St. Paul's Spectacle

A way to define the experience of attending mass at St. Paul's Cathedral would be: man-made spectacle. Especially when the church is supposed to be focused mainly on God and spirituality. St. Paul's Cathedral seemed to have a lot of differences and it could definitely be described as a spectacle.

Growing up Catholic, I couldn't help notice the differences during mass however, to my surprise, there were a lot of similarities as well. The biggest and most obvious detail that caught the eyes of many is the fact that St. Paul's was high in performance. The orchestra and the choir can be used as a perfect example of this. The orchestra seemed to be playing louder than the choir themselves, which took away from a spiritual performance in itself. In addition to this, mass was difficult to follow along, even though pamphlets were distributed beforehand. To me, personally, mass should have a sense of community to truly experience something spiritual. St. Paul's Cathedral falls short of this, which is another reminder why this is a man-made structure, not a God-made one. Therefore, the sense of community gets lost in the grandeur of the building and even the performance the choir provides at certain points during mass.

The choir had beautiful voices and the echoes of the building added to that beauty. However, adding Latin verse just keeps adding on to the spectacle of the cathedral because other than that, it is not really necessary to add a different, hard to understand language when a soul is trying to connect with God. Throughout mass a specific structure and set of rules were set that many people could have been oblivious to. The structure was set between grandeur and the people attending mass. There was a definite line between these two that are noticeable during mass readings, with the large echo, along with the choir and the orchestra. One is seemed to be encouraged to follow along in the pamphlet, but at the same time, is impossible with all the grandeur and the defining characteristics of their structure.

Overall, it seemed to me, aside from being beautiful in the eyes of the beholder, St Paul's mass was mostly focused on the grandeur and performance, which inevitably makes someone feel a lot smaller. Because of this, humility and the sense that the Lord was there with us, in spirit, was inevitably lost through all the spectacle.