Wow. The music at Mass this morning was easily the most uniformly bad collection of the worst of American worship music circa 1982 that I have heard in a long, long time. (And that really is saying something.) And it was very badly done, to boot.
I got to watch my wife cringe through the entire service. Poor thing. I should have warned her before she converted that Catholics in this country have given up on beauty in favour of the vapid and accessible. I guess I had forgotten that this was something to be noted. She had never even heard of a ‘guitar Mass’, and I don’t think anything I could have said could have prepared her for the agony it caused her soul the first time she was subjected to one.
Even three years later, this insipid yet ubiquitous pap is still almost unbearably painful for her, and her suffering reminds me how very numb my own soul must now be, that I am not similarly nauseated. I know I used to be; I guess I have simply given up hope at some aesthetic level.
Where does one have to go for a sense of the sacred these days? And even if there was such a place, would we really be able to take a toddler there? Can’t we worship in awe anymore?
Write the guitar mass scene! I will love it, guaranteed.
You’ve evoked many of my childhood Sundays, please continue!
(Good questions too, but you’re underwriting them. Let us have it!)