The Slow Death of Beauty in Our Lives

 

Friend Xerxes laments that the typical religious service ought to be more of a feast for the senses than it is, and especially ought to consider the sense of touch. Touch, after all, is our largest sense organ, he notes, covering our entire body.

He ought to try Catholicism. The old high mass, at least, was the original multimedia virtual reality event. The bright multicoloured light streaming through stained glass windows; the statues and paintings, the awe of the dome or arched nave; the music and the hymns, the intonations, the responsorial prayer, perhaps more purely aesthetic in their appeal when in Latin, adding the beauty of mystery; the incense, the little bells tinkling and the big bells sounding; the mighty organ swelling; and perhaps not least, everyone in their Sunday best. 

Granted that taste and touch were rarely engaged directly; I think because they are the two senses most associated with physicality as opposed to spirituality, in which basic instincts are least able to be sublimated. Touch is, after all, as Xerxes notes, coextensive with the surface of the body, and taste tends to involve assimilating some physical thing. You do not see taste and touch engaged with much in art generally. And when, say, a posh restaurant makes a claim to art, it always feels like an alibi for gluttony or else a con. Never mind touch… treated “artistically” in various back alleys, or under neon lights.

But even they were there, taste and touch, by implication, in the old High Mass. As for taste, there was the fast, and then the special brunch right after mass, and that was part of the full experience. As for touch, there was the self-anointing with holy water, and sometimes a sprinkling by the priest walking up and down the aisles. And kneeling was a special touch experience one did not get outside church. 

But these in particular tended to be chastisements of these two senses as much as celebrations of them. The point was to sublimate and spiritualize the senses, as art, not to indulge them.

More broadly, being a Catholic is or is supposed to be living a life as a work of art. One crafted oneself into something better; a conquest of nature by art.

There were many beautiful signposts along the way. Not just the mass on Sundays, but Christmas, and Easter, and Lent, and Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday and (yes, it is a Catholic festival) Hallowe’en, to mark the seasons. 

And then, to mark the seasons of your life, there were sacraments like First Communion. It marks the age of reason, age seven, before which a child does not understand the concept of sin, does not have a fully formed conscience, and so cannot properly receive communion. I still remember fondly the day of my First Communion; all the little girls posing on the steps of the church, wearing their white dresses and with lace doilies bobby-pinned in their hair. And me wearing real button-up trousers and a jacket and clip-on tie. It is a great event in the life of a child. 

As I remember fondly those of my two children. 

And I have on my desk before me the carefully preserved little Catechism my younger brother Gerry, now gone, received as a gift for his First Communion. 

Such ceremonies consecrate a life to beauty: confirmation, the doorway you stride through into adulthood; the joy of matrimony; watching your children pass though these doorways in their turn; then extreme unction, and the more solemn beauty of the funeral service. 

These leave all the memories that make an ordinary life meaningful. One’s memories are always of family, and one’s family memories are always of these holy events.

We are losing this; we have let it slip away. The church itself is losing this. The current mass does away with much, most, of what was most beautiful. 

To what possible purpose?