Ditch Doc

The other day, I saw an ad for a sleek looking bathroom faucet, the chief boast of which was its revolutionary water-saving design. How does it work? Well, (and listen carefully, it’s complicated), it appears that it runs at a mind-bending 1.7 gallons per minute, trouncing the industry standard 2.3. That’s right. It makes the water run slower. So while the rest of you neanderthals are doing the same thing by cranking your dinosaur taps a quarter turn less, I’ll be getting water from my boldly yet reservedly styled, almost sentient cosmosoteriofaucet, like the rest of the enlightened. If only there were more of us. Sigh.

The language and music of the liturgy use our minds and bodies to express God’s love of man and our love of Him. Although visual art expresses the same thing, it does so with an inanimate medium, and so has a secondary place in worship.

That is why you can kneel in a beautifully decorated gothic Basilica untouched by the iconoclasm of the last forty years, in misery over the sickly-sweet vapidity of “Peace is Flowing Like a River.” And it’s why you can be brought to tears by a small congregation confidently singing the Kyrie in a cramped, misshapen church. You have entered the cave in Bethlehem, where the faithful have found the Lord in unworthy surroundings and come to do Him homage. The first scene recalls instead the Temple in Jerusalem after the veil was rent, when the great edifice still stood to the glory of the Lord, but the Lord had left. It is among Christ’s greatest mercies that he will never leave the tabernacle to escape bad music.