Sixth Sunday in Course
February 13, 2011
Spirit of the Liturgy
Today we are challenged to consider the place of law in our lives. In the psalm we prayed for divine understanding, so that we may keep God’s law and observe it wholeheartedly. The Offertory verse pleads “Blessed are you, O Lord, teach me your ordinances. Blessed are you, O Lord, teach me your ordinances. I have with my lips proclaimed all the judgements of your mouth.”
This age is no friend of law. We might be so bold as to call the generations born after 1935 “antinomian”–anti-law generations. Small wonder. We matured, so to speak, during the revolution that had the motto, “sex, drugs and rock and roll.” In an era of Jim Crow legislation, we were rightly taught that there are just laws and unjust laws, but somehow got the idea that any law that interfered with our particular favorite activity, or got in the way of our pleasure, was unjust. The Supreme Court played enabler for this twisted thinking in 1973 when they overturned every law that protected children in the first nine months of their lives. The result has been a widespread disrespect for law among the citizenry.
This antinomian thinking has infected the Churches and ecclesial communities of our country as well. I believe the bishops unwittingly contributed to this infection when, in November, 1966, they released American Catholics from the strict obligation under pain of sin to refrain from eating flesh meat on Fridays. They did encourage us to freely make “of every Friday a day of self-denial and mortification in prayerful remembrance of the passion of Jesus Christ.” But the general opinion was, as one person expressed it, “Joe could die and go to hell for eating a hamburger on the first Friday of November, 1966, but his twin brother could die and go to heaven having eaten a hamburger on the first Friday of December.” At the same time, of course, so-called Catholic theologians were telling young marrieds that the use of the Pill was permissible, despite the two-thousand year old teaching of the Church of the evil of contraception.
What is the good of Law? Law, in particular the natural moral law expressed in the Ten Commandments, is like the operating system for our human person. It’s a fact that if you fiddle with the operating system of your computer, it won’t boot up properly. Likewise, when we violate the operating rules God has established for our spirits, souls and bodies, we damage ourselves. Injure another person and there is a complementary injury to our own soul. We call it mortal sin. Lie to another, or to yourself, and you enter a world in which Truth is relative to your feelings and self-interest. Ultimately you lose track of what is true and what is false.
Law gives a power to our common life. Consider the recent disorders in Egypt, for instance. When thousands gathered in one place with the intention of bringing down the government, police were pulled from all over Cairo to control and keep order. This left neighborhoods bare of protection, and massive looting and violence and vigilantism resulted. A society of persons who obey just laws is a calm and well-functioning society, whose tax moneys can be used for purposes other than catching bad guys.
This brings us to consider our liturgical laws, the documents that order our worship. Why do we worship? Does our common prayer, our coming together, our song and praise and hearing God’s word, our Eucharistic sacrifice, do anything for God? God is perfect in Himself. He does not need our praise, our money, our bread and wine. He revealed that even in the Old Testament, where in Psalm 50 he asks “do you think I eat the meat of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?” No, we worship for two reasons: first, praising God together improves our lives, does good for us individually and as a community. The Maronite liturgy says it best: “our praises improve our mouths.” When we hear the Word of God, we hear God’s love song for us, we understand better how to live our lives and how to help others. When we take the Body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ into ourselves at communion, we are changed into His image and empowered to say with Jesus and Mary, “thy will be done, be it done to me according to thy will.”
Second, and of equal importance, we worship together for a reason beyond self-improvement. We are not a closed community of belief. We open our arms to the world because God’s love is for all. We must be a community of evangelists–preachers of God’s good news by our word and deed. Our orthodoxy–our right praise–should attract others and inspire them to become practicing Catholics themselves.
Now we can understand the good in our liturgical laws, our rubrics. There is a little-known sentence in Article 22 of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of Vatican Council II: After confirming that the bishops regulate the liturgy, they say, “Therefore no other person, even if he be a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the Liturgy on his own authority.” The rubrics allow for some variation in certain invitations and actions, like the omission of the Kiss of Peace, but outside that flexibility, we are to use only the words and actions found in the liturgical books, and we are to study and learn from the various liturgical directives published since the Council. This will be especially important to remember over the next year, because we will have a move accurate and more reverent translation of the Mass on the first Sunday of Advent. It will give us a chance to rework our liturgical attitudes and habits even as we learn some different words.
This will take time and work and the formation of new habits. Fr. Theodore Book reminds us that C.S. Lewis “once quipped about the need for praying and gesturing the same way before God over and over.” He says that as long as we are still worried about where our feet are going, we are not yet dancing. “Each time we enter a Catholic Church for Mass, we can expect and experience the same things, and such liturgical repetition exists to free our souls to soar and to pray. We need not worry about ‘what’s coming next.’” And, for instance, when I pray the blessing “The Lord be with you,” you will be able to answer “and with your spirit,” which is a Hebrew prayer that goes back even before the time of Christ. No longer will we have to use redundant and awkward words in our prayer together.
That brings me to the issue of our corporate witness, and the power of the rubrics to help us go beyond what we like to do toward what the Father wants us to do in worship. Recently the Coming Home Network published Taylor Marshall’s account of his, and his wife, Joy’s, journey from Reformed Christianity through Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. He writes that the death of Pope John Paul II was like the death of his own father. In his own words, “deeply moved. . .my wife and I decided that we would attend Holy Mass at the local Catholic parish to show our respects to the Pope and perhaps hear a moving homily in tribute. . .the Catholic priest . . .instead . . .spoke about how St. Peter was not the true author of either 1 Pt or 2 Pt. Moreover, during the consecration prayer he . . .proceeded to recite a eucharistic prayer he himself had composed–a prayer that rhymed. . .Joy and I were horrified. Not only was this terrible poetry, it seemed sacrilegious and contrary to the life and message of John Paul II–a message of perfect obedience to Christ.” This parish perhaps was pleasing itself, but it was giving scandal to a Christian couple who were looking for authentic Catholic teaching and worship, but didn’t find it there. Is that not one of the core reasons why there are 23 million ex-Catholics in the United States, nearly 10% of the US population? The Pew Research group says that were it not for Hispanic immigration, the US Catholic church would be shrinking in size.
We can do better by doing what the Church teaches. As St. Paul taught, the law is good. It is not the greatest good–only God can claim that. Worshiping with the Church, in accord with the directives and rubrics that are the Church’s gift to us, improves our lives and witnesses to our individual and collective obedience to Christ. That can become a precious gift of Holy Spirit parish to a world so very hungry for the True, the Beautiful and the Good.
