Liturgy and Music

Although I am personally too much of a music illiterate to get the maxim benefit out of the sections of this book referring to chant and polyphony, I have to agree with the reviews that this book is a real blockbuster and the perfect gift for any church musician. If the church musician himself or herself buys the book and likes it, they should share it with their priests. Priests who are musically illiterate (like me) should still read the first and last parts of this wonderful book.

What I like best about it, after reading the book of Laszlo Dobszay (Part I and Part II), is that William Mahrt brings you almost to where Dobszay wanted to go with liturgical renewal, but without confrontation, upheaval or anguish. He's a man after my own heart.

As I am able, I'll comment on a couple of fine ideas from that book.

Ears open and attentive

 

The verse of the Responsorial Psalm for this 4th Sunday in Ordinary Time, with its proper psalmody, really inspired me to hope this morning. It is not only faith which comes through hearing. The marvelous interplay of ears and heart, by the grace of God, can indeed melt the frozen, warm the chill. VENI, SANCTE SPIRITUS!

My review of PART II of the Dobszay book on the restoration and renewal of the Roman Rite left me a bit pensive and wondering whether I didn't owe someone something more than a judgment in terms of the merit of his project on the future of Catholic Worship labelled: "PROJECT ON HOLD!" I would not discount Dobszay's work, so shouldn't I offer a suggestion or scenario for its employ? As only fools rush in where angels dare not tread... I should probably leave well enough alone. We are talking about more than just the difficulty of imposing again, as was done in 1970, on the average man or woman in the pews, without appreciation of what is at stake. We're talking about the tip of an iceberg involving a whole array of questions, theological, ecclesiological and even moral. The ongoing commentary and analysis of the state of affairs in efforts toward a rapprochement between the Catholic Church and the SSPX (see latest installment over at RORATE CAELI), at least as I am able to follow it and despite its complexity and the fact that it is also very much emotionally charged, leaves me nonetheless wanting to contribute to untying the Gordian knot and especially now as I am filled with sentiment inspired by the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity just behind us for another year. The SSPX issue is an important piece on the puzzle table of how to go about restoring and renewing the Roman Rite. Liturgical renewal figures centrally in what we are calling the new evangelization.

I disagree with those who claim that when it is all said and done one can characterize "Roman" wariness vis-a-vis the SSPX as an unwillingness "to lose face" in seeking reconciliation and going on with our common history. If that were all there is to the matter, then I'd say, let's pray and study and work hard in the upcoming "Year of Faith" and then come back and look at the matter in November 2013, hoping and praying that we as a Church will be graced truly during this coming year with ears and heart open and ready. What makes this situation different from the old and glorious school fights which pitted the Jesuits against the Dominicans (to give but one example) in titanic battles where despite the heated tone nobody wished to deny anything to the other side except perhaps a sufficiency of understanding of the fullness possessed by the other or a lack of vision on the part of the opponent? These school fights simmered and even boiled on the back-burner and were not always resolved. Why can't we reestablish full communion and be about the fisticuffs in good old Catholic fashion? Not everyone applauded the results of Vatican I, but at some point certain people turned their backs on us forever and others made peace. Why and in what sense is our present dilemma any different?

I think my question is fair, but I'd be a fool if I thought I had an answer to it. I'd be like one of Job's so-called friends, who jumped to conclusions excluding the possibility that it was the Lord Who was there to teach His chosen people another way to understand personal justice and God's favor. Maybe indeed we still have not spent enough time sitting there on the ground and praying with the friend in our midst there upon the dung heap? "If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts."

Summorum Pontificum speaks about "mutual enrichment" as something willed for the two expressions or forms of the Roman Rite. Each day, as more young people of good will get involved, I see new and creative ways found to reintroduce the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite into the life of the Church and especially at the level of parish. What will the outcome of this process of exposure and hopefully enrichment be? Are we apt to see a universal and grassroots movement to pick up the thread and proceed from where we left off in 1962? Will history lead us to a workshop where those responsible sit around and plan our liturgical future with Dobszay's book as an instruction manual or a road-map in hand? I seriously doubt it. Optimal liturgy can only be the keystone of the marvelous edifice of the recovery of the faith. That involves renewed Christian family life and children learning their prayers at home. That involves a more general and profound knowledge of basic catechism.

As I say, I'm terribly hopeful about a positive outcome to the struggle to recover our continuity with a liturgical tradition we never intended to jettison and this for the sake of the proclamation of the Gospel, for the sake of the praise in spirit and in truth of His Holy Name. Although I truly always have been put off by the most strident and mindless manifestations of "new liturgy", I can't say how I was able to overcome my association with the trendy perception that Mass "across the altar" was preferable. To a certain extent this was a gradual process worked out in my own life as a priestly celebrant. My longing for worship ad Orientem whenever and wherever possible seems to be the fruit of "melting the frozen, warming the chill, guiding steps which had gone astray". The Lord's Voice goes forth; His Word will bear fruit in due season.

"If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts."

The Church is Where You are to be Found

The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy

Alexander Schmemann

(St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, New York, 2003)

A colleague loaned me his copy of this book which must be labelled either "a standard work" or a "classic". Reading it you get an impression, not so much of timelessness but of freshness, such that you would hardly guess that the 2003 edition is the third reprint in English of a work first translated from the Russian and published in 1963. I have some very strong objections to Schmemann's approach to history, but I learned a lot from the book especially in terms of contextualizing the experience I had of Orthodoxy while stationed in Jerusalem in the years 1993-96.

Despite my strong temptation to go after the way Schmemann yokes the Byzantine Church to temporal power, I prefer to take his observations on monasticism, not so much in the Greek form but as he describes it in Russian Orthodoxy and especially in the 15th century as point of departure for a reflection on how even ordinary Christians manifest contrition and set their hearts on the heavenly Kingdom:

"Yet amid all this darkness and decay there was the pure air of the monastery, evidence of the possibility of repentance, renewal, and purification. The monastery is not the crown of the Christian world, but on the contrary, its inner judgment seat and accuser, the light shining in the darkness. This must be understood for a comprehension of the origins of the "Russian soul." In the midst of its degradation it stretches toward this limitless brightness; it contains the tragic discord between the vision of spiritual beauty and purity expressed in monasticism and the sense of the hopeless sinfulness of life. Those who see a wholeness in the Russian religious mind of these ages are deeply mistaken, for just then, in the centuries after the Tatar invasion, the dualism which would mark its future course began to enter into it." (p. 308)

Elsewhere and repeatedly in his book Schmemann maintains that Christianity was imposed on the people of the Rus and only ever absorbed or integrated by an elite. He seems convinced that for the masses, the ordinary folk, Byzantine ritual was a veneer covering the "soft paganism" of the Slavic lands. He points to the rudeness in the people resulting from centuries of slavery under the brutal Tatars. So far Schmemann, the expert on Orthodoxy writing his original in Russian, and as he is dead at the moment, as they say, it hardly pays to get too worked up about what he says about post-Muscovite Slavic Orthodoxy. It is sort of like a French Dominican of over a century ago who insisted that American Catholicism had nothing to offer to the Church at large because of the hypocrisy generally of American Catholics. You have three choices in the face of such a condemnation: 1) Object with vehemence; 2) Beat your breast: 3) Get on with life as the Dominican too in question is long dead.

Getting on with the question for me in terms of Schmemann means posing another question or taking another perspective in terms of the why and wherefore of the Church in time and then ultimately. Ultimately, the Church should be our window on how things ought to be, how they will be in the fullness of time when Christ comes again in glory:

"And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light shall the nations walk; and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it, and its gates shall never be shut by day - and there shall be no night there; they shall bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations." (Revelations 21:22-26)

 Here on earth we perforce see as through a glass darkly. The Church even at its most sublime while celebrating the Sacred Liturgy can be no more than foretaste and promise of the Kingdom which is to come. Hans Urs von Balthasar writing about the liturgy ("Liturgy and Awe", vol. II of his Explorations in Theology, Ignatius Press) attributes greater clarity to the worship of the Western Church in its classic liturgy than is preserved in the East. In another article published in the same volume ("Seeing, Hearing and Reading Within the Church), von Balthasar seems to take exception to Schmemann for blaming the Russian dualism on the Tatar yoke and points to a specific deficiency of the Byzantine liturgical tradition:

"Thus while it is true that the Eastern liturgy, where it genuinely unfolds itself, is a liturgy of seeing, in which the believer is permitted to see, through mirror and likeness, the supraheavenly mysteries of the new age in a great symbolic-representative sequence of scenes as it were solidifies into the "wall of images", the iconostasis - solidified like the ceremonial of the Byzantine court - and that this now divides the church interior into two, one space for the profane, uninitiated people who must be content with the "colorful reflection of the splendor" and one space for the mystic-initiated priest who always has the iconostasis at his back and already stands on the far side of all likenesses." (p. 485)

Von Balthasar is no less sparing in his criticism of Western liturgy, but my point would be that the basic question is another. How do we get to the Kingdom? How do we live the Christian life? The Byzantine world is filled with stories of saints and would-be saintly people who at the end of their lives took the monastic habit. The great example for me is St. Methodius' brother St. Cyrill, who took the habit at Rome when he realized he was dying. I think Schmemann has a great and beautiful description of Russian monasticism when he says of it: "The monastery is not the crown of the Christian world, but on the contrary, its inner judgment seat and accuser, the light shining in the darkness."

Taking the habit is not so much going over to a religious elite, not so much choosing the better path, as it is symbol of commitment with firm purpose to amend our lives. It is that step really which the Church asks of us all, regardless of our state in life, beyond the tears of our penance. It is our "yes" to the exhortation of Jesus to the woman caught in adultery "Go and sin no more."

As taboo as it is to speak about such things in the Church today, I cannot but think of the number of people in the West who in days gone by, on the advice of their confessors, took the hair-shirt or the discipline. Ultimately, the sense of the brown scapular of our Lady of Mount Carmel in which we were enrolled at First Communion is the same, namely as token, sign, sacramental witness of our resolve never to be separated from Christ and His Blessed Mother again.

It is not the judgment but the love, the light, the luminous witness, which draws us, and is so eloquently illustrated in the tender dialogue between the Virgin of Tepeyac and St. Juan Diego.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Americas, Pray for Us!

Back in the Fold

In Ukraine I find myself far from that part of the world, and from the parish and the excitement of the first experiences with the new English translation of the Roman Missal. I have to content myself long-distance with comments in the blogosphere and candid reactions from friends at home and elsewhere in the English speaking world. Among the tidbits which have come my way, I was a bit taken off guard by a comment from an Italian priest friend who said very simply that the new English reminds him of the Italian Missal in the sense that both demand attention and application if a priest is going to pray them properly for the people. My spontaneous thought was: Looks like we're back in the fold with the greater Church around the world. Despite glitches, it is obviously a smaller but significant blessing that this old Simeon has lived long enough to see. Deo gratias!

My prayers continue for all who strive in the area of sacred music. Long term and not discounting initial hurdles and objections to abandoning much of a parish's repertoire of songs in an attempt to set forth the genuine tradition of the Western Church (read: Latin Church), I am convinced that in the area of music, sacred music, the English-speaking world is called to provide the leadership in the work of recovering plain chant and more, both in Latin and in the vernacular. I'm exposed to music in a lot of different languages and most of it involves translations of the English speaking world's hymnody or popular church music. The Western Church's vernacular music repertoire in the average community everywhere in the world is really quite limited. If you taught people or even a scola just a couple basic chant melodies and turned them loose on the propers for Mass, you'd end up with exponentially more variety (if that's what you want) than comes forth from those few hymns everybody knows and that just with verses 1 and 2, which are as far as we go. As I say, all involved in church music and pastors who have responsibility for encouraging restoration and development according to the mind of the Church are definitely in my daily prayers.

On the issue of worship ad Orientem, I'd ask your continued prayers for my carpenter who has begun preparing the new altar for my chapel. I can't wait. The other day I finally met with the priest who designed the chapel and we have agreed on the modifications which need to be made. I may have strong-armed him a bit, but the sisters were there to console him after our meeting and to assure him that the additions and changes were really going to make Father's work even more beautiful. Don't ask me to go into liturgical art consulting!

In this regard, the experience of these months of celebrating across the altar have confirmed my belief that we are dealing with a fad and not any kind of liturgical development. Both ways of preparing the gifts and praying the Eucharistic Prayer are possible in the Church today, but the great tradition and, I am thoroughly and profoundly convinced, the better way is ad Orientem. 

Not from my own experience (which I explained back in Island Envoy), but from listening and observing, I can see however that the change to ad Orientem where that is possible without a huge financial outlay is really a terribly high hurdle to clear. What was done overnight and in haste two generations ago (moving in a table or quickly fabricating something of TV or movie set quality) looms terribly large and immovable for most priests today when it comes to reversing a trend. What can I say? The Extraordinary Form of the liturgy today teaches eloquently and should have its impact on the Ordinary Form. Beyond the Missal and decorous music, a key component is studying and accurately celebrating the Mass according to the rubrics but doing so if and whenever possible ad Orientem. 

No doubt the difference from 2 generations back in time is that Father back then could act capriciously and few dared call him to account. I can only hope and pray that for our day and time genuine leadership among priests and bishops in this regard will find the way.

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

Adieu! Reform of the Reform!

"The Restoration and Organic Development of the Roman Rite", by Laszlo Dobszay (T&T Clark, New York, 2010)

I just finished Part I of this magnificent book by a man whose earlier book I had shied away from because of the use of the words "Bugnini-Liturgy" in the title. I am so glad I put out big money (caveat!) for this book and look forward to reading Part II as my post-vacation or traveling schedule permits.

Part I of the Dobszay book does many things in a truly scholarly but eminently readable way. He sings the praises of Summorum Pontificum and offers great insights into what the Holy Father might intend or what we could hope for from a mutual enrichment (short term) from the coexistence of the two forms of the Roman rite. In no uncertain terms he explains his reasons for declaring the Novus Ordo (especially the Liturgy of Hours) to be, in the words of our present Holy Father, a devastation (cf. preface to Gamber book from 1992). As the title of his book indicates, Dobszay proposes a return to the 1962 Missal as a point of departure for a (long term) reform of the Roman Rite as willed by the Fathers of the II Vatican Council in Sacrosanctum Concilium and somehow subverted by the post-concliar committees. The author sees the way of Summorum Pontificum, two forms (ordinary and extraordinary) existing peacefully next to each other, as this way to finding ourselves and promoting the development of the Rite. For the time being, he sees no alternative for the majority of Catholics to an abuse-free and well celebrated Novus Ordo.

There is nothing too heady or cerebral about Dobszay's proposal. He understands and articulates well why turning back the clock to 1962 and abandoning the Novus Ordo altogether would be a grave error. At the same time he disavows the reform of the reform movement, arguing most convincingly that the gap created in 1970 and the years following cannot be bridged; the rupture is less that than a complete abandonment of the Roman tradition. To my mind he has undoubtedly made the case for returning to the firm foundation of the liturgy of the ages.

... Am I going to shred my liturgical reflections over at Island Envoy ? I don't think I have to. Granted, mine are not the fine tuned insights of Laszlo Dobszay but we share the way forward in terms of encouraging not only the best possible celebration of the Novus Ordo but also in terms of a suggestion he makes for opting whenever possible in the celebration for the option closest to the tradition. Decorum or sobriety, chant, and most dear to me preparing gifts and praying the Eucharistic Prayer ad Orientem.

The introduction of the new English translation of the Third Edition of the Roman Missal is at the door. Please, Lord, that it will be received well! Please, Lord, that a generous application of Summorum Pontificum will hasten the day when the thread can be picked up and the tradition be organically set forth!