(I feel I need to start this post with a disclaimer to preempt any teeth gnashing and tomato throwing and also make mention that I do not like liturgy wars. I have inadvertently started them in the past and I find they never end on a palatable note. As I heard a priest once note, "There's a difference between liturgists and terrorists--you can negotiate with terrorists." I'm not a liturgist, nor do I have a strong affinity for or knowledge in all things liturgical either. I realize it is a tender area that deserves respect and sensitivity to write about. This is meant to be a largely dispassionate account of our personal and particular reasons for attending traditional Mass in the Latin Church, despite my being Byzantine by rite, not to highlight any perceived deficiencies in one liturgy or another)
Before I became a Catholic, I attended the Divine Liturgy. Though most people coming into the Church or discovering the Eastern liturgy for the first time find it exotic and other-worldly, the liturgical Church of the East was my first exposure to Catholicism before I even had any interest in the theological truths of the Faith. In other words, it was familiar and, I should say, commonplace.
My father was born to a mother who was Russian Orthodox and a father who was Ukrainian Catholic. My father was baptized as an infant at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Philadelphia. When he married my mother, an Episcopalian, faith was a wedge--there was no agreement as to what my brothers and I were to be raised; we were baptized in the Episcopal church as infants, attended an occasional Sunday school lesson, but any formation ended there. To avoid disagreements and arguments, my parents would attend their respective churches separately, and us kids were free to go or not go (aside from Christmas and Easter, when we would attend one or the other church as a family).
Because I was close with my father, I would occasionally 'tag along' when he would attend the Divine Liturgy at the Ukrainian Catholic church not far from our house on Sunday mornings. Incense, the gold domes and vestments and iconostasis, crossing yourself three times (with two fingers and thumbed joined) from right to left, bowing, standing (rather than kneeling), and the prayers--this was my first exposure to liturgy (though to my mom's credit as well, hers was a high-church Episcopal that would probably today very much resemble a Mass at an Anglican Ordinariate). When we would visit my dad's great aunt up in coal-country for a funeral or something, it was usually at a Russian Orthodox church. Even today, before communion, I have the habit of beating my breast three times by way of habit, praying, "God, be merciful to me a sinner. God cleanse me of my sins and have mercy on me. Forgive me, Lord, for I have sinned without number." Because I never formally switched rites (the only time it became an issue was when I was discerning a monastic vocation), I sometimes have slight guilt about not observing the Byzantine fasts (no dairy, eggs, etc). But strict legalism has never been my forte.
My 'backdoor entrance' into the Church by way of the Byzantine rite was part the heritage of my father, and part happenstance. When I went off to college, my dad gave me a list of religious services at the university and pointed out the Catholic Masses on campus. As I have mentioned in previous posts, I had a strong ransoming conversion around age sixteen that got me thinking about the eternal, desiring the eschatological, and starving for lasting happiness. I showed up at a Catholic mass in the auditorium on campus--I believe it was my first Roman Catholic Mass. I was out of sorts--I couldn't understand the casual dress or what was going on at the altar. When I eventually approached a Roman Catholic priest to inquire about becoming Catholic, I was told about RCIA. As it turns out, I had "missed the cutoff" for that year. Patience not being one of my virtues, I sought out a local Ruthenien priest who came to campus once a month to celebrate the Divine Liturgy to see what my options were. He agreed to catechize me one on one.
The priest himself was delighted to have someone looking to join the Church, especially in the Byzantine rite. Though the catechesis was more or less solid, the priest himself was clingy and seemed emotionally stunted. I became his kind of 'poster-boy' and while most of my now-friends went to the Roman Mass on campus, I was expected to attend the Divine Liturgy. A kind of unilateral co-dependency developed, and though I was confirmed, made my first Confession and received my first communion, I began to distance myself the priest and the liturgy, and try to attend the Latin Masses whenever I could. Maybe it was a latent and delayed rebellion of the traditional liturgy that I was exposed to (but never raised in fully). Ironic that the Novus Ordo would be the 'exotic' draw.
What I did appreciate, and ended up trading in tradition for, was a kind of universality of the largest rite within the Church. Because I did not have a refined liturgical palate, this was acceptable to me at the time and, I suppose, a concession. When I traveled throughout the world over the years, "the Mass was the Mass"--whether we were sitting on tree stumps instead of pews in Haiti or in the grand expanse of Sacre Coeur, there was a universal commonality. This seemed important, as I had a heart for evangelism ("telling the other beggars where to find bread") and there is strength in numbers. For the next twenty years I would traverse through the gamut of liberal Catholicism.
When my parents moved and my dad left behind the Ukranian church he attended, I would invite him to Mass with us in their new town. The Roman church had become familiar territory to me, but was unfamiliar for him. The Liturgy for him was, I realized, a nostalgic and familial affair. It was his connection to his father, who died when he was 21 and left a deep hole. Though I told him of a Ukrainian Catholic church not far from our house he could attend, he has not yet. I'm not sure why.
I've wondered why we haven't either as a family. Our men's group took a "Sunday Field Trip" there a few weeks ago for the Diving Liturgy (I didn't attend, for whatever reason, maybe because it's not unfamiliar to me) and the priest was welcoming and excited to have newcomers exploring the Eastern liturgy. Though our parish home is now a diocesan Latin Mass parish, I am at least comforted that we have the SSPX, the FSSP, and the Ukrainian Catholic church all relatively equi-distant.
But when you're making a home, I have to take my wife and family into consideration. My Filipino wife never really took to the Divine Liturgy, though she has attended it with me occasionally while we were dating at my dad's parish. Any Ukrainian heritage I have I don't feel particularly feel attached to. I don't speak the language. Though the liturgy itself is beautiful and full of 'smells and bells,' there is a nationalistic element to it (pierogie festivals, Ukrainian dance nights, old ladies who speak the language) that I just don't identify with. Ethnic 'ghetto' is too strong a word, but you get the idea.
One thing about the Eastern liturgy I have grown to appreciate in retrospect, however, is that (like the Latin Mass) it appeals to male sensibilities. There is nothing effeminate or embarrassing about either Orthodoxy or Eastern Catholicism, and for that reason I would have no qualms about attending the Divine Liturgy over the Novus Ordo. From observation, there is also a subtle 'fluid' or relaxation (not casualness) I've noticed (again, in retrospect) to the liturgical posture of the priest when compared to the tight and focused precision in the Latin Mass. (Dr. Peter Kwasniewski notes these differences in liturgical expression in Let Latins Be Latins and Greeks Greek: On Remaining Faithful to Distinctive Identities (New Liturgical Movement) and here ("The Byzantine Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and the Novus Ordo--Two Brothers and a Stranger")
Where we "take refuge" in the Church is kind of like who you marry--there's no 'one reason,' but an amalgamation of factors and personal histories that goes into attraction. I dated a lovely Catholic girl in college who for all intents and purpose would have made a lovely wife. But the timing never seemed to work out with us, and that's really all I attribute it to. And thanks be to God. I have Latin friends who have found a beautiful refuge in the Byzantine Church and its rich liturgical tradition.
For us, for whatever reason, we have made our home in tradition and in the West. I'm not sure I can go back to the Novus Ordo. Though one of these Sundays, I'm might just to have to get St. Nicholas to remember where I came from. For old time's sake.
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