Why I Smiled When a Cell Phone Went Off At Mass

We had cried Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord, God of Hosts and knelt in profound reverence. Our presider, an Ugandan priest, declaimed the Eucharistic prayer in his distinctly sonorous accent. The whole event culminated in those timeless words, echoed worshipfully throughout the centuries by countless saints, “On the day before he was to suffer he took bread in his holy and venerable hands, and with eyes raised to heaven to you, O God, his almighty Father, giving you thanks, he said the blessing, broke the bread and gave it to his disciples, saying: TAKE THIS ALL OF YOU AND EAT OF IT FOR THIS IS MY BODY WHICH WILL BE GIVEN UP FOR YOU.”

At that moment, the saints and angels surrounding the altar prostrated themselves in awe. My fellow mass-goers and I bowed our heads, believing, but with earthly minds incapable of completely understanding the great mystery we knelt before.

As our priest continued the Eucharistic Prayer, he began to list the names of martyrs, popes, and saints who had performed the exact same action and now beheld their Lord face-to-face, rewarded for the love they had shown for the God-Man Himself during their earthly lives.

As the priest read, “Ignatius, Alexander, Marcellinus, Peter, Felicity…,” his litany was sharply cut into by a moment of polyphonic flatulence. In place of this the most profound prayer of the Church, I now heard an instrumental version of the timeless classic, “La Cucaracha.”

As the embarrassed communicant rushed to turn off their phone, humor of the moment refused to be lost on me. A wide grin spread across my face.

You see, nothing could capture the absolutely comical plight of mankind on earth more than the heavenly liturgy being broken into by the absolute worldliness of a cell-phone tone. In so many ways, the smartphone captures our slavery to the travails of earthly life. Mourning and weeping in this valley of tears, we are, and the smartphone, by arresting our attention to the groundedness of this earthly state, keeps us constantly aware of this fact.

You see, it is this very reason that I attend Mass daily in the first place. I desperately need the daily reconsecration of the hilarious details of my life to the Lord in the Offertory Prayers. My feeble mind requires a being lifted up into the ways of the Father through the daily readings. Most importantly, I need to receive my daily bread so as to continue to be a light in the world.

The human person is an utterly comical being. He or she will live forever. As C.S. Lewis famously remarked, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal… Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.” Man is truly an exalted being and made more fully so by his redemption in Christ Jesus. It is this same being however who does things like defecate himself for the first few years of his life and even more mind-blowingly, choose against his the good of his nature by sinning.

It is this, the already-but-not-yet of Christian eschatological hope which was so clearly marked by the tones of La Cucaracha being interwoven with the spoken blessing of the Eucharistic Prayer. Even in this, the holiest of moments, our hilariously feeble humanity could not help but make its voice heard, reminding us all of our mission as a Church, and, possibly more importantly, to not take ourselves all so seriously. It is probably from a similar experience that Chesterton reminded us, “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.”