Continuing to reflect on my recent visit to a friend’s Evangelical church, and the differences in worship between that church and the reverent Catholic liturgy I attend at the Cathedral here, something else occurred to me that I have come to cherish in Catholic liturgy: gesturing, praying, responding, and singing truly as one Body.
It occurred to me last night as I was concluding a meeting with two of my trainees in my door-to-door program. We always close the meeting in prayer, and last night, as we usually do, we took turns praying extemporaneously, and then joined together in praying the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be. The extemporaneous prayers are always beautiful and heartfelt, but when we join together as one in the traditional prayers, something happens that is even more beautiful: we become one.
We feel a joining as one in prayers that our Lord and the Church give us to pray together, a deep spiritual unity as the beautiful, scriptural words roll off our tongues: “Our Father . . . thy kingdom come . . . forgive us our trespasses . . . Hail Mary . . . blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus . . . Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and the Holy Spirit . . . amen.” It is a beauty that surpasses our extemporaneous prayers, makes us forget our individual cares and concerns, unites us as one in love for our God and our holy faith, and unites us in peace of heart.
Not that extemporaneous praying is bad; and it has a place in the practice of the Church. But it is ironic to me that so many in the Protestant world think that written prayers, recited alone or together, are of necessity dry, rote, and dead, without faith. They are so only if the person is so. Any kind of prayer, including extemporaneous, can be dry and dead if done rotely, without faith and attentiveness.
Which brings me to liturgical prayer, especially the mass. Many non-Catholics have commented on and questioned, especially in conversations I’ve had going door-to-door, the idea of ritual in Catholic liturgy (the pastor of the Evangelical church I mentioned above did the same in his sermon, in a kind of boasting “we’re not dry and dead here, we’re so superior to that because we’re spontaneous” way). It’s common as well in Evangelical Protestant literature to encounter references to dead, rote worship, empty or stifling ritual, which is always a reference to liturgical worship.
People who grew up in liturgical churches also sometimes have experienced it as dead, rote, and stifling, and come to prefer, at least for awhile, the more externally enthusiastic, free-wheeling worship in Evangelical Protestant churches (though many tire of it later, come to yearn for liturgy and the real Eucharist again, and sooner or later return to the Catholic Church, with much greater appreciation for what they have here).
I think this is because people don’t actually understand what liturgy is, what it is for, and how to enter into it. Maybe they have not yet really had a conversion experience, in which they truly have encountered our Lord Jesus – in which case liturgy would be an empty, rote experience.
But in the Catholic Church, liturgy is not only a structure, a ritual, an external practice. It is the outwardly orderly worship called for by God in scripture, but it is so much more. In liturgy we truly come together as a single body, a single organ, a single Bride, to love and praise and worship our God as one body, as one voice, our God who literally is the true High Priest leading us in worship through the mediation of the earthly priest, who truly descends into our midst and offers Himself in the bread and wine, and who enters into a real one flesh union with us when we receive His body and blood in the bread and wine.
At the Cathedral, I usually sit near the front, to one side, so that during the mass I can turn my head to see and hear the whole congregation singing, responding, and gesturing as one. It is a beautiful mass where the congregation truly is reverent, attentive, loving, responding. The voice of the congregation often sounds to me truly as one great voice, a single organ, crying out to God in love and worship.
I turn my head so I can marvel at the wonder of it, and contemplate how this is truly a partaking in the great worship in heaven, where countless voices, a vast sea of voices, are raised as a single voice, the Bride and Body of Christ worshipping her Head as one in heaven. And when we kneel, I feel keenly that we truly are a single body kneeling, when standing a single body standing, when praying a single body praying, when singing a single body singing, our hearts united as one heart, loving and worshiping our God.
And when we go forward to receive communion, our God enters into us. Since I’m near the front I go near the beginning, and often while kneeling afterwards watch as streams of people move forward to receive God into their bodies, and it is almost as if I can see God entering into the people as a wave, from the altar to the ministers to the people, gradually flowing through the Church from front to back, until finally the Presence of God has entered into the whole Body, to the very last people in the rear of the Church. And then we are truly one in God, and God is one in us, united more and more closely as one the more often we receive God in Holy Communion with truly loving attentiveness and faith.
As Dom Prosper Gueranger, the great Abbot of Solesmes who led the restoration of the Church in France after the French Revolution, expressed of the Church at worship in the preface to his monumental The Liturgical Year, “Day and night is her voice sounding sweetly in the ear of her divine Spouse, and her words are ever finding a welcome in His Heart.” In the Cathedral, our voice truly is the voice of the Bride sounding sweetly in the ears of our Divine Spouse, who is truly present at the altar, and then in the Eucharist, and who in Holy Communion enters into us, and welcomes us into His heart, carrying us up in the power of the Holy Spirit into union with our Father in heaven, in a union of deep, abiding love. That is the meaning of liturgy.
And that is why, as I said to my trainees after we finished praying last night, “I love praying as a Catholic.” I loved praying as an Evangelical, too. But I love praying as a Catholic more. There is an abiding oneness, a real unity, that flows from the liturgy in which Christ is truly present and active, that we are taken up into when we receive Him in the Eucharist, and pray as one, with attentiveness and love, the great and beautiful prayers given us by the Church to pray, that I never want to be without again.
