I can recommend this as an exercise (alas! only too easy to find opportunity for): make your Communion in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children – from those who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is opened sit back and yawn – open-necked and dirty youths women in trousers and often with hair both unkempt and uncovered. Go to Communion with them (and pray for them).
It will be just the same (or better than that) as a
mass said beautifully by a visibly holy man, and shared by a few devout and
decorous people. It could not be worse
than the mess of the feeding of the Five Thousand – after which our Lord
propounded the feeding that was to come.
--J.R.R. Tolkien, The Philosophy of Tolkien:
The Worldview Behind the Lord of the Rings, p.219
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