Edmond Grace SJ provides some reasons for using music during the Mass to a parishioner, who finds music in the church a little irritating.
I am one of those people who do not like music in Church. As I see it, most Church music these days is of very poor quality, and anyway a Church is one of the few places of silence in our increasingly hectic world. I really don’t know why people want to clutter up the Mass with music which is often in questionable taste. Whenever I mention this to one of our local priests, whom I respect a lot, he is quite dismissive of my point of view. I would be interested to hear what you have to say on the matter.
There is no denying that silence – shared silence – has a powerful role to play in deepening our awareness of God. Furthermore, it is something which many people today find difficult to cope with. They have to be doing something or else watching others doing something. The idea of being silent and still in the presence of mystery is increasingly alien.
Two kinds of silence
It is vital, when people come together to worship God, that there are moments of deep silence. However, these moments are more than an absense of noise. It’s like when two people are together saying nothing to each other. They may be saying nothing because they have nothing of any significance to say or it may be because they have said all they want to say and are content simply to be in each other’s presence. The first kind of silence is empty – the silence of boredom in which people are embarrassed and just want to get away. The second kind is full – the silence of contemplation in which people are aware of each other and happy to be together.
Boredom
When people – particularly young people – speak about being bored at Mass it is because they do not experience the full silence of contemplation. What for people such as yourself is an experience of the mystery of God’s presence in the celebration of the eucharist, is often for them little more than a meaningless repetition of tired formulae. They don’t mean to belittle the experience of other people when they talk in this manner; they simply find it hard to understand.
The main challenge for those of us who want to hand on the faith is how to awaken in them a taste for the gentle healing silence of contemplation, especially at Mass.
Music and contemplation
This is where music has a role to play; it can help us to listen and relax. It may sound strange at first sight but we cannot be contemplative – that is truly focused on the deeper realities of life – unless we are relaxed and at ease.
Music in worship is a means towards contemplation and never an end in itself, though there are many well-intentioned people who do not realise this. They think that the more people sing and the more singing there is the better. Very often the result of their efforts is to crowd out any sense of shared silence without which there can be no real experience of communion.
Music has no place at Mass if its only purpose is to entertain and to keep people from being bored. If it doesn’t awaken in those who hear it some sense of wonder and reverent listening, then it does a disservice to those who attend. I know one choir director who maintains that the moments he enjoys most in the liturgy are when the choir has just stopped singing! He has the right idea. Not that he is downgrading the significance of music, but he is aware that it certainly is not the whole story and that at its best it draws us into the silence of contemplation.
It is also important for us to remember that different kinds of music can help different people in different ways. As a schoolboy I remember the old Latin High Mass with Gregorian chant and how it helped me to acquire that sense of contemplation to which I have referred.
A few years ago I found myself at a Mass in Cincinnati at which the music was all from the Afro-American spiritual tradition. This is a very different style of music from Gregorian chant ,and yet during that Mass I had the same sense which I had at High Mass as a child – a sense of being part of something greater than the gathering of people who were in that Church.
A sense of community
When the liturgy of the Church is well done it gives people a sense of being part of a community which includes not only people in every part of the world but also the communion of saints in heaven. A sense of that, even a glimmer, is something powerful which can change our lives for the better. If there is no sense of contemplative silence in liturgy people will have no sense of anything beyond what they see and hear in the rituals.
This silence, however, is not a starting point. It is a destination which we can only reach by opening ourselves to that other world through acts of worship and, even then, it is only possible through the power of the Holy Spirit. But what do we find in that silence when we are touched by the mystery of God? And how do we savour it? We savour that sense of mystery by listening to the silence, because it has something to tell us.
Singing God’s praise
According to scripture, the angels – those mysterious creatures which act as messengers between this world and the next – never stop singing the praises of God. In that deep silence which opens our hearts to God’s love there will always be music because, like the angels, we are made to sing God’s praise.
When we are happy we sing, and there is no greater happiness than to be in God’s presence.
This article first appeared in the
Messenger (October 2000), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
