzinger’s main point here is that rock music, with its Dionysian quality, cannot be reconciled with Christian worship, because of its anti-rational quality, its pursuit of a sort of experience of transcendence through the intoxication of sense and the suspension of reason.

We are a religion of the Logos, and our music in liturgy must acknowledge that God comes to us as logos, as Word, and that hence our rational faculty is engaged, even if we know that reason itself must be transcended by the deeper action of the Spirit.

Now, you may disagree with Ratzinger’s evaluation of rock music, although as I said a few days ago, I think it is remarkable that he considers rock significant enough to write a theological analysis of it and engage it at that level, both as a theologian and a musician. Elsewhere in his books he writes of his experience as a university professor in the late 1960s and witnessing his students going to these rock festivals which indeed had the quality of religious rites of a strongly Dionysian character.

I think his basic principle of evaluating music for its suitability in worship is right on the mark. Music must have this Apollonian quality, this union of reason and sense, of beauty and truth. 

I too am a Church musician of a very low stature, having directed the MH schola cantorum for a couple of years early in my life in the community, sung in it for many years before and after that, and even written a few pieces of sacred music here and there, to boot. So I am fully aware of the struggles and obstacles church musicians face, in terms of limited resources, human and material, and the need to tread carefully while working with the pastor and the parishioners. You can only do so much, and the director of music in a Catholic parish is a job with great challenges, to say the least. I am fully aware of that.

That being said, it’s time for me to take my stand on these matters. I would say that the musical forms available to us in North American parishes that meet the Appolonian standard, if I can put it that way, are three in number. There is Gregorian chant, available in good English translations now, which is necessary in these uneducated times. There is the traditional metrical hymnody—the ‘Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow’ sort of thing. And there is, for the more accomplished parish choirs, the great tradition of choral pieces—Palestrina and Byrd and all that. There are other forms of music that are suitable—in MH we use the Gelineau psalmody to good effect, for example—but these are not necessarily available easily on the parish level.

While I love praise and worship music in itself, I find it too aggressive and showy on the one hand, or too self-indulgent and subjectivizing on the other (as I talked about yesterday), for easy and appropriate use in liturgy. But I realize that in many places there is a great love and attachment to this music, and so it cannot be simply eliminated.

I think what is really needed is a great liturgical catechesis, a real learning of what liturgy is, what it is supposed to do for us, what mystery we are entering into when we enter into the Mass. Along with that, we need a musical education, much like what Ratzinger does a little of in this book, to know what the history is, what the different forms of music are that are useful in liturgy. 

From that, I think all of us will be able to discern what is suitable and what is not, what is in accord with the theology and experience of worship and what is not. And that is my position on this subject, which I come to only after thirty years in the trenches of liturgy and music and its difficulties today.

Saying Goodbye to 'My'

In liturgical music, based as it is on biblical faith, there is, therefore, a clear dominance of the Word; this music is a higher form of proclamation. Ultimately, it rises up out of the love that responds to God’s love made flesh in Christ, the love that for us went unto death. After the Resurrection, the cross is by no means a thing of the past, and so this love is always marked by pain at the hiddenness of God, by the cry that rises up from the depths of anguish, Kyrie eleison, by hope and by supplication. But it also has the privilege, by anticipation, of experiencing the reality of the Resurrection, and so it brings with it joy of being loved, that gladness of heart that Haydn said came upon him when he set liturgical tests to music.

Joseph Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy

Reflection – So we continue with excerpts from this fantastic book from Pope Benedict. I’m only giving short excerpts of his treatment of the subject of music and liturgy—just enough to give a flavour of it, not the full argument. As I have said more than once on this blog, this really is the best book you could buy on the subject of liturgy, if this is something that you want to really understand better.

In this passage, though, we do see the fundamental principle of liturgical music that has to be applied carefully to every discernment around a given composition: sacred music must be at the service of the Word, must be in its essence a proclamation of the Word, a ministry of the Word.

This is why, for example, I believe rock music itself, with its drums and loud volume and amplified guitars, is not a suitable genre for liturgy. It seems to me that the purpose of rock music is to draw attention to itself through its aggressive pounding beat and power chords, and not to the Word being proclaimed in the liturgical action.

It is not only rock music that is like this. Some kinds of classical music are problematic, such as operatic arias. I recall once trying to distribute communion at a Mass while the cantor, a professionally trained singer, belted out at full volume some quasi-Wagnerian piece a few feet away from me. It did not create the most reflective and meditative atmosphere to receive the Body of Christ in. 

Liturgically speaking, there is little to separate that kind of performance from Spinal Tap. No, the music at Mass has to be at the service of the sacred text, and also of the sacred action. This is why the Church had a serious reservation against the use of polyphony at Mass—the text is obscured by this type of music, the artistic bona fides of which are beyond question. 

The other consideration in this excerpt is the content of the Word that the music is to support. It is meant to be reflective of the great dialogue of love of God and man, the love coming down from heaven, the supplication coming up from the earth, God entering our human reality from within, the Son’s prayer to the Father becoming the prayer of all mankind to God, and in that, that prayer becoming suffused with the joy of the Resurrection and the anticipated joy of the heavenly liturgy.

All of this is meant, according to our best abilities, to be reflected in the music we croak out at Mass. This implies that the music we use have a certain gravitas to it, even if it is simple and plain. Scriptural texts are best—at Madonna House, we really do use psalm settings quite a bit in our liturgies, for example. 

It is better—and I know I may be treading on some toes here—to avoid texts that are all about ‘me and my love for Jesus’. Those are fine for other settings, like praise and worship sessions, prayer meetings, and so forth. But when we enter liturgy, we are leaving behind the simple level of ‘me and my love for Jesus’ and entering into Christ’s own love for the Father, the Trinitarian action of love and offering and gift, and the whole Paschal Mystery—Cross, tomb, Resurrection, the ascended Christ, the descending Spirit.

It is all so much beyond our personal level, yet coming to us at that personal level to draw us up and out—out of ourselves and our subjectivity and up into the heart of the Trinity. This drawing, this movement, which is the real ministry of the Word at its deepest level of understanding, is not well served by songs that continually throw us back to the subjective level, to my feelings and my experience and my desires and my love and my pain and my, my, my…

As I say, all of this can be very good music and very good in other contexts, but in the liturgy it is to time to say goodbye to my and open up to Him and in that opening to Him, to Us, to the corporate worship of the Body which is essentially the worship given by the man Jesus to his Father in which the whole life and love of the Trinity is made available to us.

Music must at least palely reflect that essence of liturgy, and so we have a real challenge given us here, to see how we can shape our liturgical musical culture better in light of the reality of the liturgy we have been given.

Escaping the Cult of the Banal

Three developments in recent music epitomize the problems that the Church has to face when she is considering liturgical music. First of all, there is the cultural universalization that the Church has to undertake if she wants to get beyond the boundaries of the European mind. This is the question of what inculturation should look like in the realm of sacred music if, on the one hand, the identity of Christianity is to be preserved and, on the other, its universality is to be expressed in local forms.  

Then there are two developments in music itself… modern so-called ‘classical’ music has manoeuvred itself, with some exceptions into an elitist ghetto, which only specialists may enter…  

The music of the masses has broken loose from this and treads a very different path. On the one hand, there is pop music… [which is] aimed at the phenomenon of the masses, is industrially produced, and ultimately has to be described as a cult of the banal.  

‘Rock’, on the other hand, is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumes a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship.
People are, so to speak, released from themselves by the experience of being part of a crowd and by the emotional shock of rhythm, noise, and special lighting effects. However, in the ecstasy of having all their defences torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe.  

The music of the Holy Spirit’s ‘sober intoxication’ seems to have little chance when self has become a prison, the mind is a shackle, and breaking out from both appears as a true promise of redemption that can be tasted at least for a few moments. 

Joseph Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy

Reflection – Since I’m giving prominence to the psalms on the blog right now with my new weekly series the ‘Monday Psalter’, I thought I would share a few excerpts from Ratzinger’s exceptional book Spirit of the Liturgy on the subject of liturgical music. His writings on this subject are unusual in the annals of the Church; it is rare that a theologian of his caliber is also an accomplished musician, and has both the interest and knowledge to write about the subject as he has.

He also is one of the few serious theologians in the modern Church to really grapple with the challenge of rock music, taking it seriously and analyzing the deeper meaning of this new musical form. While his evaluation of it is ultimately negative, he is respectful of it and does not dismiss it out of hand. This is genuinely unique, I believe – I don’t know of anyone else at his level even bothering to try to understand the subject.

At any rate, he is grappling seriously with the question of liturgical music here as only a musician can, being aware that the quest for appropriate music is limited on the one hand by the capacities of the available musicians and the tolerance of the assembly for unending revisions of its hymnody, but on the other hand is a necessary quest since we too often find ourselves caught up in the very ‘cult of the banal’ that pop music denotes, or the essentially anti-Christian transcendence offered by rock music. 

Admittedly, I don’t think I’ve ever heard genuinely hard rock being done in the context of the liturgy, which would be fairly absurd – would the nave be turned into a mosh pit? Would we change the lyrics to ‘Highway to Hell’ to ‘We were on the highway to hell, ‘til we met Jesus’? At what point in the Mass would it be appropriate for the musicians smash their guitars? (Some of us would argue that would best happen before Mass begins…)

When liturgical music has tried to be in the modern popular vein, it has more aimed at an imitation of light folk rock, and generally ends up with a fairly banal, mediocre production even of that. The oeuvre of Haugen, Haas, and the St. Louis Jesuits has produced little if anything of lasting value, and certainly nothing that would draw any music-loving young person into Church, which was supposed to be the entire point of the exercise. Whenever I hear a choir crank up ‘Sing a New Song’ for the hundred thousandth time, I feel like saying in response, ‘Yes, please! Can we please sing a new song? Anything at all will do!’ Whatever else we need to do, we have to escape from the cult of the banal that still reigns in far too many parishes.

Ratzinger will go on to describe his own resolution of these problems and the basic principles that need to guide liturgical music, and we’ll get there later this week. But the problem is real, and I don’t think anyone has done more that he has to address it in this book and his other liturgical writings.

Sing, and Keep Going

Christians who find themselves in the new covenant now sing an altogether new song, which is truly and definitively new in view of the wholly new thing that has taken place in the Resurrection of Christ… The in-between state of Christian reality (no longer a shadow, but still not fully reality, only an ‘image’) applies here. The definitively new song has been intoned, but still all the sufferings of history must be endured, all pain gathered in and brought into the sacrifice of praise, in order to be transformed there into a song of praise.

Joseph Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 138

Reflection – We did something new this year for our All Saints Day celebration on November 1, and I hope we keep doing it, as it really worked well. In the days before we all wrote down, on little file cards, our favorite quotes from the saints, with the quote on one side and the saint on the other. In the evening of the day we played a guessing game of ‘which saint said what’. It was fun and helped us to enter the world of the saints more fully.

One of the quotes I wrote down reminds me of this passage from Ratzinger. St. Augustine of Hippo, ‘Sing, and keep going.’ I think this pithily gives us our Christian way of life in the world. To sing and keep going—praise God, lift up our hearts and minds and voices to the Lord in thanksgiving and worship… but keep moving in this world, keep heading towards the new and everlasting Jerusalem, keep living our life in such a way that our feet tend towards the kingdom of love and goodness.

We all can tend to live in our world where the ‘sufferings of history’ are endured and the pains of life have a way of grabbing our full attention. There is something about ‘gathering it all in to the sacrifice of praise’, as Ratzinger so beautifully puts it here, that is absolutely crucial if we are to navigate our life correctly and get to our final and proper destination.

All, ultimately, is to be gathered upon into praise and into song. Even the most dreadful events, the deepest sufferings, the worst evils visited upon people—all of this is meant to be redeemed and transformed into a song of praise. This is very deep, this business of song and praise. Even if you happen to be tone deaf and have little to no musical appreciation, there is something about song and praise that is at the heart of reality, something that is not, in the end, optional at its core.

Heaven, C.S. Lewis writes in the Screwtape Letters, has only silence and music. Hell has neither, and is all noise. Our world is a battleground of silence and music against noise. To sing and keep going, to enter now in the midst of the noise of the world into the sacrifice of praise, the song of the Risen Christ, is to win a great battle that rages in our own hearts and lives, too.

That within us which is Noise, which is Hell (and we all have a little bit of Hell in us, alas), tells us to respond to the struggles and strains and evils of life by asserting our own prerogatives, by taking control of our own destiny, by extending our self as far as we can into this world. Only by the extension of the ego into the world can we push back the evils and ills that beset us. And so, as all our egos get busy clamoring for that push, for tat extension, Noise grows and grows and grows in the world.

That within us which is Heaven (and I believe every human being has at least a glimmer of that gold shining somewhere in them) bids us to be silent, and to praise God with a psalm. To sing, and keep going. Singing, in which that in us which must express itself is coordinated into a beautiful harmonious whole, a unity of love and purpose, and silence in which that which is interior in us is made receptive and attentive both to God and the needs of our brothers and sisters. And then, to keep going, to keep loving, to keep serving, to keep moving through the world that is into the world that is to be, the world Christ is fashioning in his resurrected body and to which the whole cosmos is turning and yearning. And that is the fundamental way of life of the Christian in the world.

The Homecoming

The sheep caught up in the thorn bush and unable to get out is a metaphor for man in general. He cannot get out of the thicket and find his way back to God. The shepherd who rescues him and takes him home is the Logos himself, the eternal Word, the eternal Meaning of the universe dwelling in the Son. He it is who makes his way to us and takes the sheep onto his shoulders, that is, he assumes human nature, and as the God-Man he carries man the creature home to God.

And so the reditus becomes possible. Man is given a homecoming. But now sacrifice takes the form of the Cross of Christ, of the love that in dying makes a gift of itself. Such sacrifice has nothing to do with destruction. It is an act of new creation, the restoration of creation to its true identity. All worship is now a participation in this Pasch of Christ , in his passing over from divine to human, from death to life, to the unity of God and man.

Joseph Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 33-34

Reflection – OK, time for some vintage Benedict-blogging – the good old German Shepherd still has some ‘woofs’ to share with us. Don’t be thrown off by the Latin word reditus  here – it simply means return. Medieval theology, influenced by neo-Platonism saw all the drama of creation and redemption as an exitus-reditus movement, a going forth and a returning to God.

But as that part of creation called ‘man’ went forth, it got caught up on a thorn bush and couldn’t get back to the sheepfold which is the superabundant merciful heart of God. And hence, Jesus, and the Cross, and redemption. Now all of this is being written by Ratzinger in the context of liturgy and worship. Specifically, he is talking here about the notion of sacrifice, and how the very act of making sacrifice to God is a symbolic realization of the reditus movement of creation. God gives us produce of the earth, and we return it to Him by offering it in sacrifice, a sacrifice that entails the destruction of the lamb, or calf, or sheaf of wheat, or libation of wine.

Of course in our fallen folly, sacrifice was corrupted, and we come to think that God is a blood-thirsty tyrant demanding the death of his creatures, or somehow in need of our gifts. ‘Do you think I drink the blood of goats?’ God asks incredulously in one of the psalms. Sadly, in our days of religious ignorance and profound confusion, this is still the image many have of the Christian God – an angry God demanding blood for punishment for sin, an abusive father-god taking out his rage against rebellious humanity on his son, a grim distorted parody of the Christian story.

And so the sacrifice of Jesus, properly understood, clarifies precisely what these mysteries are all about. It’s all about the love of God reaching down, in Jesus the Son, to the suffering one, the lost one, the dying one, the dead one—humanity, that is—to be with us where we are and to bring us along from there to where He is, which is heaven. It is all about going home, in other words.

This is the whole form and content of Christian worship, of Christian faith, and of Christian life. Lex orendi, lex credendi, we say—the law of prayer is the law of faith. I would add to that one more ‘lex’ – lex vivendi. The law of prayer and faith is the law of life. In other words, it is all about mercy, mercy, mercy. The Eucharist is about mercy. The Cross is about mercy. The Trinity is about mercy (or rather, mercy is the form of love coming forth from the Trinity towards creation). And so you and I are to be about mercy, today.

We all need it, and we all need to extend it, show it, bring it, go out with it, make it visible, make it believable, make it real in the world today. That’s what Pope Francis has been saying in various ways, and it’s what we all need to reflect on and act on, as the world today needs mercy more and more urgently with each passing year.

Send Out the Clowns

The liturgical level [of Christian life] does not stand on its own. It has meaning only in relation to something that really happens, to a reality that is substantially present. Otherwise it would lack real content, like bank notes without funds to cover them. The Lord could say that his Body was ‘given’ only because he had in fact given if; he could present his Blood in the new chalice as shed for many only because he really had shed it. This Body is not the ever-dead corpse of a dead man, nor is the Blood the life-element rendered lifeless. No, sacrifice has become gift, for the Body given in love and the Blood given in love have entered, through the Resurrection, into the eternity of love, which is stronger than death.

Joseph Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 55

Reflection – Well, back to Benedict on this wonderful Sunday in June (it is currently grey, cold, and rainy outside here in Combermere). It is still too soon to talk about ‘legacy’ with Joseph Ratzinger and his life of service to the Church. I think, though, that in the long run this book Spirit of the Liturgy will be the most significant contribution.

I say this because of the very real chaos that has existed in the Church in the past 50 years, a chaos expressed on the local level in widespread liturgical disobedience, an ‘anything goes’ attitude where the rubrics and texts of the Mass are at best suggestions, a chaos expressed on the level of liturgical theory by a determinedly horizontal, anti-hierarchical, ahistorical casting of liturgy as primarily or exclusively the local community’s self-expression—a sort of Hegelian manifestation of Spirit through the locally devised rituals of the parish gestalt (a gestalt that is in fact the pastor and his hand-picked liturgical committee inflicting their creations on the rest of the parish).

Ratzinger’s book, which is the best of several fine works on the liturgy he has written, is so significant because it shows the vacuity of that reigning liturgical ideology, and establishes the theology of liturgy on the sure foundations of Christology, soteriology, and ecclesiology. By knowing how the saving work of Christ has been communicated in the Church, we can see why the liturgy is structured as it is, and how each rubric is carefully fashioned to express some dimension of this saving work of Christ, each text is carefully formulated to precisely articulate it.

And so we can’t mess around with it. The era of experimentation and liturgical improv is over. Alas, the memo has not quite gone out everywhere. Just recently there was a Star Wars themed first communion Mass in Germany, complete with light saber blessings. Because, you see, they had used Star Wars in the catechesis of the children, and so it was really ‘relevant’ to the community’s self-understanding. That ‘the Force’ has no connection whatsoever to the Christian understanding of God and that there is actually a pretty profound historical, mystical, transformative reality of Christ being, well, communicated in the Eucharist is dismissed as irrelevant. The children had a good time and everyone had a great laugh, and church was fun for once. That’s what matters.

Meanwhile, the Body and Blood of Christ are given, not as symbols or notional ideas but as living realities. Sacrifice has become gift, and love flows through every prayer, every gesture, every element of the liturgy, until it rises to a climax where Christ in the priest transubstantiates the bread and wine into His own being, which is then given to those present who are in communion with Him (by being free of grave sin) and with His Church (by being members in good standing of the visible Catholic Church).

This is simply the truth of the matter. I think what jars me, and people like me who would be classified as ‘conservatives’ liturgically (I call myself no such thing), is the idea that we have to dress this truth up with balloons or clowns or skits or comedy routines or… I don’t know – something else. Like what’s there is not enough and needs a little help from us. What God has given us is insufficient and so the creative skills of the liturgy committee needs to come to God’s rescue with pirates or dinosaurs or superheroes or strobe lights.

At Mass, we are at the last supper, on Calvary, at the empty tomb, in the upper room. Jesus is there, risen, living, radiant, bearing the wounds of his passion and death, and bearing his love and salvation. We don’t need to dress it up with the fashions of the day or the latest pop culture references (coming soon, a Twilight themed Mass!).

We just need to say the black and do the red and prayerfully, reverently, gratefully, let Jesus love us and save us in the action of the liturgy. Happy Sunday – see you in church!