How Does the Mass Work?

A most interesting nugget here.

...Aidan Nichols, in his Looking at Liturgy, in 1996, explains how a desire to increase the understanding and participation of the laity in the Mass did so on faulty sociological theories. Citing Dominican liturgiologist Irenee-Henri Dalmais, Nichols shows that, contrary to many of the Fathers of Vatican II’s experts, liturgy “belongs in the order of doing (ergon), not of knowing (logos). Logical thought cannot get far with it; liturgical actions yield their intelligibility in their performance, and this performance takes place at the level of sensible realities … capable of awakening the mind and heart to acceptance of realities belonging to a different order.” The theme of noble simplicity, one of the principle axioms of Vatican II’s liturgical reforms, in this light appears somewhat naïve, excluding as it does methods of perception proper to the human person that are wider than Enlightenment epistemology can obtain or even account for....

Thus the failure of didacticism, the 'everything is explained' or, more currently, 'everything is self-explanatory.'  It's why Chant works and why today's Mares-Eat-Oats hymnody, derived from Broadway fails. 

Would you--COULD you--be delighted if a magician explained the trick as he went along?

Didn't think so.