Articles under Liturgy

What is the Liturgy?

August 10, 2015

At one point in yesterday’s Oblate meeting, we discussed the difference between devotional pictures and icons. This discussion took place in a conference based on Pope Benedict XVI’s The Spirit of the Liturgy. And so it was noted that icons and devotional pictures might share themes, and composition. Pictures might even be of icons. But icons are always liturgical. The way an icon is prepared, the fasting that an iconographer undergoes, the forty days that an icon traditional rests upon a consecrated altar, and the final blessing of the icon by an ordained priest using holy water marks this object as part of the liturgy. A reproduction of an icon, such as those that adorn our home page, are not liturgical objects in this sense, but are devotional. As such, they extend from the liturgy and should lead us back to the liturgy. Reverence for an icon is a liturgical act, pious thoughts and prayer before a devotional picture is not–though these are perfectly good, even necessary, activities when one is not able to attend the liturgy itself.

Corpus Christi Procession: the liturgy goes out into the world.

I open with this reflection to draw attention to the breadth of what we mean by the liturgy. In the previous post, I noted that I needed to say something about what the liturgy is. I’ve spent a good amount of time explaining the liturgy’s interior, spiritual reality. From this vantage point, the liturgy is the work of Christ the high priest, bringing us to the Father in the Spirit, mediating for us and by means of us, His Body, for the salvation of the whole of the cosmos.

But how does this happen, and how do we know that it is happening? The liturgy also has an exterior, incarnated reality, in that it takes place by means of certain types of persons (the baptized generally, the ordained ministers in a more specific sense), at certain times, in certain places (mainly churches, but also anywhere that the faithful gather in Christ’s name), by means of certain texts and ritual actions, and with certain instruments (bread and wine, water, oil, stone, incense, vestments, icons, crosses, candlesticks, wax, etc.).

Catholics are apt to the of the Mass when someone says, “liturgy.” And this is a good impulse, though a truncated one. The liturgy’s center is indeed the Eucharist, but to reduce the liturgy to Mass is quite problematic. The liturgy includes all of the sacraments. It also includes the whole Divine Office. This is not an obligatory part of the liturgy for the laity. However, since it is the liturgy, the Divine Office possesses an efficacy for uniting us in spirit to God that non-liturgical prayer does not have (I plan to write about how to pray the rosary in a ‘liturgical’ manner, and why this is the deeper spirit of this beautiful–almost indispensable–devotional prayer).

But…I’m still not finished listing the events that make up the liturgy. Blessings pronounced by a priest are part of the liturgy, and blessed objects retain a connection to the liturgy. So what I said above about icons falls in here. So do meals (!). Exorcisms, processions, religious professions, oblations and promises are all part of the liturgy. The marriage act itself is liturgical, since it is intrinsic to the confection of the sacrament of matrimony (this is also why same-sex marriage, whatever merits there might be to bestowing recognition on a stable partnership of love, cannot be considered Christian marriage).

The anointing of the sick, another action of Christ the mediator.

So the liturgy is actually quite extensive. In the West, we have had a tendency to shorten and narrow what we mean by the liturgy, as I mentioned above. This has some problematic effects. The good news, however, is that recovering the richness of the liturgy can be a life-altering project, a real point of foundational renewal for the Church, and the basis any genuine ecumenical effort. As I mentioned in the last post, the corporal works of mercy are not therefore dispensable. They will be efficacious, I would suggest, to the extent that those ministering in this way are clearly grounded in the liturgy. The acts of healing and love, the active life, will be seen to be the work of Christ Himself and not simply that of human do-gooders. In fact, we can throw ourselves into all kinds of activities, without fear of falling into Pelagianism, if our source of energy and strength is Christ Himself, uniting us to Him and to each other in the liturgy, He “Who has made the two one.”

From this standpoint again, we have a way of understanding the Church’s traditional teaching on the centrality of the consecrated life, especially the contemplative life. Contemplatives have the duty to live the liturgical life to the fullest, to invite others to the vision of the liturgy, and to give witness to Christ’s triumph and mission of reconciliation. “A monk is he who directs his gaze towards God alone, and who, being at peace with God, becomes a source of peace,” said St. Theodore the Studite. Christ made peace by the blood of His Cross [Colossians 1: 20], that is, by the unique sacrifice which is extended and re-presented at every liturgical event. And immersion in this reality changes us into eschatological persons.

Mass is often seen merely as an obligation, and the notion that even the laity would benefit from regular attendance at yet more of the liturgy is, in my experience, often shrugged off as an inconvenience, taking them away from more pressing concerns. From the perspective that I am outlining here, I hope that it is clear that this dismissal is skewed somewhat. Yes, Mass is obligatory for a baptized Catholic, but if we knew the gift of God that is the liturgy, we would welcome opportunities to participate more frequently, as our state in life permits. We would also learn to connect all of our prayer to the liturgical celebrations, to the vocabulary, priorities, and sentiments of the “work of God.” Then all of our prayer would be transforming us into women and men of Christ, into saints. Thus it is that the liturgy is the foundation for one of the most crucial insights of Vatican II, the universal call to holiness.

“A Sacred Action Surpassing All Others”

August 7, 2015

Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends…

Christ worked many wonders during His earthly life, demonstrating a great compassion and tender-heartedness for the poor, the grieving, the sick and neglected. These were signs of God’s love for humankind, to the very least of the Lord’s sisters and brothers.

The Communion of the Apostles

Yet on our Lord’s own words, the greatest act of His love was not any of His acts of teaching, healing, or even raising from the dead. Rather, all of these signs of love point to His supreme act of love, laying down His life for His sheep. There is no greater love than this act of self-abandonment. “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life [John 10: 17].”

The liturgy of the Church, according to Sacrosanctum concilium (the constitution on the liturgy of the Second Vatican Council), is an exercise of Christ’s high priesthood. That is to say, it is a re-presentation of this supreme act of love. We who are His Body, enter into this act of self-offering to the Father for the sake of the world when we enter into the liturgy. Here is a quote from paragraph 7:

Every liturgical celebration, because it is an action of Christ the priest and of His Body which is the Church, is a sacred action surpassing all others; no other action of the Church can equal its efficacy by the same title and to the same degree. [emphasis added]

This superlative construction parallels our Lord’s own words that the greatest love consists in the laying down of one’s life for one’s friends. Can it be that our celebration of the liturgy is this action, is this love?

Answering that question depends on active participation. I don’t mean this in the sense in which it is frequently taken, that everyone at the liturgy needs to be speaking, gesturing, helping at the altar, and so on. The Actor is Jesus Himself, not us; we are strictly participants, and we participate–take part–in our “spiritual worship [Romans 12: 1]” when we see, with spiritual eyes, what is actually taking place at the liturgy and its implications for how our lives must change, that we become the sorts of persons who show compassion for the poor, the grieving, the sick and the neglected.

Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.

That is to say, in the liturgy “we live Christ,” we are conformed to Christ and become His crucified and resurrected Body. The acts of service that flow from becoming Christ are always a function of being sent, being Apostles who have witnessed the Lord’s sacrifice and resurrected Presence, and wish to point others to this same reality. Just as our Lord’s earthly ministry is meant to help us understand the meaning of His sacrifice on the Cross and point to it, but cannot replace it, our loving service of others must flow from our encounter with Christ at the Cross (meaning at the liturgy), and must be a sign to others to come to believe in the saving power of God in Jesus Christ. Our loving service should draw others to the liturgy (e.g. first of all baptism). This is what the Church means when she says that the Eucharist (the central act and meaning of all of the liturgy) is the “source and summit of the Christian life [CCC § 1324; “fount and apex” as Lumen gentium 11 puts it].”

It remains for us to broaden and deepen our understanding of the liturgy. I have been reflecting mostly on the deepening part over the past several weeks. What do I mean by broadening? I will answer this question in the next post, God willing.

Liturgical Strangeness

August 4, 2015

I’m spending the week at my mother’s and stepfather’s farm, working on my book. I do hope to post somewhat regularly during this time, and continue to do so when I return.

I’ve written in the last two posts that our baptisms invite us to become different kinds of persons, not simply better persons, but truly different persons. Reborn persons. I also suggested that this process will keep us out of our comfort zones, that we can’t even be quite sure what kind of persons that God intends us to be, until we have developed the capacity to recognize what this otherness looks like and feels like. I finally suggested that if the liturgy disorients us, we should be cautious of “fixing” it by making it more rational.

Pope Benedict XVI at the Regensburg Address

This may sound like a recipe for complete nonsense. If we don’t know what kind of persons we are going to be until we get there, but we can only get there by being different kinds of persons, how can we proceed? One temptation in modern times is to understand the virtue of Faith as the engine that gets us where we are going. And faith in this sense is understood as a blind stab in the dark. God, in this model, takes pity on our helplessness and responds by mysteriously enlightening us.

This could happen. And it does. But it also is fraught with potential problems. I don’t find evidence of this dynamic in the early Church (with the possible and notable exception of Tertullian). Persons like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria and Origen borrowed from themes in the writings of the Apostles John and Paul to stress the objective rationality of the Christian gospel over against the superstition of pagan piety. Pope Benedict XVI dwelt with this profoundly in his much-misunderstood Regensburg Address, titled “Three Stages in the Program of De-Hellenization.”

Furthermore, this is not a model that commends itself either to separated Protestant brethren or to most non-believers. From a Protestant perspective, the notion of blind faith might actually make sense, but then to make such an act of faith within the Catholic Church appears self-defeating. For critical thinkers outside Christianity, we would seem to be asking them to leave reason at the door.

Finally, such an act of blind faith contradicts the Magisterium, the teachings of the First Vatican Council and of Pope Saint John Paul II.

So what am I getting at? The paradox that I am describing was one recognized by Socrates. How can one discover justice when one is not just? The same way one learns to be a pianist without being born a pianist. One makes an act of faith in a teacher who already knows the craft, the kind of person that the student must become, and how to get train the student to become a real pianist.

Thus, if we are called to become eschatological persons, citizens of the Kingdom of God and fellow citizens with the saints, we must apprentice ourselves to those who already are the kinds of persons who know what this feels like. To some extent, this is all of us who attend the liturgy together, since at the liturgy we really are trained by the combined wisdom of a tradition molded by the experience of prayer and the presence of Christ.

Let me take this one step further, at some risk to myself. Even within the Church, there are those who spend more time and focus their lives more intently on living the life of the Kingdom now (or at least should be doing this). These are monks and nuns, especially of the contemplative type. This is why, historically, the liturgical books in the East have been crafted by monks, and in the West, up until around 1300 or so, the Benedictine Rite is almost indistinguishable from the Roman Rite in general. This is also why, after this link in the West was weakened, the liturgy has become shorter, and more ‘rational’ (meaning less mysterious and baffling). The changes that came after the Council were simply a continuation of a trend centuries in the making.

The incorrupt body of St. John Vianney

This is a shame because the Council’s teachings are actually quite lovely and traditionally orthodox. We as a Church were simply not prepared to implement them well in 1970. This has been changing. Our last three popes have all been profoundly shaped by the documents of Vatican II and have been finding creative ways to correct some misunderstandings. What I am thinking about here is how central the liturgy ought to be in our lives, for example. On the train up to Wisconsin on Sunday, I prayed the Roman Office from the community cellphone. It’s easy to find. Anyone can pray the Office, and many people are. The notes on the website were excellent. When I arrived, my stepfather shared with me his fondness for the publication This Day, which is Liturgical Press’s answer to the popular Magnificat publication. Both have shortened versions of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, based in the Psalms and the rest of Scripture, the daily readings from Mass, reflections on the saints in the calendar. These are beautiful examples not only of the centrality of the liturgy, but of the way in which the liturgy can connect to the increasingly important role of the laity to evangelize in the world. At the heart of our shared identity as the Body of Christ is our shared work of the liturgy, in which we see clearly how we relate as members of the Body, and we allow ourselves to be incorporated into this Body, lifted up with Christ to the right hand of the Father.

So…to wrap up:

Become a different kind of person, an eschatological person.

Live the Kingdom now, and train for this by praying the Church’s liturgy, even if on your smartphone in your room.

If monks and nuns require you to do strange things at the liturgy, don’t neglect them on the grounds that they are irrelevant rituals except to these strange contemplative types. We might not be able to explain right away why certain precepts need to be observed at the liturgy. You will get it once you’ve done it a bunch of times.

Imitate the lives of the saints. Of every era, not just recent ones or those who fit your definition of sanctity. Learn to be catholic in your tastes.

Never despair of God’s mercy.

“My little children, your hearts are small, but prayer stretches them and makes them capable of loving God. Through prayer we receive a foretaste of heaven and something of paradise comes down upon us.”–St. John Vianney

Living the Divine Life

July 30, 2015

We must become different kinds of persons.

The liturgy is the primary place where this happens. And this is why the liturgy first disorients in order to re-orient us as new kinds of persons.

What kind of persons are we to become?

If I may coin a term, we must become eschatological persons.

The eschaton is the end-time, the goal of history, the eternal life in communion with the Holy Trinity that we hope for. A person who is eschatological lives already with one foot in this reality.

Let me unpack a bit of this today.

Becoming a different kind of person really is a matter of kind and not degree. The aim is not to become better at some set of behaviors that we already possess, to be nicer, more generous or happier. Becoming a different kind of person involves receiving and cultivating capacities that my old self did not possess. Let me use music again as an analogy. At age seventeen, when I first heard the album Close to the Edge by the band Yes, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the music. As a result, I judged it inferior to the music I liked at the time, mostly variations on blue-eyed soul and the later New Wave bands of the mid-1980’s. The album was on one side of a cassette tape, and I liked the music on the other side. So rather than rewind, I began flipping the tape over and playing Close to the Edge without listening very closely (I used to listen while practicing basketball and while running). After a few such passive listenings, I suddenly realized that I was actually able to identify recurring themes, and I began to have a sense for how the very energetic opening section was constructed musically. After some months, I had a capacity that I did not have before, a capacity to understand this difficult kind of music. I wasn’t necessarily a better listener, or a more discriminating listener. Rather, my ears had changed, my mind and heart had changed. Close to the Edge became one of my favorite albums.

Now conversion to Christ is analogous, though stronger. In my example, one might argue that in fact, I already had the capacity to understand Close to the Edge, but it was latent and needed actualization, to use Aristotle’s term. By contrast, when we are initiated into the “things handed down to us,” the Christian faith, we really do become new creations. By grace, we receive a share in the divine nature. Therefore we receive potentialities and capacities that we did not have before baptism [it is perhaps important to note that all human beings have the capacity to receive this divine life; but the divine life is not present in the same intimate way before baptism].

What are these new capacities? We would normally group them under the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, understanding, counsel, knowledge, fortitude, piety, and fear of the Lord.

Here’s the trick, though. Since these virtues and gifts are proper to the divine nature and not our own, their exercise should, at first and perhaps for prolonged periods of time, feel unfamiliar, perhaps even strange and uncomfortable. We might not even recognize what it feels like to walk by faith, to act in charity or live in hope, even when this is actually happening, just as we aren’t usually aware of our breathing until we pay attention. We can become accustomed to the divine nature at work in us through self-denial (which reduces the distractions of the flesh to allow us more freedom in the Spirit), and through prayer. The work of asceticism and prayer is the work of owning this new self, making it who we really are.

The liturgy is the primary place where we are acclimated to the divine life. There we co-operate with our high priest and Head, Jesus Christ, to offer worship to the Father in the Spirit. We are immersed in the divine life, and it appears to us, as it were, through the senses. The visible, audible, and tactile signs of the liturgy really do communicate God’s loving, enveloping, and suffusing presence. The liturgy conforms and accustoms us to the divine nature, to the life of heaven, the eternal life to which we aspire, the celestial commonwealth that is our true abiding homeland.

But the liturgy will often feel unfamiliar, strange, perhaps even a bit irritating at times for the same reason that the divine life is at first unfamiliar. It is not ours; we didn’t invent it based on some already-existing human capacities that we discerned. The liturgy is a gift from God, attuned to and ordered for the human person, to be sure, but not of the human person.

An image by David Jones. He worked out a very sophisticated theory of art and liturgy based on the ‘gratuitous’ nature of a gift and the ‘utile’ nature of instruments.

This is why efforts at liturgical reform that are based in rationalism, trying to help the liturgy “make more sense,” are misguided at best. We only begin to understand the deepest logic of the liturgy when we have become totally transparent to the Divine Will, when our minds have been truly renewed in Christ. And unfortunately, there is some reason to think that, in the West, we have been truncating and rationalizing our liturgical observances for some time, probably coinciding to some measure in the rise of the centralized, monarchical papacy during the high middle ages. Which is to say since the end of the Benedictine centuries (ahem). As active religious life became more the norm and the papal curia became more involved in the standardization of the liturgy throughout Europe, the usual drift has been toward simplification, utility, and so on. The last thing the liturgy can be is utile (David Jones’s wonderful term) or useful. It is divine, and God has no need of spaceships or our worship for that matter. The liturgy is a gratuitous gift to His creatures, a bridge between the creaturely and the Creator. In a utilitarian world, this will be profoundly uncomfortable for many of us (what if Mass started to take two hours? Would we stick it out?). All the fuss about candles, processions, maniples, altar cloths…I agree that this can be irritating, and the liturgical traditionalists sometimes can be their own worst enemies. Perhaps because the tendency even for a traditionalist is to find a water-tight reason why you need this or that thing, to make it make sense, rather than allowing the profound uncanniness of liturgy to break down our human agendas and replace them with the divine.

The liturgy is not utile. It does exist for any end in this creation, which is also why it is eschatological. I hope to have more to say on this point in future posts.

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!

Going to the Father 7: Icon and Altar as Ascension

July 22, 2015

The Ascension of Jesus Christ to the right hand of the Father is the founding moment of the liturgy. The Good Shepherd went off in search of His lost sheep–us–by laying aside His dignity and prerogatives as Son of God and becoming flesh for our sake. Becoming obedient to the Father even unto death, He won our salvation and returned to the Father as the pioneer of our salvation. In our baptisms, we are united with Christ, and in the liturgy, we participate, really experience our own ascensions to the Kingdom of Heaven, as daughters and sons of God in the Holy Spirit.

Christ’s Ascension is the founding movement of every liturgical celebration. Now He intercedes for us at the right hand of the Father [Romans 8: 34].

What an astonishing claim! And yet, it is our faith, the faith we profess every time we enter a church, recall our baptisms by signing ourselves with holy water in the form of the cross, and enter into the everlasting dialog of love between Father and Son. Yet because it is such an astonishing claim, we need practice in order to continually realize the Truth into which we have been received. Our minds need constant renewal, lest we fall back by a preoccupation with the earthly appearance of things. As I mentioned in the previous post, this vigilance requires us to hold in tension God’s transcendence, the goal toward which we move in our ascension in Christ, with God’s immanence, His real presence to us in all things through the eyes of faith. Thus the things of the world are transformed by contemplation, a gaze informed by faith, and this informing faith is oriented toward the Father “who is above all and through and in all [Ephesians 4: 6].”

In Gothic church buildings, this symbolism of ascent is signified by the long “vertical” shape of the nave. One enters at the baptismal font, the gateway to life in Christ, and moves toward the altar through stages, not necessarily “closer to God,” Who is in any case not at all bound to the sanctuary, but through the purification of the soul, the understanding and the will, so as to be more and more conformed to God. Christ the Mediator is symbolized variously by the direction East (from whence He shall come at the parousia), the altar (incised with five crosses, the five wounds by which the risen Christ is recognized), the priest (whose initial movement to the altar is a representation of Christ’s Ascension), and finally by the Blessed Sacrament Itself.

Christ goes forth from the sanctuary at two crucial moments in the liturgy. The first is the gospel procession, where the Word becomes flesh, as it were, in the human voice of the priest of deacon who proclaims it. The gospel book is carried in procession from the altar to the people. The second movement “outward” is the carrying of the Body and Blood of Christ from the altar (again!) to the people, who now receive Christ Incarnate in Holy Communion. In this latter case, there is a complementary movement of the faithful toward the altar, “caught up together with [those who have died in Christ]…to meet the Lord [1 Thessalonians 4: 17].”

Christ in glory represents the Lord both ascending and returning (see Acts 1: 11). Note the two interlocking four-pointed stars and white rays, representing the divine energies radiating in and through the Son.

Here I am describing a dynamic liturgy, with a lot of movement. It is not what most Catholics think of when they think of liturgy, which unfortunately seems to bring to mind standing and sitting in one pew and watching while the priest does a bunch of things far away. What I have described is quite possible, even desirable in the present “ordinary” form of the Mass, and to a certain extent the reforms that followed Vatican II have made this latent dynamism more obvious (and this represents a restoration of certain elements of the Mass that had fallen away in the Tridentine period, which I personally consider to have been a bit ‘bureaucratized’, with a liturgy too much influenced by the Roman Curia and not enough by monks!). Orthodox liturgy tends to display this dynamism more openly, and often Orthodox liturgists will draw connections between the in-and-out motion of the priests and deacons with the mysterious energies of God, that go forth and return to Him [cf. Isaiah 55: 11]. And this connection in turn is sometimes reinforced with references to Eastern theologians like Gregory Palamas (1296-1359). But this dynamism is everywhere evident in Catholic sources, especially through the thirteenth century. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas is entirely patterned on what is called the “exitus-reditus” movement of God’s creative and restorative Word and Spirit, breathing outward into creation and gathering inward toward salvation and exaltation.

Our monastery church is a neo-gothic structure. The first altar that we had built for the church was slightly larger than four feet square and stood in the center of the sanctuary, at the eastern end of the building. Though it served us well, it was slightly small both for the space and for the number of concelebrants typical at our Eucharistic liturgy. After a benefactor came forward to commission the great iconostasis that you see on our home page (and above), we knew that it was time to commission as well a new altar. Present liturgical discipline favors a stone mensa or “table” on the altar. If we were to do have a stone altar constructed, we had two choices, necessitated by the weight of the potential structure. We could first of all restore it as a ‘high altar’ against the easternmost wall of the church. This would be easier and more cost effective, since there was already an iron and brick support in place there, and since we were already celebrating Mass ad orientem. The other option was keeping it in place and building a new support. This would have been quite costly. Moreover, the building itself calls for the altar to be at the very head of the structure, as the “Head” Who is Christ.

Our new iconostasis and altar, with four concelebrating priests. One gets a sense of the size of the church that we received from the Archdiocese and its orientation.

When the iconostasis and altar were installed last year (and I will have much more to write about the icons, so stay tuned!), the architecture of the church really came into strong focus. I can say with some assurance that all of the brothers have found this new arrangement to be a tremendous blessing and aid to prayer. The danger of such an arrangement is that the very strong vertical thrust might lead guests to feel faraway from the action and left out, as if God had retreated somewhere relatively inaccessible and only peeked out for communion. How could we help newcomers to feel more welcomed, to have a sense of God’s nearness without undoing the brilliance of the transcendent recaptured in our high altar and iconostasis? This was the challenge that we took up when we began to plan the last phase of our renovation of the church, the construction of the new choir.

Going to the Father 5: The Full Benedict Option

July 18, 2015

Our community began life living according to the charism of the Community of Jerusalem. This new religious order began in Paris and spread to many major European cities and to Montreal. We were going to be their foundation in Chicago, and in a filial sense we were. When the brothers arrived in Chicago in 1991, however, there were canonical obstacles in the way of an official affiliation.

Palmisano Park and Saint Barbara’s parish in Bridgeport. It looks a lot nicer in the summer! For a terrific gallery, click on the photo.

This meant that our continued existence depended upon the local Archbishop. Cardinal Bernadin had invited us, and was a strong supporter of our work, but by the mid-90’s, he was experiencing serious health problems, including the cancer that would eventually claim his life in 1997. So we were looking for a way to strengthen our community canonically, perhaps by affiliating with a different monastic community. Another factor in this discernment process was the strain of translating what was then a _very_ French, even Parisian, religious ideal into the blue-collar, multi-ethnic, South Side Chicago neighborhood of Bridgeport. These were the days before Bridgeport became the new Bohemia (or for locals, the new Wicker Park/new Pilsen…), but even now, I don’t see the Jerusalem model working here.

We began looking for something more stable and at the same more flexible. The idea of becoming Benedictine had been tossed around, but most of the Benedictine communities we knew were operating schools or involved in other active ministries. Our mission from the Cardinal was to be contemplative. One of the monks went on retreat to Christ in the Desert in New Mexico, and there learned that they had recently entered into a congregation of Benedictines that was more oriented toward contemplation. Formerly known as the Cassinese Congregation of the Primitive Observance, in 1997 the newly-christened “Subiaco Congregation” numbered nearly seventy communities, spread over six continents.

Christ in the Desert has its own very interesting history, which you can read about here. Make no mistake, this is a place of contemplation. Fourteen miles down a gravel road into the Chama canyon, it’s pristinely quiet and just rustic enough to keep you alert (e.g. rattlesnakes). The community there very generously offered to adopt us city boys as a dependent house, if we so chose. After consultation with Cardinal Bernadin, who enthusiastically supported the change, we entered into the Benedictine family.

Christ in the Desert, a place of extraordinary beauty and prayer.

During one of the abbot’s first visits, he got rid of the community money box and pointed out that we needed to pray the office of Vigils. We began to visit there more frequently, often returning with new ideas. We noted how traditional practices like statio (brothers lining up in ‘battle rank’ and processing into the choir) and penances for latecomers at the liturgy helped to create an atmosphere of recollection and purpose. We also discovered that once we would adopt a new practice from the Rule, we would begin to see how it connected to other practices in the Rule. Many disciplines that seemed silly or outdated when we began, gradually came into focus, and the wisdom of the Rule understood as a whole, and within the larger monastic tradition, began to invigorate us. We became evangelists for Saint Benedict’s monastic vision.

There were two other significant events in this movement toward a stronger, more integral observance of the Rule.

First was another article in Worship magazine, this one by Monsignor Francis Mannion. The article discussed the blessings for brothers leaving and returning to the cloister. These are minor exorcisms. This being the case, use of these blessing generates a certain disposition of the monk toward the world. It is not hostile, mind you. But it is cautious and realistic about the importance of the discipline of silence and withdrawal for the monk or nun. We live in a bustling city with many potential dangers to one’s spiritual health, especially for those who cultivate a contemplative openness to God’s quiet communication through His creatures. So we began to use the blessings.

A profession at St. Walburga’s Abbey. Note the abbess’s crosier.

Secondly, we struck up a friendship with the nuns at St. Walburga’s Abbey in Virginia Dale, Colorado. We used to go there regularly on community retreats as a way to experience a bit of distance from the city. They are another contemplative community, and even have a mitered abbess (meaning, among other things, she has the canonical right to carry a crozier and to preach). It was there that the idea of doing all 150 Psalms in a week took shape in our minds. We had felt that the peculiar circumstance of the city required us to have less Psalmody and more silence, but the sisters’ example worked away at us. There was something about their joyful, matter-of-fact acceptance of the requirements of the Rule that moved us deeply. We began chanting the full Psalter in the year 2001, and once more, the immediate effect was that many other aspects of the liturgical code of the Rule suddenly made sense. They seemed rational.

Now I recount all this because it is parallel to our experience with the larger tradition of the liturgy. Our typical experience tends to narrow of thinking about the liturgy to: 1) the Mass; 2) Tridentine vs. Novus Ordo; and 3) political leanings of those who favor one of the two options. But the liturgy is celebrated by all Christians, and has been for two millennia. It includes the whole panoply of the Mass, Divine Office, Processions and Litanies, blessings of persons and holy items, and all the accoutrements that go with: vestments, buildings, music and so on. Once we began to discover the ancient Benedictine rite of the Divine Office, for example, other aspects of the liturgy seemed less odd, less tied to contemporary political positions, more laden with potential for spiritual growth, more full of joy. This is the broader background of our use of the ad orientem posture at Mass. There is a whole world of thought that created the liturgy under the influence of the Holy Spirit, and working our way back into this stream of life brought insight into theology and prayer that we had not obtained through newer, more locally restricted practices.

The more we discovered, the more we hungered for discovery in the Church’s broad experience of the Kingdom of God, inbreaking in the the Divine Liturgy, to which we will return in the next post.

Going to the Father 4: An Assist from Saint Paul

July 15, 2015

For the first three installments of this series, see here, here, and here.

Our community organized a pilgrimage for the Holy Year of 2000. We began in Istanbul, where we visited the ancient churches of the great Eastern see and had a private audience with Patriarch Bartholomew. From there we journeyed to Rome where we attended Mass on the 80th birthday of Pope John Paul II, a sweltering day in late May. The Holy Father somehow got stronger as the day heated up, in spite of his advanced Parkinson’s at the time.

His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. As a young man, he studied in Rome with the Benedictines! So he surprised the Greek pilgrims with us that day with an eloquent teaching on St. Benedict. Pray for his persecuted church!

On the other days in Rome, we celebrated Mass at the other papal basilicas. The three priests of our community took turns being the principal celebrant. On the last day, we were scheduled to offer Mass at a side chapel at Saint Paul’s Outside the Walls. This was personally significant. During the planning stages of the pilgrimage, it was uncertain whether we would attract enough interest to be able to afford to go. So I prayed fervently to Saint Paul to ask his help in attaching more pilgrims to our trip. When we finally arrived in Rome, I looked forward to visiting his tomb and saying, “Thank you.”

St. Paul's Outside the Walls, built over the grace of The Apostle. Carbon 14 and DNA tests carried out eight years ago on remains from a sarcophagus in the crypt convinced Pope Benedict XVI that they really were Paul's.

St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, built over the grave of The Apostle. Carbon 14 and DNA tests carried out eight years ago on remains from a sarcophagus in the crypt convinced Pope Benedict XVI that they really were Paul’s.

The day before we were to visit St. Paul’s, the priest who had been scheduled to offer Mass there came down with a toothache. It got so bad the next morning that he was rushed to a dentist and had a root canal performed. He would not make it back for Mass. So the priest who was leading the tour decided to step in and offer Mass in his place.

As I mentioned yesterday, we were at that time in the midst of a passionate discussion about experimenting with Mass ad orientem. Two of the three priests wanted to try it and one was opposed–the opposing priest happened to be the one leading the pilgrimage. So it was with delightful irony that we strode together into Saint Paul’s and headed for the side chapel that had been assigned to us, only to discover that the altar there was fixed to the eastern wall. As this dawned on our trusty guide, he stopped in his tracks, turned to me and the other priest, rolled his eyes and grinned. Of all of us, he would be the first priest to celebrate Mass ad orientem.

He took the hint and agreed to go along with an experimental use of Mass facing East. When we returned to Chicago, we began to face East twice a week, on Mondays and Saturdays just to try it out. It felt awkward at first. There were questions about when to turn, which way to turn, and so on. However, this brought out more clearly certain indicative phrases within the rubrics of the current Roman Rite. At a few places in the Missal, the rubrics included the Latin phrase, “sacerdos conversus ad populum” which literally means, “the priest, having turned towards the people.” The implication is that his typical stance is not towards the people. I may at some point weigh in on the various controversies that beset the translation of this phrase and others (such as paragraph 299 from the General Instruction on the Roman Missal, where there is a dispute about the normativity of Mass facing the people, based on a potentially ambiguous Latin pronoun, a problem aggravated the low level of Latin knowledge in the clergy at large), but let me continue with anecdotes.

It is important to note that we wanted, if possible, to steer clear of polarizing “left” or “right” issues. As monks in the cloister, we didn’t feel that these were battles in which we needed or even ought to take sides. We saw value in either orientation at Mass, which is why we used both. Neither affects the validity of the sacrament, and Christ is present in either case.

After a couple of years, we sensed a growing desire to use the Easter orientation more regularly. Why? In those days I said that our community life was so intense that the last thing we needed was to look at each more. I was half joking, but this captured some of our experience. When the presider turned around, we all faced the same direction. The symbolism intended is that we all together face toward the place of Christ’s expected return. The principal celebrant becomes one with everyone else, rather than someone separated out and facing a different direction.

We also were slowly discovering certain given features of our church’s architecture. In the year that the parish had been closed, before the brothers arrived from Paris to begin monastic life in Chicago, the building had been stripped almost entirely of furnishings. Where the tabernacle had been, in the center of the sanctuary stood the old predella, now badly damaged. So at first we kept the tabernacle on the side of the church. We did this until we noticed that people would walk right by it and fail to notice it was there. So we shored up the predella and moved the tabernacle back to the center of the sanctuary.

The architecture of our basilica-style church invites those entering to journey toward God, along a strong ‘vertical’ axis running the length of the church and (now) culminating at the altar.

This brought about an almost tactile sense of the connection of the altar of sacrifice and the reserved Sacrament in the tabernacle. And it was especially apparent when celebrating Mass ad orientem, since the priest was no longer standing between the altar and the tabernacle. All of this gradually led us to a greater appreciation of the strong vertical thrust of our neo-gothic church. And this verticality connected to our desire to encounter and communicate God’s transcendence.

Now, it needs to be said that God is also immanent, and this is especially important to grasp in the exercise of the common priesthood of the faithful gathered at the liturgy. Our attempts to realize this aspect of the liturgy will appear in a few installments as we get closer to the construction of our new choir. First, however, it will benefit us to keep working away at the transcendent and eschatological dimensions of the liturgy. Next: the commissioning of the iconostasis that you can see on our home page.

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 2: The Land of Unlikeness

July 7, 2015

As our brothers were preparing to come to Chicago to begin living the quasi-monastic life of the Community of Jerusalem, one brother discovered an article written by the late Fr. Aidan Kavanagh, OSB. Fr. Aidan was a monk of St. Meinrad’s Archabbey and a liturgist. His book On Liturgical Theology is a modern classic, a book to be read and savored again and again. The article appeared in Worship magazine, and, if memory serves, was his acceptance speech upon receiving an award from St. John’s School of Theology in Collegeville,