conjectural navel gazing; jesus in lint form

'Thirty years ago, before the Vatican Council, Catholics didn't know what liturgy was.'

I think I know what Fr Greeley means but he's still wrong.

So Solesmes and later the legitimate liturgical movement that went along with Catholic Action (social-justice ministry) in those years... didn't exist?

Try again.

Anyway, he is partially right as Thomas Day better explained. Among the Irish devotions displaced liturgical piety. So you had the dead-silent Low Mass with the people praying their rosaries during it and maybe singing some sentimental 1890s saloon ballads with lyrics about Jesus and Mary tacked on (rather like what Christian rock does today).

But Day also refuted Greeley's implied statement that many/most Roman Catholics know what liturgy is now. No, the liturgical movement - teach people the traditional office and to sing the Tridentine Mass - was squashed and what they have in the parishes is still a Low Mass junked up with devotional, unliturgical, soppy hymns, only with the actual liturgy pared down and watered down the unliturgical stuff can take over even more! And the hymns are now imitation 1970s folk-pop.

Another gem from Day: in traditional Catholic rites everybody yet nobody has power simultaneously. The priest is boxed in nicely by vesture and rubric so it doesn't become 'the Fr Bob show'.

HA!

I so knew that would get you to comment. Sorry to bait you. How have things been? You have a good summer?

This summer I:

1) moved house - in six days! In the beginning there was a splendid little apartment, neat as two pins, in a Victorian house in a charming neighbourhood of an old inner-ring suburb of Fluffya, and YF saw that it was good. And it is.
2) had hernia surgery - see 1). It's what happens when 40-year-olds with no upper-body muscle do that kind of thing. It still will cost me less than hiring removers.
3) started bicycling again about a week ago, a fortnight after the operation. Hooray for laparoscopy and Darvocet.
4) named the part-time resident rabbit in my new place's garden after a character in a year-old sermon of yours. You can see him (her?) in the Flickr page you kindly added as one of your contacts.
5) was in a street procession round a city block for St Anne's Day, just like something you'd see at Walsingham or on the Continent. But I'd forgotten to unload the old photos using up my camera's memory. Alas. Take my word for it that it happened.

I am glad that you are recovering so well from your move...with all that it brought. Wondrous.

Now, back to your comment. I agree with you. Liturgy is a difficult thing. Idolatry always creeps in...whether or not one employs icons and the like. How, when, and who can all become idols. The colors, the space, the time, the people can all become idols. Scripture warns us of this. Those people knew. And it's no answer to suggest that we simply avoid worship all together. The Psalms suggest that is impossible. All creation praises the Lord. No?

Anyway, so, what then does a pastor do? Enshroud themselves in the liturgy so that Pastor Bob vanishes? Perhaps. But perhaps Bobby is distracted by that very practice and his soul is banished each mass in the process.

It is a sticky wicket.

I think that the biggest issue with liturgy is the separate perceptions about whether liturgy is for the benefit of the participants or for God. Of course, it doesn't and shouldn't be one or the other, but should and can be a symbiotic experience. But the manifestation of liturgy is colored by which side of this range of opinion one falls.

I agree that idolatry is a constant danger of the people centered worship service. But there is a subtle difference between a people focused worship designed to engage the faithful where they are and a people centered worship that makes their concerns override the need to interact with God. This is the accessibility and marketing debate. In my tiny brain, I think that the minister has responsibility for the management of that difference. The spiritual leader of the church needs to be open enough to allow for the cafeteria approach most people take to all aspects of their life, but solid enough that outliers can be gently herded back to the group.

Good liturgy is an expression of this push me/pull you dynamic. Tradition is a means to an end, not an end of its self. And a worship service is a gateway to interaction with God, not the definition of how God wants us to interact with him.

Can worship become a performance and still be worship? I think so, but only if we view it as a means to invite people through the gateway. This means that there has to be something for them as they move past the emotional experience of the performance. Thus the performance is like the prologue to a larger worship experience. The mega churches assert that the Sunday performances are exactly that, but the appetite of the American churchgoer is more suited to short attention span theater, so who can say how much real engagement there is? On the other hand, when the Jubilee Band plays and people applaud and then move into the next phase of worship with a lighter heart and a sense that life is not all Dhukka, I think that is good balance in liturgy.

Thanks for the book, BTW. I scanned it, and although the text is somewhat turgid, I'll enjoy reading it.

Tripp, do you REALLY think idolatry is all that present a risk? Do you REALLY think 21st century people can't tell the difference between inspiration delivered by way of image or sound or whatever, and worship of the object that embodies that image or sound or whatever?

(In case you can't tell, I REALLY think not. ;-)

Abusus non tollit usum.

Megan,

Sure I do. We have wealth and status and technology that serve "salvific" functions all the time, supplanting genuine spirituality with some kind of quick fix. We've been talking about it throughout Sabbath. Don't you think?

Do people still worship statues (If they really ever did)? Nah. We have other things now like "Democratic ideals" or "The American Family."

The same things that we do in the name of democracy we do in the name of liturgy. It goes both ways.

Ah, we're back to "salvific." Worry about salvation creates worry about idolatry, apparently. Since I'm not burdened with the one, I don't run into problems with the other.

But apart from that fundamental philosophical divide -- are the functions you're talking about for technology, etc. really "salvific"? Or just distracting?

As far as supplanting genuine spirituality, I don't think you (or anyone) have a snowball's chance of telling whether anyone else is ever having a genuine spiritual experience. Genuine spirituality is fundamentally private.

Megan,

Divides abound...Anything that stands in the place of the divine (and that can distract, yes) is an idol.

And this is where we differ...I believe that genuine spirituality is both communal and individual. Purely private spirituality raises a lot of questions for me simply because I think of all spirituality as relational. Thus, it is not private IMO.

Okay, it is past midnight in my timezone. I'll catch you on the morrow.

Neither "Democratic Ideals" nor "The American Family" are objects or graven images, however. This seems to me not idolatry so much as other focuses in competition with god for our attention, and these things have always been around in one form or another (not "The American Family" specifically, of course; generically, things on which people spend energy).

I suppose you can argue that the point of idolatry is just this, that you should point your energy somewhere in the direction of god and not onto some other, less worthy pursuits. If so, the question then seems to become, what if god doesn't supply enough feedback? If a person isn't supposed to expend their energy on things not godly, i.e. don't develop a passion for, say, music, even if it feeds your soul and delivers at least if not more energy to you as you devote to it, then where is the balance? Is loving music, which you find deeply enriching, a form of idolatry? Is being passionate about the state of one's fellow human beings to the point of getting involved in the political process (instead of attempting the same thing through a church) in order to affect change considered a sin? Does god frown on it? Where is the line drawn, and by whom?

Me, I always confused idolatry with not having any other god before God. They both seem to say don't worship anything but God. Also confusing about idolatry to me is the idea that you can't make an idol of anything at all, in heaven above or earth beneath - just what, exactly, is a crucifix?

Ben,

Hey there. Good stuff.

The line you are drawing is the issue. And it seems movable. Even Paul in his epistles suggests that this line moves a bit. His thinking on eating meat from idols is a great example. Certainly you can, he says. It's just meat. But not everyone who follows Jesus is "spiritually mature" enough to get that distinction. They may believe that the idol actually holds power of some kind. So, best not to eat meat...you don't want to "set a stumbling block before your brother or sister." The issue, as I understand it, is where you understand salvation to come from. Does it come from self-will? Does it come from wealth? A good political system? Or does it come from God.

Now, the issue of the crucifix etc that you bring up is pretty common...and it is a question of whether or not things of beauty can evoke something godly within us and can help transport us to God. The crucifix is not God. But it can point us to God. Similarly, there are tomes written about icons and their importance in Christian spiritual life. When one has an enfleshed God in Jesus, then a graven image is no longer the issue. Or is it? That's the debate.

Christian, a majority of us at least, worship a God that includes Jesus (Trinity), a physical God. So, one can paint a portrait of this god, and carve a statue of this God. God is now visible. You can lay eyes upon this God and not die. The understanding of God in this particular differs between Jew and Christian.

A Jew cannot have a graven image. God is invisible in some interpretations. Seeing God is more than the human being can withstand in other interpretations. Thus, no graven images.

But Christianity pushes this around a bit. People were held by God, hugged by God, ate with God. The central image/icon/portrait of Christ is the Eucharist. We are still invited to dine with Christ. Theologically, this physical nature of God is central.

If this is so, then what is an idol? An idol is more than a physical God. Heck, we worship one of those in the Trinity...Jesus. So, idolatry is still a real spiritual ill, but it is not simply in the graven image. It is found in our relationship to all sorts of things, ideas, issues, and relationships.

Wow...this is getting long.

Final example, trying to connect this to the liturgical conversation again, Father Bob cannot save me. He's not God. He can help me find God. He can be charitable to me. He can be kind. He can even preserve my life, save it in some way. But in the end, Fr. Bob is not God. He cannot save me. He is not judge of all the created order. To suggest otherwise is to make an idol of Father Bob.

Thanks for chiming in, Ben. And welcome!

Rich,

Just some more for you to read as you attempt to recover from your golf outing...Larry posted here on "seeker sensitive" worship. Read through the post. But more importantly, read through the comments. It's interesting stuff, and I think it responds to your comment well.

http://priestlygoth.blogspot.com/2007/09/some-promised-reflections.html

Larry comments, "Yet as you say the solution throws the baby out with the bath water. In fact the proposed solution places the blame in the wrong place. It blames the liturgy not the people who simply look without seeing, and the leaders who think that all one needs is a good or proper liturgy and all will be fine."

Recover from what golf outing? I haven't played in a month. It's killing me.

My read you Larry's thread is that we agree in large part, just not necessarily on where the line is. I also don't think that liturgy is bad. But liturgy for liturgy's sake misses the boat. No one function is the sole focus of worship, and while the seeker phenomenon is somewhat exaggerated in my mind, there exists a need to leave the worship experience open to free thinkers to find their way back in.

More importantly, I believe there are legitimate mindsets that find ritual stultifying when the meaning is separated from the ritual. For me, that is where the Mass fell apart as a long time Catholic. Even in English, it became a repetitive chant without meaning. That doesn't mean that it was that for everyone - just for me and people like me. So, I can agree with YF that it is OK to bring back the Tridentine Mass, as long as we can understand that I don't have to attend and I am none the poorer for it. Many roads to God and all that which goes with it.

So really, in the context of CCW, I simply want us to choose a general road that is meaningful to the greatest number of people like those we serve, unless we believe that we are truly a blip and people like us do not exist. Your direction from a few weeks ago about being a family to all really does begin that process in my mind.

Ciao

Rich

Rich is right that these things are the learning aids not the learning as pop-psych writer M. Scott Peck said about something else.

(That said the presence in the Blessed Sacrament and the quasi-sacramental presence in Orthodoxy of icons are something more than that.)

And Tripp is spot-on here:

'Do people still worship statues (if they really ever did)? Nah. We have other things now like "Democratic ideals" or "The American Family."'

From Fr Andrew L.J. James: 'There is no-one so stupid as to believe an image is actually his or her god'.

The stock character in my native tradition of the 'spike' who cares more about the production values of the services than what they really mean illustrates your criticisms but again, translating the Latin bit I quoted earlier, the abuse of something doesn't take away its right use.