Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez

Author:Richard Rodriguez
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780553898835
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2004-02-02T16:00:00+00:00

III

Now. I go to mass every Sunday. Old habits persist. But it is an English mass I attend, a ritual of words. A ritual that seeks to feed my mind and would starve my somewhat metaphorical soul. The mass is less ornamental; it has been ‘modernized,’ tampered with, demythologized, deflated. The priest performs fewer gestures. His central role as priest—intermediary between congregation and God—is diminished. Symbols have changed. A reciprocal relationship between people and clergy is dramatized as the congregation takes an active role in the recitation of the mass. The priest faces the people, his back to the tabernacle. And the effect of this rearrangement is to make the mass seem less a prayer directed to God, more a communal celebration of the Eucharist. There is something occasional about it all, and no occasion for pomp or solemnity. No longer is the congregation moved to a contemplation of the timeless. Rather it is the idiomatic one hears. One’s focus is upon this place. This time. The moment. Now.

In the old Latin mass my mother could recite her rosary while still being at one with prayer at the altar. The new English mass is unilinear, lacking density; there is little opportunity for private prayer. The English words enforce attention. Emphasis is on the communal prayer, communal identity. There is a moment just before the Communion when members of the congregation shake hands to dramatize a union. We nod and bow, shake hands like figures on a music box.

I go along with the Kiss of Peace, but paradoxically I feel isolated sitting in half-empty churches among people I am suddenly aware of not knowing. The kiss signifies to me a betrayal of the older ceremonial liturgy. I miss that high ceremony. I am saddened by inappropriate music about which it is damning enough to say that it is not good enough, and not even the best of its authentic kind—folk, pop, quasi-religious Broadway show tunes. I miss the old trappings—trappings that disclosed a different reality. I have left church early, walked out, after hearing the congregation spontaneously applaud its own singing. And I have wondered how the Church I loved could have changed so quickly and completely.

I continue to claim my Catholicism. Invariably I arrive late at somebody’s brunch or tennis party—the festivities of a secular Sunday. Friends find it peculiar that I still go to mass; most have heard me complain about liturgical changes. Amid the orange juice and croissants I burlesque the folk-mass liturgy (‘Kumbaya’), the peppy tambourine. Those listening find my sarcasm amusing. And someone says that my Catholicism is a mere affectation, an attempt to play the Evelyn Waugh eccentric to a bland and vulgar secular age.

I am not surprised. I do not know myself, not with any certainty, how much I really am saying when I profess Catholicism. In a cultural sense, I remain a Catholic. My upbringing has shaped in me certain attitudes which have not worn thin over the years. I am, for example,

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