Liturgy & lawns

...Liturgy performs its deepest rooted work rooted more deeply, even, than crabgrass whether or not our moods and minds of the moment permit the desired psychological effect...

...At this Sunday's Mass, it happened...

...And our participation there is confined to the responses of the people...

...Actually, knowing that liturgy's work doesn't depend on our feelings can help release the appropriate feelings...

...Lay responsibility in liturgy is a must and a joy...

...Lord, I am not worthy indeed...

...And moving to this center no, letting ourselves be so moved is all we need for our vision of everything to be utterly transformed...

...I suspect, though, that I feel partly responsible for my distractions, since I cringe at my most scandalous ones...

...it's not about to get out on its own...

...By dinner it was clear to us both that we were having a rare spell of getting on each other's nerves...

...God's being with us is the perspective that puts all things in their place their place which is in his being...

...The order of Mass...

...I walked by him just as he was watering it in, saw that he'd put it too close to the ferns, and ungraciously said so...

...The Lord be with you...

...Pauses for reflection are spread throughout the liturgy, and the psalms of Terce precede the Mass, so that the whole liturgy lasts more than an hour and a half...

...That's why mystics' momentary release from illusory self is called a "vision...

...We hope we'll hear them in our hearts...

...The experience I've been describing of being healed through liturgy, of having the order of Mass put things in their place certainly isn't unique...

...I fill in as lector or eucharistic minister when needed...

...Like many other cliches, these became and remain cliches because they express widely acknowledged truths and values...

...We believe in one God, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen...

...At the kiss of peace, my husband and I squeezed hands in thanks that we had not "made up," but been made up...

...Listening, watching, responding with body and voice as one people, anonymously and by rote...

...I think freedom from distractions is a gift that comes or doesn't...

...For me that's about as good as it gets, and I'm always grateful for any degree of attentiveness to liturgy...

...I couldn't decide where to set the foxglove seedlings and left him to plant them alone while I divided perennials elsewhere...

...The psychological truth in this case is that our self would just as soon stay wrapped up in itself, cozily enclosed with whatever things are its private obsession...

...Having things out of perspective is serious business...

...As Simone Weil describes the devastating situation, with her usual unflinching severity: we're "incapable of discerning a single object or directing a single step" as long as we remain stuck in our illusory world of which we imagine ourselves the center...

...The pace at the monastery is much slower...

...Taking,putting: there's wisdom in the active forcefulness of the verbs here...

...Blessed be God forever...

...Liturgy's ritual gift of taking one out of oneself, putting things in perspective...

...But there's an experience of liturgy that one can't have when responsible for helping get it done, the experience of letting it happen...

...The mail then brought me two professional frustrations: a favorite article rejected, and a letter from a scholar saying she hadn't a clue how to answer a source-question I'd counted on her expertise for...

...We knew that none of the things obsessing us mattered, yet knowing this wasn't enough to free us from them...

...My husband cantors...

...God is of course our real center...

...Glory to God in the highest...

...We can count on these words to be said...

...And he is...

...We needed liturgy...

...On this particular Sunday, I'd guess I paid attention to 70 percent of the Mass...

...My husband, discouraged by the crabgrass killing our new lawn, went to the garden store for help and came home sick at finding out what poisons he'd have to use to attack it and even sicker at trying to figure out whether he cared about crabgrass at all...

...We were given what we needed...

...God is always ready and eager to pull us into his transforming presence...

...Thanks be to God.ks be to God...

...Maybe by taking the pressure off...

...we're grateful when we do...

...We're disappointed when we don't, but not despairing...

...He doesn't need liturgy for this, but we sometimes do...

...The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit...

...And we believe even when our attention wanders from the profession we speak...

...I assume it's as common as crab-grass, though received with exactly the opposite response...

...At liturgy we all say and hear the words that heal us all...

...I'm certainly not arguing against it...

...My husband and I began our planned afternoon gardening without our usual enthusiasm for it...

...I confess to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have caught myself at the Memorial Acclamation realizing that I spent the Consecration discerning whether I should get my hair cut like the woman sitting in front of me...

...Though liturgy isn't the only means by which this radical shift of perspective is offered us, enacting God's transforming presence is liturgy's special work...

...Fortunately, we'd already planned to go to Sunday Mass at the Trappist monastery thirty miles from home...

...I meanwhile was being overrun by internal crabgrass, that premenstrual crab-biness which feels as if it's smothering and even clawing out any hope of tender green delight...

...But only say the word and I shall be healed...

...PEGGY ROSENTHAL is the author of Words and Values: Some Leading Words and Where They Lead Us (Oxford University Press...

...I like that the Greek word for "work," ergos, is at the root meaning of the term "liturgy...

...Sometimes just hearing it is enough...

...A reading from the Book of...

...Celebrating Mass there is different for us than celebrating it at our parish, in two main ways...

...At our parish, we usually help lead the liturgy in some way or other...

...The value acknowledged in the idioms is that such self-enclosure is bad...

...When he was done and ready to transplant a new shrub to give it more room, I told him where to put it and went back to my dividing...

...Glory to you, Lord...