I made a promise to review this book. It has been a long time coming, I know. By way of excuse perhaps, I have my preconceived expectations about books on the liturgy. I have walked quite happily with Msgr. Ronald Knox as he slowly, in his orderly English way, explains each part of the Mass with warmth, holy wit, and a bit of fire.
I prefer purely Theological books on the Mass. I like to feel my mind clicking everything into comprehensive place, as I seek to understand the knowledge of a master - ordering it here and there as I go and seeing how one thing follows from the other in a beautiful, logical whole. I like the tight grasp of comprehension. This is why I am drawn to catechisms, treatises, and step by step explanations through which I can look back and know as much as possible, the contentment that comes from the tidiness of ordered, theological thought.
On the other hand, I am nothing if not poetical; but I like my poetry spontaneous. I don't want people weighing it down with form, or obsessing over rhyme schemes. I don't want anyone telling me how much angst they had for weeks coming up with the right word in a line. I want to cry STOP. You are smothering the sparks. I rather unrealistically desire that poetry should simply appear as a whole and drop down like dew from Parnassus into the pen - else all magic is lost. For me, spontaneous flight is essential for poetry. Leave me to my illusions. I simply don't want to know how the sausages are made when it comes to poetry.
This little book has given me a bit of a struggle concerning these two propensities.
For suddenly, I am asked to approach the liturgy not with a purely Theological Knowledge so much as with Poetic Knowledge; that intuitive and personal sense of meaning behind the concrete existence of the Mass. I am asked to not just see a structure of words, actions, beautiful colors, textures and melodies decorating doctrine. I am asked to wonder what is under them. What meaning do they reveal: not only metaphorically and allegorically, in a general, universal sense this time, but ...... personally ....... in my individual soul as it gazes on the One true God. I am asked to think like a poet in matters where habitually, I stubbornly struggle to think only like a theologian. And then on the flip side, I am to freely admit the necessarily slow, painstaking effort and structure needed for that poem to exist, when by preference I just want to see it fly free all at once.
Yes, I am asked to flip my propensities. I admit to bristling a bit. No one wants their neat, little propensities all stirred up. It’s unnerving.
More disconcertingly, I am asked to stand face to face with Christ crucified on the altar, my pitiful life in my hands, all preoccupations with mere Theology aside - and beg Him for light on the why and wherefore of my particular existence, which leads to the discovery that Christ is the poet and I am His unique poem breathed into existence and, through the Sacrifice of the Mass, He is writing my particular life anew. And I am to let Him. It is far easier (and safer) to dwell in the intellectual alone, rich as it is in truth, and leave that "face to face" meeting unexamined. That is why this book was written, I am thinking; to give us the courage to look at our own life, to believe that it is a priceless gift, one worthy of bards - a life uniquely written only once by the poet Christ singing us into existence and then into re-creation through his cross. We must seek to understand ourselves as His poem.
This is the story of one particular life that almost against its will, mercifully crashed up against the Mass. It is a conversion story. Not mine. Not yours. It's own. A life examined with a particular poetic knowledge that seeks particular meanings. Its aim is for us to do the same with each of our own lives.
With Michael Rennier we take a journey: a skinny little kid from Missouri brought up in the high powered Pentecostal Church. A kid with persistent 'whys' dancing in his head. A shy introvert who agonized his way through the effusive , extroverted expression of his Pentecostal Church's prayer life. A deliberate thinker seeking predictability in an emotionally unpredictable and spontaneous Pentecostal world. We follow him through his years of study to become a pastor. We feel his young heart disillusioned with those he had looked up to for guidance and truth - and who so blithely betrayed him.
We follow him into the world of High Anglicanism, with its own particular kind of flavor, during his Yale days, where he readily admits that his less than shining qualities were encouraged and fed. He confesses an innate arrogance, a fussy preoccupation with beauty in his surroundings, a propensity to be a superficial ‘swell’ who only deigned to associate with 'beautiful people' who knew how to dress, knew the preferred dialect of the Yale man, who knew their way around a martini and preferred their liturgies dripping in beautiful, tasteful accoutrements - simply and only, mind you, for the aesthetic pleasure of experiencing them. He confesses to being properly horrified by the mere thought of donut Sundays or parish picnics or raffles or papist commonalities. He also confesses a deep, depressive intellectual angst. He petulantly demands complete answers from religion. He wants assurances that don't exist. He is up nights sleeplessly obsessing about his eventual death. He is, in short, quite the mess.
This may seem at first to read as a cautionary tale, but in the end you are surprised to find it is the very ‘stuff’ of a poem. This life of twists and turns, bumps, bruises, a series of events that make no sense really - unless you are God. These very things are the words and metaphors that will be used to write the poem of the new man - the new man finding re-creation simply by crashing up against the Roman Catholic Mass with full heart and attention and consenting to be written with the language Christ speaks there.
I won't tell you the rest of the story, except to say that through his experience of the Catholic Mass one particular day and on many days thereafter, his life began to make sense. He became a Catholic and then a priest. It all had to happen this exact way for his poem to be written by Christ. All the joys, the sorrows, the painful disillusionments, the embarrassing faults and failures, the sudden and gentle gift of wife and children asking for his love and attention - all of it was needed for Christ to write Michael Rennier's life into beautiful poetry where once there was only senseless and disjointed prose.
Christ sending particular experiences, the right timing, pain, self knowledge, joy, discovery, rest. Christ writing slowly and painstakingly with all of these things to produce a living, breathing poem. Lyrical, indeed. But suffered over, struggled over by Christ, who is pained to the point of dying for it every day at the Consecration - that the poem of this particular man would unfold line by line.
In the end, I discovered that poetic knowledge is not always effortlessly spontaneous and free. It comes slowly and majestically and painstakingly into view as a life is lived daily through grace until the end - a life that consents to be written, and rewritten over and over again until the poet rests content. This is how Christ our poet creates us and how we are to read ourselves.
We are asked through this book to pay attention to the meanings underpinning our particular lives - to practice poetic knowledge. How is Christ working? What is He asking? Are we allowing Him to write us unto glory in His way and not ours - not choosing our own words and expressions but leaving it up to him? Are we living our lives as the poetry He wants them to be? All good questions.
I confess it was a struggle for me to read to the end, but slowly I entered the flow of it and found understanding in this new angle on an ancient liturgy. It did my propensities good.
I will close this little review in pointing out that it was also a great example to me of the wonderful writer Verlyn Klinkenborg's assertion that every sentence matters in a work. We must not just skim and hurriedly aim to get to the end in order to impatiently find the gist and general meaning of the author's "purpose". We need to actually read ALL the sentences. We need to dwell in every part. Even one chance sentence that was merely connecting one thought to the other can change our perspective and fill us with a surprising and concrete truth we were not expecting just there at that point. This book is full of those little sentences.
It's a quirky little story, to be sure, but one worth reading. If only to get a different perspective on a Mass you think you might have put in a neat and tidy little box of satisfied understanding. Your propensities may be challenged a bit. But that is a good thing sometimes.
*sigh* gee thanks. Now I have yet another book to purchase and add to the wait pile :) We're very blessed to have Fr. Rennier as Vice Rector of our Oratory.