I eat a gluten free diet. Consequently, I occasionally enjoy trying out different gluten free baking recipes! There are so many wonderful gluten free things I can make from scratch today: Pancakes, waffles, cookies, cakes, pretzels, muffins, and breads! However, the one mistake I sometimes make is I take my gluten free delights, which I am super excited about, and I offer them to my non-gluten free friends.  See I would say things to my friends like: “You need to try this brownie, it’s amazing!” then because my friends trust me they would excitedly take a bite of the brownie and then make a face and if they were really nice, they would finish swallowing it. This obviously was not the response I hoped for.

Then I learned one little trick that solved the whole problem! Instead of telling my friends “Try this brownie it’s amazing!” I would tell them “Try this brownie, it’s gluten free, so it won’t taste like a real brownie, but it’s still pretty good!” That one little qualifier changed the whole experience. Suddenly my friends could eat my gluten free baking without nearly as many faces!
So what changed? Their expectations changed. In the first scenario, they were expecting to taste a brownie. But a gluten free brownie is not a brownie. It mimics a brownie, but it is not a brownie. Anyone who eats a gluten free brownie, expecting a real brownie will be disappointed simply because…. it’s not a brownie! However, once I told my friends that this was meant to mimic a brownie, but was not an actual brownie, well now their expectations changed. They were not expecting a brownie and so were open to the actual flavor of the gluten free brownie and they were judging the flavor on its own merits, not comparing it to a real brownie.

So why all this baking sharing? I think for many people something similar happens with our expectations for the Mass. We are so used to being entertained everywhere we go. We are used to the events we attend to have natural factors to draw us in and engage us. So naturally, when we go to church, we expect the same thing! We expect some level of entertainment. Then when the Mass doesn’t deliver, we decide it’s not worth it, or we just can’t do it every week because we get nothing out of it. In short, for many of us, Mass is the gluten free brownie, that we expected to taste like a real brownie.

The reality is that Mass is not meant to be entertaining, its meant to be worship. While worship is not necessarily entertaining, it can still be engaging! But worship will never be engaging if we continue to come to it with the expectation that it will be entertaining as well. It’s not a natural mind shift either. There are still days I come to Mass expecting to be entertained, and I find when I walk away from Mass disappointed, it’s a cue to check my expectations and try to reset them for the next Mass.

I’ve included a video from Father Mike Schmitz to elaborate a little more on the idea of worship and our expectations of Mass.  Here is to all of us working to no longer compare gluten free brownies to real brownies, and to no longer compare the Mass to entertainment.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuyxQvb9Ayw