To most of the world outside the Church, a controversy over a brief part of the Mass will seem absurd, especially since it is called “the sign of peace.”
My column last week, “The Snub of Peace,” drew more substantial direct responses from people on our mailing list that anything else I’ve written, and the republication of it on the website of the Imaginative Conservative likewise elicited more comments than any of my dozens of other pieces archived there. The reason for the responses is not hard to find. For many Catholics, the “sign of peace” has become a test of thoughts and feelings about the Church today. Ironically (since peace is the question), it exposes a persistent divide in the way people experience the Mass.
Many of the people who responded to my column gave me a quick “amen,” sometimes adding that they had experienced the same kind of snub that irritated me. Other respondents were disappointed that I had judged the motives of those reluctant to share a sign of peace with their neighbors in the pews. The reasons could be subtle, as they rightly pointed out, and by ascribing attitudes of righteous superiority and Pharisaism to everyone who avoids the sign of peace, I was forgetting that motives differ. (A sample of these thoughtful comments can be found here, with my gratitude to their authors.)
Some of the descriptions of behavior during the sign of peace had me laughing. For example, a comment on the Imaginative Conservative website says that “in one parish we attend for daily Mass, a fellow raises both arms dramatically and slowly rotates, waving and calling out to all and sundry, like a politician on a parade float.” One friend wrote that in the early days after Vatican II, he and his friends called the exchange moment “Howdy Doody Time”—a description less hilarious to those who missed the TV show in the 1950s. Another comment suggests a metaphor for the interruption of the Mass: “If you went to a symphony and 3/4ths of the way through the 4th movement, the orchestra quit so that the audience could have a little face time….”
Granted, the sign of peace often feels to me like an interruption. Nevertheless, abuses aside, a dignified offer of the peace of Christ—an acknowledgement during Mass of our call to love our neighbor as ourselves—will not lead us to perdition, whereas I have my doubts about making a point of refusing any such gesture (and I received an email description of a fairly egregious recent one). But perhaps there is always a reason not immediately visible.
As often happens, a new perspective on these questions came from an entirely unexpected direction. My wife was recently talking to an old friend who had suffered a massive heart attack and described himself as having died before being revived after hours on the operating table. He told my wife that he had seen the face of Jesus. The same morning, she had been reading about the Holy Face, the devotion dear to St. Therese of Lisieux, which was that day’s entry in her year-long book of prayers. Such things are never coincidence.
Sometimes a face can be so radiant with holiness that merely beholding it can change something within us—an experience I had here at Wyoming Catholic College two years ago in a time of great distress. But even the face of Jesus was not always so obviously holy. In her Last Conversations, St. Therese wrote, “These words of Isaiah, ‘Who has believed our report? . . . There is no beauty in Him, no comeliness’ have been the whole foundation of my devotion to the Holy Face, or, to express it better, the foundation of my whole piety.”
The radiance of Christ might be altogether hidden when we turn to our neighbors, but it is nonetheless present to recognize in faith. As we approach Lent, perhaps the “sign of peace” can be reimagined as an experience of faces in the person of Christ—and an occasion not to judge.
Republished with gracious permission from the Wyoming Catholic College Weekly Bulletin.
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The featured image is “Bernard Gilpin Making Peace among the Borders, Takes Down the Glove in Rothbury Church, c.1570” (1859) by William Bell Scott. This file is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.