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Letter #30, 2017: The Spirit of the Liturgy, #2

[2017-06-05]
[Engleză]
June 4, 2017, Sunday, Feast of Pentecost

The Preface

"...This is the use of memory:
For liberation — not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past..." —T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

"Introibo ad altare Dei" ("I will go up to the altar of God").

"Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam" ("To God, who gladdens my youth").

—The first words of the old liturgy (pre-Second Vatican Council). The first words were spoken by the priest, the second by the altar server, as the priest prepared to ascend the steps of the altar. I spoke those words as a boy, on many Sundays, perhaps 50 times a year for six years, or some 300 times. The words are taken from King David's Psalm 43 (42 in the Vulgate), which expresses a desire to find refuge in God

"'What is Dad doing?' I asked my mother. 'He is meditating,' she replied: 'Don't disturb him. It is the time of the Crucifixion.'" —My words to my mother, and hers to me, when I was four years old, in the late 1950s, when I looked out of the window in our home in Connecticut and saw my father sitting quietly in the garden outside, his head slightly bent as if in prayer, while Gregorian chant played on the old record player. During my childhood, he did that each Good Friday from noon until three, the hours that Jesus hung on the cross

"'What did they do to that man? Did he do something bad?' my two-year-old son whispered to me, his eyes wide with alarm, as I held him in my arms in the back of the church, and he gazed upon a life-sized crucifix nearby on the wall that showed a long-haired, bent-necked, crucified man, blood streaming from wounds in his hands, feet and side. 'No,' I said, with a deep sense of my own inadequacy to answer my son's question, and a certain sorrow -- which I feel now, decades later -- because he had gazed upon the crucifix in this way, stumbling upon it, as it were. Still, feeling compelled to answer, I tried. 'He was punished in a cruel way, a long time ago, as if he were a bad man, yes. That is why he has those wounds. But he wasn't bad. He was a good man. In fact, the best who ever lived. That is why we remember him, even today. His name was Jesus...' And my son buried his face against my shoulder." —Conversation with my two-year-old son in 1995, 22 years ago

"Implicit here is the more radical question of whether beauty is true or whether it is not ugliness that leads us to the deepest truth of reality. Whoever believes in God, in the God who manifested himself, precisely in the altered appearance of Christ crucified as love 'to the end' (Jn 13:1), knows that beauty is truth and truth beauty; but in the suffering Christ he also learns that the beauty of truth also embraces offense, pain, and even the dark mystery of death, and that this can only be found in accepting suffering, not in ignoring it." —Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Message to the Communion and Liberation Meeting at Rimini, 24-20 August 2002, on "The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty" (link)

"No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord." —Jesus in the Gospel of John 10:18, speaking of his crucifixion and sacrificial death, events which were followed by his mysterious Resurrection, and then by the creation of the Church on the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples in a great wind and tongues of flame, which we commemorate today

"I will not tell the mystery to your enemies." —Part of the prayer just before communion in the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, used by the Orthodox and the Eastern-rite Catholics

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

A Book that Becomes a Pilgrimage

The face of Jesus is the final end of our search.

To see Him, and be seen by Him.

I can say it now, from the beginning.

But we still must travel from here to there, to come to the place where we may see Him.

And that journey will require considerable reflection.

We must explore what a face is, and what a man is (what kind of beings men and women are, what kind of beings all of us are).

And we must explore who Christ was, who the Jewish people were, what God's covenant with them meant, and what the Jewish worship was, and it relatiosnhip to the Jewish law, and to morality in general.

And we must explore how material beings such as we are, beings in bodies of flesh, with eyes and irises, and eye-lids against any too-glaring light, can yet have eyes to "see" spiritual beings, spiritual persons.

How can this be, if our eyes are made only for, attuned only to, a material, photon-lit, light-wave mediated, reality?

The answer, of course, is that we must be given new eyes with which to see, and new minds with which to understand...

That is our quest, then -- to place ourselves in a condition, in a place or state, where we may be transformed by the renewing of our minds, and of our eyes, so that we may see and understand things impossible for purely material or earthly eyes and minds to see or understand.

Fundamentally, the faculty of seeing, the ability to see, spiritual things is the result of... a gift.

A gift given freely, but for which we must in some way prepare ourselves.

And the liturgy -- that place where ancient prayers are chanted, and ancient rituals re-enacted, renewed -- is the pre-eminent "place" where this "gift-giving" and "gift-receiving," this "spiritual sight-giving" and "spiritual sight-receiving" (if we understand what the liturgy truly is), occurs.

And this is precisely what Joseph Ratzinger wants us to understand by reading along with him as he presents to us The Spirit of the Liturgy.

He wants us to understand what the liturgy truly is.

And he will tell us, in the end, that one thing the liturgy is, is... a bridge.

A bridge to God.

A bridge that we "cross over" in order to come to God, and, in a certain way, the bridge we cross over in order to become like God, to share in His very being and life, which is... holiness itself.

"The Lord has gone before us," Ratzinger writes. "He has already done what we have to do. He has opened a way that we ourselves could not have pioneered, because our powers do not extend to building a bridge to God. He himself became that bridge... He, the Holy One, hallows us with the holiness that none of us could ever give ourselves. We are incorporated into the great historical process by which the world moves toward the fulfillment of God being 'all in all.'" (The Spirit of the Liturgy, p. 59)

So that is, in a sense, or in part, the answer already.

But, before arriving at this deep interpretation of the liturgy, Ratzinger begins by telling us how he himself came to study the liturgy, and slowly grew to understand what it truly is.

"One of the first books I read after starting my theological studies at the beginning of 1946 was Romano Guardini's first little book, The Spirit of the Liturgy," Ratzinger writes.

These are the first words of his Preface.

"It was published at Easter in 1918," he continues, "as the opening volume in the Ecclesia Orans ["the Church praying"] series edited by Abbot Herwegen, and from then until 1957 it was constantly reprinted."

So from these words we can begin to orient ourselves, both chronologically and in terms, as it were, of "theological filiation."

The Influence of Romano Guardini on Joseph Ratzinger

Chronologically, we are in 1946. In that year, Ratzinger began to study Guardini, and he is now writing in about the year 2000, 54 years later, 35 years after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council.

So, in some way, Ratzinger's book on the liturgy is an "updating" of Guardini's book on the liturgy, and both books have the exact same titles.

When Ratzinger began to study Guardini, it was the year after the end of the Second World War, 1946.

Ratzinger is not yet 20 -- he would turn 20 on April 16, 1947.

So he is 19 years old.

And his spiritual father, in studying the liturgy, is the Catholic professor and scholar Romano Guardini (1885-1968), who in 1946 was 61 years old.

Who was Guardini?

Guardini was born in Verona, Italy, in 1885, but his family moved to Mainz, Germany, when he was one year old, and he lived in Germany for the rest of his life.

After studying chemistry and economics, he decided to become a priest. He was ordained in 1910, before the First World War, at the age of 25.

He studied in Freiburg under Prof. Engelbert Krebs, receiving his doctorate in 1915 for a dissertation on St. Bonaventure. He was 30. He completed his “Habilitation” in Dogmatic Theology at the University of Bonn in 1922, again with a dissertation on Bonaventure. He was 37.

Throughout this period he also worked as a chaplain to the Catholic youth movement.

Sursa: www.InsideTheVatican.com

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