The Law of Unintended (Liturgical) Consequences

A phenomenon that has long fascinated me is the oft-referred to "Law of Unintended Consequences." It is a socio-political/economic theory of sorts that dates back to Adam Smith but was popularized in the twentieth century by sociologist Robert K. Merton. In his theory, Merton stated that often unanticipated consequences or unforeseen consequences are outcomes that are not the outcomes intended by a purposeful action. In some cases, the law of unintended consequences could create a perverse effect contrary to what was originally intended and ultimately making the problem worse.

Merton refers to the “relevance paradox”, whereby decision makers think they know their areas of ignorance regarding an issue, obtain the necessary information to fill that ignorance void but intentionally neglect other areas as its relevance is not obvious to them.

I have no experience in economics, politics, or sociology, but in the past few years I have been paying attention to the issues surrounding liturgical reform. Why?  As an American I am indirectly affected by economics, politics, and sociology. As a Catholic who has made faith the cornerstone of my life, however, I am directly affected by both my interior prayer and external worship.

For much of the past twenty years since I became a Catholic, I have been looking from the inside-out. My personal conversion of heart in the wilderness of upstate Pennsylvania at the age of seventeen constituted an inner metanoia or "born-again" experience which demanded a vessel to house it. That vessel of deposit was the Catholic Church, into which I was grafted when I made my first Confession, Communion, and Confirmation a year and a half later. Although Byzantine by rite, for twenty years I was more or less fed by the standard-fare of the Novus Ordo, as it was the only thing on the menu in college and beyond. I attended daily Mass often, and always on Sundays. I never gave much thought to how I was being formed from the outside-in: that is, how the liturgical expression of the Mass that I attended affected my inner spiritual disposition.

A.J. Jacob, the secular agnostic journalist who wrote an account of his guinea-pig attempt to live the Judaic biblical mandates to a 'T' in his book The Year of Living Biblically, noted that "Judaism has a slogan: deed over creed.' There's an emphasis on behavior; follow the rules of the Torah, and you'll eventually come to believe." Perhaps it was because I had such a strong interior conversion--recognizing my sinful nature and need for a Savior--that such a focus on the external locus (ie, "deed over creed") seemed foreign and Pharisaical. Religion was, and should be, a matter of the interior, the heart.

When I got married and my wife and I began having children, we continued to attend the local suburban parish as a matter of convenience. Built in a circular configuration in the 1990's, we were accustomed to the more or less anthropocentric experience of being "gathered around the table of the Lord" without giving much thought to it. We exchanged the Sign of Peace, took Communion in the hand from Eucharistic Ministers, and dressed more or less casually.

Little things were beginning to chafe over time, however. The applause by the congregation, the prominence of the music ministry, the creative license of the words of consecration by the priest. I was bothered, but couldn't put my finger on what it was that was bothering me.

We eventually switched parishes in large part because I was trying to get a street evangelization team off the ground and the parish we were attending was not interested in supporting one. The parish we ended up at had a pastor who was excited about claiming this endeavor and adding it to the roll of activities that marked a "vibrant parish." The church building itself was over one hundred years old, and maintained the architechural integrity of that era. There was an altar rail, though it was not utilized. The altar servers used a paten at Communion, but were still composed of boy and girl servers. The music was more traditional, though using the same hymnbook as our old parish. Again, these things began to chaff after a while, though they were in a parish more or less devoid of blatant liturgical abuses.

By happenstance, a local friend extended an invitation to attend a Latin Mass in the city. I decided to scout it out alone and report back to my family. I do not remember being overwhelmed by its beauty or reverence, but I do remember feeling a little disoriented and lost. But a seed was planted, and when we discovered a Latin Mass closer to our home we began to attend once a month, while attending the Novus Ordo the remaining Sundays. When it became too schizophrenic, we eventually made the jump to attending the TLM full time, and registered at the parish.

We were worried about our children's behavior initially, since they could be rowdy. But surprisingly, the more we attended, the quieter and better behaved they became. We began to realize we were somewhat under dressed, and I began to wear a tie and blazer like the other men and my wife, a dress. Ironically, the first Mass I attended as a Catholic in the university auditorium I dressed up for (because I thought that's what you do for church), but felt out of place among the shorts, tank tops, and flip flops of the other students. We found the Latin Mass itself to be more physically demanding with all the kneeling, but found eventually that it to be fitting for worship. Mass ad orientum reminded us why we were there--to offer worship, not primarily for fellowship. Eventually, the little pieces started to fall into place.

What does all this have to do with the law of unintended consequences? As someone who feels led to evangelize, and was attracted to the idea of a "New Evangelization" in order to share what I have received "like a beggar showing other beggars where the bread is," I found that our Latin Mass community was growing bigger each week with more and more families, despite the lack of programs, school, or formal efforts geared towards evangelizing. It was as if the Mass of Ages itself was drawing people in with no real advertising and no established program to do so. There was no welcoming committee, no greeters, no established outreach--and yet, people heard and came.

When I learn about the history of the liturgical reforms, it seems as if the efforts of drawing in people by making things less demanding, less mysterious, more accessible, and more anthropocentric has had the opposite effect. In relegating traditional communities in many dioceses to the "bad parts of town" and having them few and far between to seemingly discourage traditional worship as non-normative, another unintended consequence takes place--people drive far distances, sometimes upwards of an hour or more, to attend, even when they have a church 10 minutes from their house in a safe neighborhood.

This all presupposes that there was no nefarious intent in the reforms of the 1960's and that the attempts to "open the windows to the world," in the words of Pope John XXIII were indeed intended to evangelize the world. The argument could also be made that "correlation is not causation" and that the turbulent times of the sixties and seventies had as much to do with the plummeting attendance at Sunday Mass and the loss of belief in the Real Presence rather than the result of the liturgical reforms themselves. This is a topic which I am not prepared to tackle here.

Suffice it to say, however, when viewed through the lens of "unintended consequences," there seem to be many that have resulted from both the reforms themselves (decline), and the marginalizing of traditional worship (increases in attendance and devotion, as well as vocations). Could this be a so-called "paradox of relevance," whereby decision makers think they know their areas of ignorance regarding an issue, obtain the necessary information to fill that ignorance void but intentionally neglect other areas as its relevance is not obvious to them? It may be worth considering, and may even prove the old adage I still remember from my college retreat days: "Want to make God laugh? Tell Him your future plans."

Adrift and Untethered

I read The Brothers Karamazov for the first time while staying in a shed on a horse farm in New Zealand.

I had returned to Wellington to visit a Samoan girl I had fallen for the year before while at university, but the relationship was on the rocks and she kicked me out of her apartment after a few days. With a month to kill before my flight home, and more or less adrift, I took the ferry over to Picton and began hitchhiking the 1,000km to Invercargill, on the southernmost tip of the South Island. I spent a few nights in a Trappist monastery, and a hostel here and there. At one point I slept in the doorway of a public bathroom on the beach, cooking my dinner on a small alcohol stove to escape the wind. I remember a small child going to use the bathroom being startled that there was someone lying there. I was, for all intents and purposes, a vagrant.

I spent about a week on the horse farm somewhere between Christchurch and Timaru. Most people in New Zealand are very laid back and friendly, and after I encountered the farmer she invited me to stay in a shed on her property. I would sit on the porch and drink tea, hang my laundry, walk into town for the newspaper, and read books. I was more or less alone, and more or less adrift. Yes, I was traveling, but I was also searching. I had been Catholic for about three years and had struggled to leave my old life behind. I still remember lying in bed, the light of dusk coming through the one window of the shed, and reading Dostoevsky's words in The Grand Inquisitor:

“I tell you that man has no more tormenting care than to find someone to whom he can hand over as quickly as possible that gift of freedom with which the miserable creature is born. But he alone can take over the freedom of men who appeases their conscience. With bread you were given an indisputable banner: give man bread and he will bow down to you, for there is nothing more indisputable than bread. But if at the same time someone else takes over his conscience - oh, then he will even throw down your bread and follow him who has seduced his conscience. In this you were right. For the mystery of man's being is not only in living, but in what one lives for. Without a firm idea of what he lives for, man will not consent to live and will sooner destroy himself than remain on earth, even if there is bread all around him. That is so, but what came of it? Instead of taking over men's freedom, you increased it still more for them! Did you forget that peace and even death are dearer to man than free choice in the knowledge of good and evil? There is nothing more seductive for man than the freedom of his conscience, but there is nothing more tormenting either. And so, instead of a firm foundation for appeasing human conscience once and for all, you chose everything that was unusual, enigmatic, and indefinite, you chose everything that was beyond men's strength, and thereby acted as if you did not love them at all - and who did this? He who came to give his life for them! Instead of taking over men's freedom, you increased it and forever burdened the kingdom of the human soul with its torments. You desired the free love of man, that he should follow you freely. seduced and captivated by you. Instead of the firm ancient law, men had henceforth to decide for himself, with a free heart, what is good and what is evil, having only your image before him as a guide - but did it not occur to you that he would eventually reject and dispute even your image and your truth if he was oppressed by so terrible a burden as freedom of choice? They will finally cry out that the truth is not in you, for it was impossible to leave them in greater confusion and torment than you did, abandoning them to so many cares and insoluble problems. Thus you yourself laid the foundation for the destruction of your own kingdom, and do not blame anyone else for it.”

Kornelije Kvas wrote that Bakhtin’s theory of "the polyphonic novel and Dostoevsky’s dialogicness of narration postulates the non-existence of the 'final' word, which is why the thoughts, emotions and experiences of the world of the narrator and his/her characters are reflected through the words of another, with which they can never fully blend." Though Dostoevsky was influenced by his Orthodox Christian upbringing, and was pious in his own right, the polyphony that is evident in his work laid the groundwork for his influence on Existentialists like Sartre and Nietzsche. Though fond of the Christ of the New Testament, he described himself as a "child of unbelief and doubt up to this moment, and I am certain that I shall remain so to the grave." He also wrote that "even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ rather than with the truth." He essentially created his own belief system that was not tethered to dogmatic constructs, and he idealized the loving Christ in the way a modern day (though much more childishly) Joseph Girzone has in the Joshua books.

Was it any wonder Dostoevsky spoke to me at this untethered point in my life? I was in a foreign country, thousands of miles from home, and I couldn't even tell you why or what I was doing. Like Dostoevsky, I was probably sympathetic to Christian Socialism at that point, seeing in the monastic ideal the embodiment of what was possible. If Christ came back to earth, as he did in The Grand Inquisitor, he would be cast out once again, and then the question would become--would I follow him off the Barque.

An interesting event happened after I resumed my journey southwards, though. I eventually met a family in Dunedin, a Catholic family, who took me into their home. They were devout and joyful. They were a little puzzled by my listlessness, but lovingly 'adopted' me for a week or so and I got a glimpse of the "order" that family life prescribes to those in it. You live under a roof, with expectations, and a bond of cohesion. You go to Mass together, you eat together, you sign on to what the Church teaches. You are a domestic church in and of yourself, and you are one of millions across the globe with a common creed, common prayer before meals, common goal to get one another to Heaven. You love one another in a communion of persons, just as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are a communion of Persons. Family life mirrors that of the order of the Universe.

There is a loneliness in cobbling together your own belief system, whether quasi-Christian/anti-dogmatic, syncretist, universalist, or otherwise. When your 'beliefs' are idiosyncratic, you become a church of one. You are like a traveler adrift, not part of a community, a sarabaite or gyrovague, "the most detestable of all monks" as St. Benedict said,

"who with no experience to guide them, no rule to try them as gold is tried in a furnace (Prov 27:21), have a character as soft as lead. Still loyal to the world by their actions, they clearly lie to God by their tonsure. Two or three together, or even alone, without a shepherd, they pen themselves up in their own sheepfolds, not the Lord’s. Their law is what they like to do, whatever strikes their fancy. Anything they believe in and choose, they call holy; anything they dislike, they consider forbidden...who spend their entire lives drifting from region to region, staying as guests for three or four days in different monasteries. Always on the move, they never settle down, and are slaves to their own wills and gross appetites." (Rule, Ch 1)

In the narrative in the Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky inverts the temptations of Christ, so that The Grand Inquisitor (the Church) said that Christ should have given people no choice, and instead taken power and given people security instead of freedom. That way, the same people who were too weak to follow Christ to begin with would still be damned, but at least they could have happiness and security on Earth, rather than the impossible burden of moral freedom. The Grand Inquisitor says that the Church has now undertaken to correct Christ’s mistake. The Church is taking away freedom of choice and replacing it with security. Thus, the Grand Inquisitor must keep Christ in prison, because if Christ were allowed to go free, he might undermine the Church’s work to lift the burden of free will from mankind.

Obviously Dostoevsky was critical of the (Catholic) Church, and imagined a Christ freed from the constraints of dogmatism (ie, his idealization of Christian Socialism). Of course, I am not a literary scholar, and much of the history of Russia in the 19th century makes any analysis I can make inadequate. Dostoevsky had an immense respect for freedom and wrestled with it his whole life. But in a kind of ignostic way, this greatest gift (of God, on which love in its truest sense is dependent) was also his greatest burden.

But my takeaway is this: You can only do your own thing for so long before you realize that your adrift-ness is the result of your refusal to sign on to something where you can grow, not any great misunderstood martyrdom or idolized man viz-a-viz the world. To refuse to subject your will, your freedom, and your conscience to something greater than yourself--be it dogmatic constitutions or the permanence of family life--you will always be asking the existential questions without answers.

"The Time For Preaching and Teaching Is Over"

I asked a friend this evening, "Do people read books anymore?"

"No. They don't," he replied.

"What's the point, then?" I asked.

"The people who read books like those that you or I or anyone of like mind might write have all read what we have to say by better people. And the thing is, nobody who needs to read your words ever will. The target audience is immune." 

I thanked him for the reality check, and confirming what I already suspected.

"Everyone is over exposed and over "published." The like-minded end up having conversations with the same pool of people. It's all been heard." 

This friend of mind, I know, has eyes that see--maybe too much sometimes. But I know I can turn to him to get it straight. Then he went on to say something that stopped me dead, because I had been thinking it for a long time without the words to express it:

"I once had a vigorous disagreement with a religious, who was absolutely right. He said, "The time for preaching and teaching is over.""

"I was shocked by that, but...he was profoundly right."

"What did he mean by it?" I asked, still reeling a bit from the cold stiff truth.

 "He meant it on a large scale, a metaphysical scale, a historical epoch scale. Not that one couldn't teach and such...but that the preparations now are not evangelistic. They are one hundred percent witness and prayer."

I had to take this to prayer. I crawled on my hands and knees into the "hidden room" (which is really just a three foot by twelve foot pipe closet) where I had moved my kneeler and crucifix and icon, to have a little bit more hidden-ness to finish my rosary. I joke with my priest friends that it can double as a priest hole if things get bad, or a kind of spiritual entombment where no one would even know where you were in the house if you wanted to to be so hidden. Though I crawl in in the middle of the night for late night prayer, I could probably make better use of it. It's like a writer's desk--you get the perfect desk, and then you find yourself with writer's block all of a sudden. 

What did this religious mean, "the time for preaching and teaching is over?" My first reaction when my friend mentioned it was YES. But then, why? Haven't the Word on Fire videos brought many spiritually curious people to intellectual assent of the faith? Haven't we been learning to make "intentional disciples" in parishes and through workshops and conferences and retreats? Haven't we been DOING something to address the "failure of catechesis"by LEARNING more about what the Church professes, TEACHING more about the truths of the Faith, EVANGELIZING by having discussions on social media with non-believers? Haven't we been preaching the good news to the poor, the imprisoned, as a kind of spiritual product to be considered to improve one's life, gain eternal life, attain peace?

I'm sorry to be so negative, but I'm in a bit of a stripped down state of being right now. The words my friend shared by the erudite religious--the time of preaching and teaching is over--point to a harsh and unsettling reality we are faced with as followers of Christ in war.

In fighting off demons of despair shooting arrows in my back, another wise friend also sent me a scripture that made me exclaim, once again, "Wow":

"And the places that have been desolate for ages shall be built in thee: thou shalt raise up the foundations of generation and generation: and thou shalt be called the repairer of the fences, turning the paths into rest" (Is 58:12).

But we are not in this state yet either, I suspect. We are in an in between. The well-produced teaching and catechetical materials, the preaching to a pagan culture--I have lived through these endeavors and been a part of them myself. I don't know how effective they are, or if they are making wrong assumptions about things. I do have a friend who makes rosaries and plants them for people with instructions on how to pray it; he does is clandestinely. Someone he knew even picked one up and considered it a sign to come back to the faith. So you never know. 

But we are not saving masses here, we are pulling stray bodies on the ark who, I'm sure, are ultimately grateful to be there. Like writing a book these days, it is, I'm afraid, ultimately futile. Not to those who have been saved, who would consider it anything but. And there is it's place--of course, we need to preach and teach when called for, one on one. But we are not going to convert the world by well-produced series on the history of Catholicism, or using any of the tools of the modern age. Those going to the front lines are getting mowed down by the culture because they are ultimately going alone with no shepherds to have their back, no critical mass to support them long term. The Steubenville degree and Thomistic defenses of Natural Law in a disordered society, I'm afraid, may not hold their weight against the breaches. 

"We are living in the age of witness and prayer." Bold witness and confident prayer, the kind that works miracles. What does this mean? What does it look like? 

I attended First Friday Mass this evening and there was a new face, a young woman who has fallen away from the faith and somehow found the Latin Mass in the state (the only one) and showed up. She seemed moved, hungry, but just mostly willing to recognize it as an outpost in an otherwise harsh wasteland, one that she seemed especially grateful for. We made small talk after Mass, and I told her we all hope to see her again and when Mass times were, that she was welcome, that it is a respite from the war. I think she will be back. "That some might be saved," as St. Paul writes to the Corinthians, being all things to all men. 

Do we really need more books? More blogs and podcasts? More catechetical materials? More parish programs? Everything is being stripped down around us, maybe it's time to strip our faith down to the essentials as well, the powerful essentials rather than tepid peripheries. To pray well, to witness boldly. To strip out what is not needed, to enter into the loneliness of stepping outside the kind of 'matrix-esque' mirage of technical engineering and just get back to square one. Then count the cost and do the work ahead of us, but knowing that our time is running short and things are ramping up--a time in which teaching and preaching may very well fall on deaf ears, and in which prayer and witness is all we have. 

The Dead of Night

A friend recently sent me a conversion story of a woman who had come to the faith. She wrote down her story after her confirmation as an adult. This friend of mine had simply planted a seed in a mom's group, somewhat innocuously, for her to consider the Catholic faith. This was in the midst of the other moms badmouthing the Church.

What I see time and time again, for those who come to the Faith, is that those stray seeds that may have been cast in off-moments--a word here, a book there, a conversation or an experience of grace--tend to sprout during those times in which they are alone. Self-reflection--when it is used as a end in itself--we can probably do without if it doesn't lead us somewhere deeper than the here-and-now. But for those who are open and searching, even just a little bit--these are the ones our Lord can use.

Our Lord uses the analogy of leaving the ninety-nine to search out the one sheep that was lost. I think that's a pretty good ratio of those who come into the Faith--1:99. In my experience, the Lord draws us away from the crowds to speak to us, just as he himself communed with the Father alone.

We've been hearing a lot about mobs, and there is something frightening about a group of people who have lost their autonomy and sense of reason. It's akin to being swept up in a riptide. Whether you want to or not, you are being pulled out to sea. 

Jesus may have preached to the masses (Mt 5), and he may have permitted the crowds to lay palms at his feet (Mt 21:8), but he also had to deal with the mobs that sought to put him to death (Lk 23). There was no reasoning with them, for nothing but blood would appease them.

But perhaps one or more went back to their clay house after this would-be Messiah had expired, and thought. They lay in their bed in the dark of night, and could not get his words out of their head, "forgive them, for they know not what they do" (Lk 23:34).

It can be a high bar when we think of the great evangelists like St. Francis Xavier converting not tens or hundreds, but thousands of people to the true Faith. In a post-Christian pagan country such as our own, it would be no small miracle to have a large crowd convert on the spot at the preaching of a disciple of Jesus today. Usually, conversion is more of a gestation than a spontaneous birth. It steeps and it marinates, it forces us to question things. I believe it is reserved for those willing to look at themselves as they truly are, and who recognize there is something missing.

Not always, but often, this happens in the solitary places--the back pew in an empty cathedral, the lonely apartment after a night on the town, the emptiness after a one nigh stand, the car on the way to work when there is no one to counter the innocent questions: "Why am I here? Why am I not happy? What is really true?" If we never visit these places in which we find ourselves alone, responsible for our own thoughts and not subject to mob rule, when the air is quiet enough for the waves of discontent to lap at our innermost parts--we may never truly find ourselves willing to not only ask the questions, but take the steps to seek the answers.

Thankfully, for those who open themselves to seeking truth wherever it leads, who recognize their inadequacy, and who find themselves unable to be dissuaded by detractors and the mob--whether its a group of moms or cowards masked for destruction--they may just find the answers they are looking for. Like Nicodemus, they may come to Christ in the dead of night, speaking against the mob even when they are drowned out, because of a ray of spiritual perception that transcends it's brutish fury.

Because grace moves in to fill the space between, to gently whisper in one's ear, to introduce friends and even strangers into our paths who either plant the seeds or help them grow. They sprout in the dead of night, watered by a silent din, and eventually take root and can no longer be contained by the vessel of our intellect or culture. It's a precious time in the life-cycle of faith, these tender formative years, and we must shield it from the mob like a mother hen shields her young. When faith is full-grown, it needs its own pot; it can no longer be contained. It must go forth, bearing seed, reproducing itself, one person at a time.