Letter #33, 2017: The Spirit of the Liturgy, #5

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Letter #33, 2017: The Spirit of the Liturgy, #5

[2017-06-09]

[Engleză]

June 8, 2017, Thursday

The Spirit of the Liturgy: A Commentary

Part One: The Essence of the Liturgy (continued)

Chapter 1

Liturgy and Life: The Place of the Liturgy in Reality

"The whole history recounted in the books of the Judges and Kings... is intended to show precisely this, that the land, considered just in itself, is an indeterminate good. It only becomes a true good, a real gift, a promise fulfilled, when it is the place where God reigns. Then it will not be just some independent state or other, but the realm of obedience, where God's will is done and the right kind of human existence developed." —Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, Chapter 1, p. 17. The underlinings were made by my father in his copy of the book, which I am reading in order to see the cardinal's work and message also through my father's eyes (here below is an image of that page)

"Promised Land: The realm of obedience where God's will is done." —A brief note written by my father, now 90 (the same age as Joseph Ratzinger) in the upper margin of Ratzinger's great book on the liturgy, showing my father's agreement with the cardinal's judgment on this point: that the "Promised Land" is indeed the "Holy Land," but that this "land" is not simply a territory of earth and stone and rivers and desert, but rather an "interior" land, a "spiritual" land, a land of the heart where one gives oneself over to God, where one submits one's will to God's will. But how does one enter this "Promised Land" of the soul, and what kind of life will a person who has entered this "Promised Land" live, what kind of joy, or sorrow, will he or she experience?

“Earthly contemplation means to the Christian, we have said, this above all: that behind all that we directly encounter the Face of the incarnate Logos becomes visible... Contemplation does not ignore the 'historical Gethsemane,' does not ignore the mystery of evil, guilt and its bloody atonement. The happiness of contemplation is a true happiness, indeed the supreme happiness; but it is founded upon sorrow.” â€•Josef Pieper, the great German Catholic Thomistic philosopher, Happiness and Contemplation

"Israel [after leaving Egypt and traveling to Mt. Sinai] learns how to worship God in the way he himself desires. Cult, liturgy in the proper sense, is part of this worship, but so too is life according to the will of God; such a life is an indispensable part of true worship. 'The glory of God is the living man, but the life of man is the vision of God,' says St. Irenaeus (cf. Adv. Haer. 4, 20, 7), getting to the heart of what happens when man meets God on the mountain in the wilderness. Ultimately, it is the very life of man, man himself as living righteously, that is the true worship of God, but life only becomes real life when it receives its form from looking toward God. Cult exists in order to communicate this vision and to give life in such a way that glory is given to God." —Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, Chapter 1, p. 17-18 (here below is an image of that page)

"The innermost meaning of wonder is fulfilled in a deepened sense of mystery. It does not end in doubt, but is the awakening of the knowledge that being, qua being, is mysterious and inconceivable, and that it is a mystery in the full sense of the word: neither a dead end, nor a contradiction, nor even something impenetrable and dark. Rather, mystery means that a reality cannot be comprehended because its light is ever-flowing, unfathomable, and inexhaustible. And that is what the wonderer really experiences." —Josef Pieper, from his great work Leisure: the Basis of Culture

"Everything in our life, today just as in Jesus’ time, begins with an encounter. An encounter with this Man, the carpenter of Nazareth, a man like all men and yet different. The first ones, John, Andrew, and Simon, felt themselves to be looked at into their very depths, read in their innermost being, and in them sprang forth a surprise, a wonder that instantly made them feel bound to Him, made them feel different." —Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, April 27, 2001, at the Buenos Aires International Book Fair, the largest in South America, presenting the Spanish edition of a book by the late Don Luigi Giussani, L’attrattiva GesĂą [The Attraction That Is Jesus] (link)

(My father's annotated copy of The Spirit of the Liturgy, Pages 16 and 17)

(My father's annotated copy of The Spirit of the Liturgy, Pages 18 and 19)

==============

What is the liturgy? It is, Ratzinger tells us... the true worship of God

I have embarked on a reading of Joseph Ratzinger's great study on the liturgy, The Spirit of the Liturgy (2000).

To assist me in this task I have a special help: an old, much-thumbed book.

It is a book once owned by my father, his own personal copy of The Spirit of the Liturgy.

He read and re-read the book because the liturgy fascinated him.

In the 1940s, before entering the Marine Corps, he spent two years in minor seminary near St. Bonaventure, in western New York. He was following in the footsteps of his older brother, Robert Moynihan. The older brother had also studied at Callicoon, then had joined the Marines and was shipped to the South Pacific. He was a gunner on the U.S.S. Hornet. When he returned home safe to Haverhill, Massachusetts, he promptly entered the Franciscan Order. He was ordained a priest. When I was born, my father gave his older brother's name... to me.

"Rough," my father once said of his minor seminary days. "I still remember the cold gruel at 6 a.m. But also, in many ways, a very happy time..."

So my father, in part because of his own experience at Callicoon, imbued in me a sense of the grandeur, and mystery, of the liturgy.

Precisely as Joseph Ratzinger's book, The Spirit of the Liturgy, imbued in me this same sense of grandeur, and mystery.

For my father, this ritual we called the Mass was "the still point in the turning world."

It recalled events from 2,000 years ago, confronting all of us in a regular weekly cadence with solemn, profound words and hymns chanted in dignified, mysterious languages. (I mean Greek -- Kyrie eleison -- and Aramaic -- Alleluia -- as well as Latin.)

The words and gestures and actions introduced us into a relationship with the deep mysteries of our own being and personality, of our sins and guilt, of God's mercy and forgiveness, of mortality, of death, of hope...

So my father read Ratzinger's book very carefully, in the years after 2000, took notes on it, wrote in the margins, underlined key phrases.

Then, a few weeks ago, my father, who will turn 91 this summer -- he is almost 10 months older than Joseph Ratzinger, who is 90 -- gave the book to me. "Take the book, it will be one less thing to deal with when the time comes," he said.

So I took up the book, and several days later I opened it in a cafe on via delle Fornaci in Rome.

I began to read it, and realized that the pages of the book prompted memories... memories from my childhood, memories of my father, memories also of encounters with Joseph Ratzinger, memories of other encounters which in various ways transformed my life.

I realized that, without seeking it, I was immediately engaged in a complex double dialogue.

I was in dialogue with the writing of Joseph Ratzinger, in a certain sense one of my "spiritual fathers."

And I was in dialogue with my own father's reading of Ratzinger's text.

And this "double dialogue" rippled forward, including my own sons and my relationship to them and their faith.

St. Augustine once said, "I learn by writing."

So, if you will permit me, I will make an effort to follow Augustine's model, and to learn about the liturgy by reading Ratzinger's book, and by writing these letters.

I began the first letter by saying that the end is already clear, even at the outset: to see the face of Christ.

But in the journey toward that end, we must follow along a complex path of argument, step by step.

And as we do so, we will come to discover that a seemingly "marginal" matter like the liturgy is actually a central matter, that understanding the liturgy, as it truly is, is the single best way to confront the enormous injustices, cruel oppressions, and horrifying poisonings of our world and of ourselves that characterize our age.

In other words, a study of the liturgy, of what the liturgy truly is, is in a profound sense the best way to begin to try to heal the diseases ruining our communities, and ruining our souls.

A New Approach

I left off the last letter by saying that Ratzinger himself felt that the suggestion of some in the Liturgical Movement in Europe that we should understand the liturgy in terms of "play" was... "insufficient."

And I noted that my father wrote: "It was worse than insufficient. It sends us in a totally wrong direction."

But Ratzinger was himself aware of this "insufficieny," and he began to deal with it himself immediately.

Ratzinger first considers "another aspect of this theory of play." He says this "other aspect" will bring us "closer" to "the essence of the liturgy."

What is this "other aspect"? It is that "play," especially children's play, is "a kind of anticipation for life, a rehearsal for later life, without its burdens and gravity."

We can understand this: children "pretend" to be policemen and soldiers and mothers and so on, in a sort of "anticipation" of someday carrying out such roles in reality.

So, Ratzinger says, by analogy, "the liturgy would be a reminder that we are all children... in relation to that true life toward which we yearn to go."

Sursa: www.InsideTheVatican.com

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