Fight for the Right (Brained)

We have been attending the Traditional Latin Mass as a family every Sunday for about seven years now. Our reasons for doing so are consistent with those of many others who find a liturgical refuge within Traditional worship: reverence, consistency, catechesis-by-osmosis, and a vertical orthopraxis. A bonus is the ruling out of what I call “funny business”; that is, the potential for improvisations and liberties taken by priests in the Novus Ordo are largely non-existent in the Tridentine Mass thanks to the strict liturgical rubrics hemming it in. All of this is as it should be: lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi.

Our diocesan Latin Mass community maintains a demographically healthy swath of people—young and old; black, white, Asian, Hispanic; male and female; single folks and families; high earners and laborers; indult veterans and newcomers to Tradition. Many (though not all, obviously) of the wives and mothers in our community are homemakers, while many of the men I know are lawyers, engineers, software developers, electricians and other tradesmen, or work in finance or IT. I have also noticed that the Latin Mass seems to be a liturgically “safe space” for those who are neurodivergent (though this is just an anecdotal observation).

I asked a (Traditionalist) friend casually by text this evening what percentage of those who attend the Traditional Latin Mass he thought were “left-brained” versus “right-brained.” He estimated that 75 percent of those who attend or are attracted to the Latin Mass would qualify as “left-brained” thinkers.

Of course, these are just anecdotal observations—brain scan studies also suggest that the idea of personality traits taking place in one actual “side” of the brain is largely myth—that don’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, but it also tracks in my observed experience as well. Those who would be considered left-brain dominant are typically characterized as logical, analytical, objective, linear, factual, and sequential. Those who are right-brain dominant are more creative, intuitive, subjective, artistic, emotional, and imaginative.

I fall into that 25 percent minority who would be considered predominately “right-brained.”

I can see the draw of the Latin Mass for those in the “left-brained” camp: the movements of the priest and acolytes are crisp and predictable (linear and sequential); the Mass itself is ruled by an order and coherence that is both fitting and comforting (logical); the “it’s not about you” appeals to objective sensibilities. Of course, the Holy Sacrifice is a divine mystery which defies reason and strict sensibilities. But the context in which this mystery is revealed is ordered, structured, coherent, and fitting.

So where does that leave right-brained Catholics like myself? Should we look to things like the “Synod on Synodality” convened during the pontificate of Pope Francis which took place from 2021-2024 and seems the exact opposite in nature of everything the Latin Mass represents? The language the Synod uses to describe its mission and purpose is dripping with effete, right-brained euphemisms:

We recall that the purpose of the Synod is not to produce documents, but to plant dreams, draw forth prophecies and visions, allow hope to flourish, inspire trust, bind up wounds, weave together relationships, awaken a dawn of hope, learn from one another and create a bright resourcefulness that will enlighten minds, warm hearts, give strength to our hands.

If that’s the case, I will gladly forfeit my place at the synodal table, right brain be damned.

Still, I do wonder why I find myself in the minority in my liturgical “camp” when it comes to predominant brain hemisphere and personality—and why I stay despite that.

The aforementioned friend wrote a great essay that teases some of this out titled “The Worship Compass,” in which he talks about a “Charismatic to Trad Pipeline” and why it makes sense that the TLM would attract so-called “Trentacostals.” He writes:

The lesson of the Worship Compass is that worship attracts people by committing to a set of spiritual values and embodying them without apology. The TLM knows exactly what it is; so does the Pentecostal revival meeting; so, for that matter, does the Episcopal parish with the rainbow flag. People sense this coherence intuitively, which is why the pipelines run where they do: the charismatic disillusioned with wackiness but still hungry for transcendence finds a home among the trads; the progressive Episcopalian drifts toward the megachurch or the base community as his horizontalism sheds its remaining formality. Movement across the compass follows values, and values are only legible where worship states them plainly.

He also goes on to surmise that the Novus Ordo, in trying to be all things to all people, ends up in a non-committal space:

This is also why the center is the loneliest place on the map. A liturgy that hedges on every axis asks the worshipper [sic] to supply the meaning himself, and most will eventually go looking for a community that supplies it for them. This is why the stock remedy to the problems of the Novus Ordo is always “more catechesis”: the NO requires the worshiper to be intensively catechized to understand it because the rite itself doesn’t commit to any quadrant of values. The worshiper is expected to bring his own meaning.

Although I feel that my right-brained sensibilities—creative, subjective, artistic, emotional (yes, even as a man)—are more liability than asset while assisting at the Traditional Latin Mass, there is still something that keeps me there despite being a “personality minority.”

For one, the respect for (and enforcement of) silence provides a fertile “white space” in which one can enter and drink deeply from. Silence is the blank canvas of the soul in which the Holy Ghost is afforded creative license to speak and act. It fosters contemplation—a deeply subjective enterprise. There is also the aesthetic sensibilities of many traditional worship spaces coupled with chant and polyphony that can move the emotions in a way the Novus Ordo never did for me.

The artist Pablo Picasso famously said, “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” Because the liturgy itself is hemmed in by rubrics (“the rules”), it affords the worshipper a kind of metaphysical “open space” to enter into a new and vertical reality. Conversely, when the liturgy is constantly breaking or bending the “rules” through creative license or extemporaneous improvisation, the worshipper is aesthetically bound to earth by the celebrant, the congregation, and sometimes the more horizontal orientation of the liturgy itself. The point is not to “break the rules like an artist” in order to sin or profane the supreme act of worship but to crash through the barriers that keep us bound here on earth while taking part in the liturgy itself. We should be taken to Heaven during that hour in the presence of the God who takes His place on the altar before us.

In the presence of so many predominately left-brained men at my parish, I can sometimes fall into the trap of feeling like a fish out of water, less-than as a man for my particular sensibilities, a worshipper with “nowhere to lay his head.” But I trust that although I may be in the minority as a right-brained Catholic at an overwhelmingly “left-brained” liturgy, the liturgy is more than just brains—it is hearts and minds and bodies and souls oriented to God, and that God is not in the business of wasting those gifts that He Himself gave us to glorify Him, whether engineer or artist.

So, I will continue to write, to paint, to compose, to create, to feel unabashedly, and to give thanks to God for the gift of silence, order, and reverence the Latin Mass affords me. As David did, I will dance in wild abandonment before the Lord (2 Samuel 6:14-22).

Just not at Mass.