VALERIE SCHULTZ: Catholic Mass offers the mystery of faith
| Friday, Feb 03 2012 05:11 PM
Last Updated Friday, Feb 03 2012 05:12 PM
In the new translation of the Mass, which Catholics have used since the first Sunday of Advent (the liturgical New Year's Day), a particular change has struck me. During the Eucharistic prayer, the priest no longer says to the congregation, "Let us proclaim the mystery of faith." Instead, he simply says, "The mystery of faith." He says this rather expectantly, as though the phrase were followed by a colon. (It is not: a period punctuates in the text.) We then proclaim the designated response.
The changes in the Mass, of course, are the subject of heated debate, discussion, displeasure and ultimately, for many, ennui. The translation from the Latin being more literal, the restored English doesn't exactly flow. Our tongues trip on the unfamiliar, the awkward, the murky. While this may pain the poet, the lover of words or, indeed, the plain speaker in us, we Catholics know that, no matter the translation, the Mass is still the Mass.
And something about the way each priest has uttered "The mystery of faith," so pregnant with possibility and pondering, has made that phrase emblematic of why I am there. The way that the great mystery of faith beckons to us and resonates in our hearts is the reason we go to Mass.
Most people like a good mystery. I do. In my earliest years as a dedicated reader, also known to my family as a bookworm, I was enthralled by the Nancy Drew mysteries. Nancy, with the help of her faithful friends, her lawyer father, and her brilliant intellect, could unravel any mystery and restore order in her world by book's end. From Agatha Christie novels to spy thrillers to the Bourne trilogy of movies, I am captivated by mystery, by the heroes and heroines who pursue the clues and solve the larger riddle. My husband is the kind of thinker who figures out endings quickly and shrewdly -- the only movie I recall actually fooling him was "The Sixth Sense" -- but my mind works through the hints and evidence more slowly. I like the process. Why else would I bring the Sudoku puzzle with me on my morning break at work? Why else would I spend quality time pursuing the mystery of the seven cents that unbalances my checkbook? Solving a concrete mystery brings me a sense of closure.
The mystery of faith is higher order of mystery. Like the mysteries of life, love and death, the mystery of God is something that we can't solve, and yet we can't give up on trying. As a friend who is a priest in Los Angeles recently preached in a funeral homily, and whose words have inspired this reflection, "With life, love, death and God, we have to wrestle, and it is by our wrestling that we will live."
We cannot solve it, and we cannot give up, and so this mystery attracts us like no other. A part of keeping the faith is simply accepting the mystery of God, with the understanding that as human beings we cannot know the unknowable. But another part of faith is deeply struggling with the difficulty, the seeming impossibility, of that acceptance, and wrestling with the ineffable until we are spiritually pinned. A mystery that is as huge as the cosmos and as small as the womb will always baffle us.
This mystery of faith, regardless of which words we use to describe it, is our little glimpse of the infinite. We can try to avoid or dismiss the mystery, block it from our minds, but we will not fully succeed. It intrigues us. It calls us. We can't ignore what is in our DNA. In a mysterious way, we are part of the holy.
