Rules are often seen
as bad, and the enemy of freedom and of fun.
But consider this: games are fun.
And for the game to be fun for everyone, or for long, every game has to
have rules, and those rules have to be followed, and even enforced by
referees. The rules put the form
to the activity, and are necessary for anyone to participate or even understand,
and therefore have fun.
While “fun” is not
the goal of the liturgy, joy is – and peace, and communion with God and our
neighbor. The rules put the form to the liturgy, and are necessary for anyone
to participate and understand.
Participation is at the heart of the liturgical undertaking, and that
requires some understanding. It does
NOT mean that to participate, everyone must have a visible role, like lector or
altar server. And while it does mean
uniting oneself with the visible actions of the body of worshippers – kneeling,
standing, responding, and singing -- it does not mean that one always need be
visibly doing anything.
Joseph Cardinal
Ratzinger, before he was elected to the See of Peter, wrote: One of the principles of the (Second
Vatican) Council’s reform was, with good reason, the participatio actuosa, the
active participation of the whole “People of God” in the liturgy. Subsequently, however, this idea has been
fatally narrowed down, giving the idea that active participation is only
present where there is evidence of external activity – speaking, singing,
preaching, liturgical action. … Yet (it) also speaks of silence as a mode of
active participation. We must go on to
say that listening, the receptive employment of the senses and the mind,
spiritual participation, are surely just as much “activity” as speaking is. Are receptivity, perception, being moved, not
“active” things, too? What we have here,
surely, is a diminished view of man which reduces him to what is verbally
intelligible, and this at a time when we are aware that what comes to the
surface in rationality is only the tip of the iceberg compared with the totality
of man.
This touches on why
the liturgy is so different from almost anything else we do. We are engaging “the totality of man,”
everything that we are in our very being.
We are interacting with the Creator of our being, and the source of
everything good in our lives and in all creation. So our words and gestures are
out-of-the-ordinary, because our conversation is out-of-the-ordinary, as is the
One with whom we are conversing: the All-Holy One, who calls us to be
holy.
Our prayers and our
gestures, and the whole act of worship itself, are different from anything
going on around us here and today. However,
this act unites us with our brothers and sisters around the world and across
history who not only “worship in the same way” but actually participate in the same worship. It is timeless, like the One we worship who
is timeless. And it is universal (that’s
what “catholic” means, after all), because it is proper to everyone,
everywhere.
Similarly, the music
we offer to the glory of God is necessarily different from what we might listen
to on the radio while driving, over speakers while shopping, or on our iPods
while working out. Its goal is to draw
us out of the ordinary and elevate our minds and hearts to God. Pope Benedict set the goals of our music very
high: The Church must not settle down with what is merely comfortable and
serviceable at the parish level; she must arouse the voice of the cosmos and,
by glorifying the Creator, elicit the glory of the Cosmos itself, making it
also glorious, beautiful, habitable, and beloved.
That’s the nature of
this game, and much more rewarding than having fun: making the Cosmos glorious,
beautiful, habitable, and beloved. It is
what we are about in our worship here, which is far more than the sum of some
rules.
Monsignor
Smith
