Men in Tights

Here's another great article by Anthony Esolen discussing the need for masculinity in the liturgy as a proper means of inspiring vocations to the priesthood. I think it is particularly applicable to those of us who have been man enough to bear a son.

Insofar, then, as the liturgy is seen as a feminine enterprise, so will it fail to interest boys. I don’t mean that they will reject it consciously. We are not talking about something bad that happens, so much as about something good and necessary that does not happen. They will not say, “I don’t like holding hands, I don’t like the soprano at the piano bar, I don’t like the cutesy slogans on the banners.” It’s simply that their minds and hearts will wander. They will not be inspired to devotion.

Although, I think in my case it has rapidly become a conscious rejection. But since I am not a child, nor a candidate for the priesthood, I digress.

For boys are those strange creatures who fail at the simplistic and the frivolous, and succeed at the seemingly impossible. Set the bar low, and many of them will fail to come up to it; set it high, and many of them, often the very same, will clear it. They who cannot pass a tedious geometry test can take apart and reassemble a motorcycle.

He suggests that one way of raising the bar is to embrace the danger:

There is no sensed danger at a picnic; therefore Mass should never be a picnic, even when it is celebrated at the park. The holy is dangerous because it is holy, set aside: “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet,” said God to Moses, “for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground” (Ex 3:5). The holy, the wondrous can shatter all that we think we know. It can drown us in itself, kill us, and give us a new name and a new life. Most welcoming were the men of the Middle Ages who chose to carve, over the entrance to their churches, the Last Judgment, with saints in trepidation and sinners weighed in the balance and found wanting! They knew exactly what they were doing. Over that door, always facing the setting sun that is the end of the day and our reminder of death, we see the dread moment each of us, saint and sinner, will have to face. Some churches nowadays trawl for members by advertising that they welcome all. Let the door and the Mass rather be welcoming because they are forbidding; because they open out onto that strange place that we need and seek; because if we step beyond that threshold we may never be the same again.

Fun vanishes with the occasion, but solemnity has the power to bring us a deep and abiding joy, whose wellsprings remain with us even in times of grief. We are solemn when we understand the surpassing import of what we are doing and when, knowing how unworthy we are to be there, we place ourselves full-heartedly under the direction of our betters, our forefathers, our teachers, our God.

And then he discusses a distinction between men and women and how we receive truth:

Many a woman will believe the truth because she loves the man who speaks it. That is why it is relatively easy to convert a woman to the truth by manly kindness; consider the strong touch of Jesus’ hand as He defended the woman who had anointed His feet with oil, saying to her at last, “Thy sins are forgiven” (Lk 7:48). Indeed, a woman who is responding in love to a man who speaks the truth will often catch his meaning instantaneously, instructed by a praiseworthy desire to follow the truth, and him who speaks it, to the end. In this regard they are almost always much quicker than their brothers. For when the angel at the tomb gave the holy women the good news of the resurrection, repeating for them the words of Jesus, they remembered those words, and hurried to tell the apostles, surely reminding them too of what Jesus had said. But the apostles had to see to believe, for “their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not” (Lk 24:11).

The apostles had to run to the tomb to see for themselves. Thomas would not trust even his brethren, but had to probe the wounds with his own hands before he finally confessed, “My Lord and my God!” (Jn 20:28). Do we not recognize the men here, suffering from their peculiar weakness? Men are more difficult by far to convert. They are stubborn. They do not often embrace the truth because they love the speaker. More often they learn to love the speaker because they have come to see the truth of what he says.