Reading at Mass and “eye contact”
Posted on 3 September 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf
From a seminarian:
I wanted to know if the lector should keep eye contact while
proclaiming the word of God at Holy Mass? Many parish guidelines say that it’s important to keep eye contact.
proclaiming the word of God at Holy Mass? Many parish guidelines say that it’s important to keep eye contact.
Keep eye contact… presumably with the “audience” to which the lectoress is “playing”?
Here’s my view. There is a thin line between reading the Word of God in an articulate, intelligible, thoughtful way, and a performance. While Holy Mass is the greatest drama even in earthly terms, our roles are not dramatic roles.
I was an actor in a former life. I know the temptation to “play” the crowd. Keeping eye-contact, for most people, will lead them into problems, in my opinion. Unless they are quite disciplined, they will lend to their reading the overtone that that reading is about the reader and not the Word. In all our reading in Scripture, the Word is both speaking and being spoken, raised to the Father.
“Keeping eye-contact” is not something that I would push. I would push proper pronunciation of the words, the phrasing, the meaning.
Perhaps we can, under the gravitational pull of the Extraordinary Form, take a cue from how the priest was trained to say Holy Mass. Even though the priest knows most of the texts by heart, he is to keep his eye in contact with the texts printed on the pages of the Missale Romanum or on the altar cards. A priest does well, for the sake of prudence, to follow the printed texts even when they are something he has said everyday of his life for decades. The texts are important. They are Christ speaking. The priest ought not stumble over them, scramble them, lose his place.
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