The Liturgy

The liturgy is a form of public worship performed by a religious group, especially in the Christian faith. The presumption is that the purpose of liturgy is to move you in a specific way. One must feel a sense of transcendence. According to Guardini, “The liturgical entity consists rather of the unified body of the faithful as such — the Church — a body which infinitely outnumbers the mere congregation.” The liturgy is not exclusively about you. It is the worshipping of the entire city of God. Additionally, the liturgy is a distillation of generations of theological reflection upon the nature of God in a sustained poetic form. Through this, the congregation is brought together. The liturgy is a school of our liturgical emotion, or our proper emotions of Christian life. In order to find meaning in the Word become flesh, we must think of the human condition. The liturgy has a style that “conveys that in the works of art to which reference has been made the individual yields place to the universal.” Style is transcendent and is universal to the liturgy. A key example of liturgical style is that of “The Gloria.” “The Gloria” has been proven to have universal versatility, as the various interpretations of the hymn take on a distinctive style while keeping alive the importance of the text. Lastly, in relation to the liturgy, there is an internal dimension to the liturgy in which men and women see themselves exclusively in light of Christ who transforms what it means to be human.

After understanding the liturgy, one can begin to understand its playfulness, its symbolism, and its festivity. As we previously learned from Gadamer, play is defined as what creates an artwork, as play is “the fact that something is intended as something, even if it is not something conceptual, useful, or purposive, but only the pure autonomous regulation of movement.” Further, we discovered that “the significance of the symbol and the symbolic lay in a paradoxical kind of reference that embodies and even vouchsafes its meaning. Art is only encountered in a form that resists pure conceptualization.” Lastly, the festive is described as “such moments represent the primacy of something that happens in its own time and at the proper time, something that is not subject to the abstract calculation of temporal duration.” For Guardini, symbolism is linked to materiality, as well as to the veiling and unveiling. He states that “A genuine symbol is occasioned by the spontaneous expression of an actual and particular spiritual condition. But at the same time, like works of art, it must rise above the purely individual plane. It must not merely express isolated spiritual elements, but deal with life and the soul in the abstract.” In the liturgy, symbols are linked to sensation, but they are also linked to the natural dimensions of water, darkness, and light, and of purity and sacrifice. These elements are taken up and have a type of style that transcends the particular and moves above it. Through entering the liturgy, as we all share the same life, symbolism is found as we enter into those who share in and complete our lives. In the liturgy, playfulness is linked to our direction outside of what is purposeful for its own sake to a playfulness we are only directing toward the Word of God. In this, the fullness of your identity is at play. The purpose of the liturgy is for the salvation of the human person. In the liturgy, one encounters God and experiences divine salvation. Through this, the liturgy is festive as “the liturgy must be understood from the point of salvation; it is about the salvation of the human person who comes through this beauty to become like the God who emptied himself in the totality of love.” Further, there is an eternal Jesus removed from time and space that connects you to those from different time and places, particularly in how the liturgy is a distillation of generations of theological reflection upon the nature of God.

The playful, the symbolic, and the festive are additionally represented in the liturgical contemplation of Cyril of Jerusalem, Gertrude the Great of Helfta, and Romano Guardini’s Sacred Signs. To begin, Cyril of Jerusalem describes how images draw you into the rather remarkable transformation that is to take place through the Sacraments. Through the reformation of the senses that takes place through the Initiation, one will learn to see beyond the visible, to know the depth of the scriptures, to see the mysteries, and to understand the Sacraments of Salvation. There is a serious playfulness of liturgical action that Cyril describes in which he invites one to see the bright light of what they participated in. There is a visible, material action performed when participating in this drama of Initiation, in which the recollection of this moment provides a type to make sense of the aesthetic condition. What you are doing is the very same thing that was done by the Israelites and you are learning to see what you are seeing and you interpret it. This is learning its symbolism. In the Initiation, you symbolically keep your eyes to the West where you renounce a darkness and gloominess. And through this action, you perform an action that is a renunciation of Satan. This furthers the demonstration of playfulness. What is at stake, is the salvation of the person who is looking to escape the grasp of Satan. Cyril of Jerusalem continues as he describes the anointing with oil as the symbol of the communion, of the richness of Christ which is that one receives the power to repel all traces of the opposing force. Symbolically, in baptism, you are descended three times into the water and ascended once more; therefore, reenacting the three day burial of Christ. This allows one to participate in the mystery. This symbolic aesthetic dimension meant that our bodies were icons in which Christ’s salvation really happens. Our salvation is unveiled through our participation in the symbolic image. We share in Christ through the materiality of the oil used for anointing, in which we need attunement and faith to experience a sensual effect that changes our senses, in which our body is now in Christ. There is a festivity as the oil for anointing allows you to enter the generations of theological reflection. For Saint Gertrude of Helfta, it is her imaginary visions in which the sensible material world of the liturgy comes to be understood together with the act of contemplation. One is being formed to worship or write through the physical senses. For Saint Getrude, the Sanctus is an example of a physical act that takes you into more to be seen as the liturgy takes you up into the world of the heavenly liturgy. Through the ritual of the Eucharist, in reflecting on the wounds of Christ, as Saint Gertrude receives the body of Christ, the Lord seemed to receive the concentrated host in his divine mouth and it passed through his body and proceeded to issue from the wound of his most sacred side. There is a playfulness through this as most cleanse this moment through a hymn. There is rich symbolism of the heart, the wound, and the blood that participates in the sacrifice, and further her completion of the moment demonstrates beauty as symbol. This is linked to a festivity in which there is salvation, for Saint Gertrude experienced an existence outside of time. Saint Gertrude demonstrated a likeness to God in which we are pieced together to have the same characteristics of God, along with a strong connection to the senses that allows us to become more human to be closer to God. To end, Romano Guardini addresses that the material world matters. We are rooted in the material world in which we return to humanity, yet this is how salvation unfolds. For example, there is a liturgical aesthetic of water as in baptism we emerge from this water changed. Its symbolism matters. Holy Water is a sign of nature set free from sin. We playfully contemplate it and understand how it is transformed through the church. With incense, the sweet smell transformed through the church’s offering is not a symbol used to communicate information to you, it is itself the offering. This is a playful, serious offering of love to God. Lastly, we allow the aesthetic encounter with the candle to change us. The candle does not communicate this as a sign to a receiver, it is not instructed; the candle invites you in to perform a drama yourself, to see yourself as the candle before God. As said by Ratzinger, “…the Christian Sacraments mean not only insertion into the God-permeated cosmos…they mean at the same time insertion into the history that originates in Christ.” This is a pure example of festivity as we work to connect to something beyond our own time through which we must exist outside of particular time. Per Guardini, “paint, sound, space, all these natural dimensions must also be taken up into the history that is Christ and art is this natural dimension taken up into the fullness of Christian history.” Through this, the liturgy is playful, symbolic, and festive, and we can enter a time of contemplation of worship.

Information for this blog provided by:

• Romano Guardini, The Spirit of the Liturgy
• Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogical Catechese
• Gertrude the Great of Helfta, The Herald of God’s Loving-Kindness — Book III, 175–184; The Herald of God’s Loving-Kindness — Book IV, 109–148
• Romano Guardini, Sacred Signs
• Professor Timothy O’Malley, Lecture on January 11th, 2021: The Nature of Christian Worship
• Professor Timothy O’Malley, Lecture on January 12th, 2021: Contemplation and the Liturgy