By Anthony Esolen
My family and I spend several months a year in Nova Scotia, in a part of the province that was once overwhelmingly Catholic. The congregations are aging, in part because many young people leave the island to work far away, and in part, I believe, because all the movements and accessories in the Mass seem to say: “There is nothing here that the mind can seek.”
In the Mass at one parish, everyone stands after the Sanctus, but only during the first sentence of the ever-used second Eucharistic Prayer. We are supposed to kneel once the priest invokes the Holy Spirit over the gifts. In practice, this means that the clomp-clomp of the kneelers and the movement of bodies interrupt the prayer and distract the priest.
Ideas about liturgical gestures, like this one from the Canadian bishops, may sound good in the abstract, but gestures are not abstract. They derive their force from the realities of human bodies. Only someone insensitive to the human body in motion could fail to foresee what would happen, and only someone clumsy in the art of human gesture could fail to see that this physical interruption confuses the prayer, separating one sentence from the next, when no such separation of meaning or action is required.
That clumsiness characterizes their general approach to liturgical gestures. At the end of the consecration, everyone must stand, and again the rustling and disorder occur just as the priest says: “This is the mystery of faith.” Once more the interruption, the discontinuity, and once more the likelihood that, in the discomfort of the moment, you won’t pay attention to your response to the priest. If the Eucharist is a great mystery, we want then, above all, to direct all our attention to it. Nothing should distract from it.
Communion is received standing, as almost everywhere since the Great Liquidation. I suspect that the posture was imposed not for what it is, but for what it is not: kneeling. One cannot impose a meaning on a bodily gesture that it does not possess in itself, nor to which it does not naturally lend itself.
You wait in line, vaguely aware of the person behind you, and you cannot stop after receiving Communion, in the same way that you do not stop after receiving your hamburger at the fast-food counter, or after placing your luggage on the airport conveyor belt, or in any of the many things for which we line up, usually with slight impatience or irritation. You step aside and return to your seat. Already banal, but in the diocese of Antigonish, Nova Scotia, you remain standing until everyone has received, thus prolonging the impatience.
In this particular parish, this generates confusion, not conducive to prayer. Some people kneel. Others sit. Most remain standing, as the Canadian bishops insist is best. It is supposed to be a sign of solidarity.
That is nonsense. You may pray, but above all you wait for the last person to sit, so that you can sit too. You are not recollected in yourself; you cannot be. People waiting for a signal can do nothing but observe. Try to lose yourself in prayer while waiting for everyone to receive Communion—a dozen in each row, then four or five, then two, finally one—finally!
It is also difficult to pray while advancing in line, because you must think about when to move your feet and where to place them so as not to step on anyone’s shoes. I don’t say it is impossible. With God all things are possible. But it is unlikely.
We are bodily beings, and what we do with our bodies instructs our minds. When I was a child, we knelt at the communion rail in our church, a work in Italian marble, inlaid with mosaics of Eucharistic symbols. After that Great Liquidation, I did not kneel to receive Communion again until one day, around 1988, my wife and I attended Mass in a great cathedral where the communion rail was still used.
We knelt together to receive the Sacrament. And the bodily gesture struck me like a powerful electric shock. I expected nothing. What I experienced was a variety of sensations, both in body and mind. I was kneeling: it was an act of humility. I could pray, without that little voice saying: “Move, move.” I could see the faces of many communicants kneeling to my right, faces of strangers, but not so strange, because they too were kneeling, and they too were at rest.
They were men and women, young and old. I felt that we were united. The sensation was all the more memorable because our posture was unusual. No one in our time kneels, except to worship God. And if man is, as I have often said, united only by what transcends him, then those who do not kneel before God can never form the strongest human communities.
What explains the animus against kneeling, and in general against solemnity in its various forms, among so many Catholic hierarchs and priests? I can venture several guesses, but they would be outside the point I am trying to make here. Bodily movements not only teach—and teach in a way that engraves the learned into memory—but also incline us toward mysteries of knowledge that transcend the everyday, even the humanly conceivable.
What, in the Mass, tells the body—and through the body—that you are, as Moses once was, on holy ground? In what posture do you approach the holy, as if you were no taller than a child? What choreography of movement and stillness opens the mind to a world of meaning that leaves our chatter behind?
About the author
Anthony Esolen is a professor, translator, and writer. Among his books are Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World and, most recently, The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord. He is Distinguished Professor at Thales College. Visit his new website: Word and Song