I have a confession. Not the oddest thing for a Catholic to say but there it is. I never memorised the Apostles’ Creed. For years sitting in Mass I would have to mumble my way through the Creed, like the middle lines in my school’s war cry. The Gloria I was all over, the Holy Holy Holy was all good, the Lord’s Prayer a doddle. But the Creed? I can still see the pictures in the prayer book Mum bought to help us learn the Mass, as well as the two pages of type that made up the Creed. And although the rest lodged in my memory, for some reason the Creed never stuck. As an actor I have had to learn much larger speeches so I thought one day I should sit down and learn the Creed just as if it were a speech. But I never got around to it.
And now it’s all changed. Australian Catholics are now using a new translation of the Mass, which has altered many of our responses and prayers. These aren’t huge – we aren’t suddenly saying the Jews or the Protestants were right, you know – but they are significant. If you go to Mass these days, you are given a large card with all the responses and prayers. – our new script. This is supposed to a more accurate translation of the Latin Mass
For example, “The Lord be with you” the Priest starts, to which our response has been since Vatican II (I think) “And also with you”. Now we are to respond “And with your spirit.” In Latin the exchange was “Dominus Vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo.” Even I can see the Spirit is mentioned there but not in the English translation. And so I assume this translation is better. Mind you, years of habit die hard and even with the script in hand the old response pops out before you realize it. I suppose we will get used to it.
Because the words do matter. I mentioned elsewhere that poetry is where we go when words are not enough. Music has the same function. People, as in a well-written musical, will use music because what they feeling goes beyond what they can say. And so in Mass we have prayer and music and ritual, in an attempt to codify spiritual experience. We can only talk about God in metaphor. There is I think a deluded arrogance in the idea, shared by believers and atheists alike, that we should be able to understand God, a being or a spirit that has existed forever and can create space and time and universes. Do you really think if you met God, if you could, you’d be on the same wavelength? Or do you think it would be like an intellectual meeting between you, say, and a bacterium?
It has been the trend for some years now to try and humanize God, to normalize the religious experience. And so we have had the Bible translated into flatter and flatter prose, which wouldn’t excite or interest you in a newspaper article but was somehow supposed to take us toward the Ineffable. I remember Stephen Fry satirizing a trendy vicar, talking about the Bible being about a guy on the streets, rapping with the kids. But we have fallen into a well-intentioned trap here. By trying to make it seem approachable, we have suggested the religious experience is explicable, ordinary and finite. But in a real sense it is strange and inhuman. Which is why we use poetry, song, ritual and depending on your religion chants and dance to deal with it – and have always done so, long before Jesus or even the Jews came along.
That’s also why the Bible sounds better in archaic language. We are entering into an area where our everyday words are inadequate. No-one in Elizabethan England spoke in the rich cadences of the King James Bible, but the richness of the language was a metaphor for the potential richness of the experience. No-one these days speaks in the flat and dreary English of the Good News Bible, but the language is still a metaphor, suggesting what we are reading or hearing is dull and ordinary. Both Bibles are a result of stylistic choices. I know which approach works better for me.
And now there’s the option of two Creeds, the Nicean and the Apostles'. I approach Mass with the same thought as Week 3 of rehearsal – I’ll never learn these bloody lines!
