Chapter II (Spectacular Mass) P1
As a ceremony in which the community should be raised up to a higher power through shared, external symbolic actions, it seems that our mass has a lot of room to further explore how it can unite and elevate. Our liturgical service evolved into a comprehensible and unchanging set of sequential signs. By utilising all the means of communication and engagement (images, texts, songs and repetition) known to man in the past, the imagination and attention of the congregation was captured simultaneously, and the intended conveyance of salvation, and the elevation of the group was achieved.
At the heart of our mass is the great daily miracle of transubstantiation and communion with God; all else is the mere form, and method, for joining together the group in a shared experience, and maintaining their recurrent participation. In this arena the world has evolved away from us. We have resolutely clung to the outward form of our service, while it no longer seizes the imagination of the masses; we have tenaciously maintained the repetitiveness of a ritual designed for men whose everyday lives did not contain spectacle, did not contain anything of the incredible. Now man is surrounded on all sides by spectacular form, his eyes and ears are kept perpetually wondering at the inventive magic of films, bands, videos, shows, adverts, sport; he is swept up in communal fervour as he attends concerts or films where there is no higher aim than to venerate the novelty of sounds or display. Man’s participation is ensured both by coruscating display, but also by the illusion of choice. The sheer variety of event that is available at any given time, the hit-list in which each individual may have his own personal favourite, which he will then choose to go and venerate, this apparent wealth of options serves to hide the fact that it is all only outward form. There is no core meaning, no higher content than the generation of wealth.
We -the Church- are surrounded by cultic and spectacular rituals which manage to engage man, but engage him for no higher purpose. We are surrounded by the lessons of spectacular form and yet continue to fill our churches with a mass that speaks to people who died long ago. Let us separate the essential core of our liturgy from its outmoded form and instead communicate it through the continuous novelty and variety which so captivates today’s audiences. We propose a Liturgical tautology of spectacle; the essential heart, the message of liturgy will remain always the same, only it will be communicated in as many ways as there are bands on MySpace.
We propose Spectacular Mass.
