The Liturgy, the Real, and a Journey to Both
The Liturgy, the Real, and a Journey to Both
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I undertake this writing opportunity with joy and excitement. I also take it up in true “unconformed” fashion by writing my first draft with pen and paper.
This collection of posts by the Gaskovski’s is intended to encourage others to detach more from their technocratic world in order find, appreciate, and love “the Real”. There are many directions I could pursue to achieve this goal, but in an effort to be true to my own writing I would like to share a small reflection. I would like to write about the place of—or lack of—technology in my being Catholic.
I used to be a charismatic Christian. But, first, let me explain that term for those unfamiliar with it. In the United States—and in other parts of the world—a “charismatic” is a Christian who believes in miracles (and that the gifts of the Holy Spirit outlived the apostles and have persisted to our own day). This is not really surprising since I am not sure how a Christian could not believe, at least, in the occasional miracle. Furthermore, so long as a person is even vaguely familiar with the saints, they would know that the Christian tradition has always had its miracles. But I must add that in the United States the mainstream charismatic culture comes with a lot of fixtures and spectacles.
The mainstream-American-charismatic is flooded, blasted, and drowned in a sea of technology. A charismatic can hardly walk into a successful church—in their eyes—without seeing cameras, microphones, electric instruments, broadcasting devices, mixers, projectors, and in some wealthy churches, large digital signs that display the lyrics to songs already memorized. One wonders why so much hardware and software are packed into churches. And for me the pressing question is not, why is the technology there? We know why it’s there; we live in a modern time with technology and gadgets everywhere, and church must be “up to date.” Rather, the question I believe more significant and demanding is, why do we feel like we need it?
I remember living in this culture. Many of us spent countless hours streaming sermons on Youtube, or playing music through our phones, and (even when in the flesh for a church service or a conference) we felt the best sermons had lights, a well produced band, and a digitizable sermon. Our technology and our engagement with it were integral parts of the culture. So much so, that my charismatic past would be hardly recognizable with out them.
Our lives displayed a living need to be supplemented. As a charismatic we felt like we needed miracles. But, I would submit to you, the desire for miracles in that modern-machine environment was only the symptom of a deeper desire. It was perhaps the wake of a boat left behind on a lake. What we needed was a type of Christianity that could keep up with us and our times. We need a Christianity that offered greater freedom, greater control, and greater self-actualization. And this point I feel gestures at why we felt like we needed miracles. It was not that we wanted the supernatural merely. Rather we wanted a Christianity that gave us what our machines gave us: control, excitement, and constant newness.
In our modern world we can achieve so many things with so little effort. We can manipulate our world with more success than Merlin ever dreamed of. Our technology can also dazzle us in ways that paintings, sculptures, cathedrals, and the genuinely numinous used to. So what happens when Christianity, a relic of an old world long forgot, becomes less awful (by which I mean the old sense of the word as in awe-full) than our machine world? What will we do to ourselves when machines—read “mechanized-magic”— becomes our faith?
I am not honestly sure what would happen, but I believe that I have begun to feel the cure, or perhaps I sense it like one senses the presence of the sun by the warmth on their skin as they walk outside. I first felt it as I began to be drawn to the Catholic Church. I was not drawn to the Catholic Church because I was repulsed by technology. Rather, the closer I got to the Catholic Church the more I noticed how much of my faith had been machine-mediated. At times we do not know how influenced we are by something until its importance recedes from our lives. I was in great need of a detox from something I had no idea I was addicted to.
A genuine encounter with the liturgy and the sacraments can provide us with this cure: just as it has for me. The liturgy has a way of planting one’s feet to the ground and helping that person to see. In the liturgy I found a more human way of being. I found myself more, I think, precisely because I was being mediated less. The liturgy is the high point of Catholic worship and, this is absolutely essential, it must be attended in person: in the flesh. The Liturgy, according to the Catechism, is the people of God engaging in the work of God. And therefore the more human it is, in the sense of genuinely human, the more it lives up to its purpose.
Now there are those who, seeing the whole machine show of modern charismaticism, dismiss the whole thing as “sensual”. But this is a misplaced critique. It is not that the machine makes a charismatic’s faith more sensual than the liturgy, but it does make it less human, and faster. A modern machine-service attempts to keep us entertained while, the liturgy helps human beings achieve their end. But, the liturgy has no less “sensuality”. It knowingly uses sounds, smells, sights, and touches to draw us in. It is a drama of which we play an indispensable part. I believe this is one of the main points really. The liturgy has taught me to pursue “the Real” rather than the purely exciting.
On that score, one of the best things about the liturgy is its simplicity. It needs only humans, one of whom is a priest, and the prescribed elements for consecration—along with God you understand. It does not need a computer, or a camera, or lights, or microphones or screens. To include these things would in no way improve the liturgy. The reason? Worship in its highest form is sacrifice, not the speed or easiness with which I feel some emotion. What a genuine sacrifice requires is a human who wills to relinquish something of value to God. Therefore, to treat the liturgy as if it can be improved by machines runs the risk of making our sacrifices easier. And at what point is an easy sacrifice, no longer a sacrifice at all?
This is why the liturgy is so beautiful and human. Because it thrusts more of me—properly speaking—into the act of worship. Not in an arrogant way, but in a way that demands, inspires, and engenders humility.
It teaches us in other ways still. It reminds us that there are some things that technology can not fundamentally improve. The liturgy is one, but we, us, human beings are another. This “liturgical”—if you will—way of being is therefore, truly “unconformed”. We hoard our technology because we feel that the world is a machine, and that everything in the world can be, indeed should be, improved. But the liturgy reminds me that what our modern world calls “improvement” might just very well be another word for “distortion”.
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