Let liturgy be liturgy
Garvey, John
Of several minds: John Garvey LET LITURGY BE LITURGY STOP TRYING TO PUT A NEW SPIN ON IT MY DAUGHTER came home from the Catholic high school she attends with a complaint about a Mass they'd had....
...Liturgy ought to address those deeper levels...
...As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance...
...I don't believe there were any good old days, ever...
...Pre-Vatican II Catholic music was, in our parish anyway, as bad as the current stuff...
...The priest sounded like a bad Shakespearean actor," she said...
...A good shoe is a shoe you don't notice...
...Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore...
...And it enables us to do these things best - if you like, it works best - when, through long familiarity, we don't have to think about it...
...help in seeing those common elements of our lives in depth, and this demands a radical shift of perspective...
...and thinking about worship is a different thing from worshipping...
...our attention would have been on God...
...Nor do I miss Gregorian, which I love...
...I hate "They'll Know We Are Christians By Our Love" and "Let There Be Peace On Earth" - the first sounds like Howdy Doody Indian music and the second like a skating rink ditty - but "Immaculate Mary Our Hearts Are on Fire" was also pretty bad, musically...
...The solution is not a return to the did liturgy but rather an appreciation of the fact that we are called by our faith to transformation, something which liturgy ought to assist us in...
...If they are very good at acting they will still have missed the point about liturgy, but at least they won't be so embarrassing to the rest of us...
...Instead, we encounter here, with limited vision, something unlimited...
...It lays one's devotion to waste...
...But like the argument that "my work is my prayer," this is a half-truth...
...There are feelings which lie buried deep beneath our superficial emotions, and in the same way there are aspects of our person which are obscured by attention to personality...
...But a time passed attentively, with absolute alertness, is not exactly spent - it is appreciated, perceived, more than street time is...
...They go to use the service or, if you prefer, to enact it...
...Novelty may fix our attention not on the service but on the celebrant...
...being famous didn't help it...
...The holiness of time isn't in doubt...
...One priest I know, a thoroughly decent man, was given for awhile to beginning his liturgy with "The Lord be with you" (as well he might), and when the people replied "And also with you," he said "Thank you" - as if the people replied that way to do him a favor or compliment him...
...And it is not the shift from Latin to the vernacular which caused the problem...
...Which leads to what my daughter said: the priest who read the words of the liturgy like a bad Shakespearean actor is a man who feels that the words of the Mass can't live without his beefing them up with special emphases and dramatic gestures...
...In some ways this assumption mat liturgy has to be made new every time isn't just bad liturgy but a profound misunderstanding of liturgy's purpose...
...the truth is that outside some miserable attempts by parish choirs - and not many of them - the only place I have ever heard it was on records...
...It has been too easy for some defenders of what most of us have to put up with, liturgically, to dismiss the idea of mystery as either obscurantist or a false memory, so it is important to say what I mean...
...You know what I mean...
...In the sense that we know there is no limit to what we encounter, the Eucharist is un-fathomably deep-but not because anything is closed to us...
...Half of the language of adolescents is unintelligible, but none of it is mysterious...
...When liturgy makes us feel profoundly self-conscious we are moving in the wrong direction...
...People start business meetings with this sort of haphazard rapidity, but it is a lousy way to begin a liturgy...
...In the moment before the Orthodox canon begins, the choir sings, "Let us, who mystically represent the cherubim, now set aside all earthly care.'' The prayers at the foot of the altar, with the sense of moving from one sort of time to another, also accomplished this - or anyway gave an opportunity for its accomplishment...
...JOHN GARVEY...
...In Letters to Malcolm C.S...
...This sense of moving from street time to sacred time - a movement which can ultimately result in our appreciation of the sacredness of street time - doesn't happen when a priest comes out, says "Good morning," gets a ragged "good morning" in return, and then says quickly "To celebrate this liturgy let's prepare ourselves by calling to mind our need for God" and, pausing just long enough to make silence awkward and not long enough to allow any real space for prayer, he rattles into the next prayer...
...By mystery I do not mean that we are in the presence of mystery when we are in the presence of something unintelligible...
...A still worse thing may happen...
...there aren't that many accomplished actors around...
...Of course all time, coming as it does from God, is sacred...
...so I once replied to his reply, "You're welcome," greatly annoying my children...
...Unless they are sensitive to what liturgy ought to be about, even the nicest priests can fall into the trap of thinking that their job is to put some new spin into the liturgy, giving it some extra pizzaz...
...This can't happen if there is no perceptible difference between the sort of time we spend on the street and the sort we spend during the liturgy...
...But on esthetic grounds alone there are good reasons not to regard the liturgy as a kind of play which needs to be beefed up by its actors...
...Arguments have been made that all time is sacred, and that an attempt to make certain times sacred through ritual can blind us to the holiness of the ordinary...
...Her comment led me to think about what I don't like, and occasionally downright hate, about liturgy...
...It fixes our attention on the service itself...
...Lewis wrote that people who object to novelty in liturgy are not being hidebound at all: "They don't go to church to be entertained...
...But every novelty prevents this...
...Priests who think they must act the liturgy had better be sure they are very good...
...when the celebrant in any way calls attention to himself or his personality he leads us smack into the surface of liturgy and we can't get beyond it...
...The problem is that our perceptions are ordinarily too cluttered to allow us an awareness of the holiness of time, and we need the deliberateness of liturgy, the way it has of altering and slowing time down, to remind us...
...His personality didn't matter one damn bit...
...Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or spelling...
...The old Latin liturgy was often sloppy, and I don't miss it...
...The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of...
...Try as one may to exclude it, the question 'What on earth is he up to now?' will intrude...
...Spending time isn't far from killing time...
...What I do not find in many liturgies is something I have found just often enough to miss it...
...That is a sense of mystery, and the knowledge that in gathering to celebrate the Eucharist we are doing something important, something which calls out to everything in us...
...What follows is not a Lefebvrist plea for a return to the good old days...
...What I mean by mystery is the consciousness, not so much of "unfathomable depths," but of a fathoming which doesn't end no matter how deep we go...
...Most high school drama embarrasses us...
...but I really did want to see how long we could keep this little colloquy going...
...Liturgy must lead beyond itself...
...The term "spending time" is itself interesting...
...we do spend time when we regard it as something paid out...
...That means not an affirmation of time, emotion, and language as we ordinarily perceive it, but...
...He wasn't there to charm them...
...I have been to Eastern Orthodox liturgies in English which communicated more of mystery than Latin ever did...
...Unless we make this effort consciously we are not likely to develop any deep consciousness of the sacredness of time, just as work cannot really be prayer unless a specific time for prayer is taken apart from our ordinary busy-ness...
...I know the priest, and she was right on target...
...The old liturgy at least made it clear that the action being done was being done for the people by someone who, defective as he might be, represented the people as a whole...
...The church started out bad, and the letters of Paul and James make it clear that liturgical abuses got in on the ground floor...
Vol. 109 • December 1982 • No. 21
