Getting to the Point: worship

Showing posts with label worship. Show all posts

Monday, July 20, 2015

Doing The Best We Can Under Current Conditions

Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause

against an ungodly people,

from the deceitful and unjust man

deliver me!

For you are the God in whom I take refuge;

why have you rejected me?

Why do I go about mourning

because of the oppression of the enemy?

Send out your light and your truth;

let them lead me;

let them bring me to your holy hill

and to your dwelling!

Then I will go to the altar of God,

to God my exceeding joy,

and I will praise you with the lyre,

O God, my God.

Why are you cast down, O my soul,

and why are you in turmoil within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,

my salvation and my God.

Psalm 43

Reflection – I am back from another week of family ministry, this time at the Nazareth family apostolate in Quebec, slightly sunburned and with that pleasantly exhausted feeling that comes from having spent a week doing something good for people.

This lovely psalm follows upon the previous one and repeats some of the same images: ‘why do I go mourning… why are you cast down my soul… hope in God, I shall praise him again…’ It captures to some degree an important aspect of our experience of life in this world. There is a certain amount of uncertainty, a certain darkness of human experience, a certain cast-down-ness that is part of the human condition.

We simply don’t see God and simply don’t ‘know’ Him in this life, not really. Not as we hope to know Him in the next, anyhow. And meanwhile there are ‘ungodly people’ all about—who may be anyone who by word, deed, or omission makes the world in which we live darker, makes it harder for us to hold onto faith, hope, love.

And at the same time, there is this God who while shrouded in mystery is our hope and our salvation. It is so important to realize, and the psalms help us to realize it, that our faith in God is not some airy-fairy, pie-in-the-sky escape from reality, but is in fact the light of hope that allows us to embrace reality in all its roughness and sorrows. We do not flee from the difficult and painful parts of life into a fantasy world of ‘me-and-Jesus’. Rather, Jesus and His Father empower us by the gift of the Holy Spirit to confront everything in the world, and everything in our hearts (which is even harder) that opposes light and love and bring the light and truth of God to bear on it.

Psalm 43 is a battle psalm, a psalm that is taken right from the daily experience of a person of faith living in a world without faith. And it does acknowledge that in the midst of the battle we need help from on high. ‘Send forth your light and your truth’. It is the truth of God, given to us above all in the words of the Gospel, that is our light on the path, that is the sure guide showing us how to get to that altar of God which is our joy in this world and the next.

That is significant, too. Our joy, salvation, deliverance, is found in coming to the altar of God. This is something I am exploring at length and (hopefully) in depth in my Thursday commentary on the Mass. We are made for the worship of God, and to enter that act of worship in Christ is the deepest fulfillment of our humanity, and indeed the very entry of the human person into the life of the Trinity.

Meanwhile, we carry on and do the best we can under battle conditions. Turmoil without and turmoil within, and yet always looking for that bit of light, that bit of truth that will see us through whatever the current struggle is to the next place of calm and freedom where we can take up the lyre and strum another psalm or two to the God who saves us. And that is our task this day, to look for the light, weather the storm, and praise the Lord for all things.

Thursday, July 9, 2015

A Matter of Strict Justice

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of good will… It is Thursday and so time again for my running commentary on the Mass and our living it out in daily life. There is a marvellous sacred logic in the entrance rites of the liturgy—we begin in the sign that encapsulates our whole faith, the sign of the Cross, then are brought together into a communion by the ritual form of greeting. Then we, as a group, acknowledge our failure to live this communion of love with God and neighbour.

Now, having received the assurance of God’s mercy and forgiveness in the conclusion of the penitential rite, we break forth in a hymn of jubilant ecstatic praise—the Gloria. It all makes perfect sense and sheds light on how we are to conduct our whole spiritual life—living in the mystery of the Trinity and the Redemption, ordering our whole action towards communion and love, deeply humble in light of our failures, but in that knowing his mercy and so continually praising Him.

While the Mass will of course go on and all of this will just get deeper and more beautiful, the whole of our Christian life is found within the first few minutes of a normal Sunday liturgy. Isn’t that great? While there is a great need for catechesis and evangelization throughout the Church, isn’t it wonderful that an attentive and thoughtful presence at any old Sunday Mass anywhere in the world can potentially give a person adequate instruction on how to live their lives, at least in the basic pattern?

So, praise and thanksgiving. The Gloria is all of this on overdrive, an outpouring of repetitive euphoric delight in God for His goodness, His mercy, His awesome might and majesty and beauty and power and love and goodness and, well, glory.

What is this about? Why is it so vital to praise and thank God? It is my firm conviction, to be quite honest borne out by long experience, that when we are praising and thanking God continually, there is a peace and order in our lives even if we are in trial and anguish. And when praise and thanksgiving grow weak and faint, there is a heaviness, a hardness, a shallowness or a deadness, a loss of vitality or a rising of anger in us that is inevitable.

The reason for this is as simple as simple can be: to praise God and thank Him is to live in reality. To fail to praise Him, or worse yet to refuse to praise Him, is to step out of reality. Because the reality is that, even when life is full of troubles and sorrows and pain, we have a God who loves us, who gives us being, and who has poured out Himself not only to sustain us in our own being, but to communicate to us His Being, to give us His Life.

And there are natural goods all around us, too. If you are reading this blog post, you are probably not starving to death. You probably have adequate shelter and clothing. You have clean water to drink. I personally live in a place that has so much natural beauty of water, earth, flora and fauna that I am quite honestly dazzled by it every day of my life.

And the people who do lack these things—well, our experience in MH has been that the poorest of the earth among whom we have been privileged to live and work actually are the most inclined to thank God for everything and praise Him in all things. So they don’t need to be told; they need to tell us.

So the most basic response of honesty, of personal integrity, of strict justice for crying out loud, is to thank God for all of the above and for so much more—for all the decent good people we know, and those we don’t know but who keep the world afloat just by showing up each day and doing their jobs. And I could go on, and on, and on. There is literally no end to all of what we really should, really must give thanks for.

And thanking God for His gifts, we come to know that God is the Giver, that God is truly the source of all that is, that God is truly great, that there is something There that is beyond our capacity to even give thanks for. And so thanksgiving yields to praise, to rapturous exultant praise that the Reality which is at the center of all reality is ‘all that’ – all good, all love, all beauty. Simply, all in all.

It is this spirit of praise and gratitude that then places us so deeply in reality that we are rightly positioned to really understand and tackle the real problems, the real evils, the real work that we need to do to make the world the beautiful place, the place of communion and love that it is meant to be.

We cannot do that if we are fuming and fulminating, bitching and complaining and stewing and sulking. Internet culture fosters that, unfortunately. But liturgical culture, understood and lived out, heals that, and out of that empowers us to be people of action and mission, in a spirit of love and genuine care for the world and all who dwell therein.

Sunday, September 28, 2014

How Can We Make the Mass Relevant to People?

Universality is an essential feature of Christian worship. It is the worship of an open heaven. It is never just an event in the life of a community that finds itself in a particular place.

No, to celebrate the Eucharist means to enter into the openness of a glorification of God that embraces both heaven and earth, an openness effected by the Cross and Resurrection. Christian liturgy is never just an event organized by a particular group or set of people or even by a particular local Church.

Mankind’s movement toward Christ meets Christ’s movement toward men. He wants to unite mankind and bring about the one Church the one divine assembly, of all men.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy

Reflection – One more day of ‘Ratzinger blogging’, and then we’ll be on to something different next week. It seemed appropriate on Sunday, the day of the Lord’s resurrection when the whole Body of Christ throughout the world is gathering together to worship the Risen Lord, to have this excerpt from Spirit of the Liturgy.

Liturgy in Roman Catholic culture in the past 50 years has suffered deeply from the loss of this universal perspective. Far too often we are locked into our own immediate community, our own immediate parish or culture or situation, and the liturgy becomes a mere expression of communal solidarity or identity.

The worst examples of this are seen, of course, in youth ministry, when efforts to make the Mass ‘relevant’ to teenagers or children lead perhaps well-meaning priests and youth workers to introduce such novelties as rock bands, rap, superhero vestments, and so forth. When the focus of the liturgy becomes the assembly and not God, the people and not the Person, fellowship and not Communion, then we are badly off course.

This is why fidelity to the rubrics matters so much. We are not just a little group doing our own thing at St. Soandso Parish, and so able to edit, add, delete, and modify the rite according to what works for us. What really works for us is to celebrate the liturgy exactly as it is given to us, to ‘say the black and do the red’ and in this to know ourselves to be part of a bigger body, a larger reality, a Church that extends to the ends of the earth and in fact transcends the earthly realm to extend to the worship of the Church Triumphant before the throne of God.

In fact, I would argue in a Chestertonian style that the liturgy is most relevant to us, most meeting us where we are, precisely when it is incomprehensible, obscure. It is most meaningful precisely where it is ‘meaningless’. Because we moderns need more than anything to be shaken out of our narrow provincialism, our conviction that the world begins and ends with us, that all reality is to conform itself to our little ideas and our little prejudices, rather than we conforming ourselves to the reality of God which is vastly greater than us.

When we are pushed beyond our immediate understanding and resonance with a liturgical moment, we are actually touching upon the fact, which goes way beyond liturgy and extends to every aspect of spiritual and moral life, that God is continually calling us well out of our comfort zones, well beyond what is easy or feels natural or corresponds to our notions about life.

The simple act of conforming ourselves to the liturgy that the Church gives us, rather than demanding continually that the liturgy conform itself to our likes and dislikes, is a deep act of spiritual humility that genuinely helps us to be conditioned for all the acts of discipleship, obedience, surrender, abandonment that the Lord will most certainly ask of all of us in our lives.

And that we do this act of conformation as a body, a community, signals then that this is the true identity of our community: we are the people the Lord calls together (the original meaning of ecclesia) to be his people, the ones he fashions and shapes according to his good purposes and not ours, his truth and meaning and not ours, his Death and Resurrection and glorification in heaven, and not our little and poor ideas about human happiness and flourishing.

Liturgical obedience is a powerful means, expression, and symbolic realization of the basic stance of faith and discipleship, and we in the Western Church need desperately to recover that sense of faith regarding the liturgy, both for our own selves, and for our task of evangelizing the world.

Thursday, September 25, 2014

What is the Point of Religion?

The essence of an image consists in the fact that it represents something… with the fact that it goes beyond itself… thus the image of God means, first of all, that the human being cannot be closed in on himself. If he attempts this he betrays himself. To be the image of God implies relationality. It is the dynamic that sets the human being in motion toward the totally Other. Hence it means the capacity for relationship; it is the human capacity for God.

Joseph Ratzinger, In the Beginning

Reflection – ‘What is the point of religion, anyway?’ In a novel I read on my holidays, one of the characters, completely steeped in secular values and irreligious, asked this perfectly reasonable question. What is the purpose of prayer in human life, of religious observance, of turning towards God?

It is an important question – one might argue that it is the question the world poses to the Church right now. What are we bringing to the table? We have to avoid, it seems to me, giving answers that are utilitarian in nature. Religion helps us to be more peaceful… or helps us to work for social justice… or makes us more generous… or creates a more stable society…

All of these may be true to greater or lesser degrees, but none of these is the ‘point’ of religion. Prayer, and hence God, are not tools we use to achieve some greater purpose, some end of our own. This quote from Ratzinger gives us the real answer. The real answer to the question, hard as this may be to present to a thoroughly secular person, is that the point of God is that God is the point of everything.

We are not religious people because we hope to gain some other good from being religious—having our prayers answered so that we get what we want, or some variation on that. We are religious people because we believe that the purpose of creation is to enter into relationship with God.

Really the question is not ‘what is the point of religion?’ The question is ‘what is the point of anything?’ Life can be about professional success… but why bother with that? Life can be about happy family relationships… but why bother with that? Life can be about cramming in as much pleasure as we can into each moment (YOLO!)… but why bother with that?

At each twist and turn of trying to find some ultimate meaning and purpose to life, we are always confronted with human finitude, with the inevitability of death and the insufficiency of strictly human goods to genuinely satisfy us. What is the point of anything, really, unless everything is pointing us beyond the human and the finite and the mortal?

Once we open the door to that other reality, to God and to faith and to prayer, then everything becomes charged with meaning—our work, our loves, our families, our pleasures all become taken up in a world of meaning that is not doomed to the futility of the grave.

The point of religion, of faith, is that it gives a sure and solid and indestructible meaning to everything else in life, and without this meaning, everything else is really very fragile. It is quite a mysterious affair—it is only when we allow for the invisible, the unprovable, that which no eye has seen and no ear has heard, that which seems to be so insubstantial and fleeting, that all the things that are near at hand, obvious, plain, become fully solid and real with a lasting meaning and purpose.

Secularism has turned its back on the invisible and indemonstrable matters of God and the spirit in favor of what can be proven and known to the senses. Ironically, we find ourselves in a world devoid of lasting value or purpose, a world of brute matter and physical forces, a world where there is no meaning save what our frail and feeble humanity can impose on it for a short span of years.

Faith allows for this one element of impenetrable mystery—God!—and so the whole universe becomes charged with crystalline purpose and goodness, all the brute matter echoes like a resonating glass vibrating with the music of the angels, and all of humanity becomes the great priesthood of the cosmos, offering praise and worship to the Creator and so enacting that which is the utter fulfillment of all creation, the utter fulfillment of our own human destiny and vocation, the absolute and final and endless point of all that is.

And that is the point of religion.