Making the Mass More Personal: Reviewing "The Beauty of the Word" by Anthony Esolen

The Beauty of the Word: A Running Commentary on the Roman Missal by Anthony Esolen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Guided by Anthony Esolen, a master translator and professor of literature, you'll go deep into the meaning of each part of the liturgy. Esolen explains the importance of this new translation, and provides context, scriptural references, notes which reference the original Latin text, and more. This is a must-have guide for unlocking the riches of the newly implemented and newly translated Roman Missal. The Beauty of the Word gives a comprehensive, step-by-step commentary to the changes in the Order of Mass (including Prefaces), the Proper of Time, and the Proper of Saints. The unique insights found in this book give the reader a full understanding of the scriptural, liturgical, linguistic, and pastoral rationale of the revised Missal.

I am not sure exactly what I expected however I suspect that, once I have had a chance to reflect upon it, this book is going to deliver more than I realized. Anyone who has the Magnificat Roman Missal Companion published for the change in the liturgy, has an abbreviated version of this larger book.

Anthony Esolen breaks open the prayers of the Mass throughout the year, using the changes in the translation as a starting point. However, he goes beyond simply discussing word choices as he draws the reader's attention to connections with scripture, the Mass readings, and Christ in our lives. The first half of the book is devoted to the Collect, Prayer over the Offerings, Preface, and Prayer after Communion for every Mass through the year. Special times like the Triduum, of course, have commentary for many other prayers used only then. Thus we are given a rich source of reflection to add to the Mass readings themselves

Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Prayer over the Offerings

Grant us, O merciful God,
that this our offering may find acceptance with you
and that through it the wellspring of all blessing
may be laid open before us.
Through Christ our Lord.

...the wellspring of all blessing: Echoing the words of Jesus to the Samaritan woman at the well: "The water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life" (Jn 4:14). The bridegroom in the Song of Songs, whom Christians interpret as Christ, says of his bride, the Church: "You are an enclosed garden,my sister,my bride, / an enclosed garden, a fountain sealed" (Song 4:12). We pray that the fountain may be opened to us, like the opened side of our Savior on the Cross.

The next section covers the Order of the Mass in detail, commenting not simply upon prayers but upon all the spoken liturgical elements. This book, unlike the aforementioned Missal Companion, contains comments for Mass elements arising only at special times, such as various Prefaces for Lent and Easter or Blessings at the end of Mass for Weddings.

The last section comments upon the Collects, Prayers over the Offerings and Prayers after Communion for the Proper of Saints. As Esolen says, there is not room to comment upon those for each of the saints in the year, which is a real shame. He makes general remarks that apply to all these prayers and then discusses the specific prayers for special feast days. Included among those we might expect, such as for the Annunciation and special feasts for Mary, we find commentary for interesting extras like the Chair of Saint Peter the Apostle, Saint Lawrence, and Saint Bartholomew. Certainly it is enough to make me wish for a book of commentary on the saints throughout the year.

This is an extraordinary resource and it is fascinating to see the riches contained in even the smallest prayers read during the Mass. They often catch my ear with personal meaning but this book will help draw me closer to Christ to consider the underlying beauty and depth in every portion of the holy Mass. I will be using this book for daily contemplation and as a prompt to look up the scripture to which the prayers refer. It will be a different sort of Bible study but one that should have immediate application every Sunday at Mass.

Highly recommended.

Where Do We Draw the Line with God?

This was the theme that our priest returned to again and again as he talked about the story of Abraham taking Isaac up the mountain, thinking that God would have him slay his son as a sacrifice. Neither Abraham nor Isaac protested or put up any opposition to God's orders. They exhibited completely willingness and trust in God no matter how terrible and abhorrent his plans seemed.

This made me think of Mary's "yes" to God, her similar complete willingness and trust.

I also thought of what I had read that morning in Thomas Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation.

We must learn to realize that the love of God seeks us in every situation, and seeks our good. His inscrutable love seeks our awakening. True, since this awakening implies a kind of death to our exterior self, we will dread His coming in proportion as we are identified with this exterior self and attached to it. But when we understand the dialectic of life and death we will learn to take the risks implied by faith, to make the choices that deliver us from our routine self and open to us the door of a new being, a new reality.

The mind that is the prisoner of conventional ideas, and the will that is the captive of its own desire cannot accept the seeds of an unfamiliar truth and a supernatural desire. For how can I receive the seeds of freedom if I am in love with slavery and how can I cherish the desire of God if I am filled with another and an opposite desire? God cannot plant His liberty in me because I am a prisoner and I do not even desire to be free. I love my captivity and I imprison myself in the desire for the things that I hate, and I have hardened my heart against true love. I must learn therefore to let go of the familiar and the usual and consent to what is new and unknown to me. I must learn to "leave myself in order to find myself by yielding to the love of God. If I were looking for God, every event and every moment would sow, in my will, grains of His life that would spring up one day in a tremendous harvest.

I thought of a couple of occasions when I have seen people who knew what was right but who so clearly desired to do what they wanted instead. How they went from friend to friend asking for an opinion. When it never was the answer they wanted, these seekers having honest friends, they kept searching almost frantically for someone who would affirm their wishes instead of the larger truth. In each case, their friends' hearts ached for them during the search.

Then I thought of myself. How easy it is to identify when someone else is turning from obedience. Yet, as I had just been telling Tom that morning, I had been feeling nudges from many sources to begin attending daily Mass. No one was saying that most deadly of arguments to me, "It's so wonderful. So inspirational." I'd heard that before. It merely left me thinking I didn't feel that "call."

No, the comments that nudged would always be about something else entirely. I can't really recall they were now, for the most part (except for yours, Rita, that one I remember). To get my attention to that level, however, they had been coming for some time and from many sources. Even at a party on Saturday when a friend was telling of her own Lenten addition of Wednesday morning Mass, my antennae perked up. That "I ought to ..." feeling was there.

I could not even argue that it would disrupt my morning schedule. I would merely have to put aside my own activities for an hour before getting to work ... and I can't even tell you what activities would be disrupted, that is how unimportant they are.

I was beginning to feel annoyed and hunted. Until I realized during that homily just where I was drawing the line. At giving God one hour in the morning. An hour which He fully is intending for my own joy and good and benefit ... and freedom. If I am reading the "nudges" aright.

In response, here I was kicking and screaming. Not trusting and wondering and looking forward to what might come that I cannot possibly foresee.

It was a shaming moment.

But afterward, when I had apologized and said a wholehearted, "Yes" ... I had complete peace. No annoyance over the schedule, over the daily obligation. Simply peace. That is the clearest sign of all.

My only mulling over then was wondering what time, if some of the daily Masses were held at the lower school instead of the church and so on. At which point I spared my guardian angel a thought. He had just been waiting, evidently, to whack me on the head and say, "Just go, knucklehead! Don't sweat the details."

Got it.

I went home afterwards and finished reading the essay.

My chief care should not be to find pleasure or success, health or life or money or rest or even things like virtue and wisdom--still less their opposites, pain, failure, sickness, death. But in all that happens, my one desire and my one joy should be to know: "Here is the thing that God has willed for me. In this His love is found, and in accepting this I can give back His love to Him and give myself with it to Him. For in giving myself I shall find Him and He is life everlasting.

By consenting to His will with joy and doing it with gladness I have His love in my heart, because my will is now the same as His love and I am on the way to becoming what He is, Who is Love. And by accepting all things from Him I receive His joy into my soul, not because things are what they are but because God is Who He is, and His love has willed my joy in them all.

Indeed.

And if not joy yet, certainly peace.

No measurable good may come of daily Mass attendance that I will ever be able to report (though I don't really believe that). However, even if the sole good comes from my realization of my stubborn struggle and my change of heart to a willing "yes" ... then that is enough.

Update: Ironically, this morning at my first daily Mass I realized that this actually may be God's way of economically answering my own prayers and using them for something which I had not intended. I'd been having so much trouble getting my time use under control that I'd been praying for help with focusing. Mass waiteth for no man (to paraphrase that famous saying). Except for the priest, one supposes. I've gotta hustle and focus to get there on time. Hoist on my own petard!

Mary Catholic Ponders New Translations, a Bishop's Tantrum, and Efficiency

Recently someone very kindly said that this was a nice place to relax in a Catholic atmosphere. Unfortunately, I'm now going to speak up about a controversial subject. You've been warned. So just move along if you don't want to get riled up ... or just plain don't care, which is fine too...

Engrish.com

Translations are tricky things, aren't they?

It is no secret that I have been in favor of the new liturgical translations, purely from the standpoint that the post-Vatican II thinking probably did to the language the same thing that was done to the architecture. Which is to say, they were made so basic and "dumbed down" that we were left without beauty.

I freely admit that this is a large supposition. It was in part based on looking at my New American Bible's language versus some of the older translations. It also was "dumbed down" and left without beauty. Furthermore, as I have been going for over a year to weekly scripture study and the question of accurate translation has arisen, the New American Bible frequently "loses" when compared with other translations and the original text.

However, as I really have no say whatsoever in the matter, I cheered the bishops' approval of a new translation and then largely forgot it.

That is, I forgot until several items popped up recently which I will address in order of occurrence.

The Bishop
Bishop Donald Trautman had an article published in America magazine castigating the accessibility of the new Mass translations.

Please go read it yourself. I was stunned at the sheer lack of professionalism in what looked largely like a condescendingly and poorly written tantrum. I say this because:

1. Firstly, he is worried about "John and Mary Catholic" and "American English." Isn't this English translation being used everywhere in the English speaking world? What about "Bruce and Sheila Catholic?" (G'day mate!) Or "Tyler and Brittney Catholic?" (See, some of those Catholics are pretty young ... they speak a different kind of English.) Or "Keesha and Darnell Catholic?" (Yep. There are African American Catholics also). Anyway, you see my point.
   
   How uncharitable of Bp. Trautman to assume that we are stupid, in other words, assume the worst of us, and then insult us by shouting it to the world.
   
   
2. Ironically, the very person complaining about using words that no one understands phrases it in language like this:

   If the language of the liturgy is inaccessible, how can liturgy catechize and convey the reality of the living, risen Son of God in the Eucharist? If the language of the liturgy is a stumbling block to intelligibility and proclaimability, then the lex orandi, lex credendi is severely compromised. If the language of the liturgy does not communicate, how can people fall in love with the greatest gift of God, the Eucharist?

   Inaccessible? Catechize? Didn't he mean "hard" and "teach?" I'm not sure that "proclaimability" even is a word, but a suspicious number of those look mighty hard to understand. I mean to say, there's Latin in there! Could it be that the words he used actually communicated best what he wanted to say ... and that he didn't worry about making it simply understood by the meanest intelligence? That he trusted people to be able to comprehend the article properly? Hmmm ...


3. Simultaneously, Bp. Trautman supports his statement thusly:

   ... and odd expressions like “What you have charged us to believe will taste sweet to the heart” (Collect for April 21). Does the heart “taste?”

   This makes me feel for the poor bishop who has never listened to modern poetry as it is most commonly contained ... in song lyrics.
   
   If he missed Rodgers and Hart's "... the conversation - with the flying plates ..." ("What?" I hear him saying, "Do plates fly or converse?"), then perhaps he is thinking of more modern songs.
   
   Nope. Because here's Kill Hannah's "I want a girl with lips like morphine, Knock me out every time they touch me." And yet, teenagers understand the real meaning. (No actual drug use is being endorsed here, Bishop. Just in case you were worried.)
   


4. What annoyed me the most was his exhortation to go speak up. Now there's a fine example from a bishop. I wouldn't like that behavior from a CEO much less someone who is supposed to be able to work on a team and be obedient instead of throwing a tantrum for sympathy from the masses who can't change anything.
   
   I saw a post by a thoughtful blogger who I respect but who leans in a different direction than I do on many issues. Fair enough. We're together on the things that matter most. However, Bishop Trautman's aforementioned exhortation to "speak up" resulted in this attitude:

   Of all the issues facing the church today – and there are plenty of big, serious ones – why in the world is... who's in charge of this thing? - why are 'they' spending precious time and resources on such a project that will further alienate and distance people from the Mass? We don't need different translations, we need better homilies and more priests! I'm irritated enough to start writing my bishop about this, for all the good that will do. I get cynical and pessimistic as I get irritated.

   Considering how the article was couched, this is a response to be expected. The Bishop's rhetoric simultaneously riles up and depresses people over an issue that they have no control over. That is the way tantrums work. They draw attention and that is the ultimate goal of a tantrum ... to get attention and one's own way.
   
   However, I think that the above response is possibly forgetting that words and translations do matter. If they matter in everyday life as we all know, then surely they matter when lifting our hearts and souls to God. Surely this is worth hammering out until it is right, rather than convenient "as is."
   
   If the people and the mysterious "they" have had their hearts drawn closer to God, then the thinking would follow that they will go on to express that love in helping those around them. Indirectly, then, an improved liturgy would logically go on to aid in the "big, serious" things. (Though I am far from admitting that the liturgy is not a "big, serious" thing. Meeting God ... that's big and serious to me.)
   

To be fair, I do understand the bishop's overall concern. He's afraid that the translators are doing to the liturgy, what that translator did in the picture above.

However, what I am wondering is if the liturgy we have now is the result of that sort of translating.

The blogger trusted Bishop Trautman's word on this. I trust the the translating committee.

So we see the dilemma. Who is right?

That is far as my thinking on the subject went. Until this week.

Comparing Liturgies
The end of our scripture study was different than usual. Our priest had read Bp. Trautman's article. Without talking about the article very much, he wanted to see if the language was too difficult to understand. He then proposed a "liturgical experiment" and handed out sheets of paper. One side had Eucharistic Prayer 1 as we use it now. The other side had the proposed translation of Eucharistic Prayer 1.

Then he read the proposed translation aloud while we read the current side to see how they were different. Afterward, he solicited thoughts from us.

As simple as that.

Yet suddenly everything became unexpectedly clear for me.

This was quite different than having a few sentences compared to each other or phrases pulled out of context for scrutiny. The words rolled over us and I suddenly was awash in phrases that showed me God's majesty, Jesus' sacrifice, my place in it, God's unending love for me ... and I felt gratitude and love in response. This may sound as if I'm overstating it. I'm not. I practically was in tears. That language literally lifted me to God. Meanwhile, I was astounded at the sparseness of the current text that corresponded to what was being read.

Please keep in mind that I am not a fool. I do know that after several months of hearing the language "roll over me" it will become routine. However, the liturgy that we have now stands out for me during Mass in this place or that to call me to God. The proposed liturgy will do so even more if this is any indication.

Mind you, it didn't strike everyone this way. Of the 15-20 people there, three preferred the current version. However, they all used the qualifier, "I am a lawyer" and said that they preferred "efficient language."

Obviously these will be the two attitudes to the proposed change.

Interestingly, one fellow hesitantly said, "But if this new text is mysterious ... isn't that what God and the Mass are? Mysterious?"

Which would seem to be the point to me. That worshiping God and celebrating the Mass are not about efficiency. They are about bringing us to God, lifting our hearts that we might have that veil drawn back for a second or two so that we may truly have a glimpse of heaven.

Efficiency
Think of how many things in our life are not efficient. So many of them are the very things that we treasure most. Preparing a meal and eating it with our families instead of grabbing a sandwich and all going to our rooms. Living as families instead of in communes. The love of a man and woman for each other is obviously terribly inefficient as a way to choose a spouse. As for making love, that most mysterious of all acts which makes husband and wife one on so many levels as well as creating visible evidence of our love (about 9 months later) ... well, I believe science has proven that if all we want is efficiency a test tube or two will suffice.

Let's take it to a more religious level ... the Bible? That's such an inefficient way to communicate, despite all attempted "clear" translations, and difficult to understand on many levels. Jesus' Passion? Sheez, talk about a mystery. Clearly, God is not worried about efficiency. His ways are not ours.

The conversation about efficiency made me think of John 12:1-8. Judas thought very efficiently (for whatever reason).

Six days before Passover Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead.

They gave a dinner for him there, and Martha served, while Lazarus was one of those reclining at table with him.

Mary took a liter of costly perfumed oil made from genuine aromatic nard and anointed the feet of Jesus 2 and dried them with her hair; the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil.

Then Judas the Iscariot, one (of) his disciples, and the one who would betray him, said, "Why was this oil not sold for three hundred days' wages 3 and given to the poor?"

He said this not because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief and held the money bag and used to steal the contributions.

So Jesus said, "Leave her alone. Let her keep this for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me."

Proposal
I would propose that our priest's liturgical experiment is a good one. I have formatted the text so that you can download it as a pdf. Give it a try. Don't just read it to yourself. Have someone read it aloud while you read along. (If you would like to look beyond what our priest chose, go to Whispered in the Sacristy who is one of those who has been asked to be a “reader” of the new translation of the Mass for Bishop CVG. He has more translations available. We will be reading Eucharistic Prayer II next week after our scripture study.)

Will it convince you that a translation is needed? Not necessarily. But at least you will have your own honest reactions to judge from instead of taking someone else's word for it. That is the place for honest conversation to begin.

No matter what, in the end it really comes down to what wise 94-year-old Phyllis said:

No matter what translation they use, in six months we'll all have accepted it and be on to worrying about the next topic.

Remember the writing and ink spilled over The Da Vinci Code? Yet how often do we see people getting all worked up about it now? It too has passed.

Let's do the experiment, take a deep breath, and remember that this isn't up to us. It also would be a very good idea to say a few prayers for everyone working on this translation that God will guide them in how He wants to be worshiped. As I recall He had quite a lot to say about that in the Old Testament in the building of the arc and the temple. Doubtless He has some very definite opinions about this too. He knows what we need and what will work best in achieving it.

May God's will be done.