Articles under Going to the Father

Going to the Father 3: Light from the East

July 14, 2015

Deo gratias! Our Br. Timothy made his Solemn Profession on Saturday, the Solemnity of Saint Benedict. Posting has been non-existent during the immediate preparation and aftermath. My thanks for your patience, especially to subscribers (do become a subscriber if you are not yet!). Now back to our liturgical history.

Fr. Pierre-Marie Delfieux, 1934-2013, founder of the Community of Jerusalem

One of the biggest changes in our liturgical style over the years has been the adoption, within the Ordinary Form of the Mass, the ad orientem (“toward the East,” indicating especially the rising sun) stance of the principle celebrant. I will be offering many reflections on our experience and the theology of Mass ad orientem, but I thought I’d begin with a few scattered anecdotes to indicate how God brought this about.

As our Fr. Brendan tells it, the founder and long-time superior of the Jerusalem community, Fr. Pierre-Marie Delfieux, used to challenge the Paris community in the following way. “When a first-time visitor comes to our liturgy,” he would say, “I want them to ask not, ‘Who are these people?’ but ‘Who is the God they are worshipping?'” This itself reflected a deep sense, shared, interestingly enough, with a number of the emerging “high church” Anglicans of the nineteenth century, that the flattening effect of the modern industrial city called for greater attention to beauty, mystery, and transcendence in the liturgy. This helps to explain the apparent paradox that many high Church parishes are located in poorer neighborhoods in the large cities of England.

John Mason Neale, 1818-1866.
As an Anglican priest, he caused consternation by his desire for greater “Catholic” vesture and liturgical ornament combined with an advocacy for the poor, especially their full inclusion in liturgical celebration (after James 2: 2-3).

The presence of a majestic God Who invites everyone into His glorious house is a reminder of the dignity of all human persons and our shared transcendent goal, the joy and splendor of the Kingdom of Heaven, in which the last shall be first and the poor share inherit the earth. And many of us city dwellers are poorer than we think, precisely because our imaginations have been leveled, and we have forgotten the new creation beyond tears and sorrows that is everywhere coming into being around us.

But how to communicate this? Especially out of a very poor monastic community such as we had? Around the year 1998 or so, we began reading the liturgical writings of Cardinal Ratzinger, and two brothers in the community were intrigued by the possibility of signalling God’s transcendence by turning the priest back around, as he had been until a few decades ago, and as he is in every other rite of the Church (with the exception of some Maronite customs that, in any case, were borrowed from the reform of the Roman rite), including the Eastern Orthodox rites.

This was a tough sell. Many of us Catholics had learned that this posture involved the priest “turning his back” on the congregation. It was seen as a rejection of Vatican II. I was a novice in the community at the time and felt vaguely uncomfortable about the discussion, though I also recognized that I had virtually no training in liturgical theology and so I made a point to read and listen. I had been to Orthodox liturgy, and in spite of the fact that the priest is barely even visible during the words of institution (he’s largely hidden by the iconostasis), I didn’t recall feeling as if the celebrant were somehow coldly distant. This fact has stayed with me over the years. Is there something about Catholic liturgy that lends itself to the opposite impression, when Mass is celebrated ad orientem? I didn’t know.

A coptic priest celebrating "ad orientem" behind the iconostasis

A Coptic priest celebrating the Divine Liturgy “ad orientem” behind the iconostasis: in this case there are no holy doors obscuring him

What changed my mind on the whole question was an intervention of Providence. I was still conducting choirs at St. Thomas the Apostle parish and Calvert House in Hyde Park, and on days of rehearsals, I couldn’t be around for the community Mass, which in those days was in the evening. So twice each week, I went to St. Barbara’s parish here in Bridgeport. One morning, I arrived for the Mass being celebrated by a newly-assigned priest. I hadn’t yet become acquainted with his personal style. At the preparation of the gifts, he invited anyone who so wished to come and stand around the altar. I was used to this kind of thing. I grew up in the 70’s after all. But I’m a bit shy and so took the option to remain in the pews. As a group of about ten people stood around the altar, I noticed something quite astonishing. They all stood in a semicircle…behind the priest. I nearly laughed out loud as I mused that they were deliberately choosing to have “Father’s back to them.” Indeed, it seemed an obvious thing to do! If we only rotated the whole scene 180 degrees, we would have Mass facing the East.

There was clearly an intuition among these guests around the altar that the presider was “leading,” that he occupied a position “out front.” But the proximity also seemed to indicate that the priest was “one among” rather than a separate class of person within the Body of Christ. This resonated with my experience of Orthodox liturgy, where the churches were often quite a bit smaller than the average Catholic parish in Chicago, and the priest sat quite near the congregation for the readings. I came back more enthusiastic about attempting Mass ad orientem, but Providence would need to intervene a second time.

To be continued…

Going to the Father, Part 1: Liturgy as Evangelization

July 6, 2015

We are preparing to have a new choir constructed and installed in our church. I have been invited by Fr. Anthony Ruff, OSB, at Pray Tell Blog, to offer some explanation of the theology behind the shape and placement of the choir. As a prelude to this project, and to give the fullest possible context, I would like to tell the story of our liturgical development, from the foundation of the monastery to the installation of the choir.

This story begins with our three founders working as missionaries in Haiti and Brazil

Going to the Father 8: God’s Welcome

July 24, 2015

When I was appointed prior of our community in 2004, one of my tasks was to work out realistic plan to build a genuine monastery cloister. We have been living in a former parish rectory and convent for twenty-four years. Most of that time, the space has been quite adequate. But as we have increased in number to ten, the need for better living quarters has become much more apparent. That said, the plan needed to be conceived from a long-range vantage point. The cost of construction is not trifling, and we are still a young community. Renovation and construction are psychologically straining, and we need to prepare ourselves well for this kind of work.

The magnificent choir of Westminster Abbey. Nothing quite so impressive for us! But one sees the architectural significance of the choir in a monastic church.

Thus, it seemed to me from early on that the first priority was the renovation of the church building. Take care of God’s house and let him take care of our house! The church is a public space, the place where most people learn about who we are. Now the structure of our church was conceived for the needs of a medium-sized parish, rather than for a small monastery. While we have been able to use the building profitably, we have long been aware of the ways in which the church’s architecture nudges us away from our professed goal of being a cloistered, contemplative community.

Renovation began in earnest two years ago when we commissioned our iconostasis and began work on the altar. The most important step, however, was certainly going to be the construction of a real monastic choir. Monks can spend over three hours a day in choir, and having a choir that meets the demands of the full Benedictine office would not only be a plus for us, but would also help visitors grasp that this is not a parish anymore, that it fulfills a different ecclesial function.

So we began the discussion of building a new choir. What would be our requirements for this improvement?

We have a beautiful neo-gothic church. The new choir must be appropriate to the space, with a design that doesn’t conflict with the gothic motifs that we already have. We were fortunate to discover New Holland Church Furniture in Pennsylvania, who have designed an absolutely beautiful and noble, yet functional, choir. It fits perfectly in the transept.

Our old choir had nineteen stalls, enough for our daily liturgy, but not enough when we hosted meetings, or when we invited Schola Laudis to join us for Solemn Vespers. The new choir has thirty-two stalls, adequate for both of these recurring needs.

Rood screen in Southwold Church

We needed some sense of separation from the rest of the nave, without giving the impression of being distant or unwelcoming. Some brothers were even interested in a grille or rood screen. Ultimately we decided that this was too much separation. We decided on a low wall for the choir, and two additional low walls separating the choir from the nave. These look like small portions of a communion rail, though they are really stylized versions of a rood screen.

I mentioned in the previous post that our work on the altar and iconostasis, as well as our custom of celebrating Mass ad orientem could cause a kind of theological imbalance, implying God’s distance and undermining a sense of His welcoming immanence. Our design of the choir needed to address this.

Traditionally, the choir is part of the sanctuary. This means that in some monastic churches, for example, most Trappist churches, the sanctuary can end up stretching out over nearly the entire church. We had not capitalized on the possibilities of using the full, extended sanctuary to “close the gap” between clergy and laity. Again, the old parish architecture tended to form our imaginations in such a way so that we thought of the old, narrower sanctuary (all the way to the eastern apse, on the other side of the choir) as the sanctuary proper and the choir as something else. And the choir tended to act as something of a barrier between the laity and the distant sanctuary.

The grille separating the nuns of Regina Laudis from the rest of the abbey church.

Then one of the brothers got a splendid idea. To express it best, let me quote from the General Instruction of the Roman Missal.

The Chair for the Priest Celebrant and Other Seats

310. The chair of the priest celebrant must signify his office of presiding over the gathering and of directing the prayer. Thus the best place for the chair is in a position facing the people at the head of the sanctuary, unless the design of the building or other circumstances impede this: for example, if the great distance would interfere with communication between the priest and the gathered assembly, or if the tabernacle is in the center behind the altar…[emphasis added].

With our new, rather massive choir in the center of the church, putting the presider’s chair in the old sanctuary up near the altar would definitely interfere with communication between the priest and the assembly. So we put the presider’s chair on the west side of the transept, between the choir and assembly, where the priest will sit during the Liturgy of the Word. For the Liturgy of the Eucharist, the priest will make the long walk through the choir, up the old sanctuary steps, up the new predella steps, to the new altar and icon.

The altar of St. Nicholas’s Basilica in Bari, Italy. Note the three steps. This graded platform is known as the predella.

I describe this movement of the priest quite deliberately. Another strategy we have used for bridging the gap between the lay faithful and the monks is the copious use of processions. For example, when we process from the entrance of the church, through the nave, to the choir, part of what is expressed is our being called forth from the gathered assembly to our particular place in the church as monks. We go forth, as it were, to lead our lay brothers and sisters rather than slipping in from the sacristy and departing without having any ‘communication’ (and I intend this word in its full theological sense) with other members of the Body of Christ.

Most radically, this unusual placement of the presider’s chair helps to illustrate what I take to be the meaning of facing east. Now, when we turn to the East for the Kyrie and Gloria, as has been our custom, the monks will have their backs to the priest! We actually tried this out last Sunday, when the old choir stalls had already been removed and we were making do with wire chairs. The meaning was quite clear. We were all turning to face a common direction, and there was nothing particularly ‘clerical’ about the priest’s orientation, since he was very much in the middle of everything rather than far away.

The construction is finishing up today. We will have many photos available soon, and hopefully these will include photos of the actual liturgy in progress. We welcome any questions or comments!

The Mystery of the Ascension

June 5, 2017

Along with Epiphany, the Solemnity of the Ascension is one of the more overlooked celebrations of the Church year. Both, interestingly, have to do with the intelligibility of our Faith. When Christ ascends into heaven, He does not go to another “place,” since He ascends “to my Father and your Father,” and God the Father is omnipresent, not bound by location. As long as Christ remained in His physical body, He belonged in a sense to this material world. And one important property of this universe is that two objects can’t occupy the same location at the same time. But by “passing over” to this new, glorified, spiritual existence, Christ was enthroned as King of the cosmos, because now all things from quarks and photons to super-novae, are permeated by His glorified presence, with us always until the end of the world.

This now means that all created things take on new significance. All things (potentially) point to Him and find genuine meaning in the goal that is Christ’s Kingdom. We can learn to read the Book of Nature precisely because of Jesus’s Ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit. The gifts of the Spirit, which include wisdom and understanding, give us the power to read and interpret nature, history, and ourselves. This might sound like magic, but it really is not. The Incarnation and the Paschal Mystery in its entirety reveal to us the sort of God Who is the creator of all things, and this revelation supplies the missing piece to the meaning of the cosmos.

I began by saying that the Ascension tends to be overlooked today. If this “missing” mystery in the Christian imagination is one that would otherwise give meaning to our lives, then it is not surprising that the absence of an understanding of the Ascension occurs in a time plagued by meaninglessness, cynicism, and doubt.

There is one last important aspect of the Ascension mystery to note. I suggested that the true meaning of things is found in Christ’s presence and with reference to His Kingdom, which is slowly becoming manifest. This might suggest that the playfulness associated with artistic creation, musical composition and the inspiration of song, dance, and poetry is ruled out. This is perhaps why it is again important to recall the close link between Ascension and Pentecost. The gift of the Holy Spirit is the true gift of in-spiration, and the Spirit, Who “blows where He wills,” becomes our spirit. The Spirit, Who brooded over the creation of the world, makes us truly sovereign co-creators of God’s plan, truly individual yet unified. Creativity is not at all absent when the Holy Spirit is present. Thus the culmination of the Ascension liturgy is Pentecost, which governs the rest of the Church year until the end of time.

The Transfiguration

August 3, 2017

“He did not know what to say, for they were exceedingly afraid [Mark 9: 5].” With this little detail, Saint Mark reveals quite a bit about the character of Saint Peter and the human condition in general. Under normal circumstances, we are unprepared to behold the full glory of God, and when suddenly God’s grandeur “flame[s] out, like shining from shook foil,” it can be a terrifying, disorienting experience.

We have many testimonies of this encounter. One early, telling encounter was that of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah was a priest and probably had entered God’s temple countless times to offer sacrifice. One day, he suddenly saw in reality what he had been celebrating in shadowy, symbolic ways. “I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up….And I said, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips…for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts [Isaiah 6: 1, 5]!” Isaiah is rendered voluntarily speechless until his lips are cleansed by a coal from the altar.

Similarly, Saint Thomas Aquinas, toward the end of his earthly life, was celebrating the Eucharist as he had many times before. This time was different. Like Isaiah, he glimpsed something of the reality that he had celebrated in the half-veil of sacramental mystery. The author of the Summa Theologica, perhaps the greatest intellectual achievement of all time, wrote no more after this, leaving the Summa unfinished. “All that I have written seems as so much straw,” he confided to a friend.

Saint Peter suffers no such scruples. Beholding Christ transfigured, he was properly afraid. Not knowing what to say, however, he said whatever came to mind. In this, he seems to be of a kindred mindset to modern man. Is it not the case that our incessant talking, the swarming proliferation of words, is so much nervous chatter to cover over our anxiety and alienation? We hardly know what to say, yet we can’t stop talking. In our case, I suspect that silence doesn’t occur to us because our fear is not the result of an encounter with the living God, but with the dreadful possibility of His utter absence.

I began by saying that we are not normally prepared to meet God in the unmitigated power of His limitless Being. What the Transfiguration begins to teach us is that, under the dispensation of grace, in the afterglow of the Resurrection and Pentecost, we live under a “new normal.” We live in the in-between time, the time of the holy Liturgy, after the shadows of animal sacrifice but not yet at the full consummation of the world. The Kingdom of God is breaking into the world that itself is passing away. The baptized, as God’s adopted children, are being trained to “see [God] as He is [1 John 3: 2].” The training of our senses and their elevation to the spiritual realm takes place in the liturgy.

This past June, we were blessed to be able to unveil our two newest icons, the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, flanking the Mother of God and John the Baptist. Gradually, our sanctuary is being populated with the communion of the saints. Icons are not mere representations of model believers. The iconographer truly receives the image from the inbreaking realm of heaven. Iconography is, therefore, an ascetical craft, a discipline of visual listening and receptivity, a training of the interior vision to see beyond the sacramental into the reality of God’s holy court. At the same time, icons train the worshipper to attune his or her senses to this new reality. The icons are a central part of the liturgical act, and as conduits of grace, help to elevate the sense of sight to its proper spiritual register.

Similarly, sacred music is much more than pleasing ornamentation of holy words. As Kevin Allen and I have discussed at various time in our decade of collaboration, the composer of sacred music must, like the iconographer, exercise a discipline of spiritual listening. The aim is, through purification of hearing, to catch something of the overwhelming beauty of the perpetual song of heaven. At Solemn Vespers this coming Saturday evening (August 5, 5:15 p.m.), the First Vespers of the feast of the Transfiguration, Kevin and I humbly offer two new motets in this spirit. We pray that our double motet will be a similar conduit of grace, to prepare our hearts to hear God’s Word in its fullest transformative power.

On Ezekiel’s Vision

November 21, 2017

[The following is from the program notes for Solemn Vespers of Saturday, November 18.]

A church building is an eschatological sign. Explaining this and this evening’s Magnificat antiphon from the prophet Ezekiel is the burden of the rest of these notes. First of all, what is eschatology?

The dictionary definition will say that eschatology is the study of the “last things,” from the Greek word eschaton, “the end.” This definition is not, however, theologically precise. The believing Christian does not merely study eschatology any more than the believing theologian studies God. We can, of course, and should, learn things about God. But our God is a living God Who “cares for us.” In a more ancient sense, theology is the simple act of knowing God more and more intimately, the ascent of the mind to greater union with the mysterious Trinity.

In a similar way, the Christian does not study eschatology as if it were something yet to come. The former things are passing away as I type, and the Kingdom of God is breaking in all around us, if we possess the eyes of faith to see it. We already dine at the heavenly banquet, the wedding feast of the Lamb, every time we approach the altar, whereupon the one and only sacrifice for sins was and is offered. This one sacrifice inaugurates the end times.

In fact, we entered into this new existence at our baptisms. It is for this reason that the baptismal font is traditionally at the entrance to the church, and why we re-activate this baptismal grace by signing ourselves when we come into church. We go out from the world to undergo a “translation” from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son [cf. Colossians 1: 13], who is the Light that enlightens everyone. Our entry toward the altar is a figure of our ascent, as the Body of Christ, to where the Head has gone before us, in His return to the Father.

This is why the church is an eschatological sign. The church building is meant to be more than a gathering space or even a worship space. In a recent lecture, master iconographer Vladislav Andrejev cautioned us against understanding icons as windows to some other place, openings by which we look through to something not yet entirely here. In fact, the icon is a kind of “surface” of the present spiritual realities. It makes visible to our physical eyes what is truly present to the eyes of faith, so that the eyes of faith may become more and more accustomed to the otherwise blinding light of divine life.

I would like to suggest that the whole of the church building is just this kind of “surface.” Thus the twelve pillars of our church are not merely symbols of the Twelve Apostles, the foundation of the heavenly temple being built up from the bodies of believers. They are the Apostles, manifesting themselves as great supporting columns of the space in which these spiritual realities are appearing.

Sacred music is a similar phenomenon. It is not merely a diversion, a sign of the beauty of something that we hope to encounter one day. It is the song of the angels, made audible to our ears.

This can only happen if human creativity is bridled by genuine asceticism, the work of listening to what is already being sung in heaven by those who have received the gift of hearing from the Holy Spirit. Cooperation requires a silence with regard to earthly sound, even secular music. This is perhaps why, in many churches today, music and art don’t strike the worshippers as “sacred.” It’s music and art that comes from us, not from the inbreaking spiritual world.

All of this said, we can now look at the antiphon for the Magnificat. “I saw a closed gate in the house of the Lord, and an angel said to me, ‘It shall remain closed; the Lord alone shall come and enter in and go out.’” This passage is taken from Ezekiel’s stunning vision of the reconstituted temple (which had been destroyed some years earlier by the Babylonians when they captured Jerusalem in 587 B.C.). Solomon built the first temple based on a pattern given by Moses. Moses saw this pattern in a vision of heaven. We would say today that this vision of Moses was a first glimpse and foreshadowing of what was to be the reality of the true Temple, the Body of the Lord, which was destroyed not by the Babylonians, but by the Romans, only to be raised up in three days as the sole and eternal Temple.

Only God could bring this about. Only God supplies the gifts of the artist, the composer, the singer. We receive this gift from God; we do not earn it or otherwise bring it about. God alone will rend the veil that separates this world from the new age, the spiritual kingdom that is breaking in as we sing together this evening. May our gathering and common liturgical prayer open the eyes and ears of our hearts, that we may receive Him Who is coming!

On the Mystical Antiphons

January 3, 2018

[The following is from the program notes for Solemn Vespers of Sunday, December 31.]

The coming of God in human flesh is the central event in human history. After the Word became flesh, all of creation appeared changed to those who encountered Jesus Christ risen and glorified. Christ’s sacred humanity became the key that reinterpreted all of the Scriptures and indeed unlocks the mystery of the human person and human destiny: to be divinized by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

The Incarnation has had a way of scandalizing those who feel that it is beneath God’s majesty to inhabit the ordinariness and weakness of the human state. Early ‘gnostic’ movements in the Church’s history invented a variety of ways of protecting God from His own rashness, it would seem. In this milieu, the Church discovered that the virgin birth by Mary, the Mother of God was a central guarantee of the mystery of the Incarnation. Christ took flesh from the Blessed Virgin while retaining His divinity, as shown by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit.

As the Church re-read the sacred Scriptures of Israel to understand more profoundly the mystery of Christ, she also began to discover a multitude of allusions to the mystery of His conception and to the sanctity of His Mother. The antiphons (the short texts at the beginning and end of each Psalm) of today’s solemnity assist us in reinterpreting the Psalms according to their Christology and excavating for us hidden meanings of the Old Testament. The mysterious fleece of Gideon (see Judges, chapter six) was covered with heavenly dew while all the ground around it remained dry and barren. This descent of the dew portended the Lord’s triumph in battle and salvation for Israel. The bramble bush that drew the attention of Moses burned with heavenly flame but was not consumed. And from it, he heard God’s Word, the Son, according to the Fathers of the Church. Mary received the fullness of deity in her womb without losing her virginity, nor being consumed by God’s powerful presence. And the Word that was her only Son was to lead all peoples, not through the Red Sea, but through death itself. He did this by taking our sins upon Himself, becoming the Lamb of God, attested to by John the Baptist.

The length and density of the traditional antiphons attached to today’s solemnity are unusual. Most antiphons quote or directly paraphrase Biblical texts. The theological content of these ‘mystical’ antiphons is surely related to Mary’s status as the ‘vanquisher of all heresies’, the guarantor, as explained above, of the orthodox interpretation of the Incarnation.

Even more unusual is Josquin’s decision to do a full setting of the antiphons of this one liturgical day. Aside from his numerous Mass settings, Josquin set almost no fully liturgical music (in contrast to the paraliturgical devotional works for which he is justly renowned). Musical settings of Mass Ordinaries (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, etc.) have the advantage of being usable on almost any day of the year, whereas the ‘proper’ antiphons for today’s solemnity can only be performed on this one day of the year—at least if one wishes to honor the traditional placement of liturgical texts.

In Josquin’s day, the Roman liturgy celebrated the Circumcision of Christ on January 1, but this was a relatively recent observance, especially at Rome. And even when the Circumcision was adopted in the universal Church, it retained the more ancient association with the motherhood of Mary. Surely part of Josquin’s decision to set these texts is motivated by his own well-attested Marian devotion and the growing popularity of such devotion (especially in the use of the rosary) in his day. Even so, it is striking that he chose to set the texts of this solemnity rather than other devotional poems, which were numerous in his day.

The richness of this evening’s liturgy admirably brings 2017 to a close and reminds us of the fecundity of the mystery of our Faith. May the New Year be blessed by the Lord, the Lord of history and King of the nations!

The Ascension

May 10, 2018

Poetry tills and harvests in the fields of metaphor.

When Shakespeare’s Romeo muses, “Juliet is the sun,” he is not making a statement that is literally true. But it is true. How so? Oddly enough, answering this question involves us in more metaphorical speech.