The Guitar, The Pyx and the Mask

Last Sunday I went to Mass alone, wearing an N95 mask, for a purpose that carried none of the usual consolations people associate with the liturgy. I was there to obtain a pyx so that I could carry Our Lord home to my wife. She was too sick to sit in a pew and receive Him the way she has for more than twenty years. Sit with that image. A man in a surgical mask, in a half-empty church, on one of the more spiritually serious errands of his life, trying to keep his attention fixed on the altar while three rows ahead a small praise band executed what can only be described as an air-traffic-control soundtrack. I recognized the first number within four bars: Chris Tomlin's "Holy Forever." Then it began: Hands aloft. Eyes closed. Someone's tambourine. A woman two pews ahead swayed with her palms upward as if trying to catch something falling from the ceiling. Another was waving her arms like she was trying to land a 747.

I did not come for the ambiance. I came because my wife needed the Eucharist and I was, for that Sunday, her only available delivery mechanism.[1] I stood there watching people who appeared to have wandered in for a mild spiritual pick-me-up treat the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass like a coffeehouse open mic with a slightly better sound system. Something in me did not merely curdle. It came very close to boiling over. I wanted, genuinely, to walk forward mid-refrain and ask whether anyone present had considered that the tabernacle a few feet away contained God, actual and entire, and not a mood.

The contemporary choir—let us name the thing without the usual soft language—was performing. That is the accurate verb. They were not assisting at the sacrifice. They were putting on a show, and they had picked their setlist accordingly. "Holy Forever" is a perfectly serviceable arena anthem for a nondenominational worship service; it is not a setting of the Sanctus, and no amount of hand-raising converts a generic praise chorus into an acclamation of the thrice-holy God present on the altar thirty feet away. Then came "O Come to the Altar," Elevation Worship's evangelical altar-call number, sung, with no apparent sense of irony, at the literal altar of sacrifice, where the "altar" it invites the listener to approach is not the wood-and-stone table on which the unbloody re-presentation of Calvary was about to occur but a generic Protestant metaphor for a moment of personal decision. These two songs do not belong within a hundred miles of a Catholic Mass. They were not written for it, they do not teach it, and half of what they say about "encounter" implicitly denies what the Church actually holds happens on that altar. Singing an altar-call song at the altar of sacrifice is not an oversight. It is a category error bordering on heresy.

Here is the detail that turns my irritation into something closer to indignation: songs like these are not free. Both are CCLI-licensed compositions, and a parish that performs them needs a blanket license, paid annually, precisely so its "music ministry" can keep reproducing Christian-radio hits from the ambo instead of the Church's own chant, which costs nothing and was composed for exactly this liturgy. That license fee, along with the sound equipment, the microphones, and whatever stipend keeps the band showing up, comes from somewhere, and the somewhere is the same collection basket that funds the parish's actual works of mercy. The faithful drop something in the plate believing they are supporting the parish and its poor. Some of that offering is instead underwriting the right to perform Bethel- and Elevation-adjacent catalog music so a handful of amateur musicians can have their Sunday stage. I do not begrudge anyone the desire to make music. I begrudge the arrangement in which the sacrifice of the faithful subsidizes a performance that actively displaces the Church's own liturgical patrimony, offered for free, in favor of licensed pop worship songs that were composed for a stage, not an altar.

I have watched this style of music colonize parish after parish for years. It arrives under the banner of "meeting people where they are," which in practice means meeting people where the culture already is—sentimental, self-referential, and allergic to anything that smells of judgment or objective sacrifice. Songs like "Holy Forever" and "O Come to the Altar" rarely speak of propitiation, of the unbloody re-presentation of the one Sacrifice, of the Real Presence as anything more than a warm idea. They speak instead of "encounter," of "journey," of "being held." The language is therapeutic rather than sacrificial. The posture is performative rather than receptive. The effect is to train the congregation to treat the Mass as a spiritual spa day rather than the source and summit of the Christian life.

The woman with her palms in the air was not the problem in isolation. The problem was the entire atmosphere that made her gesture seem natural rather than jarring. When the music itself is structured as emotional climax rather than ordered praise, the body follows. Arms go up. Eyes close. The focus shifts inward to the quality of one's own feelings rather than outward and upward to the altar where the Lamb is offered. This is not accidental. It is the predictable fruit of a liturgical culture that has spent decades subordinating the objective reality of the Mass to the subjective experience of the worshipper. The contemporary choir does not merely accompany this shift; it engineers it. Their repertoire, their stage presence, their studied "authenticity," and yes, their licensing invoices, all conspire to turn the sanctuary into a platform and the congregation into an audience that occasionally sings along.

I felt my old, familiar contempt rise. It is an easy contempt when you are carrying real weight. My wife is fighting for her life. I was the man in the mask charged with bringing her the Body of Christ because she could no longer come to Him in the ordinary way. Against that backdrop, the tambourine and the swaying and two theologically confused Christian-radio songs looked like a mockery. They looked like people who had never been forced to take the Mass seriously because nothing in their lives had yet required it. Suffering has a way of clarifying priorities. It also has a way of inflating the sufferer's sense of moral authority.

Here is where honesty becomes non-negotiable. That curdling sensation was not pure righteousness. It felt like righteousness, which is precisely the deception. When you are the one actually suffering, it is remarkably easy to conclude that your suffering has deputized you. You begin to believe that carrying a cross this heavy has earned you the office of Liturgical Inspector General, empowered to survey the room and find everyone else's piety wanting—hand gesture by hand gesture, chord progression by regrettable chord progression, CCLI number by CCLI number. I stood in that church performing genuinely sacred and difficult work—bearing Christ to a sick woman—and at the same time committed the extremely ordinary sin of despising my neighbor in my heart over a setlist. Christ did not die so that I could feel superior to a woman with her palms in the air. I am reasonably certain of that much theology without footnotes.

My wife is fighting for her life, and I found several full minutes to be furious about liturgical music. That is a strange use of the limited attention a sick woman's husband actually has to spend. It is not zeal for the house of the Lord. It is pride wearing zeal's vestments. My suffering did not earn me an exemption from that particular sin. If anything, it should have made me more alert to how easily contempt disguises itself as devotion. I recognized it eventually, somewhere in the parking lot, with the particular nausea that comes from catching yourself mid-sin and being unable to plead ignorance.

I do not retract the underlying complaint, and I want to be precise about what that complaint is. The Mass is the unbloody re-presentation of Calvary. It is not a singalong. It is not a spiritual pick-me-up. It is not performance art. It is not an opportunity for the contemporary choir to run through its favorite tracks off Christian radio, purchased under license and billed, one way or another, to the people in the pews. "Holy Forever" and "O Come to the Altar" are not wicked songs in themselves. They are simply the wrong songs, in the wrong place, for the wrong purpose, performed at real expense to a congregation that has no idea it is paying to have its own liturgy replaced. The Church has spent two millennia developing forms of music and gesture ordered precisely to the reality of what occurs on the altar. When those forms are displaced by licensed radio music whose primary criterion is whether it produces a feeling of uplift, something essential is lost. The loss is not merely aesthetic. It is formational. People learn what the Mass is by the way it is celebrated. If the celebration trains them to expect a mild emotional high, and asks them to fund it besides, they will treat the Eucharist accordingly—as a mood enhancer rather than the living God.

Suffering, it turns out, does not automatically sanctify the sufferer. It hands you a very large microphone and tempts you to use it on people who have done nothing to you except worship less rigorously than you would prefer. The same week I was privately furious at strangers for treating something sacred casually, I was also, God forgive me, at risk of treating my own suffering as a credential—a backstage pass that exempted me from ordinary charity toward people who, tambourine notwithstanding, were probably carrying crosses I could not see under the fluorescent lights. The temptation is subtle. You tell yourself that your seriousness is the fruit of genuine love for the liturgy. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is simply the ego's way of asserting rank in the only hierarchy it can still control.

I went home with the pyx. I gave my wife Communion at her bedside. Only later did I admit to myself that I had left more than one sin behind in that pew. The recognition does not cancel the critique. If anything, it sharpens it. The fact that I could slip so easily into contempt while performing one of the most serious acts of my life is itself evidence of how casually the sacred can be treated—even by those who claim to revere it. Pride is not the exclusive property of the people waving their arms. It is also the property of the man who watches them, itemizes their CCLI licenses, and congratulates himself for noticing.

The liturgy needs to be taken seriously because the reality it contains is serious. God is not a mood. The sacrifice of the Mass is not a backdrop for personal expression, and the offertory is not a production budget. The contemporary choir's preference for theologically hollow, licensed, emotionally manipulative music like "Holy Forever" and "O Come to the Altar" is not a neutral stylistic choice; it is a catechetical failure that trains Catholics to approach the altar with the same expectations they bring to a concert, funded, however unwittingly, out of their own collection envelopes. That failure has consequences. It produces a generation that knows how to feel vaguely spiritual but does not know how to adore. It produces the very casualness that so offended me last Sunday. And it produces, in men like me, the corresponding temptation to respond with a pride that mistakes irritation for fidelity.

I will continue to insist on the distinction between the Holy Sacrifice and a singalong, and I will continue to insist that Chris Tomlin and Elevation Worship, whatever their gifts, did not write music for the Roman Rite and have no business being licensed into it on the parish's dime. I will continue to find the performance-art version of Sunday worship grating, theologically empty, and unworthy of what it claims to celebrate. But I will also continue to examine the pride that so readily attaches itself to that insistence. Suffering did not make me pure. It merely made the stakes clearer. The Mass is not about my feelings, whether those feelings are uplift or contempt. It is about the objective presence of Christ and the objective offering of His sacrifice. Everything else—every raised hand, every four-chord refrain, every licensing fee quietly absorbed into the offertory, every private judgment I form while standing in the pew with a pyx in my pocket—is secondary. The liturgy must be ordered to that reality, not to the emotional needs, aesthetic preferences, or setlists of the people who attend it. That is not elitism. It is simply the recognition that some things are too important to be treated as a spiritual pick-me-up. Last Sunday made that truth harder to ignore.

Endnote:

[1] - This is the example of Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion. While I most certainly believe I have no business handling our Blessed Lord, I also understand and fully accept the Church’s teaching [despite being called a “Trad”] that in times of necessity, it is permissible. Sure, I could ask an already overworked man with consecrated hands to deliver the Sacrament. But, that man could expose my sick wife to additional harm. In these instances, I am deeply grateful that my Priest entrusts me with such a sacred honor and duty.