RITE OR WRONG:

...At the same time, there are plenty of us who are willing to let clergy and religious act for us as surrogate Christians, and that lay tendency must be vigorously resisted...

...And then there are those who think we should return to the tried and true patterns of the recent past (gratuitously labeled "traditional" by their proponents and "medieval" by their opponents, when they are in fact neither, but only modern in contrast to contemporary...

...Until we gather in the new Eden and the heavenly city, where a transformed creation rejoices with its God, there is no perfect liturgy for the church...

...There is virtually no connection between the "community celebration of life" almost totally at the mercy of the celebrant and the corporate Pauline proclaiming the death of the Lord until he comes or the Johannine entry into the liturgy of the heavenly court...

...Sunday is an unbroken whole devoted to the prayer of praise and the re-creation of the human spirit...

...Having found that old symbols do not speak, we have turned to revision, and found revision wanting...

...The baptismal emphasis of the theology of the paschal mystery renders this approach obsolete and inadequate...

...Few seemed to have perceived the incongruity of the attempt to find what is supposed to be lurking under the cultural bed-a truly modern liturgy using truly modern symbols...

...Three evident traditional streams converge in the theology of the paschal mystery, as they evidently converge in the reformed rites: Johannine thought, Pauline thought and modified Augustinianism...

...First of all, the question of gospel and of conversion has not been addressed seriously enough on the level of theory, of articulation and of principle...

...And that is a luxury we cannot afford...

...We come desperately short of prizing the faith of a celebrant over his ability to maneuver a committee or maneuver at the altar, as we come desperately short of prizing the faith of a congregation over its ability to put on a good show...

...They have been shorn of all the familiar pegs on which popular pre-conciliar piety could be hung...

...As the lights continue to go out for Christianity, we could do worse than turn to our own traditions, especially to the biblical symbols of darkness and the desert, for the desert is paradoxically the place of emptiness and desolation, and yet the locale of God's encounter with his people...

...It has meant that the recovery of tradition implied in the liturgical reforms has pretty much gone by the boards...

...They may undergo adjustment and reinterpretation (they always have), but we are not free merely to ignore them, and not free merely to discard them...

...The Pauline understanding of the body of Christ, and the Johannine understanding of discipleship have little room for a church divided into a few active and committed ministers and a great mass of passive, inert, and half-committed "objects" of ministry...

...It is perhaps the fundamental flaw of the Constitution of the Liturgy that it did not address this question in sufficient depth- a question which is critical when we come to what is called "cultural adaptation...

...Since the prevailing tone of the modern world is secular rather than religious, it is not likely to generate such symbols, and certainly not likely to support a liturgy...

...It is striking that the sense of God's absence is accompanied by intense pain, a pain that manifests itself in anger at the church, in benumbed dissatisfaction, in restlessness, or in frantic efforts to cover the pain with anything at all that will make us forget it...

...In a real sense, too, we can say that Christ did not come to found a cultic religion...

...Liturgy is the synthesis of culture and gospel, the gospel, if you will, incarnate in judging and transforming culture so that it is purified and restored to communion with the Father...

...Modernity is not normative...

...Nothing has been more traumatic than the assumption that a new liturgy would solve our problem...

...The church must be ever alert both to see that it does not become a sect isolated from the culture in which it lives and also to see that it does not become a denomination swamped by the worst presuppositions of the culture...

...The alienation from these forms is most evident in the more creative liturgical Week The Liturgical Conference is currenlty observing its 33rd North American Liturgical Week with a conference on the Princeton University campus...

...to himself in his crucified flesh...

...This is not to say that the concern has been absent, but to assert that it has not been central, and has been assumed rather than carefully addressed and articulated...

...We should expect a certain tension between faith and form, and acknowledge that in this world we will never find any forms which are entirely and perfectly appropriate or satisfactory...

...The two things which we are probably most free to discard-the pastoral models of the past four hundred years, and the naive optimism of the early sixties-are the very things which we cling to with the greatest ferocity...

...Much is said about the silence of our symbols...

...In a real sense, the prophetic critique of the temple cult represents a paradigm of the tension inherent in any attempt at liturgy on this side of the eschaton...

...But it is perhaps those symbols of darkness and of the desert which most eloquently portray our own situation, when all other symbols are mute...

...An insecure world yearns for the security of old values, and so it watches the Waltons, reads R. F. Delderfield, eats hearty "natural" cereals, and buys antiques, because they have the savor of that simplicity and security...

...Quite simply, our liturgical problem is not a problem of rite but of spirituality, and the task before us is infinitely more demanding and infinitely more painful than the kind of engineering with which we often think we can dispose of our liturgical difficulties...

...At the same time, they are by no means contemporary: the most evident direction of the reformed rites has been a restoration of pre-medieval forms, with the result that we worship within something like a liturgical Williamsburg...

...Let us hear more about change of heart and less about change of ritual...

...Any serious attention to the gospel and to conversion will not make life any simpler, will not solve any problems, and will not give us room or time for saccharine piety...

...For the few that have it, good taste becomes a substitute for the signs of faith, and for those who lack good taste or a streak of rebelliousness, authority will do-any old authority at all-in a pinch, even the rubrics will do, because respectability and safety are always handy ways of avoiding pastoral care...

...We might well take this pain as a sign that the finger of God is upon us, and as a sure sign that he will not be palliated by the cheap substitutes we offer him, nor will he permit himself to be confined by our conception of what he is or what he asks of us...

...Mary's Seminary and University in Baltimore, and a frequent contributor to Worship magazine...

...In the meantime, any liturgy worth the name is inevitably as much a battlefield as it is a home...

...Fidelity to the gospel is all too easily traded for the idolatrous presupposition that we can manage our situation by putting it in the hands of scholars and ecclesiastical managers on one hand or by leaving things to local whim and fancy on the other...

...The liturgy is purveyed like soap, on the assumption that with the right packaging, the product will sell...

...Having found revision wanting, we have turned to innovation, expecting that God will return through the reading of Kahlil Gibran and gospel words joined to advertising slogans around a coffee table...

...But there is a distinct danger that this movement will be poisoned by a clericalist twist, as equipping people for a ministry toward and for the laity, rather than equipping them for ministry with and among the laity...

...The most serious failure of the past ten years has been the failure to develop, articulate, and make pastorally applicable the theology of the paschal mystery which animated liturgical reform in the first place, and which permeates the new rites...

...Most of the clerical attempts to raise Catholic social consciousness in the sixties were abortive precisely because of a clericalism which did not hear the laity out on their particular perspectives and concerns, and there was a distinct tendency to walk off in anger with an "I'll do it myself" attitude...

...This is a confusion of the form of religion with its reality...

...But not simplistic or pious...

...And so there is the distinct prospect of a wave of liturgical camp in what is left of Catholic seminaries and universities...

...We must be on guard against an uncritical re-appropriation of values of the "old church...

...This article was originally delivered as a paper at a symposium on the tenth anniversary of the Liturgy Constitution, sponsored by the Liturgical Studies program at Catholic University...

...The magic of a communal absolution is preferred to pastoral care, while college students learn predatory ways under cover of prattle about encounter and love...

...The same thing could happen again-and in our present situation, we can ill afford to widen gaps between clergy and laity...

...But in the local church, we might hear more about gospel and less about modernity...

...Put so baldly, the assertion probably sounds pious in the bad sense, simplistic, or arrogant...

...The high Johannine and Pauline Christology and ecclesiology of the new rites, as well as their modified Augustinian-ism, is at almost total cross-purposes with the optimistic humanism which often pervades hymnody and homily...

...In many ways, it is encouraging to see the emerging concern among priests and members of religious orders for spirituality...

...Finding innovation wanting, some think restoration is the answer, and they await God's return through the murmur of Latin...

...It is even more symptomatic in unauthorized experiment, where nearly all the distinctive features of the new official rites disappear-most notably the enriched lection-ary and the eucharistic prayer as a genuine anamnesis of the paschal mystery...

...One of the things which has most seriously done us in has been the promotion of liturgical reform under the aegis of modernization...

...contemporary attempts...

...In brief, the liturgical future is now where it ought to be-squarely in the hands of the local church...

...The "community meal" is a pallid substitute for the "unbloody sacrifice of Calvary...

...If gospel and culture are not united in this way, then we have not liturgy but impotent gospel or idolatrous cult...

...The Conference is headquartered at 1330 Massachusetts Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C., 20005...

...Constitutional moderates think they can spice the bland liturgical soup with a dash of workshop, a dribble of commentary, and a sprinkling of flashy music...

...There is a radical difference between being merely "a community" and being God's sons by adoption and grace, members of the body of the risen Lord...

...And idolatry is the word, because idolatry attempts both to be a substitute for faith and to parody it, trying on one side to control everything, and on the other, despairing of doing anything...

...Yet even having said this, it is still clear that we are in deep liturgical trouble, for the new rites as actually "celebrated" are profoundly alienating...

...Let us hear more about rediscovering our own tradition and less about relevance...

...We have seen plenty of cultural adaptation during the past ten years, and the result is a liturgy which ingeniously mirrors the culture which produced the funeral parlor, the party convention and the neon strip...

...The only perfect liturgy is that offered by the incarnate Son to the Father, reconciling the world RALPH a. keifer is an associate professor of liturgy at St...

...The bright, the young, and the affluent have more opportunities than most for indulging such fads and fancies...

...RITE OR WRONG RALPH A. KEIFER Ten years after the Constitution on the Liturgy Liturgical renewal seems to be virtually over without having really begun...

...The church has a vocation in the world, and it does not respond to that vocation when it lifts its skirts and heads for the hills to suck on the security blanket of inappropriate forms...

...If there is to be a genuine renewal of spirituality, and an appropriation of the theology of the paschal mystery, it will also have to be emphatically "lay" in character...

...And the root of our present crisis is a failure to put the gospel and conversion at the top of our list of liturgical priorities...

...One of the things which defines Catholic Christianity is an understanding of the gospel which includes submission to a tradition as normative...

...John, Paul, and the main lines of the Au-gustinian theology of grace are...

...There is a chasm between the Jesus-as-ethical-example of popular hymnody and the risen Lord of John and Paul...

...And that is our task as Christians, whether we like it or not...

...It is not very fashionable to plump for a return to the sources, but it is a matter of record that all genuine reform and renewal in the church (including reform and renewal in Israel) has involved just a return, and has become innovative, creative, and "relevant" precisely because it has steadfastly refused to be trapped either by the presuppositions of the recent past or of the immediate present...

...Serious attention to the gospel and to conversion, however, is the only guarantee we have to maintain integrity and truth...

...Arrogant it may be...

...And above all, let us begin to hear one another.us begin to hear one another...

...There is an inherent tension between gospel and culture, a tension which has an obvious impact on liturgical celebration...

...Under scrutiny, what appears is the wooden use of the new official forms, coupled but not integrated with more congenial added "extras" (e.g., the folk liturgy at which the Roman Canon is used...

...Emphases are that• the Sunday celebration is central to Christian life...

...What lay spirituality there has been in the past thousand years has been derivative from clerical or monastic models...