Under my roof
Posted by Justin Sengstock on February 8, 2012
I thought I was done talking about the liturgy. I really thought I was. There is a point where you move from “vibrant and ongoing conversation” to “dead horse of a thousand contusions,” especially when you’re blogging. I get that.
But one of my friends called me right before New Year’s, and we talked about the Mass changes. Suddenly I had a new perspective, one which still begins in my frustration over literal translation but definitely transcends it.
My friend works with the homeless. Actually, at his organization they prefer to say “folks experiencing homelessness.” Saying “the homeless” defines people by their state and carries a whiff of dehumanizing.
He is well-acquainted with an urban parish where much of the congregation experiences homelessness. The parish decided not to implement all the changes in the revised Missal. One phrase they took special care to excise: “under my roof.”
Before Communion we no longer say, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” In a nod to Latinate precision, as well as to the story of the centurion seeking his servant’s healing (see Matthew 8:8), we now say “I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof.”
At this particular parish, however, many worshipers have not had a roof for a long time. Many may never have one again. This gives them, and the parish as a whole, a very different perspective on both life and church. So the leadership made a pastoral decision. They simply refused to make congregants speak of roofs.
For me, “under my roof” was one of the less odious changes. But hearing this story made me realize something about homelessness and God’s relationship to those who endure it. God is one of those folks experiencing homelessness, and it’s not a metaphor. The homeless God, in the person of Jesus, is literal.
Jesus was not being poetic but matter-of-fact when he said, “Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head” (Luke 9:58). His chosen homelessness, his life on the edge and on the run, was integral to the form and meaning of a mission principally carried out among outcasts. It should be an important factor in interpreting, continuing, and publicly celebrating his mission today.
But the ordinary Catholic Mass, the main contact most Catholics have with their faith and what it asks of them, easily sidesteps this reality. Liturgy prefers God the majestic and Christ the king. This has been true for centuries, ever since Christianity spread beyond its origins among fishermen and slaves, and the Third Edition of the Roman Missal just underlines the problem with a bit more pencil.
I am beginning to understand we have much bigger questions than whether the new English translation is good or bad, worse than or better than. Something about Jesus’ very Jesus-ness was already obscured before the consubstantiality, the prevenient grace, the precious chalice poured out for many, and our most grievous fault. It seems somewhat more obscured now. And those who lack roofs have already understood this for a long time.
thelarryd said
There’s a secondary meaning to the response, though. This response is made immediately preceding Holy Communion, the point at which we receive the Lord via our mouth – which in fact has a roof. Thus, the response is saying “Lord, I’m not worthy to take you into myself, under the roof of my mouth…”
I think your friend’s parish leadership, while trying to be compassionate to those experiencing homelessness – which is commendable – totally dropped the ball on this. Their compassion is seriously misplaced. I don’t think the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the time or place to show how compassionate we are to a certain group of people – it’s the time and place to have right worship to God. He and He alone ought to be the focus – it’s after the Mass, when we are dismissed, when we are commissioned to love our neighbor as ourselves. Proper places and proper times.
Incidentally, I was not aware that individual parishes had the right to change words of the liturgy. This sets bad precedent, and has me greatly concerned. I hope someone alerts the bishop to what’s been done at this parish.
Justin Sengstock said
The suspicion at the end of your comment is presumably true: I don’t know of any provision of canon law or official discipline that “allows” the parish to do it, and in that sense you could say they have no right to do it. My understanding is that the diocese knows and is looking the other way.
What you say seems logical: worship is God-directed; God alone is the focus; seeming to focus on the worshiping community is therefore at best misguided, at worst narcissistic. But I don’t see this parish diluting that focus. If Jesus is God, and Jesus lived among people very much like the parishioners—indeed, apparently he himself lived very much like the parishioners—then that ought to factor into our worship. To focus on God is also to focus on what God thinks is important, exemplified in how God chose to live when God took flesh. And liturgy, as those promoting the exalted vocabulary of the new translation kept pointing out, is educative.
Meanwhile, God is never unmediated, never without a thousand faces. The context of a particular community, the stuff of its life, has much to do with how God is experienced there. This in turn affects how that particular community should worship. Rubrics are an ideal thing; community life is a real thing. This is why we have provisions and indults for different liturgical rites. And while the parish I describe does not have the historic or legal relationship with the Vatican that, say, the Eastern Rites have, or that the Anglican Ordinariate or the Ambrosian Rite have, they felt they had to risk this pastoral decision because God and the Eucharist look different in the streets. We don’t know how different unless we are there, too.