Selective in our scandals--part

I began this series of articles with the observation that we Catholics are very “selective in our scandals,” indeed -- while the world watches, we scramble to develop clergy sexual abuse policies as though that were the only problem we have. I have suggested that the sexual abuse crisis is but one of a dozen major crises we have faced, for forty long years. And I began to explore a few problems with one area which is supposed to directly touch the life of every Catholic -- the crisis in the Sacred Liturgy.

For how long I will continue on this theme, I do not know; but from the feedback I’m getting from readers, it is clear that this is a subject of interest. In this fourth part of the series, I want to explore the crisis in our worship from the perspective of what I would consider to be our problem with a central Mystery of the Faith: the Incarnation.

The Incarnation is, of course, right at the heart of the Gospel: it is the mystery of God becoming Man. “In the fullness of time,” Scripture tells us, God sent His Son; and the impact of this truth upon every aspect of the Christian Faith could never be overstated. “In the fullness of time,” when all had been prepared; at a particular moment, in a particular generation, among a certain people, in a definite place and within a definite culture, God, Whom the whole universe cannot contain, stepped into His creation and became Man.

Indeed, so true is this that, had you been back there, way back when, standing perhaps by the lake as He was teaching, and someone had wandered by and asked what was going on -- IF you were in on the secret -- you might have pointed and said, “Well, you see, that one is Peter; that one is James, and that’s his brother John; but THAT One, that One there speaking: that One is God Himself.” It is an awesome thing to ponder -- the particularity of the Gospel, which has been called its greatest scandal. Because, you see, it would be so much more convenient were it not so.

Last Sunday as I wrote this, the Gospel of the Mass had a line which most of us might never stop to think about: “No one knows the Son but the Father, and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal Him.” His revelation to us is a personal revelation: He has revealed Himself to us as a Person.It did not have to be thus, did it? He might have been content to give us merely a code of life, a Law to follow, a philosophy to explore. Instead, right from the beginning with Abraham, He reveals Himself to His People as a Person, and all the more so in the New Covenant. “In the fullness of time,” there He was, walking among us: “That One is God Himself.” For us moderns, or post-moderns, or whatever we are at the moment, this is an awkward thing. It would be much more convenient if Jesus were capable of being rendered into an abstraction, and people are always trying to do that to Him.

In the “Spirituality” section of every Barnes & Noble, you’ll find all kinds of competing “spiritualities” and religious philosophies, many of which dip into Christianity to a greater or lesser extent, borrowing what they choose and leaving the rest. Jesus would be much more convenient if you could do that to Him: turn Him into just another philosopher on the shelf, borrow from His teaching to the extent that you choose.But the awkward fact is that you always have to come back to the scandal of the particularity of the Gospels.

You can’t neatly slide between Bertrand Russell and John Dewey the One Who said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” You cannot turn into a mere moral philosopher the One Who three times predicted His own crucifixion, and Who went on to say, “but I, when I am lifted up, will draw all men to myself.” You can’t regard as just another thinker Someone Who tells you that unless you eat His Flesh and drink His Blood, you have no life in you!“In the fullness of time!” The scandal of it. “This One is God Himself!”

Oh, the awkwardness.

Salvation for the world, found in the crucifixion, death and resurrection of an obscure Galilean peasant two thousand years ago! Not the “ideal of Jesus,” not the “Who is Jesus for you” vs. the “who is Jesus for me,” but... Jesus, the Lord. I honestly believe that much of our contemporary problem in Liturgy has to do with a deep discomfort with the Incarnation, with the scandal of particularity.

Take the University chapel of which I spoke in an earlier article. As you will recall, it had been carefully designed by liturgists according to state of the art liturgical principles, and erected in 1985/86. From the outside, the copper-sheathed exterior walls and the graduated stepped roof earned it comparisons with a “crushed gasoline can.” Within, one saw dark brown brick walls, unadorned; a dark floor, brown chairs with brown cushions, no visible windows of any kind, even the stations of the cross set in the floor, no adornment at all. When I questioned this, I was told that the chapel is “just space, space gathered by a skeleton of steel and brick and mortar, but just space: it is when the People of God assemble here that this space comes alive, and becomes church, and they with their variously hued garments and hairstyles and eye tones and skin colors become the adornment of the house of God.”

How different from the sensibilities of those we encounter on the pages of Scripture. Jacob, awakening from the dream where he saw the ladder erected between heaven and earth resting upon the very spot where he had slept, exclaimed, “How awesome is this Place! This is none other than the Gate of Heaven!” The wandering Hebrews marched through the desert behind the Holy Ark, which was borne before them, with the Presence of God signaled by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. When they camped, the Tent of the Meeting was erected for the Ark, as a place where God dwelt. In the Holy Land, they built the Temple, with its Holy of Holies at its heart -- where God dwelt.

The Place was important. And why, if God is everywhere? Because God created us, and understands us, and He understands that, for us, it is not enough that He is everywhere: we need the particular. The easiest way to explain this is by pointing out that, just because you should love your Mother three hundred sixty-five days a year -- three hundred sixty-six in leap year! -- that doesn’t mean you don’t still need Mothers’ Day or her birthday. Celebrating those two particular days symbolizes, ‘sacramentalizes’ the love you feel all year long. We humans deeply need the particular. Thus, God reveals Himself in the way He did; thus, we look back towards a particular time of salvation and, in the sacraments, God makes that time present to us.

It seems to me that so much of what passes for contemporary liturgy seeks to avoid or minimize the particular. There is nothing particularly special in this Chapel space at all; it’s pretty much like everywhere else until the People gather here. There’s an avoidance of the traditional sacred music of our Roman liturgy (despite the clear directive of the Vatican Council that it be fostered), in favor of a pop-folk style clearly secular in origin (and the reason for that is certainly not solely the vernacular, since there exists a perfectly serviceable and lovely body of English language liturgical hymnody, as anyone who has ever looked at an Anglican or Lutheran hymnal knows). Your contemporary liturgists speak of the “worship space” instead of the church; they put away the sanctus bell and minimize the elevation of the sacred Host and Chalice in place of a vague ‘showing’ because the particularity of a moment of consecration bothers them (the whole Eucharistic Prayer consecrates, if not the whole Liturgy).

And we are all familiar with what has often happened regarding the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament. It is not at all uncommon to find that the tabernacle is a box on a shelf in the corner, or on a window sill, or in a wholly other place (in the University chapel you could easily miss the separate Blessed Sacrament chapel). Jesus, you see, is everywhere: He is in you, and me; He is in the Word preached, in the gathered assembly, in bushes and trees... And the tabernacle, the ‘tabernaculum’ or Tent of Meeting with Jesus in the Eucharist, whereby He continues that graced particularity of His Presence from the Old Testament, that becomes just another place, the cabinet where we keep the ‘stuff we need for communion.’

If there is really no ‘sacred place,’ because every place is sacred, or ‘sacred time,’ because all of life is holy, or sacred anything else, I do not think that this is likely to sanctify everything in daily life; I think that, in our minds, it will simply drag down what was once the ‘sacred’ to the mundane level of everything else. The Incarnation of the Lord Jesus uniquely sanctified this life, this creation and everything in it, and by reverent contemplation of His unique revelation we open our hearts to its fruits. We sacramentalize and celebrate the sacredness of this creation by our Feasts, and fasts, and prayers; by our sacred customs and places, images and chants and prayers, devotions and customs.

Here’s a simple example of this mundane tendency: more than a decade ago, a new Book of Blessings was promulgated by the Holy See. Blessings are an important part of Catholic life. People are continually coming to me looking for blessings -- houses, cars, rosaries, statues, St Christopher medallions for the car. It’s an important, though simple, moment; for a rosary, for example, I simply say, “May the Lord in His mercy bless this instrument of devotion in honor of His immaculate Mother, confirming him who uses it in love of Him and His Church: Father, Son + and Holy Spirit.” The use of the sign of the blessed Cross is, of course, something people look for. Through the Cross all blessing came to us; one therefore bestows the blessing with the sign of the Cross.” The Faithful may look for that; the people who put together the Book of Blessings don’t, apparently, which is why I avoid using the book.

I gather from it that if a lady comes to me in the sacristy to have her rosary blessed, I should begin with the greeting and introduction, continue with a Scripture reading, HOMILY (!!!!!), intercessions, Prayer of Blessing (no sign of the Cross, by the way), and conclusion. The book is full of rites like this. They are typical of the cerebral approach to ritual we find rampant in the postconciliar liturgy: verbose, and with the barest minimum of customary ceremony. “Words, words, words, I’m so SICK of words,” sang ‘Liza Dolittle, and one understands her point nowadays!It seems to me that there is an underlying tendency behind all of these and like phenomena in our liturgy: discomfort with the Incarnation, discomfort with the particular. Some of it is not necessarily the fault of the revised rites themselves, at all.

Those who, for example, choose to de-emphasize the traditional ‘moment of consecration’ in the Mass because they think this is required by the revised Liturgy could not be more wrong. As I read the rubrics, there are no fewer than five things one finds in the revised Missal of 1970 which emphasize the consecration.The first is the fact that the words of consecration, the “form” of the sacrament, are printed in bold type in the Missal. The second is the rubric in the General Instruction, mentioning that a bell can be rung at each elevation. The third is the rubric contained within each Eucharistic Prayer directing that the words of institution be said ‘clearly and distinctly, as their meaning demands,’ which means EMPHASIS if it means anything. The fourth is the genuflection after each elevation. The fifth is the clearest and most obvious: the 1970 Missal inserted the Memorial Acclamation into each Eucharistic Prayer, so that the congregation bursts into song after the consecration of the Precious Blood.

It is difficult to imagine a clearer indication that something significant has just occurred! And yet, how many priests conduct this part of the Eucharistic Prayer as though they are anxious to de-emphasize the uniqueness of the moment. Traditionally, the Liturgy spoke to the People of God on many different levels. There were the texts themselves, which enshrined the truths of the Gospel and expressed them in prayer. There were the traditional chants to which the texts were married, serving as vehicles for expressing prayer in song and revealing unsuspected meanings in the texts. There was the rhythm of feast and fast and season. There were sacred gestures and familiar customs and a myriad ways of expressing love, and adoration, and awe.

I would suggest that in an unfortunate, even tragic moment in our Church’s life, a great blunder was made, the sort of blunder you and I would be making if you asked me to renovate your kitchen, and in a fit of madness I agreed to do so. I know absolutely nothing about such work except that there is a multitude of things one needs to know and instincts one needs to be able to take for granted. I am not suggesting that the Liturgy of the Church did not need renewal fifty years ago; I am suggesting that there were many things which needed to be taken into consideration, which were not.

There was an indifference towards and even contempt for the place of custom and devotion in the lives of people. There was a disdain for the priceless inheritance of art which had developed over the centuries in service of the Liturgy, and even withering contempt for the ideal of quality or excellence. There was a failure to appreciate the different ways in which hearts were touched by the Liturgy, and the uncritical adoption of an excessively verbal, cerebral model of rite.The result is a verbose liturgy which is forever yacking at us, with little silence or anything else which would inspire reflection, a poverty of symbol and gesture, which was imposed upon the worshipping community instead of growing naturally from its life of prayer as all previous rites of the Church have for two thousand years. It’s a failure to appreciate or understand the Incarnation, is it not?

When the world was waiting for God to send a Savior, He did no such thing; He came Himself! He did not drop another couple of tablets from the sky with an additional set of commandments, or cause to arise an arid, abstract philosophy to guide us. He appeared among us, revealed Himself as a Person to us, invited us to enter into relationship with Him and to discover the riches hidden in His Heart. Yes, as a Person, relating to us not as a cerebral presentation of moral laws and precepts but as a Person, on every level of our beings. Just as should the sacred Liturgy of the Church that passionately proclaims His Incarnation.

Email author: frwilson@cruxnews.com

Used with permission

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