Recently one major piece of the puzzle showed up when I was on the Internet tracking down the answer to a question about Church music.

As a result of what I found out, I made up the following trivia question: what do Richard Wagner’s opera, Lohengrin and Mendelssohn’ musical adaption of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream have in common?

 I know the answer won’t change your life, but aren’t you at least a little bit curious? OK. OK. What do they have in common?

Well, between 1860 and 1960 the most popular music for weddings in the Western world have been from these two works—“Here Comes the Bride” (“The Bridal Chorus” from Lohengrin) and “The Wedding March,” the piece commonly used for the recessional, from Midsummer Night’s Dream.

You want to know what’s odd about that? These two pieces of music come from musical works that basically present love and marriage as tragedies!

Little did we know, when we started using this music, that that myth would often become our own reality, that often both love and marriage would end up being tragedies.

This, of course, did not happen because of our musical preference. But our musical preference turned out to be, in fact, a harbinger of things to come.

Out of decades of unfocused liturgical preference and undisciplined sacramental choice came the new sacramental heresy: there is nothing within the sacraments themselves which can ease the meaninglessness and irrelevance in contemporary people’s life of Faith.

Thus it is my right and my gift to make the sacraments relevant, meaningful and contemporary.

And that is how many people today translate “active participation in the liturgy.”

Well, all you have to do in the midst of the Western world’s disorder is to mention rights and gifts in the context of me and my, and we can even manage to make of God just another light-and-sound show.

I believe that the vibrant sacramental life of the Church is in disarray because people think they make the sacraments relevant.

Hundreds of parish liturgy committees act as if they create community by how they manage Sunday Mass.

And thousands of people believe they make their wedding relevant by how they create a unique environment in the place where they are going to be married.

I certainly do not deny that we have, in many wonderful ways, brought new life into the sacramental Church over the past fifty years. But unless we find a way to enter into some kind of sacramental silence for the next fifty years we will, I fear, cease to be a truly sacramental Church.

We will become a religious association which uses sacraments to make parish community—much like we use helium balloons and candy to make successful and relevant Bingos.

But since it seems that most parishioners have no real power over this situation in their own parish or the Church at large, why even bring it up?

Well, because I believe the sacramental life of the Church is created in the same fashion as it is dismantled—little by little.

So when individual people believe that Christ, who gives us the sacraments, can also unveil for us individually what each sacrament means every time they individually approach it, then our sacramental life is re-created.

That begins to happen when I approach every sacrament believing that the Bridegroom “cometh” to me.

If I enter the church believing that something as intimate as marriage takes place there between God and me, if I make the Sign of the Cross as if I believe it wards off the evil spirits and prepares my heart for the encounter, if I go up and kiss the statue of Christ’s Mother asking her to heal my wounds about the sacraments and about the Eucharist, if I take Holy Communion (by mouth or hand) as if the Bridegroom really cometh, then my lamp is trimmed and ready.

It is ready because my own heart is immersed in the mystery. That is the only place from which we can restore sacramental life in the Church.

Is that all there is to it? What about speaking out?

In the 1960s I was made the director of the office of music in my diocese. We tried. We had weekends of teaching and hands-on education. We arranged for professional musical help for the dedicated people who played the organ in their parish churches.

Then came the Renewal and the music ministry exploded. We thought the famine was over. But it was not.

It has taken us a long time to realize that the problem was not the music. The music was just another symptom of the real problem. Nor were “sacramental relevance” or “contemporary meaning” the problem.

The problem was—and is—focus. We are not focused on liturgy as divine. We are not focused on Eucharist as sacrifice. We are not focused on the whole life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are focused on one or the other almost to the exclusion of the rest.

Thus we are not focused on the mystery of sacrament, on Christ in sacrament, Christ, the Bridegroom, who comes to us in the sacraments.

And only when our hearts are immersed in the mystery can things change.

How long will that take? That’s not our business.

But let us not forget that whenever someone who does not participate or even know about sacrament sees a true believer, in the flesh or on tv, really in the sacrament, it rattles their intellectual boundaries.

Witness the comments of so many newscasters as they mused on Pope John Paul II’s mysterious presence at the altar or kneeling before the tabernacle in every church he visited around the world. (For heaven’s sake, one would think he really believed the Bridegroom was really there!)

Yes, there is a power and relevance in the sacraments themselves, which has nothing to do with you or me. And because of that, it is our privilege to live the sacramental life, and if we live it with virginal delight and vivid expectation, others will want to fill their lamps with that oil too.

And that “oil” is available in any sacrament, at any Mass, anytime of the year, in any Catholic church.

We don’t have to wait for others to change before we fill our lamps with it. All we have to do is humbly “trim” our own hearts and leave the rest up to the Holy Spirit.

(And believe me, if my sense of the sacramental life can be re-created after all the profane, outrageous—sometimes sinful—things we did to the sacraments in the late 1960s and early 70s, there is hope for everyone!)

If we are humble and our hearts are open we will hear those exciting words, Behold, the bridegroom cometh (Mt 25:6), and we will know, in the depths of our hearts, that he really did come, and he really does come, to me!