Catholic Sensibility

In my previous posts on the liturgy, we looked at Fr Keith Pecklers’ claim that at the very center of Sacrosanctum Concilium (Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy) “was one fundamental principle: full, conscious, and active liturgical participation for the whole mystical body of Christ.” We also explored Pope Benedict XVI’s critique of much modern liturgy – that its subject has become “neither God nor Christ, but the ‘we’ of the ones celebrating.” Well, it would seem that an important question would be: How can we encourage “liturgical participation” - including the participation of minorities and those whom Fr Pecklers calls “the great unwashed, those beyond the pale” – without losing Pope Benedict’s cosmic vision of “God’s going and drawing all back to himself” and “reverential silence”? Can it be done? Perhaps we can look to the East. At his opening address at the third Orthodox Congress of Belgium, held in the October of 2000, Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia began with reverence. The Eucharist, he said, is a “mystery beyond our understanding.” He quoted the Liturgy of St James: “Let all mortal flesh be silent, and stand with fear and trembling.” But then Bishop Kallistos said, “Without direct participation in the Eucharistic mystery, without personal involvement, without active experience, all our words about the sacrament are empty and useless. St Philaret of Moscow affirmed that the creed is only ours in so far as we live it. So too with the Eucharist: it has to be lived – directly, communally, personally, practically.” And, yes, this participation must be communal. “At the Divine Liturgy there are only active participants, and there are no passive spectators.” And, if the Divine Liturgy is to express the true character of our personhood, it needs to be interpersonal - we should express ourselves in the Liturgy as persons-in-relation fashioned in the Trinitarian image. So, Bishop Kallistos suggests that, at the recitation of the Creed, the Orthodox replace “I believe” with the more ancient form “We believe.” He points to the threefold exchange of mutual pardon during the Liturgy, when the priest bows to the people and they return his bow at the very beginning of the Eucharistic celebration, before the Great Entrance, and before the priest takes communion. He says that without such an exchange of forgiveness, there could be no Eucharist. “The priest needs the people’s forgiveness, and they need his; neither can act without the other.” Bishop Kallistos then tells us to read the words of St John Chrysostom: “Everything in the Eucharistic thanksgiving is shared in common. For the priest does not offer thanksgiving alone, but the whole people give thanks with him.” The Bishop says that “it might be said that the celebrant, as it were, asks permission from the laity before he begins to recite the anaphora, and until this permission has been given – ‘It is meet and right’ – he cannot proceed.” The whole congregation should sing, the whole congregation should exchange the kiss of peace, and, Bishop Kallistos suggests, the whole congregation should repeat the threefold ‘Amen’ at the conclusion of the epiclesis. We are reminded that the Eucharist is meant to be “heaven on earth” (Catholics might want to reread Orientale Lumen, 11). St Germanos of Constantinople, after all, began his Commentary on the Divine Liturgy by writing, “The church is an earthly heaven, in which the heavenly God dwells and moves.” But we are “taken up” with the whole Church – “through the icons the members of the Church in heaven become active participants in our earthly worship, while the walls of the church building open out into eternity.” And on the drum of the dome in a Byzantine church, one can often see a representation of the Great Entrance, but if you look closer, all of the figures – deacon, priest, subdeacon, bishop – are angels. As we affirm in the the presanctified Liturgy, “Now the powers of heaven worship with us invisibly.” And collectively, you might add. We can also sustain a communal and reverential Liturgy if we remember three things. First, “the true celebrant at every Eucharist is always Christ the invisible priest; we, the clergy and the people, are no more than concelebrants with him.” The real celebrant is not a priest whose “power” can somehow be disconnected, conceptually or otherwise, from the rest of the Body of Christ. Second, the Eucharist is a communion in Christ, but also a communion in the Holy Spirit (2 Cor 13:13), and, since the Spirit makes Christ’s presence a living and continuing reality in the Church (Jn 16:13-14), we cannot separate the Eucharist from our more everyday actions that must build up the Church. “To each individual the manifestation of the Spirit is given for some benefit” (1 Cor 12:7). Third, we must remember that the liturgy looks outwards – it is celebrated for the “life of the world.” Thus, there is, as St John Chrysostom says, a “second altar” in the marketplace, streets, and alleys. Chrysostom says, “Wherever you see someone who is destitute and in need, think that you are looking upon an altar.” Why do we have such trouble reconciling participation with reverence? Perhaps we have forgotten that “everything in the Eucharistic thanksgiving is shared in common” and exchanged such a vision for clericalism, replaced our icons with less meaningful statues and paintings, neglected thinking about the “communion in the Holy Spirit” because of concerns about the other Real Presence, and dismissed the “second altar” as strangely unrelated to our personal salvation. And so on. So participation and reverence always seem to come now at the expense of one another. Do you think that we can celebrate Liturgies that avoid what Benedict XVI has called “autocelebration” while still honoring the “fundamental principle” of Sacrosanctum Concilium: “full, conscious, and active liturgical participation for the whole mystical body of Christ”? I’d love to know.