LITURGICAL RITES & WRONGS Monks in a trailer, and other epiphanies
Bauerschmidt, Frederick C
LITURGICAL RITES & WRONGS The temptation to be relevant Frederick C. Bauerschmidt A while ago I attended two different celebrations of the Eucharist on succeeding Sundays. The experience led me to...
...Finally, I must dissent from an attitude toward liturgy which I myself keep falling into...
...It depends on Christ's promise to be in our midst when two or three are gathered in his name...
...I mean that tempting mindset which says that all that is necessary to worship God in spirit and in truth is the proper liturgical nostrum-an achievable formulation that balances and coordinates this and that element...
...Nothing moved me because nothing challenged the assumptions of the world in which I live...
...But that very fact helps express some of the thematic complexity of the Christian life...
...There was no sermon at the Mass, but the prior offered a few opening remarks...
...But such time is necessary to prepare us to hear and to respond to God's word...
...To be ready to hear that word, we must first be mentally recollected and even physically engaged...
...I admit that such a statement smacks of what Matthew Fox has called the false dichotomy of "fall-redemption" spirituality...
...The liturgy itself was hardly Solesmes...
...The elements which make up the introduction to the Mass have conflicting themes and get the liturgy off to a slow start...
...They were hospitable enough (Benedict's Rule requires hospitality), making sure that I had copies of the music and had a place to sit...
...It was designed for God-to remember what God has done for us and to offer the Eucharist for the life of the world...
...The first was in the chapel of a major East Coast Catholic university...
...The homily was relevant, making reference to a recent movie (though not much mention of Jesus...
...As the monks were in the process of rebuilding their church, they were worshiping in a double-wide trailer lit by fluorescent lights...
...It was-the Sunday closest to the anniversary of the monastery's founding, so the procession before Mass formed in the graveyard...
...But as Nicholas Lash has remarked about the doctrine of the Trinity articulated in the Creed, it is a "protocol against idolatry" intended to safeguard the mystery of God...
...Such liturgy might move us from being no people to being God's people...
...As near as I can tell, the Mass was celebrated by the book, with nothing omitted, moved, or changed...
...The Trappists did not seem at all interested in "reaching me...
...However, the critical criterion must remain the Christian belief that in Christ there is neither male nor female, rather than such American notions as fairness or equality...
...The "right" liturgy may be celebrated on a college campus or in a monastery in the deep South...
...Of course as a Catholic I have grown used to vapid homilies (though my own pastor preaches quite well), but in this liturgy I was not even given the chance to answer back by reciting the Creed...
...Yet I felt strongly unmoved...
...But the liturgy was sung with as much gusto as the rather elderly congregation could muster, largely, I think, because the sung parts had been written especially for them as an act of devotion...
...My strongest emotion was my irritation at omissions and rearrangements...
...This meant that God was not only called "he" but we proclaimed that Christ became incarnate "for us men and for our salvation...
...We need a certain amount of repetition to have rhythm...
...What he said was that the souls of these dead monks, whose bodies lie buried in that graveyard, are now enjoying life with God and so are "more alive than we are...
...A second assumption of some liturgists that needs serious questioning is that the Creed is a late addition to the liturgy and should be removed...
...The liturgy had been "in-culturated" so as to move me...
...His words moved me because they challenged all my modern liberal assumptions about the point of Christianity...
...It is true that the themes of the entrance song, the penitential rite, the opening prayer, and the Gloria when mandated, are different from one another...
...The beautiful chapel was arranged to facilitate a communal celebration around the Lord's table...
...These two Masses prompted me to wonder why they had affected me so differently, and to think about the need for revitalizing the liturgy...
...it is to be "sectarian" and "against culture" (terms borrowed from the Protestant theologians Ernst Troeltsch and H. Richard Niebuhr...
...The music had all been written Frederick C. Bauerschmidt is professor of theology at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland...
...It may be celebrated in a great cathedral or around a coffee table, the presiding priest facing the people or turning away, in Latin, Swahili, or English...
...The community at this Mass was largely sixty- or seventy-something...
...When it comes to liturgy, beliefs and practices which are not "indissolubly bound up with superstition and error" (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, 37) can be woven into the matrix, which is Christianity...
...The entrance rite must prepare us for God's word, its prophetic as well as its affirmative character...
...Such inculturation is not only desirable but inevitable, and has always been one of the means by which Christian thought and practice, particularly liturgical practice, have developed...
...I would like to look at two specific recommendations routinely trotted out to "fix" the liturgy...
...It is also true that the entrance rite is "slow" in the sense that it takes some time to play out its complex themes...
...But I was inclined to forgive him since I figured it was a sign of how comfortable he felt worshiping God...
...It was as if someone had moved the furniture in my living room without my permission...
...This provision was originally formulated with mission countries in mind...
...There are even aspects of American culture which might be fruitfully incorporated into our Christian practice...
...And, judging from the looks of boredom on their faces, so did many of the undergraduates around me...
...First, that the entrance rite of the Mass is overloaded and needs to be simplified...
...It is true that the recitation of the Creed was added to the Mass at a relatively late date (near the end of the first millennium...
...But the term "orthodoxy" means not only "right opinion" but "right worship...
...By chance, or the providence of a God with a fine sense of irony, the next week I was at a small Trappist monastery in the deep South...
...Further, since the eucharistic prayer itself is the great profession of faith, the Creed may seem redundant...
...The community which gathered was largely thirty-something, with a few students mixed in...
...The Gloria and the Creed were omitted and the penitential rite and sign of peace were moved to a place after the prayers of the faithful...
...At the Mass celebrated in the university chapel much effort had been put into the design of the liturgy...
...These are by no means indifferent matters...
...Before Mass we were instructed how to change the words of one of the songs so as not to refer to God as "he...
...Underlying both of these questionable, if fashionable, liturgical dicta, however, is another presupposition which bears scrutiny: the frequently intoned piety that liturgy must be "inculturated...
...I thought, "he really believes this...
...If only we would obey all the rubrics, then we could be pleased with our worship...
...He did not try to "connect" with my everyday life...
...Perhaps the entrance rite is no more complex than it needs to be to embody the reality of what it means to gather as the corpus mixtum of saints and sinners...
...I was shaken as I realized that what we call "life" is but a pale shadow of the life enjoyed by the saints in glory...
...And yet it moved me...
...Some of the music was fine (even if it tended to the "lite-rock" end of the dial), but there was a certain monotony of tone to the words: God was our friend and companion in the struggle to build the reign of God on earth...
...The two Masses I attended were not celebrated by regular parish communities...
...The musical setting for the Mass was a first effort by a guitarist who was a friend of the monastery, and it sounded like a first effort...
...For example, given the demise of "man" and "he" as generic terms in American speech, it seems only right that liturgical texts should be translated to reflect this reality...
...Were that so, three of our four current eucharistic prayers would be in trouble...
...As proclaimed in its mission statement (printed on the back of the service leaflet), the community that gathered for this Mass saw as part of its mission being a model of liturgical celebration...
...But this liturgy was totally unconcerned with my "experience" of it, totally unconcerned with moving me...
...The homily summarized a movie I had already seen and told me a story that I didn't need to gather with the Christian community to hear...
...This idea is rooted in Vatican II's very reasonable recognition that the unity of the Roman rite allows for variations in its rituals and texts which "respect and foster the qualities and talents of various nations" (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, 37...
...My sense is that such an objection to the Creed has to do with inserting a dogmatic statement into the liturgy, thus violating its dox-ological character...
...But it is a mistake to confuse God's good creation with the world we have made through our rebellion against God...
...The experience led me to rethink some of the common wisdom about what needs to be done to "fix" the Roman rite...
...They pulled me out of my usual world and dropped me down in a strange new one where the dead are "more alive than we are" simply because God is real...
...What underlies some of the specific changes which are routinely made by "progressive" liturgies...
...Perhaps an essential first step in entering into the worship of God is having to wrestle with the conflict of wanting to praise the God who has called us while at the same time we recognize that we are yet sinners...
...I would be willing to argue that tuned guitars are an objective good...
...In all, God is capable of moving us as a pilgrim church toward the kingdom...
...If only we would move the penitential rite and the sign of peace, then we could have "good liturgy...
...Finally, it depends on forms which resist any accommodation to cultural forces which would militate against that...
...But "good liturgy" does not depend ultimately on any specific liturgical prescription...
...And should we consider it repetitive, that is not in itself a vice...
...However, being a late addition is not in itself an adequate reason for excluding something from the liturgy...
...And only that is good liturgy...
...If our worship is to be doxological it must be rooted in the credal belief of the church...
...And I find the expertise I have acquired is increasingly at odds with the recommendations made by many professional liturgists and what I perceive to be their underlying attitudes of utilitarianism and accommodation to a bourgeois culture...
...Though I occasionally read what liturgical experts write, I am myself by no means an expert-except for the expertise one acquires through participating in the liturgy, week in and week out...
...I would hazard that part of our dislike for reciting the Creed is our unease with dogma in general...
...As I have indicated, the primary purpose of the liturgy is not functional...
...The story of our salvation proclaimed in different ways in the liturgy has a pedagogical intent: to reinforce its centrality in our lives...
...This is not to imply that the Creed restricts God by pinning down holy mystery to some humanly understandable and historically conditioned formula...
...in the last fifteen years and the copyrights, which had been dutifully acquired, indicated the usual big names in contemporary liturgical music...
...My experiences of these two liturgies were strikingly different...
...I found myself irritated by the rearrangement of the parts of the Mass...
...Particularly given the predilection Americans have toward feel-good religiosity, we need a "slow" entrance rite to avoid falling into such a mistake...
...Various parts of the liturgy were relocated or omitted, according to what liturgical scholars tell us was done in the early church or what experts in ritual say clarifies the meaning of the eu-charistic celebration...
...To deny the primacy of "inculturation" is to relegate oneself to the backwater of liturgical theology...
...However, the demand for inculturation has gradually been extended to include any culture, even our own...
...It was as if someone had violently woken me from a deep slumber...
...I do not wish to idealize this monastery...
...The final liturgical wrong turn would be to believe that one specific form, in and of itself, is the "right" one...
...This was done, I was told, to bring "the whole community" into the celebration...
...It may be a grand assembly of thousands on a solemn feast or weekday Mass without either music or homily, over in a quick twenty minutes...
...The Creed seems like a drag on the uplifting character of the Eucharist, a heresy test administered in the middle of a party...
...And perhaps the desire to simplify it reflects our persistent human tendency to avoid complexity, not only in our liturgies but in our lives...
...Still, if we stop reciting the Creed, I believe that within a generation 90 percent of Catholics would not know it, and that would be a critical loss...
...The entrance rite helps us recognize that the church is not the world and that it is important to take time as we gather to realize that...
...It depends on an assembly's thirst for righteousness and its desire for the holiness of God's kingdom...
...The liturgy has been celebrated in all these ways...
...Nor was it designed for the monks...
...If only we would restore Gregorian chant or ban choir solos or sing songs with scriptural lyrics or tune those guitars, then we would be able to offer a truly joyful noise to God...
...If we understand the Creed in this way (and singing it occasionally might help in this), it is no less doxological than any other part of the Mass...
...All in all, I felt that a determined effort was being made to reach me "where I was at," to celebrate the liturgy in such a way that it would be intelligible to a typical, late twentieth-century North American...
...But what is missing here is the recognition that Christianity is itself a culture: an ensemble of beliefs, traditions, and practices which form a more or less coherent matrix by which we understand the world...
...During the eu-charistic prayer, one of the concelebrants seemed interested primarily in picking some foreign object out of his long beard...
Vol. 122 • November 1995 • No. 20
