In Praise of Irregularity
Why am I sharing a 3D topographical map of the USA?
It’s the metaphor that was in my mind as I reflected on the way the readings in the old liturgy vary over the course of the year.
Most of the USA is relatively flat, but in the West you have the impressive mountain ranges that seem to rise up with sudden grandeur.
Similarly, in the old rite, most days have two rather short readings, an Epistle and a Gospel. But at Ember Days, four times a year, you have multiple readings, sometimes a whole string of them. During Holy Week, you have all four Passion accounts: Matthew on Palm Sunday, Mark on Holy Tuesday, Luke on Holy Wednesday, and John on Good Friday. Wednesday of the fourth Week of Lent and again Wednesday of Holy Week you have two Epistles. At the traditional Easter Vigil you have twelve prophecies. Sometimes the readings in the old lectionary are very, very long, and sometimes they are only a verse or two.
It’s all very organic, growing and shrinking with the days and seasons of the liturgical year. Simply from a human point of view, it makes for a very interesting liturgy: you are “thrown off” by this variation, it catches you by surprise perhaps; it makes you think. And that’s not even bringing in the variations in the propers, where you sometimes have a Gradual & Alleluia, other times a Gradual & Tract, other times just a Gradual, still other times two Alleluias. On certain days in Lent, you kneel in the middle of the Tract. During the Pentecost octave, you kneel during one of the Alleluias. And so forth.
The new lectionary is ploddingly rationalistic by comparison: almost always two moderate-length readings every day, three moderate-length readings on Sundays and feastdays, and nothing “weird” like Ember Days, the four Passions during Holy Week, or those seemingly random second epistles on this or that Wednesday. It’s the kind of thing you’d get from a committee whose idea was to fit everything into a predesigned template, within certain parameters. A Bauhaus liturgy from an industrial age.
As Gregory DiPippo once pointed out, the first person to challenge the theory that the Roman Rite originally had three readings on feasts and Sundays, Msgr Aimé-Georges Martimort,1 noted that all historical lectionaries have these kinds of irregularities for special occasions. For example, the Byzantine Rite in Holy Week has Gospels at Orthros and the Liturgy of the Presanctified has no preceding NT Epistle and no Alleluia, while the groups of three OT readings at Vespers on Holy Thursday and Good Friday have an irregular structure, with an extra prokimen between the first and second. The Royal Hours and Jerusalem Matins both have synaxes of readings with an atypical arrangement as well.
All that’s to say: the “irregularity” of apostolic Christianity’s traditional rites is one of their most attractive features, psychologically speaking. (Naturally, much more could be said about the theological fittingness of the choice of readings themselves, but here I’m looking at something more “structural.”)
Thus, when I write “in praise of irregularity,” I am by no means making a plea for bending and breaking the Church’s matrimonial rules! The irregularity to which I refer is none other than the many beautiful differences that characterize the various seasons of the liturgical year in the usus antiquior. The traditional rubrics, texts, and chants of Lent and Easter bring the contrasting characters of their seasons strongly to the fore: in Lent we suppress the Alleluia while in Paschaltide we sing it repeatedly; the Gloria disappears and then returns with exultation; the Gloria Patri drops away in Passiontide and enters the liturgy anew with Easter. There are many such elements and structures of differentiation, and while the Novus Ordo retains some of them, most of them were abandoned or rendered optional, which has tended to mean rarely-chosen, for reasons I explain elsewhere.
The traditional Latin Mass and Divine Office display a plethora of differences between seasons as well as on certain special days of the year, be it Ember Days, Rogation Days, All Souls, Candlemas, or what have you. These irregularities or deliberate departures from the “standard” approach magnify the psychological power of the rites and augment their spiritual impact. They also help worshipers enter more deeply into particular mysteries, seasons, or feasts by, on the one hand, startling them out of rote habit, and, on the other hand, building up over the years subliminal associations that reinforce the particular graces besought by the Church at that time.