The Entire Thought

Getting Liturgy Right

The king had a banquet for his son. Mass is our banquet for God’s Son. But . . . “Are modern people even capable of worship?”

That painful question came not from a cynic, but from Romano Guardini, a lover of the liturgy and one of our great spiritual writers. It is a rhetorical question, since everyone has to worship, well or badly. But everyone knows that church worship these days, both Catholic and Protestant, is inadequate. Our relationship with God is surely more profound and more personal than the average service.

Whose fault is that? Partly the professional liturgists, who tend to get caught up in ancient, arcane rituals or modern, squishy theories. But mostly, Guardini insists, the fault is buried deep within three traits of modern
humankind: lack of contemplation, lack of community and lack of body/soul integration.

Lack of contemplation. Contemplation may be described as a long, loving look at the real. The real tree, the real person, the real God. You don’t have to understand the tree or analyze the person or pray to God. Just look at the real until the real becomes part of you, and you become real.

The Rimbaud says: It is not that I think, but that something is thinking in me. Contemplation is absorbing the other like a sponge. We have to be schooled in silence; we must shut up and know that it is better to hear “I love you" than to say “I love you.” We will not get liturgy right until our chattering prayer is muffled in the cloak of quiet contemplation.

Lack of community. The most obvious sign of our descent from community to individuality is in the titles of our magazines. We went from Life to People to Us to Self. Next might be MeMeMe. That is not all bad—we have to take care of ourselves—but we become less than ourselves when we deny our imbedded-ness in the larger
community. We admit our groupiness by taking group pictures, but what face do we automatically look for in that
picture? We must learn to balance our being: All of us are because of you, and you are because of all of us. Neither is first, neither is better; both are essential. Humankind is like a humongous intertwining web: If it is touched at any point, the whole thing trembles. We will never get liturgy right until we all vibrate together.

Lack of body/soul integration. Or simply lack of integrity, lack of wholeness. We imagine that we are
composed of two different things: body and spirit. We have to reimagine our whole self. Imagine a body without a spirit: That is a corpse. Imagine a spirit without a body: That is a ghost. Neither one is who we are. We are a
single, simple, undivided being. That makes life exciting, joyful, celebrative. Only human beings are blessed with both the pleasure of bodily sensation, and the joy of knowing we deserve it.

Because God is spirit, we are prone to distrust our bodies when we worship. But to denigrate the body is like burning the house for the insurance. Ancient Heraclitus said that the senses are bad only to those who have barbarian souls. Our souls have been civilized by Christ; our bodies have been sanctified by Christ. Our whole being, body and spirit, is bound for glory. We will not get liturgy right until we feel ourselves to be the unified body and soul of Christ praying to the Father.


Fr. James Smith
Celebration, October 12, 2008

Entire list of Thoughts While Pastoring