It’s not just the TLM. If you go to Solemn Evensong at St. Thomas Church, 5th Avenue, you will be asked not to respond or sing along with the choir except at certain marked points. The choral effort is such that the music, aside from the common worship, merits respectful silence from the congregation. It’s a kind of truce between liturgy and art. The line blurs wonderfully in a place like that, and truly: worship is silence when you are listening to a world-class choir like that.
I see the value in silence, I like silence, I’m not talking about us not needing silence in Mass, there were huge spaces of silence in the Mass (NO) at the monastery where I was rec. into the Church. I think we would loose something if we didn’t make the responses at Mass. And in terms of the bulk of the Mass, our responses are already relatively minimal.
I guess this is how I feel or what I believe in a nutshell. All of this seems like a battle between the vertical and the horizontal emphasis of any given Mass. I completely agree that during the “silly season,” as Father Neuhaus put it, there was far too much vertical, far too much touchy feely garbage that put the emphasis on community and on how great “we” were. I see, however, a great risk of the pendulum swinging too far back the other way (thankfully, when pendulums stop, they’re in the middle), to the point where it’s merely mute people, in a Mass where they cannot hear what’s being said, in a language that they don’t understand even if they could hear it, telling their beads or whatever. I’m deeply concerned about that.
You know, God doesn’t need anything. He’s perfect the way He is and was and ever shall be. There is nothing that He lacks. God doesn’t need the Mass. We need the Mass and He gave It to us because WE need it. Just as Christ said that man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man, so is the Mass for US. That doesn’t mean we have the right to hive off and do whatever we want with it, but rather that we are what is God is seeking, as the shepherd looks for the lost sheep, through the Mass. It’s to propitiate God for OUR sins, so we surely should be a bit apart of it, surely we CAN and should say,“Thanks be to God” and “Lord, I am not worthy” and “Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on US.” I don’t see how the prayerful speaking of those words, a murmer, even, if you will, can detract from worship. I don’t get it. I kind of hope I never do.