Drawing inspiration from Sikh worship
April 14, 2013: Until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, Catholic worship was austere but deeply beautiful. It was conducted in Latin (the English translation was printed in the missals). It created a spirit of awe and reverence; its musical tradition was sublime.
In purely cultural terms, few human creations are more beautiful than Gregorian chant - plain, melodious, rich, serene. The big reform of Vatican II was to have the mass in English. This was surely a good thing. But in the effort to be culturally hip and contemporary, the mass, in Western countries at least, adopted a kind of folk informality that militates against the sublime, the reverential, the transcendent. The worst mistake was to adopt the folk music idiom of the 60s and 70s for church hymns.
It strikes me as quite wicked to deprive Catholic children of any encounter with the magnificent musical tradition of their church.
And then, much Catholic preaching is so utterly timid these days. Priests, overborne by the scandals of the church, demoralised and isolated in big, empty presbyteries, often offer at most a few reflections on the gospel reading of the day and a politically correct observation on some current controversy.
Recently I attended an evangelical Protestant service and the contrast was stunning. The evangelicals don't aim for the sublime and reverent but rather the energetic and uplifting. They approach the music as a central part of their church service, while the preacher speaks with passionate commitment, drawing freely on their own inner life. This may not be typical, but it was culturally coherent, the aesthetics and sensuous aspects of the worship supporting the religious sentiment. The middle-ground blandness of many parishes now seems exactly the wrong compromise.
For an even more striking comparison, let me refer you to Sikh worship. I am intimately connected to a number of Sikhs and often attend the Sunday service in the temple, or gurdwara. The Sikh services, always packed, are simple and beautiful. A number of Sikh priests, or granthis, chant verses from the Sikh holy books to a simple, rhythmic accompaniment. This singing is exclusively in classical Punjabi, which even modern Punjabi speakers find hard to understand. It is an Indian first cousin of Gregorian chant. The key words, Waheguru Satnam, meaning the name of God, have exactly the same syllabic regularity and sturdy tonality of Catholic Latin. The only concession to modernity is that an English translation of the relevant verses is projected on to big a screen to the side of the altar.
The other stroke of Sikh genius is the sumptuous meal at the end of every service. Now there's a custom we could all follow.