He is grimacing with effort as he croons forcefully into the microphone. He is wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt along with sandals. He holds the notes a bit too long and he is sadly off-key.

And you might wonder: Why is she attending this rock concert if everything is wrong?

Answer: This is Sunday Mass at our local parish, and the man is a cantor.

This is just one more thing we have to put up with at a church that once had lovely, traditional music and even a Gregorian chant group. This is just one more thing to offer up each week, as we sit through wretched Marty Hagen tunes (“We are many parts! We are all one body!”) accompanied by the tinkling keys of what sounds like one of those “pie-AN-ees” in a saloon in a Western movie.

You might ask:  Well, why don’t you leave, for heaven’s sake? Find something beautiful, something uplifting, something dignified.

 Answer: We went on a search for about five years. We attended an Eastern Catholic church, where the liturgy was truly reverential, but we started noticing certain discrepancies between our Western roots and the Eastern world view, such as no belief in Purgatory and a difference in the Creed.

We also tried the only Western church in the metro-Atlanta area where there is a Latin Mass, but we had to drive for 40 minutes in our elderly car. And we didn’t get a real sense of community there, as people came from all over, even different states, just for Sunday Mass.

We missed the community at our beloved home parish, a mile from our home, and so we returned. The memories ran so deep. This was the church where my husband was received into the Faith, the place where we were married as Catholics and became Godparents.

My husband discovered that if he prays the rosary, he can block out the rinky-dink music, but that grace has been denied me. And truth to tell, after a year in our old parish, the music doesn’t make me cringe as much as it did at first. Is this lessening of sensitivity something to exult over or be wary of? I don’t know.

Some would suggest that we petition the pastor with our troubles. After all, we are not the only ones suffering in the pews. But we have done that, and our requests fell on deaf ears.

We rejoiced when the current music director, oh, wait, I mean “liturgist,” left. We hoped a new person might raise the level of music from egregious to bearable. But life can take some odd twists and turns, as we all know. And this particular person returned to his old job after six months away.

We asked the pastor for one Mass each week with all traditional music. After all, there are currently TWO out of five Sunday Masses with guitars and trumpets and banjos, and the rest have piano, a touch of organ, and plenty of 1970s tunes. That request was denied.

The solution is obvious, of course: Continue praying and continue offering it up. We keep in mind that there is much greater suffering than this. But this past weekend, the new cantor in his blue jeans and his rock ‘n’ roll approach to liturgy had me running to the computer to download some of my misery.

Then I just read Joseph’s recent post about traditional liturgy in Orange County, California – and I felt the same emotion I always experience when a Catholic mentions parishes where liturgists don’t call the shots, where priests still care about dignity and beauty. It’s an ugly emotion; it’s called envy.

There is something good, however, that can come out of all this. Every Catholic knows that God can take our suffering and turn it around. In my case, I have written a novel called “Death of a Liturgist.”

I am a little bit ashamed to admit how eagerly I planned and carried out the death of my fictional liturgist. But it’s the truth and I’ll own up to it.