A Leaven In The World… The Good, The True, And The Beautiful In Sacred Liturgy, Places, And People
By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
I am writing from New York City where I am privileged to be attending the Sacra Liturgia 2015 Conference. I took out my Breviarium to pray on the subway, traveling en route from my overnight accommodations to the downtown meeting venue on the first morning after sitting down next to a visibly drunken man.
I realized myself blessed to be dependent, not on a destructive use of this world’s goods, but rather on the beauty of God’s Word through this liturgy of the Church. “Beauty poured forth” upon my lips as I mouthed the words of the Psalms, praying thus also for my suffering neighbor. A young man walking out of the train at his destination along my route stopped to thank me and I blessed him, recognizing that this very response was exactly what the work of the conference seeks to promote — attracting the love and devotion of the people to God through the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco spoke on Wednesday, June 3 about sacred worship as an antidote to the loss of God through an expanding concept of the secular in society. He noted evidence of this: The fact that political leaders speak more of freedom of worship, instead of and thereby replacing religious freedom. One example of this environment inimical to faith is that values and truth claims are now classed as opinions in learning materials used for children in the schools. Under this logic, the faith and morals of the Church are no longer facts but merely opinions.
Cultural schizophrenia was at the source of the Supreme Court’s Casey s. Planned Parenthood decision that was justified upon the basis of the claim that each individual has the right to define his own concept of the universe.
Archbishop Cordileone paused at this point in his talk and asked, “The meaning of the universe? Really?” thereby underscoring the ridiculous exaggeration of the subjective in modern life that threatens to nearly eclipse any consideration of the objective or any claim to truth.
The sacred liturgy can offer healing for our people as they live in this increasingly secular environment. Archbishop Cordileone decried the extensive damage inflicted by our over-sexualized society. Christ prays specifically for us in our current context with all of our problems, needs, and sufferings: “I am not praying for the world but for those you have given me.” The world hates Him and His disciples, and He prays for us so that we may cooperate with grace for the necessary metanoia, change of mind, so that we not fall victim to the antithesis between flesh and spirit.
The archbishop reminded us that the Antichrist is anyone who denies Christ come in the flesh, as the Scriptures teach. We must never forget our Catholic perspective that creation is good in itself and only becomes bad if we use it or love it in the wrong measure. Christ come in the flesh renders all that God has made good once again.
Our people are called to conversion, thus the ability to receive this matter sacramentally, the bread rendered as Christ’s Body, depends upon a pure heart. A pattern of conversion is necessary, and for this discipline, the fasts and feasts of the Church provide the means of doing so. In the sacramental realm the elements of creation such as bread, wine, and water are not merely material for labor but are signposts of divine love for us on pilgrimage. Our Catholic education imparted by Catholic liturgy distinguishes between matter and meaning for the sake of this distinction.
The presence of our Church buildings is a grace, a reminder of a higher reality. Beauty is intact still in many of the churches of San Francisco where Archbishop Cordileone serves. Other religious traditions offer beauty as well in their own houses of worship. Many people take advantage of the churches open during the day to enter and pray. Churches then are not merely gathering spaces: Apart from liturgy anyone should be able to walk in and share in God’s beauty.
This beauty is sometimes presumed to be opposed to the needs of the poor. The archbishop recalled a story about Dorothy Day who was once surrounded at a meeting by persons condemning expenses for church buildings. She responded by affirming that money must be spent on feeding the poor but, as the poor have a hunger for more than mere bread, the Church has an obligation to also feed their hunger for beauty. The place dedicated to the sacred liturgy should be redolent of the sacred.
Ritual is repeated patterns — but these can become routine. Along with them must be developed and nurtured a sense of reverence. We face challenges along with our inheritance from changes enacted after the Second Vatican Council. “It is no disloyalty to maintain that pruning was excessive” following the interpretation and implementation of the Vatican II documents.
The archbishop shared a story from the turf wars that opened up after some of these changes. A visiting bishop was told “You took my ciborium” at Communion time by an extraordinary minister who had been asked to let him take her place and to direct him to his Communion station. Such confrontations stemming from exaggerated and superfluous use of lay persons, as many of us know, have not been rare.
Growth must be organic therefore with the hermeneutic of continuity. Just as the cross is made up of both horizontal and vertical arms, so our worship gravitates between both the horizontal and the vertical. A basic principle of the Incarnation which operates in our lives through sacramental grace is that the invisible becomes visible through the physical.
Gender ideology is indicative of the secular movement and has nowhere more so an effect on sacramental theology as on marriage in which we teach the truth of the complementarity of mother and father for the benefit of child.
The gender movement also corrupts our liturgical sense because God has chosen marriage as the principal sign of His relationship with us. In marriage about the two becoming one, man and woman are one in complementarity without losing their identity.
These principles feed into divinization in our sacramental life as taught by the fathers. “God made them male and female,” and this sets the pattern for the economy of salvation. One need only look at the nuptial imagery found throughout the Scriptures in its narration of salvation history.
Even a book of love poems that does not even mention God found its way into the canon. The Song of Songs corresponds to biblical faith that man can enter into relationship with God, the two becoming one without either losing their identity. This work of grace begins already in sacred liturgy offered properly.
