Bring back the Latin mass to save us from the curse of ‘accessibility’
The Church of England is launching a “project on gendered language”, in an effort to solve the problem of using male imagery to describe God. Why, for example, should we pray to Our Father, rather than Our Mother, or perhaps Our Non-Birthing Parent?
It sounds ludicrous, but it is actually a perfectly reasonable question. God is, after all, not a man, but a disembodied, omniscient being, entirely beyond gender. Yet for centuries Christians all over the world have used male pronouns to describe and communicate with God.
Words matter, as the social justice warriors like to say. They make a difference, psychologically and socially. Even if you know your deity has no gender, calling Him a Him will inevitably make you think He is a He. It doesn’t help, of course, that God sent a son, not a daughter, to walk among us. I definitely had the impression, as a cradle Catholic, that God preferred the company of bearded men. For many years, a similar argument was used by Anglican traditionalists to keep women out of the priesthood.
The difficulty with liberating God from the gender binary is not theological but linguistic. It is hard to talk or write about anyone, including God, without eventually having to settle on a pronoun. As the Catholic Church has decreed, with unintended irony: “God is neither man nor woman: He is God.”
We now know, courtesy of the trans debate, how clunky and exhausting language becomes when pronouns are tortured for political ends. The gender-neutral singular “They” would actually suit God better than it does most humans, but I doubt many Christians would relish the prospect of praying to “Them”.
It’s not just the literal meaning of words that matters. Historical resonance does too, and cadence, and poetry, and mystery. Much of this has already been stripped out of the Church’s liturgy, thanks to misguided attempts at accessibility. The bewildering poetry of the King James Bible, with its dust and blood and strange Hebraic rhythms, has likewise been replaced by modern verses of stunning blandness, each one more like a brochure for council services than the last.
So here’s my suggestion. Instead of trying to make its language more inclusive (which always means more boring), the Church should go back to being completely incomprehensible. This method worked perfectly well for 15 centuries of Christianity, before William Tyndale got his hands on a printing press. Illiterate congregations all over Europe quailed before the spiritual majesty of a Latin mass they couldn’t understand, and a Latin Bible they couldn’t read. The liturgy, the psalms, the prayers and the Bible readings – all were utterly mysterious to the ordinary believer, a strange, exalted tongue rumbling around them like thunder.
Bring back the Latin mass, in all its baffling beauty. We can’t be offended by what we don’t understand.
The mystery of the ever expanding school bag
Japanese children are struggling under the weight of their schoolbags, according to a new survey, with one in four saying they suffer from back or shoulder pain. The numbers must be similar in this country, if my children are any indication. Every morning they leave the house bent double under their massive backpacks. They look like tortoises, with their little legs bowing under the weight.
I don’t understand why modern schoolbags are so incredibly heavy. Are text books made of denser material than in my day? Why can’t they leave some at school? Is that what we did, in those nice desks with lids?
