Articles tagged with ad orientem

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 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…