Faith & Spirit Quote by Richard Morris

Silence is doing stage work here. Morris points to the Canon of the Mass - the priest’s central Eucharistic prayer, historically spoken sotto voce - as something that looks anti-musical on paper, yet quietly disciplines the entire sound-world of liturgy. The intent is defensive and aesthetic at once: to justify a practice modern ears might file under “needlessly secretive” by reframing it as an artistic and spiritual technology.

The subtext is that audibility is not the only measure of participation. In a culture increasingly shaped by public speech, print, and later Victorian expectations of clarity and improvement, “inaudible prayers” can read like a bug: exclusion, clerical gatekeeping, empty ritual. Morris flips that anxiety. He argues the hush is the point, because it creates a negative space that music can’t manufacture on its own: a felt center, a pause that makes the sung parts orbit something larger than performance. The congregation is asked to attend, not to consume.

Context matters. Morris writes as a 19th-century clergyman, when Western churches were actively renegotiating ritual: Tractarian/ritualist revivals, debates over “Roman” ceremonial, and new choirs and hymnody expanding what Mass sounded like. In that environment, the Canon’s quiet becomes a kind of aesthetic boundary line. It prevents liturgy from collapsing into concert, keeps the sacrament from being reduced to rhetoric, and reminds listeners that not everything sacred needs to be optimized for comprehension. The claim is almost modern: meaning can be produced by what you’re denied access to, and that denial can be purposeful rather than merely archaic.