How do I make mass a more positive experience?

Q. Dear Father John, What is the difference between those who find Mass something to be endured and those who find it deeply nourishing, and what does my experience have to do with my own disposition?

A. The short answer to this question is: don’t worry about your experience of Mass, just focus on the Mass. Read on for the long answer.

Underlying this excellent question is a faulty premise: it assumes that “something to be endured” and “deeply spiritually nourishing” are mutually exclusive. But that is not always the case. This is because the level of the spirit is deeper than the level of emotions. In our consumer society, which keeps our emotions titillated and conditions us to think that true spiritual value should always be accompanied by lovely feelings, the distinction between spirit and emotion is almost unrecognizable for many people. But the distinction is real nonetheless.

Think of a good mother whose young child is very sick with a horrible fever. That mother will sacrifice sleep, meals, recreation, exercise – you name it, she’ll sacrifice it, simply in order to stay with, tend, care for, and comfort that child. After three or four days, the mother will be emotionally and physically exhausted; her feelings will not be lovely, but raw. And yet, in the realm of her spirit, she will be profoundly fulfilled and satisfied, because she knows she is doing all she can for her sick child. The spiritual virtue of self-sacrificial love is located at a deeper place than our feelings and emotions. Sometimes spirit and emotion coincide, like on a wedding day, but not always.

The same two levels are at work in our prayer life. Sometimes we feel God’s presence in an emotional way, and it is gratifying. This is a gift of the Holy Spirit, and we should be grateful. But still, the gratifying feelings are not the substance of our prayer. That takes place at a deeper level, where we are exercising our faith, hope, and Christian love by seeking the face of God, adoring and praising him, and renewing our commitment to follow him – regardless of how we feel. Some days when we pray, we spend the whole time fighting distractions or sleepiness, and we don’t feel God’s presence at all. Yet, that prayer, if it was sincere and if we were struggling to seek God’s face and renew our love for him, was just as valid, just as fruitful, and just as pleasing to God as the one during which our emotions were high. In fact, the more difficult prayer may have been even more pleasing to God, because love in a fallen world is always more evident in sacrifice than in enjoyment.

Mass is the same. We know that the holy sacrifice of the Mass is the pinnacle of worship, the perfect prayer. But that doesn’t mean that we will always feel, emotionally, the exaltation. What matters is not our feelings. What matters is the attitude of our mind and will. If we are making an effort to unite ourselves, at the level of our spirit, to the meaning of each part of the Mass, we are giving glory to God and nourishing our souls (and building up the Church), whether we feel exalted or whether we feel bored, distracted, frustrated, angry, or [insert whatever emotion you like].

Therefore, we must dispose ourselves for Mass by stirring up the spiritual desires of a true Christian: to honor God by saying “yes” to him, just as Christ did on the Cross. These desires are expressed beautifully in all the prayers and rubrics of the sacred liturgy. Uniting the attention of our mind and the intention of our will to those prayers and rubrics is our task. We dispose ourselves for that by striving to live each day as Christ would have us, and by arriving to Mass a few minutes ahead of time to recollect ourselves. We should never think that feeling God’s presence in an emotional way is the only evidence that we have disposed ourselves properly for the celebration. We should not pursue a particular emotional experience at Mass. The Mass is not about us; it is about Christ. If God wants us to feel the exaltation, blessed be God. If not, blessed be God. We go there to worship, confident that, because it is the liturgy, it is the highest objective act of worship we can participate in, regardless of how we feel.

This is already too long, but one other point deserves mentioning. The manner in which the liturgy is celebrated can help us focus on Christ, or it can hinder us. Reverential and beautiful demeanor, music, and accoutrements are effective aids to our worship, and they are also signs of our love for God. Yet, they are not the core of the Mass, and we should not treat them as if they were. The soldiers who attended Masses celebrated on the hoods of jeeps near the battlefields of World War II experienced Christ deeply in spite of their grungy surroundings. They experienced him deeply because their daily lives were more in tune with the eternal truths than the latest gossip. The best preparation for Mass is a day-to-day life spent consciously in pursuit of Christ’s Kingdom.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC

What role does “experience” play in our life of faith? Is it bad?

Q: Dear Father John, I have been following your blog since the beginning, and I have noticed a pattern in your answers – a pattern that disturbs me. You seem consistently to counsel people against trusting in their experience of God. You seem to recommend instead a kind of abstract faith. But didn’t Jesus become man precisely in order to give us an experience, so that our faith wouldn’t have to be so abstract and dry? You have confused me.

A: This is one of the disadvantages of the blogosphere; you just can’t ever seem to explain yourself fully! I am pained at causing you confusion and internal turbulence. Let me see if I can clarify some things in order to start untying this knot.

Different Kinds of Experience

On the one hand, I fear that I am guilty as charged. I do council you against trusting too much in one particular kind of experience of God: emotional experience. As human beings, we have different levels of experience. We experience things on the level of our five senses, our instincts and passions (the drives and inclinations built in to our bodily nature), our emotions, our conscience, our intellect, and our will. These are different levels, but they are not entirely distinct; the human person is a wonderful harmony of physical and spiritual interaction. That’s how God designed us. But even though the different levels are not entirely distinct, not totally isolated from each other, there is a hierarchy of importance among them.

Ordering Experience for Maturity

To understand this, think about the term “maturity.” Infants are immature. They live only at the level of sense experience and instinct. They cry when they are hungry, cold, or uncomfortable. Children are a bit more mature. They are learning to govern their senses and their instincts, so they ask mom for a snack when they’re hungry, instead of crying. But they are still emotionally and spiritually immature. This is one of the reasons they can be so endearing, and so infuriating. They don’t know how to think and judge for themselves – they still need dad to hold their hands when they go out for a walk. Nor do they know what they are supposed to do with their emotions – they don’t understand why mom won’t let them watch a certain very enjoyable TV show; they can’t grasp how it could be bad for them if it is so enjoyable.

A sign of maturity in an adult is consistent order among all the levels of human experience. Mature adults keep their senses, instincts, and emotions in harmony, guided by their reason and faith towards their true life-purpose: to know, love, and serve God, and to love their neighbors as themselves. They are like a master charioteer who is able to keep four different horses pulling together in harmony towards his worthwhile destination (to borrow an image from Plato). They don’t let strong passions or instincts, or waves of negative or positive emotions, or intellectual pride lead them away from the path of God’s will (the commandments, the responsibilities of their state in life, the inspirations of the Holy Spirit).

The Place of Emotional Experience

So we have different levels of experience, and the level of emotional experience is not the most important one. My emotions can be affected by all kinds of irrational factors: weather, biorhythms, other people’s offensive behavior… And so, if I guide my life by my emotions, I will inevitably be led astray; I will have an unstable life, like a dry leaf being blown around in the autumn breeze. This doesn’t mean that emotions are unimportant. God gave them to us, and without them we would be inhuman. The point is, we need to educate our emotions, just as infants need to learn how to govern instincts and passions. We need to understand that the experience of faith is rooted in a deeper place than our emotions; it is rooted in our minds and our wills. Our friendship with God is based on a spiritual recognition, which occurs under the influence of grace, that God is our Lord and Savior, that he is worthy of our love, reverence, and obedience. That recognition is an ongoing thing; it may begin with a powerful, born-again experience that involves not only our intellect and will, but also our emotions and our passions. It may be boosted and renewed periodically through powerful, emotionally charged experiences of God’s presence. But if God takes away those gratifying emotional experiences for a period, which could be long or short, that doesn’t alter the reality of the recognition, the reality of our experience of God’s majesty and goodness. Rather, he is teaching us to “walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).

All of this gets even more complicated when we remember that sin (both original and personal) has disrupted the harmony that should exist between the different levels of our human experience. Our senses, instincts, passions, emotions, and will often rebel against what our reason and faith show us to be true and good. Sometimes, in fact, our passions and emotions can pull us so strongly away from God’s will that we experience excruciating pain – think of Jesus in Gethsemane. He was taking our sin upon himself, and as a result his human nature entered into agony; it took intense prayer and heroic self-sacrifice for him to bring his whole human nature into harmony with his Father’s will.

Our Present Plague

Now, it is true that I have repeatedly cautioned against trusting too much in our emotional experience of God – at least, I have intended to do so. There is a specific reason for this. Our culture is consumeristic. That means we are constantly, daily, hourly, being bombarded by images, words, and jingles that are trying to convince us to buy something. Billboards, commercials, Web ads, radio ads, movie previews, spam, mass mailings – unless you live in a monastery (or go on retreat in one), you are positively besieged by consumer propositions. This is the air we breathe. Furthermore, what is the most effective way for these producers to convince you to buy their product? Is it by presenting you with a syllogism, an extended, rational defense of why you need a particular item and exactly how that item will add existential value to your life-experience? Hardly. The shortcut to your decision mechanism is through your instincts and emotions. A billboard doesn’t have time for syllogisms; it has to bypass your reason and grab you by manipulating your emotions, often subliminally. And so, from the time we were toddlers, we have been immersed in a cultural milieu saturated with expert emotional manipulation. As a result, we have been conditioned by this atmosphere to equate emotional experience with true value. This consumer conditioning has been further reinforced by the strong entertainment component that has emerged in our modern economies. Through technological developments, we have come to have much more time on our hands, which we tend to devote to entertainment, and entertainment (especially popular entertainment) stimulates, above all, the emotions.

The result of this is simply that in our culture we tend to depend too much on emotional experience and too little on the deeper experience of faith, virtue, and spiritual truth. If something doesn’t give us an emotional return pretty quickly, we tend to dispose of it or disregard it. This is why, for example, Dan Brown’s books are read by millions, while Tolstoy and Sienkiewicz are truly treasured by dozens. This is why, for example, more than half of Internet traffic is directed to pornography Web sites. This is why, for example, it is so hard for most of us to spend 30 minutes in silence and prayer without distractions, and so easy to pay full attention to a two-hour Hollywood film.

Stepping towards Maturity

To actually grow in our relationship with God, therefore, we need to wean ourselves off an over-dependence on emotional experience. This doesn’t mean we should stifle emotional experience – that would be inhuman. Rather, we need to learn to govern our emotions instead of being governed by them. We need to learn to evaluate our lives, relationships, and activities not primarily according to how we feel on an emotional level, but according to what we know to be true on the level of our reason enlightened by our Catholic faith. This is the path to recover the true interior harmony that will enable us to experience the deeper satisfactions of spiritual experience, an experience which gradually brings our emotions into sync with our faith. This is the path to Christian joy and peace, which are so deep that they turn crosses into resurrections and so contagious that they turn victims into victors.

I do not want to disparage emotional experience in our Christian journey: God also works through that experience. I only want to encourage spiritual maturity. And in a world like ours, that may require over-emphasizing, at least a little bit, the dangers of emotionalism.

I hope this has helped to dispel your confusion. In future posts I will try to discuss more often the positive role that emotions can have in our spiritual life, so as to avoid giving the wrong impression that we should all become Puritans.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC