ANTI-GRAVITY?

"SOLEMN" (Oxford English Dictionary)

1.   a.  Associated or connected with religious rites or observances; performed with      due ceremony and reverence; having a religious character; sacred.

The seruice daylie doon..so deuoute, solempne, and full of Armonye. (Thos. Cromwell)

3.   a. Performed with, accompanied by, due formality or ceremony; of a formal or ceremonious character.

Watching the glorious Kristin Scott Thomas perform Sophocles’ ‘Electra’ recently, I was reminded of the Catholic Mass as practiced in the village churches in my area in rural France. The theatre performance was filled with passion, vast floods of it; there were occasional flashes of humour, but the semiotic of the whole production was “(Greek) Tragedy is Passion” – rip-roaring, throat-tearing, rolling-on-the-ground passion.  The Mass – the modern, post-Vatican-II Mass as presided over by our hyperactive, charming, big-hearted Algerian priest – has, obviously, a different kind of passion, but that is not its main characteristic. Its main feature is upbeat intimacy: the semiotic here is “the Mass is a family get-together – God’s family”. There are flashes of humour, and the moment of the Peace, where the liturgy is interrupted while everyone shakes hands with or kisses neighbours, here is not nearly as invasive an interruption as in some more formal Masses: it preserves the mood that has been there all along.

            Well, so what? In Electra, we are caught up in an uncontrollable hatred and grief; in the village Mass, we are absorbed into a good-humoured communal celebration. And yet, and yet. In both manifestations, something huge and important is missing, and it is the same thing: solemnity. Greek tragedies were solemn occasions, not religious services but performed and beheld with reverence and gravity. The performers wore masks. The ending comprised katharsis, a cleansing, a purification of the emotions of pity and terror that the story had called forth.

            The Mass is a religious service. It is the supreme moment of meeting between man and God, between Man and God-made-Man, between an ordinary person and the Resurrected Christ. Few people have said this better that John Henry Newman, the Anglican who became a Roman Catholic – and what he wrote is equally true for Anglo-Catholics:

To me nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming, as the Mass, said as it is among us. I could attend Masses forever, and not be tired. It is not a mere form of words -- it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. It is not the invocation merely, but, if I dare use the word, the evocation of the Eternal. Here becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble. This is that awful event which is the scope, and the interpretation, of every part of the solemnity.

Words are necessary, but as means, not as ends; they are not mere addresses to the throne of grace, they are instruments of what is far higher, of consecration, of sacrifice. They hurry on, as if impatient to fulfill their mission. Quickly they go, the whole is quick, for they are all parts of one integral action, for they are awful words of sacrifice, they are a work too great to delay upon, as when it was said in the beginning, "What thou doest, do quickly".

Quickly they pass, for the Lord Jesus goes with them, as He passed along the lake in the days of His flesh, quickly calling first one and then another. Quickly they pass, because as the lightning which shineth from one part of the heaven into the other, so is the coming of the Son of Man. Quickly they pass, for they are as the words of Moses, when the Lord came down in the cloud, calling on the name of the Lord as He passed by, "The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long suffering and abundant in goodness and truth". And as Moses on the mountain, so we too "make haste to bow our heads to the earth, and adore".

So we, all around, each in his place, look out for the great Advent, "waiting for the moving of the water", each in his place, with his own heart, with his own wants, with his own thoughts, with his own intentions, with his own prayers, separate but concordant, watching what is going on, watching its progress, uniting in its consummation; not painfully and hopelessly, following a hard form of prayer from beginning to end, but, like a concert of musical instruments, each different, but concurring in a sweet harmony, we take our place with God's priest, supporting him, yet guided by him.

There are little children there, and old men, and simple laborers, and students in seminaries, priests preparing for Mass, priests making their thanksgiving, there are innocent maidens, and there are penitent sinners; but out of these many minds rises one Eucharistic hymn, and the great Action is the measure and the scope of it.

What Newman wrote still supposes a congregation, a community; but it is a congregation united in a joy that is solemn, in a solemn hour of celebration. “Here becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble.” I have seldom if ever attended a post-Vatican-II Mass, or indeed an Anglican Common Worship Eucharist, where this sense was expressed. Solemnity is not boring, nor is it old-fashioned: it is gravitas, the expression of the respect and awe due to what is greater than our sloppy humanity. An expression that picks up and involves our sloppy human selves and catches us up, for all too short a moment, into the portals of eternity. Please, can we have our solemnity back?