Fr. Z says, “Save the Liturgy, Save the World.” An overstatement by a zealous liturgy lover? Perhaps, but on the other hand, ask yourself why there is so little sense of the sacred in our lives.
Why do young people not respect their elders? Why the disintegrating social manners? Why the foul language, the commonplace crudeness? Why the lack of courtesy? Why do we not take time for nice family meals? Why the crassness and vulgarity of modern society when we have enough money to make things nice? Why the lack of self respect? Why the casual, cheap and horrible clothing we wear? Why the sloppy attitudes, sloppy language, sloppy everything?
I reckon it comes down to a lack of the sacred. If you do not believe anything is sacred, then nothing is sacred. If you do not believe there is anything to bow down to, then you never bow down. If there is nothing to worship, then there is nothing much at all. When nothing is sacred all things are equal in value. The lack of the sacred is a great and monstrous leveler.
One of the things we notice at St Mary’s Greenville, (where we have made the attempt to bring back the sacred) is that the people dress up more to come to church. They also behave better in church. I reckon it filters down to the rest of life as well. Perhaps by re-sacralizing the sacred we also re-sacralize the rest of life.
Maybe, just maybe, when we bring back the sacred to our worship, all things sacred become more sacred. If we truly worship in church, should we not then value our family meals more? If we take the trouble and care over the liturgy should we not take more trouble and care over our manners, our dress, our relationships and our language?
Worship should transform our perspective on life, so all things beautiful, precious and eternal are valued in a way that is beautiful, precious and eternal.
Bring on the incense. Bring on the beautiful vestments, Sing choirs of angels, roll in the trumpets and drums. Train the noble young men to serve at the altar as if they were servants in the halls of the Great King. Help the noble young women to sing the praises of the king with fine music. Preach the word with passion and beauty. Value the liturgy and take time to worship and see if your world is not renewed.
Having been driven mad by the music at our main parish church we have been attending 6 pm Mass at one of our other parish churches. There is no music at this little church other than what the congregation provides. Father N picks out the processional hymns and leads us. The Our Father is a simple chant as well as all the other sung parts. Everyone sings and quite well, too.Father N is not afraid to suggest that folks dress up a bit for Mass and silence is the norm. My observation last week?? I looked around and noted how well behaved the small kids were. The teenagers were, are you ready, praying. I have never, ever seen a teenager praying at our regular church. NEVER! Do I think this sort of thing carries over into secular life as you suggest?? You bet. Thanks for the great post……..
Thank you, that was provocative. I think you are right. I think if we lack a sense of the sacred, we have lost something fundamental to being human and humane.I have put this on my own blog.
Amen Father!!!Bring on the kneelers!! Bring on the EF!!
That’s what I love about St. Mary’s, that this is serious business. When I’m at Mass with parishoners who are solemn, pious, dressed appropriately and well-versed in every prayer and song, I’m a little intimidated. And then I think of how unworthy I feel in the eyes of God. It’s a nice, humbling little reminder.
Amen Father! Love your blog, it is so important to have the voice of faithful priests in this blogsphere!
You are absolutely on the mark here. By getting the faithful to be respectful of what the liturgy really means is an enormous and much-needed smack-down to the laissez-faire and overly casual theme of “Jesus is our friend” nonsense that has been so obnoxiously prevalent in the Catholic Church for so many years now.Proper dress? If God grants you a job that affords you nice clothes, then those should be the ones on your back at Mass. Then again, if you’re poor, you shouldn’t be shunned because you can’t dress well. But you can be clean! We need to turn everything around- full circle- until it’s right again. The only disadvantage is the dwindling numbers of worshippers in the churches.Is it gonna make a difference? Maybe among the truly faithful. But what about the ones not in church? The media seems to be the god of the land.The media is the force that has altered morality and as an example, convinced the young women that they can be “just like men” esp. in regard to sexual behaviors.Horrid, but true.So now we have a nation, not of young women feminists aspiring for equal pay for equal work, but a bunch of hot-pants feminists thinking their coolness correlates with the number of bedpartners they have! Seriously, all of these acknowledgements of past respect of symbols and behaviors in worship seem so appropriate, but will they be lost on the not-so-bad-after-all churchgoers? If the church becomes too strict and truly makes people squirm, will they come back or remain alienated?And as much as I respect the priests following the lead of that learned and conservative Pope in recapturing the true meaning of it all,will their well-intentioned papal-inspired rants in the pulpit be lost on a flock that no doubt will perceive them as “out of touch” and “weird”? What do you think?
I could not agree with you more, Dwight!I recommend that everybody reads and inwardly digests the Holy Father’s wonderful Exhortation, Sacramentum Caritatis (which by the way is of far greater significance than the more recent Motu Proprio). For ease of reference, this may be found on the Vatican website at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_ben-xvi_exh_20070222_sacramentum-caritatis_en.html
Spot on, Father L!It also seems to me that there is a lack of sacramental vision among Catholics. The value of the incense and bells, etc., isn’t that they makes Mass any more valid; it’s that they increase our capacity to give more of ourselves to the Lord and to receive more of the grace He’s pouring out at Mass. But when the ability to see liturgical symbols as bridges between the temporal and transcendant realms is hampered, it’s hard to ‘catch’ the sacredness of the Mass.My hope is to help Catholics (and any others open to it) to see sacramentally. To see, if you will, that the old “Transformers” theme song is true: “More than meets the eye!”~MargoB
OK but I do think that there is nothing wrong with noble young women serving too.
I agree with this post in general. However, I don’t know if simply calling for a sense of “the sacred” can do the heavy lifting you want it to do. I doubt that the social issues you mention can be alayed simply by reasserting a sort of sacral aura in our worship (though I think that is important). What is needed is for the vibrant liturgical realities of Christian worship to be met with an equally vibrant community of intentional discipleship consisting of all believers in a given congregation. The mysteries celebrated in worship do shape us, but the hardness of our hearts can make them utterly ineffectual in shaping communal and social lives which bear witness to God. After all there was plenty of Eucharist going on in Nazi Germany, but precious little excomunnication.Anyways, my point in all this is simply to say that we cannot expect liturgy to just “work” much in the same way that we cannot expect people to just pick up their bibles and read orthodox theology off of the pages. The shaping of cruciform lives can occur only in the crucible of daily discipleship which requires the kind of sustained, consistent presense of believers to one another that precious few congregations (Catholic or Protestant) are capable of providing today. Here I think we have much to learn from the history of monasticism and the neo-apostolic movements today(“The New Monasticism”).
I guess one more, “Amen, Father!” wouldn’t hurt.
Halden,I agree with you as far as your statement goes, but (forgive me for stealing your nifty phrasing) I don’t think that even intentional discipleship can do the heavy lifting you want it to do (even in conjunction with participation in good liturgy).The key to transformation is encountering Christ, and growing in our friendship / cooperation with Him.Well done liturgy and discipleship assist our transformation, and yes, they are necessary to our continued/continual conversion. But without being connected to ‘the Power,’ i.e., to Christ, we’ll only get so far. How far does He want us to get? All the way transformed! And while liturgy and discipleship help us cooperate with Him, only He can effect this / get us there. ~MargoB
Margo, I certainly agree with that. I think both Fr. Dwight and myself were presupposing that Christ is encountered precisely in and through the liturgy and the church community of discipleship. Christ is present to us through the bread and wine of the Eucharist and through the faces of our brothers and sisters that make up his body. Certainly he is free to reveal himself to us in other mediums, but these two are extremely central in that Christ himself promised to be present in the breaking of the bread and in the gathering together to two or three believers.So, in sum, neither the liturgy nor the community of discipleship are alternatives to encounter with Christ. Rather they are central mediums through which this encounter takes place.
I totally agree with your sentiments about the need for the return to the sacred in our lives. And I think there are many ways to achieve it, an uplifting and sacred Mass being one of the main ones. However I would hate to see too many people attributing “appropriate” dress to being part of a sacred Mass. The reason being I have seen too many other denominations where the importance seems to be given to what one wears to church rather than how one lives a Christian life. A couple of years ago I met a woman in our parish who was a convert to Catholicism after many years of being an evangelical Protestant and attending one of the main “socially it” churches in our city. We talked about her conversion and her love for the Eucharist, the Church, etc. One of the main things that stayed with me is how she also loved the fact that “all were accepted” at Catholic Mass, no matter whether they came in the nicest business suit or dress, or a workers’ uniform. She said often at her former church people were stared at or made to feel unwelcome unless they were “dressed to the nines.” I agree one should be clean and presentable when attending Mass, but the quality of dress should never be a criteria for worshipping appropriately or being accepted. I have seen people in the shabbiest dress and yes, sometimes even not the cleanest dress, engaging in the most fervent prayer.
Kitschy niche-marketed disposable Christianity leads to kitschy Christ and kitschy morals. Evidence: magazine style (throw-away) Bibles. Barna research showing that Evangelical kids are fornicating more than their heathen peers. They can proclaim their faith and savedness and love all the day long but they are untransformed. God is a product to be niche-marketed to suit ME. God is reinvented in my image and likeness, as a WWJD lanyard and a plastic fish to stick on my car.Sacralized liturgy is just the opposite. God is not niche marketed to me. I am to conform to that something/Someone outside of myself, and in that challenge, I am freed from the limits of my post-Cartesian, divided, finite and ultimately lonely self. It is the solution for modern man.Gaudium de Veritate!Joy from the Truth!