The Liturgy for What It Is

The Cosmic & Universal Dimension of Liturgy

There has been a lot of talk on some of my favorite Blogs about liturgy and what should and shouldn't occur at Mass. While some may take these postings and statements as opinion, I know these bloggers well enough to know that they aren't concerned with their preference for things as much as they are concerned with the Mass and all liturgical celebration being an authentic and orthodox expression of the worship of God.

Scott Hahn in The Lamb's Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth, describes the Mass as such:

"Liturgy is Parousia [Christ's second coming in physical presence], the 'already' entering our 'not yet,' wrote [then] Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. When Jesus comes again at the end of time, He will not have a single drop more glory than He has right now upon the altars and in the tabernacles of our churches. God dwells among mankind, right now, because the Mass is heaven on earth." [1]

Hahn then quotes one of my favorite paragraphs from the Catechism which explains what the Mass IS:

"In the earthly liturgy we share in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the Holy City of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God, Minister of the sanctuary and of the true tabernacle. With all the warriors of the heavenly army we sing a hymn of glory to the Lord; venerating the memory of the saints, we hope for some part and fellowship with them..." (No. 1090) [2]

In today's American Catholic Church, we often find a type of presentation or entertainment Liturgy that purports to be the Mass. In actuality, the Mass is something that is received and not something we create or make. We don't get together in parish councils or committees and design a liturgical celebration or create a Mass to be celebrated. The Mass is already something - as Hahn puts it, a little bit of Heaven on earth. This isn't my idea either, this is the Church's and the Pope's. In his book Feast of Faith the Pope, writing then as Cardinal Ratzinger explains these concepts further:

"...it follows that liturgy has a cosmic and universal dimension. The community does not become a community by mutual interaction. It receives its being as a gift from an already existing completeness, totality, and in return gives itself back to this totality... this is why liturgy cannot be "made". This is why it has to be simply received as a given reality and continually revitalized. This is why universality is expressed in a form binding on the whole Church, committed to the local congregation in the form of the "rite". [3]

"...On earth as IT IS in Heaven."

So then, we see that liturgy is something which pre-exists us as a Church or a community. That communities in Christ, or parishes, do not exist because of what they do or their mutual interaction but because of something that already exists: The Eucharist, the True Presence. Ratzinger continues:

As "feast", liturgy goes beyond the realm of what can be made and manipulated; it introduces us to the realm of given, living reality, which communicates itself to us. That is why, at all time and in all religions, the fundamental law of liturgy has been the law of organic growth within the universality of the common tradition... In this sense liturgy has always imposed an obligatory form on the indiviual congregation and the individual celebrant. It is a gurantee, testifying to the fact that something greater is taking place here than can be brought about by any individual community or group of people. [4]

When we discuss the Mass, and liturgy in general, we are talking about something cosmic and fixed. Not fixed as in permanently one way, as some very rigid traditionalists would argue, but fixed in the sense that the Mass always is the same thing, even if organically it grows in some elements. What can never happen to the Mass though, is for a group, community, or congregation to 'make' the Mass their "own" and somehow personalize it to themselves. If they do that, it most likely stops being the Mass and some personal liturgical something-or-other. The Pope continues:

"Christian liturgy is cosmic liturgy, as Saint Paul tells us in the Letter to the Philippians. It must never renounce this dignity, however attractive it may seem to work with small groups and construct homemade liturgies. What is exciting about Christian liturgy is that it lifts us up out of our narrow sphere and lets us share in the truth." [5]

So what we see is that we aren't doing something or creating, but instead receiving. Writing almost 20 years later in The Spirit of the Liturgy, Cardinal Ratzinger explained further what liturgy is in terms of its relation between heaven and earth:

"We do indeed participate in the heavenly liturgy, but this participation is mediated to us through earthly signs, which the Redeemer has shown to us as the place where His reality is to be found. In liturgical celebration there is a kind of turning around of exitus to reditus, of departure to return, of God's descent to our ascent. The liturgy is the means by which earthly time is inserted into the time of Jesus Christ and into its present. It is the turning point in the process of redemption. The Shepherd takes the lost sheep onto his shoulders and carries it home." [6]

The takeaway from all of this is that we shouldn't think that what we do at Mass is somehow creative of the Mass itself. Instead, we are participating in the cosmic liturgy that is already preexisting.  Therefore, things like clapping for human achievement, spontaneous creative elements, and personal subjective alteration of what the Mass is supposed to be doesn't change the Mass, but instead is a misunderstanding of what the liturgy is. For a long time before my reversion, I wanted a more relevant Mass. What I misunderstood was that it wasn't the Mass that was irrelevant to me as a person living in today's world, but instead it was that my thinking was irrelevant to what the Mass is in the cosmic reality of time. The best thing we can do as Catholics is to learn and understand to accept the liturgy for what it is. Then and only then can we fully appreciate, and I would even argue participate, in the Mass in its universal dimension.

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Notes:
[1] Scott Hahn; The Lamb's Supper - The Mass as Heaven on Earth, p. 116.
[2] CCC: 1090
[3] Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger; The Feast of Faith, p. 66.
[4] Ibid, p. 66-67.
[5] Ibid, p. 75.
[6]Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger; The Spirit of the Liturgy, p. 61.

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See generally, other blogs:

The Crescat: "in the end it was the Children's Mass that drove me away"

Ibid: "Catholic Magpies"

Creative Minority Report: "Stop Clapping at Mass"

The Anchoress: "The Applause at Mass has to Stop"