While your intent and the sentiment behind your proposed idea seems to come from a beautiful and heartfelt desire to fully and outwardly express your faith, hope, and love for God, I prefer to avoid implementing any laity-devised gestures that have not been given to us by the Church by being spelled out in the GIRM.
Laity-devised gestures that are improvised or not standard throughout the universal Church can generate confusion among people who are not familiar with the traditions of a particular parish. We should seek to adhere to the rubrics for the Mass given to us by the Church to help provide a universal Mass experience that can be easily be participated in by any Catholic in any church.
Another concern is that when we try to customize or add to the Mass, it can inadvertently cause a distraction for the congregation, becoming a moment of confusion, anxiety, embarrassment, resentment, etc… that serves to detract from the mass instead of enhance it as was originally intended.
Often times when I attend mass at an unfamiliar parish, I am faced with distractions because of things that have been added by the laity. For example, at some parishes, the Our Father is prayed without holding hands, at some, only families join hands, at others people join hands with those in their pew, and yet at others the parishioners fill the aisles to form a “human chain” or “human snake” weaving throughout the church. I assume that the intent behind this hand holding is to express unity and fellowship in their prayer to the Father, yet the logistics of it can inadvertently shift the focus away from the sacrifice of the Mass.
Another example is when we had a visiting priest to our parish, he stopped during the Sursum Corda because many people did not raise their hands when they said “we lift them up to the Lord”. He told the congregation that we should all be smiling with joy and lifting our hands as high as we could and shouting the words as loudly as we can. He then proceeded to have the congregation repeat the action until he thought it sufficiently excited. It felt uncomfortably pep rally-ish. Some parishioners were chuckling afterwards, some seemed visibly uncomfortable, while others seemed rather angry at the whole situation. While the intent of the priest in this situation was to have the laity fully present and participating, he broke the universal nature of their participation and served as a catalyst for confusion and divisive emotions among the parishioners, all because he wanted to implement a gesture that is not spelled out in the GIRM as something the laity should be doing.
Again, the intent behind adding gestures to outwardly express peoples’ emotional and spiritual participation comes from a genuinely heartfelt place, the reality of their implementation without the guidance of the Church often times yields undesirable results and creates a new situation or issue for the Church to have to deal with in the future.
Ultimately, if the Church thinks this idea (or any idea) is appropriate, not a distraction, and would add something necessary to the faithful’s participation at the mass, then they will let us know through a revision to the instructions provided to us for the Mass.
