Standing in the way of worship-the discussion continues:
Dinter, Gertrud Mueller Nelson, Gabe Huck, Thomas Cahill, Paul E
THE DISCUSSION CONTINUES
STANDING IN THE WAY OF WORSHIP
RESPONSES TO PAUL E. DINTER
In response to Paul E. Dinter's observations on eucharistic liturgies in Western Europe (June 16,1989), three...
...but what do we say to young Matt when Father doesn't let his loaf be brought to the altar...
...This is Jesus, wholly man, wholly God, curing his brother's flesh and spirit with a mixture of the good earth and his own substance...
...it is the very bread and wine over which they join the presider in praising and thanking God (Eucharistic Prayer...
...The maids in the mansions are Filipino, Mexican, Central American...
...Somehow, in spite of us, it always does...
...If he believes what he says, why does he offer us no believable Eucharist...
...Hear his words: "Go wash in the water of the Messenger...
...spare us, O Lord...
...Nothing to wall out, unless it is the migrant workers who tend the mansions, the golf courses, the polo fields, the tomato fields, and who hide out in shacks made of cardboard and plastic sheeting in what dry brush is left standing...
...Then in small fistfuls he adds flour...
...Why are the clergy blind to the real needs of the people...
...they accelerate as they make the effort to climb out of the valley...
...But the presumption is clear: The bread and wine for this Eucharist, done by these people, is to come from them...
...Something, I am sure, goes on in that church, something holy and healing...
...They have no cars...
...But they are our clergy, sprung from our loins and hearts...
...Would Dinter make the preparation of the gifts into a major element of what our eucharistic liturgy expresses...
...You helped your godchild last week, he told me so...
...Can anyone doubt the priorities of such a place...
...Instead, fix what is broken...
...The new church is smooth and elegant like an ice palace...
...come home again...
...For if the Eucharistic Prayer in the reformed liturgy has failed practically to engage the assembly, why set out to repair it elsewhere...
...Efforts to read more into this portion of the rite are unwelcome...
...The first read: "This Christmas...
...We grind up some whole wheat kernels I have here-whole seeds that could produce plants if tucked into the earth, or flour if ground...
...Now one for the poor, for the sick and lonely, for the forgotten and homeless...
...behind the pastor's refusal of Matt's eucharistic bread and our pastors' failure to be "imbued with the spirit and power of the liturgy" lies in the model of sacramental power still operative in priestly circles (and in some seminaries in the northeast...
...No immersion here...
...They wouldn't be comfortable here...
...He was for twelve years publisher and editor of the Cahill & Co...
...I have yet to find a Catholic church within the Archdiocese of New York (apart from the occasional college chapel or order church) where the English-language liturgy is conducted with anything remotely approaching reverence, intelligence, and feeling...
...Directly ahead of me, beyond the tomato fields, beyond the polo fields, which I know to be green when I can see them on days when the skies are not smudged, beyond the golf courses that follow, lies a new parish...
...I, who with my wife and children have spent years of numberless Sundays in search of (not a perfect church, God help us) a possible church, ask: come home again to what...
...A generation later, many things have been done, but that central warning has not been heeded...
...I find these two rather strange partners...
...But only a very great mystic could perceive the power in the claptrap, pseudo-liturgies that are served up to us...
...But it is still not easy to find a parish where liturgy is taken as our right and duty, our own, and always the church's...
...His English is hard to understand...
...When, in paragraph 14 of the Constitution, they said why they were doing this (liturgy is the primary and indispensable source of the true Christian spirit) and what was the aim of the whole reform (that participation by the whole assembly which liturgy demands and which is the duty and right of the baptized), they said in the same breath, what had to happen or else: "It would be futile to entertain any hopes of realizing this unless, in the first place, the pastors themselves become thoroughly imbued with the spirit and power of the liturgy and make themselves its teachers...
...My point, which both Mueller Nelson and Huck seem to miss, is that the unspoken and unconscious Why...
...This is not the baptismal font, however...
...A fistful for his parents and his little sister...
...he varying degrees of anger and frustration evident in the foregoing responses are a good indication that I've tapped a raw nerve in the Mystical Body...
...It has a high wall all around the complex with a place to gather in the center...
...know how little support the official church gives us in our struggles...
...Meanwhile, back at the kitchen table, a small boy knocks and walks in: "My ma told me that when I was baptized you mothers and fathers all promised to help raise me a Christian...
...He knows no Spanish...
...In itself, that is a struggle...
...A Latino community lives there...
...Francis, there are clustered a collection of animal figurines...
...That's wonderful, but that's it...
...And this protective outer wall-it embraces the people and leads them into the church...
...I'm not so sure that's all there is to it...
...Roll, push, pat...
...THOMAS CAHILL Thomas Cahill is co-author of A Literary Guide to Ireland and author of Looking for Books...
...This model short-circuits the task of "imbuing" pastors with the power of the sacramental liturgy because they were taught that it was their power that made the liturgy happen...
...One for his friend Michael, for his neighbor, for each of his friends, for the people in the pews on Sunday...
...The pews are arranged in a shallow "U" so that parishioners won't be distracting each other during the homily...
...One expression of this is the first of the annual Liturgical Weeks which was held here in Chicago fifty years ago next year...
...Yes, the bread and wine, along with support for the poor and the church, are to be gathered in the rather quiet moments after the intercessions and before we are ready to lift up our hearts...
...Why do they look on with equanimity as millions leave the church for good...
...The valley is flanked by new houses-a sea of rooftops-and deep brown scars ripped into the chaparral indicate where more houses are yet to come...
...Touch the healer's brow, full of sweat-streaming pores, as he toils over the mess he has made in his large, calloused hands...
...It is the best we have...
...It has a famous architect...
...Here is a building that supposedly stands for something extraordinary-a building whose whole fabric should assert to a pluralistic and indifferent community a belief in the risen Jesus-but that normally says very little...
...Brown swirling carpets, brown walls, brown pews, brown banners with felt hearts, the Beach Boys, the Eucharist, a transparent flake of brittle plastic...
...So we bake bread together, Matt and I. We even bake the Eucharistic offering here at this kitchen table...
...That is why it always puzzles me that the facades of most churches say so little...
...We roll up our sleeves and work at community...
...Soon after I arrived here I had a dream: I am processing down the aisle to receive the Eucharist...
...With Gertrud Mueller Nelson I believe that kneading bread for the Eucharist is both educative and incarnational...
...All of me and all my heart and all of these people here tucked up tightly into this one bread...
...The Midwest has a deserved reputation for leadership, one that goes back long before Vatican II and that has to do, perhaps, with the centers for liturgical "imbuing"-Conception Abbey in Missouri and Saint John's in Minnesota among others-where generations of laity and clergy were trained...
...At the back of this mission, around a plaster St...
...Our Right & Duly Paul Dinter argues that the evidence is clear: twenty-five years after the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy we have not grasped in practice the renewal that Vatican II ratified and chartered...
...And it would be easier to do even what Dinter suggests: get the clergy beyond games of power...
...The men in the bushes can't wash up here...
...The only reason to endure all this is that you fear your soul is damned if you do not...
...I try to usher my children out of the line...
...The cow and the bear eat hay together...
...I think the failure, as far as the ordained go, is exactly what the bishops at Vatican II foresaw...
...and it is all and the only bread and wine for Communion of the whole assembly, presider included...
...Finally we take the children where so many-young people, professors, and other refugees-have sought alternative community: the college campus...
...In Luke's Gospel, the most physically observant Gospel, we read that the people tried to touch Jesus as he moved through the crowd, because "power came out from him that cured them all...
...Immersion is messy...
...Indeed not...
...But even if you could not see the crudely assembled mise-en-scene (the knotty pine sanctuary hung with execrable flannel bunting, the hosts taken out of the deep freeze just prior to Communion, the wine for the priest alone), even if you could not hear the single voice in screeched responses or the instrument (organ, piano, or guitar) played by someone who cannot count (never mind play), even if you were too simple to apprehend intellectually that the sermon was unprepared and uninspired and that the super-miked celebrant depended for his presentation more on Johnny Carson than on John Chrysostom, you would still feel the emptiness of the enterprise...
...THE EDITORS The Work of Our Hands From my kitchen table I look east over a parched valley...
...There is nowhere to hide, not, at least, if you are a material body...
...Their music is real, their worship authentic...
...That is task enough...
...He didn 't need to go so far from home...
...It is not "games of power" but an ideology of clericalism that is at work...
...My family doesn't go there any more...
...Slowly...
...It was easier to adjust all the rites, translate the language, do hundreds of other tasks...
...This question leads me to quibble with Gabe Huck's failure to grasp why "the pastors themselves" have not become imbued with "the spirit and power of the liturgy," and to wonder at his assertion that it should somehow be "easier" to "get the clergy beyond games of power...
...He notes especially the failure of priests to assimilate the very foundation of the reform and he points to two practices that would bear this out: the mishandling of the preparation of the gifts and table and the still nearly universal practice of using previously consecrated bread from the tabernacle for the Communion of some or all of the assembly...
...It would be convenient to lay our miserable state of affairs at the feet of the ordained clergy...
...Please accept our gift, the work of our own hands...
...Other newly built churches in the urban sprawl are as architecturally inspired as a Safeway market or a Ramada ballroom...
...On a hill to the left is my geographic parish...
...Rather there blazes forth one bold and ringing word: BINGO...
...I have waged a minor crusade about the failure to heed the clear directives that call for the use of a large bread that is broken and shared by the assembly, presider included...
...Reader's Catalogue, and is now editor of The Bookperson...
...Like E. B. White's Charlotte the spider they should bear in mind the virtue of brevity and keep their message simple...
...A broad green streak through the brown is tomato fields...
...This is sacramental action...
...The freeway cutting north to south roars with cars and trucks...
...Deep in the city, there is a black church that rocks with feeling and faith...
...As I approach my pastor, I discover to my horror that he is not distributing hosts-but rather each person receives a yellow "happy button...
...But let's not load it down with the tasks of the Eucharistic Prayer itself...
...Soon after he became the archbishop of New York, Cardinal John O'Connor hired a top Madison Avenue firm to create slogans to get people to come back to church...
...They plant full-grown trees between them in an attempt to provide some buffer: giant cactus for the hacienda, plane trees for the French chateau...
...Her works include To Dance with God (Paulist Press), Clip-Art for Feasts and Seasons, and Clip-Art for Celebrations and Service (Pueblo Publishing Co...
...At the Navy base of a Sunday, eleven hundred young men and women wedge themselves into a hall to find that the news is good, to find the only caring, the only hope, the only grace, the only dignity they may have experienced in a week of barked orders and military rites...
...I try to pass the word gently to those around me...
...Year after year...
...It goes to the very heart of how we conceive the Eucharist...
...THE DISCUSSION CONTINUES STANDING IN THE WAY OF WORSHIP RESPONSES TO PAUL E. DINTER In response to Paul E. Dinter's observations on eucharistic liturgies in Western Europe (June 16,1989), three readers from the West, Midwest, and East Coast respond with comments on their areas of the U.S...
...Each house in that community is on an acre parcel...
...I am tired of fighting alone...
...He should not...
...Standing by that parish church, you could look into another valley...
...By now he is kneading and tucking...
...They are concerned that this music and this order belong to everyone, that liturgy never become entertainment or inspiration, but the by-heart deed that baptized people need to do in their assemblies...
...The former attitude will never, whatever the rhetoric, know that all baptized persons have rights and duties around this table...
...A large plaster rabbit grazes on the astro-turf lawn next to a pair of thumb-sized skunks...
...That's a much different task...
...A priest from Spain serves them...
...Some of us have tried to "bloom where we were planted"- tried to make the church work for us, indeed to be church...
...Can anyone claim that in such a building the Spirit may be encountered...
...I think you can...
...But how do we, all of us, get "imbued" with the spirit and power of the liturgy...
...If we believe that we attend a sometimes lovely and sometimes boring long prayer by the priest and then go to Communion, preconsecrated bread from the tabernacle makes good sense...
...When the church is finished, the people will leave their large homes, come into the churchyard, and gather around a magnificent, splashing fountain...
...Yes, we have made changes galore, but the results are not encouraging...
...One factor, and a needed note on Dinter's article, is that one-shot successes count for little...
...We reveal our true selves in our trappings...
...Now one for all the things he's afraid of: feeling bad, feeling left out, scary dreams...
...Yes, it matters very much that they be ample, that they be handled with reverence, that the table be prepared with care and dignity...
...GABE HUCK Gabe Huck is director of Liturgy Training Publications in Chicago...
...They can't come into the church court...
...No Eucharist here...
...He has one neat, tight ball of bread to flatten out and put in the oven...
...You would know in your bones that something essential was missing...
...My hands are cradled and ready...
...When numbers are too great, the instructions allow for there to be other loaves to be broken...
...The optimism of the pioneers did not, perhaps, count on what these times would be...
...Paul Dinter, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, tells us that he was shocked to find that the Constitution on the Liturgy is ignored in Europe...
...Until this ideology is replaced with a more holistic notion of how the sacraments effect grace (and perhaps the Midwest is doing better than the other areas), the "spirit and power of the liturgy" and its ability to engage all the baptized will remain an untapped potential for the People of God...
...We don't want to take refuge in comfortable intellectuality, in safe middle-class uniformity and smugness, in high-minded liberal-sounding rhetoric...
...Help me get ready for my first Communion...
...Power did come out, does come out from him-palpable power that the simplest people know they are receiving...
...Like Tom Cahill, I fear the alienation of thinking and feeling young Catholic adults...
...Lack of faith...
...Here we are, God...
...They weren't imagining things...
...This is not some liturgical nicety...
...The constitution is ignored in his own diocese...
...They cannot walk to the church, much less to the mission...
...PAUL E. DINTER Rev...
...Who's Got the Power...
...Yes, these gifts come from the assembly (as do everyone and everything at the liturgy...
...Apart from the church's announcement of its name and schedule of services, there is one sign: a cross at ground level, constructed of charred and jagged beams massive enough to hold the body of a grown man...
...They are crowded because an acre does not allow them much margin-these mega-homes...
...Dinter's criticisms of the Communion rite are my own...
...On Sunday, he will bring this offering to the altar holding it high on the wooden plate...
...We, who must live in the world of birth, copulation, and death, who are committed to the Christian formation of children (our own and others), who try to witness in our families that the world does not and cannot have the last word but that Christ is risen indeed, hallelujah...
...Try though we may, we all, by our physical presences, tell who we are, for: "Each mortal thing does one thing and the same/ Deals out that being indoors each one dwells...
...Paul E. Dinter is presently serving as administrator of the Church of Saints Philip and James, Bronx, New York.urch of Saints Philip and James, Bronx, New York...
...Here, Matt, you can stir up the warm water into this bowl...
...They are not afraid to rend the heavens to mourn the loss of their young men to guns and drugs...
...And may your holy Word take our own flesh and live among us...
...Some mornings in East Harlem I pass a U.C.C...
...It is being built to accommodate the arrival of an instant and affluent population...
...Just think: the people of this church have this whole facade with which to announce their good news to the world...
...Why can they offer no credible, shining alternative Sign...
...How do I think it's going...
...It has a pastor from Ireland...
...It has to do with the ground work done in the 1930s and 1940s by laity and pastors in urban and rural areas of the Midwest...
...Even though they can lift their eyes and see the parish church, they have their own church, a Catholic mission fashioned from a warehouse...
...In John's Gospel, the most sacramental Gospel, we read that Jesus healed a blind man by applying to his eyes a paste of earth and his own spit...
...or "Christ died for us all," or just "Hope," bannered and billowing across the face of the church...
...But there is no hostile, pluralistic bustle to screen out, only the mansions which peer down anyhow from their perches into the church court...
...But none of these messages is chosen...
...The font inside the church is much smaller...
...church, a little, unimposing brick building dominated by crack-infested projects and burned-out shells, once tenements, where the homeless maintain homes...
...I say geographic...
...This is a fraud...
...On a good day, with my glasses on, I can see it...
...Pastor after pastor...
...Nothing to Come Home to an you tell a church by its cover...
...GERTRUD MUELLER NELSON Gertrud Mueller Nelson is an author, artist, and lecturer living in San Diego...
...Three-quarters, at least, of churchgoers now under the age of eighteen will be permanently lost to Catholicism (most of these lost to Christianity in any form) and virtually all because of what happens, or doesn't happen, in church...
...The cardinal talks incessantly about the dangers to teenagers of contemporary culture...
...Does it matter...
...See the man's sad, sightless eyes set in his grotesque face...
...There is nothing to come home to-unless, perhaps, you are blind, tone-deaf, and mentally asleep...
...This, a simple, creative gesture that really does what it claims to do, that "deals out" the interior being of the healer, is the medium of our human encounter with the living God...
...Each house, one a Spanish hacienda, one a French chateau, the next a Tudor mansion, or a grey stone castle complete with towers and turrets, stands cheek-by-jowl with the others...
...RCIA, in fact, is a large, unchewed lump that lies in the throat and won't be swallowed down nor spat up here...
...It might be "Jesus is risen...
...Let's do the preparation part well...
...The parish that is concerned about liturgy is working on the space, the music, the order that can be theirs every Sunday when the assembly gathers for Eucharist...
...Dinter understands the failure of liturgical reform in terms of the clergy's unwillingness to yield power...
...They are concerned that this Sunday assembly also have the rites of each morning and night, of seasons and feast days and fast days that keep the church the church...
...all the ragged edges get tucked into the middle...
...The deep problem lies where it always has: in our inability to believe in the full humanity of Jesus of Nazareth and, thus, to accept our own...
...So can you help me- cause you promised...
...If we believe that we are an assembly of baptized people, and that what we do is not "attend" but bless and praise and give thanks-and that it matters greatly that we do this-then we cannot even conceive of running to the tabernacle for bread...
Vol. 116 • September 1989 • No. 16
