I was once watching Monday Night Football at an airport while I ate a quick dinner between flights, and a man from the UK asked me what exactly the teams were trying to accomplish on the field. Briefly, I tried to explain American football to him, and the ideas around moving the football ten yards using four “downs.” After a few minutes, he finished his beer and said, “It looks like a stupid game to me.” I laughed, since I didn’t really disagree. Most games are kind of odd, even stupid if you step back and really think about them. In basketball, we try to throw a ball through a metal ring. In baseball, we use a stick to hit a ball and then we run and touch things that we pretend have magic powers of safety. And whoever is good at these games, we treat like the gods of this world.

I didn’t point out to the English dude that rugby and cricket look just as stupid to me as American football did to him, because I assume there is far more nuance and art to those games, and I just fail to appreciate them because I grew up watching football and baseball. Once when I was in London, I watched cricket in a bar and observed people getting excited and, yes, it seemed ridiculous to me. Likewise, I don’t understand hockey, despite living in a state where many are obsessed with it. Hockey bores me, but I understand there is far more happening on the ice than I understand or appreciate, because many people assure me it is beautiful if you understand it. I know what they mean by that.

What we don’t understand, we like to mock. Especially if it has a border, or a fence around it. Sour grapes is a phenomenon that I’ve certainly known personally, where if I don’t understand something, I downplay it. Or perhaps, if I’m not allowed into something, I will consider it not worth striving after.

But for that which we don’t understand, we’ll mock it as stupid or childish. I’ve written about this a fair amount here, especially in terms of prayer, where the modern doubter mocks prayer as silly, while never giving it a try - a real try - and therefore never learning to understand or play “the game” of prayer. The funny thing is that we end up locking ourselves out of beauty when we refuse to try prayer, or when we actively mock what happens at a Catholic Mass.

There is a bad idea in the Church to make Mass more exciting, more engaging, and on this topic a longstanding debate over how the Holy Mass should be conducted has raged for a decades. Arguments over Vatican II can be found everywhere online, as the Latin Mass and the Novus Ordo provoke fierce commentaries. As a child of the 1980s and 1990s, I have attended various Masses that seem to lack reverence, so I appreciate the complaints of the defenders of the Mass of the Ages, because when I first witnessed a High Mass, or Latin Mass, I thought I had walked into the wrong Church. I had no idea what was happening but knew that something was different, and that something had been lost in the reverence used in the Tridentine form of the Mass.

But I have not come to talk about Latin Mass here. I will save that for another day.

What I mean to focus on here is the Mass itself, and why it is neither intended to be entertaining nor should it ever be the main goal. If you want entertainment, you can watch Monday Night Football or the hundreds of available streaming services.

The Holy Mass is not entertainment, nor should it ever be considered as such. For anyone who thinks it needs to be more exciting, they are merely asking for trouble because that is a losing game. The world outside of the Church is in constant battle for entertainment and drama. We specifically go to the Mass for a meal with God, for non-competition, for communion. Now, I will say, it is always appreciated to have a good speaker who can deliver a good homily, but again…even that is not the main purpose of the Mass.

Religion cannot be entertainment. If your religion sees itself as a competition with the culture, where the number of people attending is the mark of success, it becomes just another sideshow, a form of entertainment, and one that will lose. In short, faith in Christ is not a popularity contest. I don’t even think faith can fully be authentic if you are only there because it’s cool, because Jesus assured us that people would hate his apostles and disciples. The cool people of the ancient world were the Herodians, the Romans, the Pharisees, and the Sadduccees, and they all got together and killed Jesus because he was a buzzkill to them.

The non-religious world has ample options for entertainment. Sex, money, power, victory, contests: now that’s what most people call entertainment. The Super Bowl is entertainment, a full deck of sex, money, power, and worship of pseudo-demigod athletes. It is the most pagan feast in the history of mankind. If that’s what you want, then go get it. But that is not what the Mass offers. The beauty of the Holy Mass is that you do not go there to get something, to be entertained. You go there to give something: you go there to give thanks. (For a good primer on how to attend Mass, watch Father Mike Schmitz’s Pray the Mass like never before. In fact, go watch his video and forget about this blog, if you want greater insight.)

Any religion that tries to be cool or trendy has a short shelf life. No one needs it. No one wants it. Fireworks are not needed. A thousand options exist already in trendy entertainment and fads. For anyone that believes the Catholic Mass must be more modern and hip, they have missed the point entirely. There is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Catholic Mass is about if you are attending in order to get something for yourself instead of to give yourself to God. Even the structure of the Mass walks this out for us if we pay attention. This is the Mass in nutshell:

1.) We bring our sinful selves and ask for God’s mercy, giving all glory to him.

2.) We listen to God’s word and try to understand the message.

3.) Then we recite our beliefs and offer gifts. Bread and wine comes forward and we donate money if we can.

Then we test our faith. Talk is cheap. And your money is no good from here on out.

4.) The act of faith in the Eucharist is where the leap must be taken, weekly.

5.) Then we give thanks for God. Eucharist means “thanksgiving.”

6.) We are commanded to go forth, to love God, and to serve others.

To observe the consecration of the hosts and step forward and say, “I believe this is the body of Christ” with your Amen - that is the test of faith. To believe that you have ingested the glorified and risen body of God requires a total surrender of the intellect and free-will. That is how faith is defined in the Catechism. (CCC 143)

This kind of surrender of self to God brings real freedom. Total freedom. The reason people who try to use LSD or alcohol fail to really get freedom is because they are like Evel Knievel trying to jump the Snake River in Idaho on a rocket-powered motorcycle. You can’t blast your way to God. Experiencing God cannot be bought or achieved with enough mind-altering experiences. The spiritual life requires the journey into the valley, into humility, and kneeling is the only way to reach God and know him.

The whole idea of kneeling is to deflate the ego entirely, shoving it aside in favor of God. To be blessed by the Creator means submitting to him. I know a man who says, “I don’t kneel” and he has a very worldly idea of what God is, and as for me, I know that either I will kneel to God each morning and night, or God will kneel me. I’ve said this before on here: humility is when you kneel to God, and humiliation is when God kneels you. The resulting outcome is the same, but how you get tapped by God differs greatly in the choice.

Modern people don’t like kneeling. We’ve been indoctrinated to “believe in yourself.” But kneeling purposefully lowers reason and ego in order to elevate faith in God to the highest place in your mind, body, heart, and soul. The beauty of Catholicism is that you get to keep your reason, as science and the Church are fully compatible (don’t let people fool you about this) and by surrendering to God you get to love yourself as God loves you. This is the great paradox of faith and the rule of spiritual physics. In order to go up, you must go down. In order to be re-born, you must die to self.

In short, we go to Mass to give ourselves to God. But, lo and behold, in return, God gives himself to us. That is the only “transaction” I will ever need from God. Not money, not fame, not food, not my job, not my health, not people, not anything. All of that can be taken, and my prayer is that I will only stay close to God, and will do so through communion with Him in the Eucharist. You know, people should be clamoring to receive the host, the Eucharist, because it is God sharing himself with us. When you go to communion without the baggage of your intellect and free-will, you will know what it means to have the faith of a child.

When I stop trying to mold God to my plans, I am molded into His plans. This is letting go of everything but God. As for earthly things, we must think like Job, who after losing everything could still say: The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Bless the name of the Lord.

That is the daily miracle of the Mass. It is never to be entertained. Witnessing an irreverent Mass may be a leading cause of dying faith, because it’s like a bad sugary syrup that leaves you unfulfilled and feeling dull all over. If you go to Mass without knowing what is happening, you will be like the man from the UK watching Monday Night Football or me watching cricket.

This is why those who understand the Mass and believe do not like applause or cool new introductions to how worship is done.

Those who say, “I left the church because I wasn’t being fed,” never understood the Mass in the first place, because you don’t go to Mass to be fed by the priest’s sermon. First of all, the Mass is not about you. That’s critical to understand.

You go to Mass bringing what little you have, nothing but your sins and a willingness to believe, and deserving nothing you get fed by God himself. This is the miracle of the Loaves and Fishes in replay, every week, where we bring very little to the table, and God provides the rest.

If it’s entertainment you want, you can get a sermon on YouTube or from a podcast. There are many great ones to hear. But those speakers are not the Eucharist. Your computer or airpods cannot serve up a host to your ears at the end of a sermon. Nor can technology consecrate a host, since phones are not ordained in the only church that has the succession of the apostles. Body and soul are required for the mystery of the Mass. The Sacraments require an in-person experience. You cannot get the Eucharist anywhere else but at the hands of an ordained priest, who is in the line of grace from the apostles right up to today.

This is where people get off the Catholic bus. Transubstantiation? Laying of hands to pass on the power of consecration? What is this, a magic act?

No. That is the faith. That is the leap. That is the formula, that is not magic, but it works. “We do not believe in formulas, but in those realities they express, which faith allows us to touch.” (CCC 170)

We believe because it endures, it works, it lasts, and by placing faith slightly over our reason, we get to keep both. Keep your science and have your Eucharist, too, as long as faith edges out reason by a smidge. When faith takes the wheel, reason provides the navigation. It’s a beautiful thing to have both, but as soon as reason tries to take the wheel, the car goes off the road.

The world laughs at faith as backward and superstitious. But this is a faith that works and has lasted two thousand years. This is the faith that withstood horrors beyond our imagination in the first three hundred years, suffering martyrdoms beyond imagination. The rituals of this old religion exist for a purpose. There is a reason for the ritual. It is an act of faith. There is proof of its power to move people, as seen in the beauty of every cathedral and small town church. Entertainment was never the point. Sermons are not the bread of life. And entertainment ages badly. Go watch any comedy film from the 1960s or 1970s and see how funny it is now. (Spoiler: don’t watch them, they are no longer funny)

This is why devout Catholics don’t like clapping and hand-waving at Mass. This is why we like silence before and after Mass. Noise and clapping and hooting and hollering are fine elsewhere, like at your Bible study or a retreat or in evangelization. But not at Mass. Here’s a quote from Pope Benedict, a fellow who really understood the value of a reverent Mass:

Wherever applause breaks out in the liturgy because of some human achievement, it is a sure sign that the essence of liturgy has totally disappeared and been replaced by a kind of religious entertainment. Such attraction fades quickly - it cannot compete in the market of leisure pursuits, incorporating as it increasingly does various forms of religious titillation. (On the Spirit of the Liturgy, Joseph Ratzinger)

But then why does it have to be so boring? Kids worldwide have wondered this while attending Catholic Mass. It’s boring when you don’t understand it. It’s boring when no one explains to you what it’s about. Consider how it feels to watch a sport you don’t know, like when Americans watch cricket or British people watch American football. What you see appears pointless, until you know what’s happening, and that every single word and action is loaded with symbolism and meaning.

Many people observe a board game being played with suspicion, but once they sit down and enter the game, the nuances become interesting. So like sports and card games, and other forms of entertainment, the Mass only makes sense once you start playing and understanding it. You have to play to appreciate a game, not read the rule book or watch in confusion.

However, sports and card games do not address the gaping, vacuous, never-ending pit in our hearts that seeks the ultimate purpose and meaning of our existence. Distractions can plug the void for a bit, but eventually you need something more. Something to hang onto when you are no longer playing but perhaps: staring at a bedroom ceiling at 4 AM or sitting in a hospital waiting room or after having a miscarriage or losing a pet or when you are drowning in anxiety or you can’t stop scrolling porn or keep yourself from drinking to inebriation.

The thing about sports and entertainment is that they don’t address the core problem. Moreover, they require a good deal of energy to stay in motion. The NFL has lasted over fifty years in America, which seems a long time. But it has only lasted because of immense marketing and sales efforts to make it cool and sexy. The moment the marketing fails, the TV contracts will fade, and the stadiums will empty. The bread and circuses of modern America only survive because of peace after World War II (at least within the country), our incredible affluence, and our desire to fill spare hours with distractions. Our efficiency has allowed odd things like the NFL to spring up and flourish, but like Elvis, it will eventually fade away.

Anyone who has worked in sales knows how hard it is, how much smoke and mirrors is needed, how much bending of the truth is required, to keep up the numbers, especially when you’re selling a bad product. The product, in the end, must sell itself. The NFL requires a marketing machine that the ancient world could not fathom. But there’s a reason so much advertising and endorsing and imagery is required, just as there is a reason that boring things like Arm & Hammer Baking Soda doesn’t need a lot of clever pitching. A person buys Arm & Hammer Baking Soda one time and it works, and then keeps buying the same product for forty, fifty, sixty years. Wealthy or poor, attractive or ugly, tall or short, college educated or “deplorable”: they all trust in Arm & Hammer Baking Soda and don’t need reminders plastered all over the TV or in their mailbox or on their phones.

Some things just work. It fulfills a need. Baking Soda doesn’t oversell its basic capability by promising that you’ll be taller or better looking, or that all of your dreams will come true. The NFL is selling that story. If your team wins, you win. If your team wins, you will be fulfilled. If your team doesn’t win, somehow you have lost. To be happy, your team must win. The NFL reminds me of the Bergens in the animated movie, Trolls, where the Bergens think the only way to be happy is if they eat a Troll. Likewise, I know people that may only be happy if the Vikings or Jets win the Super Bowl. You hear this line: “I can die happy if the Vikes win…” Give me a break. Go eat a troll.

Addendum: eating a troll is not like eating the Eucharist, for anyone who might like to link the idea. Receiving the Eucharist does not implant “happiness,” it brings us into Communion with God, and in eating the consecrated host we do not kill God, as a Bergen does to a Troll. God cannot be killed. We’ve already tried that, and it didn’t work because he popped back up on the third day. The Eucharist is the Risen and Glorified Body of Christ. Receive Him frequently, as frequently as you can.

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