My soap-box

Burn the hymnals.
Let us make a holy fire, fed by worship-aids and missalettes.

Let us enter call a year of jubilee, unchain our eyes from the pages of our songbooks and raise our eyes to the mountain. Then, perhaps, we shall lift our hearts to the Lord when we are not praying off from a page.

I know, I'm radical. Indeed what I propose, it is potentially threatening and unsettling. Imagine if there were no missalettes, no books to hide behind during mass. It is too direct: the word of God that enters right into your ears, liturgical dialogue that borders on direct conversation with God, and--most potent of all--songs that demand both an intellectual and an emotional involvement. It is too much, too real. We are too accustomed to having enough sensory input to block out that kind of intensity.

Multitasking: Driving, listening to the radio, and planning the schedule for the day, or, reading the paper while eating breakfast, and holding a conversation. It seems like more is getting done. More sensory input per minute. I have issue with that partly because the analogy is taken from our computers. Not that I dislike computers, quite the contrary; but I am reminded of what the psalmist says of idols: they have eyes, but cannot see; they have ears, but cannot hear; never is a breath in their mouths...and their makers shall become like them. Multitasking, more sensory input per minute..."their makers shall be like them."

The truth is that humans are not computers and we are not more effective persons when we are more efficient multitaskers. If we take that as our model, there is the real danger is that we might actually achieve it. Simply machines that input and output data.

Anyway, this relates back to my original point because when humans try and multitask, they end up canceling out the intensity and depth of any one of the experiences. By reading and singing and praying at the same time, we really blunt all three actions. Try this sometime: really focus on just one thing. Maybe the sensation of taste or touch, or singing, running, silence. Almost anything by itself has an intensity to it that is almost overwhelming--unless it is ignored among a crowd of other simultaneous experiences. Liturgical music shall always be shallow and cumbersome as long as we continue our dependency on missalettes.

Sadly, my incinatory answer to this issue is not viable--yet. Americans don't have positive models to revert to if all their current books were cast into flames of judgment. There are models of bookless singing, but they are not--yet--mainstreem. Charismatics figured this out (how can you raise your arms in praise while balancing a songbook?), African-American choirs don't use books (how can you clap with a hymnal in your hand?), and the Byzantine/Marianite /Ruthuanian/ other eastern Catholic rites basically have their sung liturgy memorized (surprisingly, they don't do anything with their hands while praying). The Roman Catholics need to get on the right page--no page.

As for me, I wait and I long for the day when our sacrifice of praise shall rise to heaven like the smoke of thousand hymnals burning in the parking lot.