Musical Glossolalia and Divine Play

Why Catholics Can't Sing is one of those books that's been on my radar for several years, during which time I've kept telling myself I should read it. Now, having been lent the book by our new Anglican priest (a good sign, I should think), I have finally begun to read it. It is quite instructive. Any Protestant who's ever been to a Roman Mass in the ordinary form of the rite has noticed the anemic singing and shoddy hymns. Why, not even Notre Dame is exempt from the let's-pretend-folk-music-is-church-music phenomenon. The insight of Thomas Day (the author, you see) is not just to recognize this, but to provide a plausible explanation for why it is so, and why it is so far removed from the true spirit of liturgy.

I can't review the compleat book yet, as I'm only fifty pages into it. But two points, especially, have caught my attention:

• Song, or chant, is our equivalent of speaking in tongues. This is a very attractive notion.

  Anyone who has ever attended a Latin High Mass in an old-fashioned Benedictine monastery has really attended a charismatic event. This style of worship makes us realize that the early Christian church had taken the wild fires of charismatic zeal and compressed them into the intense flame of monastic chant. ... Through the medium of music, the monks become "filled with the Spirit". They are madmen, breaking out in a focused, unified, musical glossolalia.

  Indeed! Chant is not some dry, dead thing that smothers the stirrings of the Holy Spirit; it is the authentic expression of that joy that comes from the Paraclete. Likewise, the great sacred music of the ages, from Josquin to Bach to Pärt, is glossolalia, given structured direction and form. It is no less spiritual because it is meant to be sung by professionals. Anyone who condemns professional music as antithetical to spiritual experience only reveals their own philistinism, their own impoverished view of spirituality and culture. (I probably need not reïterate here that many of my most profound experiences have been in listening to music.)
  
• Ritual is play; liturgy is divine play. This, properly speaking, is not Thomas Day's idea, but that of Johan Huizinga, whose concept of Homo ludens is worth examining. This is not to denigrate ritual, nor is it to suggest that it is somehow less real than "reality" (or whatever the things that take place outside a church building can be called).

  Ritual "is seriousness at its highest and holiest", and yet a form of play; play is fun; true ritual is supremely serious, solemn, earnest fun. In religious ritual the beautiful and the sacred can come together. Ritual (the medium) can become the divine game and from it people can become conscious of their role in the divine order of things (the message).

  Ritual, of course, is not the sole province of High-Church Anglicans. No, every form of Christian worship has its own ritual, even down to the Krustians meeting in their warehouse "praise and worship center" in the suburbs. Performed well, ritual enhances our understanding of the world and God's designs for us therein. Performed poorly, it is merely so much padding.