Art and Liturgy

“Where do we go?” My sister's question echoed through the car after Sunday Mass not long ago.

I was back East to visit my family, and we had all just stumbled out of their church like shell-shocked infantry falling out of the trenches. Apparently, the only musician available in a thousand-mile radius of the parish was an organist who had never quite mastered a single chord. Worse still, the accompanying cantor's vocal range spanned only about half an octave.

Horrifically, he covered for this by dragging out each note with wavering tenacity. I imagine the Divine was up there hearing the resulting perverse version of “Gather Us In” and saying, “You're kidding, right?”

But it was worse than just the music. From where he sat sprawled on the side of the sanctuary, the altar boy's unlaced high-tops protruded out from under vestments that looked like they had been slept in. Considered as oratory, the homily found a launching point in the day's Gospel, at least, but then quickly devolved into a rambling mess of startlingly obvious declarations with no discernible through-line. If the talk was on television or radio, most adults would have switched it off as a tedious waste.

The problem is, this parish is the most doctrinally orthodox one in the rural area where my family lives. Their other options are to go to the next town with the priest they all call “Father Dissent” or drive 40 minutes to the more functional parish three towns over. The issue gets more pressing as my sister's little boy grows up. He's 5 now, and we are worried about the long-term effect of him only seeing the liturgy obscured by disorder and absurdity.

It has to be said. Much of the art we are making as a Church is ugly and painful.

It has the opposite effect that it should.

There is a problem when the Church is roughing up music that would be better suited to an episode of “Barney,” while Nora Jones trills songs that sting people to the heart. It is not a diminution of the liturgy to evaluate it from the standard of what Hollywood calls “good production value.” The sad truth is, on a weekly basis, most parishes offer their long-suffering sheep all the beauty and excellence of a high school talent show.

I teach Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults to people in the entertainment industry. These are incredibly talented people. It is most often embarrassing to take them to church and have them come to the realization that what they do every day professionally is far superior to the artistic expression that is supposed to be an offering to God and inspired by the Holy Spirit.

The liturgy is the principle work of art for the Church. Liturgy doesn't use art, so much as it is art. It is something that the people of God create together that becomes the occasion of God's ongoing artistry of renewing and sanctifying the Church.

The point of the liturgy is not to provide an aesthetic experience for the faithful. However, an aesthetic experience can foster and heighten the point of the liturgy, which has two aspects: to bring the reality of humanity into encounter with the reality of God. That is, an authentic “climate of prayer” is one in which the arts lead the people to experience both the glory and holiness of God — which leads to awe and joy — along with their own isolation, anger and desperate need, which leads to humility.

In the best book I've read on the subject, Worship and Theology, Don Saliers notes that we have to reexamine the whole way we have taken to thinking about the liturgy.

In too many churches, the goal is not to rouse the community to worship, but to keep the community amused. Saliers notes, “To put it bluntly, God is not adequately praised and adored with the showy, the pompous, the self-serving, the mawkish, the cleverly casual or the thoughtlessly comfortable forms of art.”

The understanding of beauty, as with everything else in our post-modern confusion, has become one more flag to wave in the strange and tortured world of Church polarization. On the left, beauty has become a bad, elitist word that is seen as incongruous in a Church with a “fundamental option for the poor.” Disguised as compassion, this is a profoundly insulting attitude towards the poor.

A poor man can be just as moved by the “Pieta” as Donald Trump. Arguably, even more.

I was born in the mid-'60s amid the iconoclastic impulse in which the Church seemed to be purging herself of dross. I grew up as a Gen-Xer, mystified by the missionary zeal with which clerical and religious Baby Boomers eviscerated every ritual, symbol and tradition from our faith.

Back in 1990, I was a junior professed sister with the Daughters of St. Paul. A big feast day for our community was the Solemnity of St. Paul, and we were celebrating the liturgy at a local parish for the friends of our community. One of the other juniors and I wanted to make it as cool and beautiful as possible, and so we set out the nicest vestments and did the flowers and coached the musicians.

When Father came in, we asked him if it would be okay to use incense, and he suddenly got inappropriately irate. He fumed at us, “It took us 25 years to get rid of all that crap, and now you people want to bring it all back?”

I didn't know what “people” he was talking about.

I wanted to use incense because it feels mysterious and holy, and because I loved the symbol from the psalms of our prayers rising like incense. The priest was reacting against something of which I had had no experience and associating it with incense. Incense is not the problem. The problem was formalism. The problem was also that many of the rituals and signs had lost their meaning for people. What should have happened was to restore the meaning. Not dump the signs.

The art that has been commissioned in these years has mostly consisted of very ugly things which were justified for their political or propagandistic purposes, as opposed to aesthetic or devotional ones.

A particularly egregious example of this kind of project is the statue that looms over the door of the new Los Angeles Cathedral.

My students nicknamed the piece “Man-hands Mary” because the short-haired image has our Blessed Mother with sleeves rolled up to her shoulders, revealing heavily veined masculine arms and hands stretched out like she's ready to catch a football. She looks more like a bouncer than a vessel of grace.

The tour guide at the cathedral told us that the artist wanted to portray Mary as strong and “more human than strictly female.” I responded, “But I don't know any real people like that. Real people tend to have genders.” The tour guide exhaled patiently. “This statue represents what the Mary figure symbolizes.” (The Mary “figure”?) “Yes,” I rejoined, “but it is kind of, you know, ugly.” The guide pretty much tossed her head. “The Church isn't about that kind of thing any more.”

Why? What happened to make beauty in the Church a value associated with the past?

On the right side of the spectrum, there tends to be an overemphasis on reverence as almost an end in itself in the liturgy. Poor needy humanity gets left out of the exchange completely. The liturgy is not some kind of holiness show that substitutes propriety and formalism for genuine encounter between God and his sheep.

A genuine difficulty is the dearth of beauty and talent available, even if a parish wants it.

There are very few devout artists left in our community. Added to this is the fact that we have mostly lost the ability to appreciate beautiful contemporary art, so a lot of traditional parishes are cluttered with tacky, sentimental images of saints and angels.

As the great Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor noted, sentimentality is an inexcusable error for a believer.

On the worst side of the right are those Catholics who have reacted to the aesthetic mess of the post-Conciliar period by stripping down the liturgy with a kind of vengeance: no music, no style to the homilies, quickie Masses that offer no sensual helps at all for the poor sheep who have wandered in from the insanity of the confused world outside.

One priest told me once, with anger, “The Church was never stronger in Ireland than during the years of persecution when the people used to have Mass huddled in fields with no singing or ceremony.”

Yes, but see, time of persecution creates its own climate of prayer. People who are praying at the risk of their lives have an amazing ability to stay focused. This is not the situation of the glutted, bored and, catechetically ignorant Church in America.

Most parish priests reading these words will have shrugged early on. They hear me talk about better music, well-prepared homilies, training programs for lectors and altar servers, commissioning beautiful statuary and paintings, and their eyes glaze over. Every parish budget is stretched between social service projects, religious education programs, outreach ministries and so on.

This kind of attitude is short-sighted. Creating a climate of prayer that works will also stimulate the members of the parish to respond with more committed attention to service and self-donation.

And the word will get out that the liturgies at this church are powerful and beautiful, and many more people will come to stuff your pews and say “Thank you” via collection baskets. To the priests who tell me, “We can't afford to have beauty in our parish,” I have to shrug back, “Father, you can't afford not to.”

This is the first of a three-part series on beauty and the Church. The next installment will look at the elements of beauty. Email Barbara Nicolosi at [email protected].