The next time I'm tempted to turn my nose up at mass that contradicts Redemptionis Sacramentum, I'll try to think of this quote. (Thanks, Being! Or Nothingness)
I can recommend this as an exercise: make your Communion in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children — from those who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is opened sit back and yawn — open necked and dirty youths, women in trousers and often with hair both unkempt and uncovered. Go to Communion with them (and pray for them). It will be just the same as a Mass said beautifully by a visibly holy man, and shared by a few devout and decorous people. (It could not be worse than the mess of the feeding of the Five Thousand — after which our Lord propounded the feeding that was to come.) - J.R.R. Tolkien in a letter to Michael Tolkien, November 1, 1963
Funky Dung
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