No Wedding Garment

Dr Esolen relates his experience at Mass in Canada. When I lived in Alberta, I simply ignored the Bishops' "suggestions" and did the reverent thing.

From Crisis

By Anthony Esolen, PhD

I want to look at how we celebrate Mass, not in its total form, as others have done well, but in some of the actions and gestures that accompany it.

One of the most mysterious passages in the Gospels, to my mind, comes at the end of Jesus’ parable about the king who gave a wedding feast for his son. The people the king invites say that they can’t come. They have more important things to do. They even mistreat his servants, killing some. The king then musters his army and destroys the murderers and their city. 

Then he instructs his servants to go out into the crossroads and invite everyone they can find. That they do, and the feast is set. But the king discovers that one man there isn’t wearing a wedding garment. When the king asks him why not, he has nothing to say in reply. So the king orders him to be cast out into the darkness, where there is wailing and grinding of teeth.

We must assume here that poverty is not an issue. The man does not say what would certainly come to his lips in such a case, and Jesus’ heart is always with the poor. That leaves two possibilities: negligence and contempt. These two shade into each other so that it is hard, in our experience, to tell where the one ends and the other begins. If we hold something in contempt, we are apt to be careless about it; and the more careless we are about something, even if we do not begin by looking down upon it, the more likely we will be to believe that it does not warrant our care anyway. 

Thus, the man who is badly dressed at the wedding feast is like those who refused the invitation. He is violating both the solemnity of the occasion and its mirth; and he does so in a pointed way, too, so that his punishment fits the crime. He has already cast himself out of the feast; what the king does is to give him his wish, in a clear and final form.

I am not here going to complain about how people dress for Mass, although I think that what we wear is a sign to others and a self-influencing sign to ourselves. “Clothes make the man,” the saying goes; and there is a truth in it, if we consider that as we dress, so we become—we conform ourselves to the sign. Instead, I want to look at how we celebrate Mass, not in its total form, as others have done well, but in some of the actions and gestures that accompany it.

Here I am thinking of what I experienced at Mass two days ago, in a small (but it used to be a lot larger) parish in Canada, where we live during part of the year. There was no music at all because the choir, which means six or seven ladies and a man on a guitar or a woman on a keyboard, takes the summer off. That is a tacit sign that the singing is a bit of a chore. My ears were grateful for the lack of it because the hymns they sing are pretty awful stuff, but my heart wasn’t grateful. When I hear rotten hymns, I may roll my eyes or slap my head, but I try to remember to ask God to bless the singers, who usually don’t know any better.

There was not one male in the church under the age of 60. There was a small girl and, I believe, two youngish women; otherwise, all the women were elderly, too. The priest is a gentle old fellow with a good heart. But I don’t think he’s up to the task of lighting the fire of religious love and zeal in that old town. Because it’s been unusually warm lately, the people asked him to keep his sermon short, and he did, speaking for less than 60 seconds. He spent a good deal more time before the dismissal talking about a tennis championship. The Canadian bishops as a group seem to be allergic to wedding garments, that is, to signs of devotion and intellectual depth. In the United States, the Nicene Creed is the standard. So it has been wherever I’ve heard Mass abroad—in Italy, Germany, England, Austria, and Sweden. But not in Canada; there what’s typical is the Apostles’ Creed. 

I have nothing against the Apostles’ Creed, but I do not see why the longer and fuller and more precise Creed is set aside. If I had to guess, I’d say that the Canadian bishops wished to suppress the Nicene Creed because of the high theological term “consubstantial” and because in that Creed you have to use the term “man” twice to refer to all mankind. But that is, as I say, a guess. Negligence might be a better explanation—not that negligence is an excuse, either.

In our diocese, we have been instructed to stand at all times, except for the brief period during the first part of the Eucharistic prayer, from the calling down of the Holy Spirit, to the blessing of the chalice. That means, practically, that there’s a loud rumbling of bodies and kneelers after the prayer has begun, drowning out the following sentence. The faithful do not kneel after the Agnus Dei. 

They used to kneel after receiving Communion, but word went out that we are supposed all to stand till the last person has received, supposedly as a sign of our solidarity. The practical effect of that is to turn the period after Communion into a waiting game. The people stood till the priest sat down, and then they sat down. Nobody knelt. Of course, I don’t know and can’t tell how much praying was going on, but the posture of quiet meditation was missing because everybody was watching for their signal to sit.

The church itself is not full of signs that it is a holy place, or that the most momentous event on earth occurs there, the Holy Eucharist. There are the Stations of the Cross, without captions. There is a large and somewhat embarrassing painting of the Holy Ghost as a pigeon. There is a crucifix. But there are no shrines, no altar rail. They still station the chairs for the priest and the altar boys—there were no altar servers—behind the table, so that your attention is on him and not on an altar, or a tabernacle, or the Sacrament, or a work of religious art.

I don’t know when they got rid of their old windows, nor can I find a photograph of what the interior of the church used to be. Perhaps the old windows were simple glass. What’s there now are windows divided into large looping sections, some clear, some colored—green or red or blue or yellow according to the window; there is no meaning to any of it, and no beauty. But there is a large quilt, the most prominent object near the sanctuary, though there really is no sanctuary either. The quilt celebrates by name various families that were the first to settle in the area.

I don’t intend any blame here for the priest and the congregation. The bishops are another matter. The people are friendly, much more so than where we live in the United States, and the help they give one another is startling. They are rightly devoted to the villages where they were born. But they will lose that bond; they are losing it now, before my eyes, and they sense also that they are losing it. Only a few people make the connection between losing the church and losing the village as anything more than a vague geographical region.

As in the States, weddings are few and far between, and they are always vulnerable to willful dissolution of the vows. Jesus used the image of the wedding feast of man to reveal to us the wedding feast of God. His first miracle took place at a wedding feast; and the last vision of Revelation, of the consummation of time in eternity, is of the wedding feast of the Lamb. That surely was not coincidental. 

Would Jesus, in our time, have to use a different image to convey to us what Heaven is? I don’t think so, regardless of whether people still can grasp the power of the image. That is because it is no mere image. Nor is the human person divided into secular and sacred. 

If he loses the habits appropriate for the human wedding feast—and I include under “habits” all signs to himself and to others and all preparations for the feast, even the preparation that takes months or years, the continence or chastity that honors the wedding to arrive in the future—he will fail to understand what Jesus is talking about. But the harm goes the other way, too. If he loses the habits appropriate for the divine wedding feast, he will end up losing his grasp upon the human.

Again, let me not be understood as implying anything lavish or opulent, which in its own way can violate the spirit of the feast—by parading one’s wealth and obligating others to do the same, under pain of grim disapproval. Glitter is often the benighted soul’s bad substitute for light. But it costs nothing to kneel. It costs nothing to sing a cappella. It costs nothing to change your clothes to put on something a bit more formal than what you would wear while mowing the lawn. It costs nothing to sit for a few minutes at least to hear someone preach the word of God. It did cost a great deal to remove the devotional art that doubtless once adorned that church. Nor is that cost over and done with.

And why should we not do these things? We either believe that a miracle happens every time Mass is celebrated, or we do not. If we do, we either believe that such a miracle warrants from us a corresponding devotion, born from gratitude and a conviction that indeed the miracle does happen, or we do not. If we do, then the obvious question is what we should do to corroborate in ourselves and to show to others that this is so. May I suggest that negligence is not the answer?