By JAMES MONTI
As a season of awaiting and preparation for the coming of the Lord — both the commemoration of His First Coming in the Incarnation and in anticipation of His Second Coming in glory at the end of time — Advent is a liturgical season that particularly brings to the fore the concept of ad orientem, of turning toward the east so as to look toward the Lord at His coming.
Indeed it was a star seen in the East that alerted the Magi to the birth of Christ (Matt. 2:2, 9). And so it was entirely fitting that at the 2016 Sacra Liturgia UK conference in London His Eminence Robert Cardinal Sarah encouraged priests to consider introducing the practice of celebrating the Mass ad orientem (if they were not already doing so) during the season of Advent.
All the controversy that came in the wake of Cardinal Sarah’s bold invitation has not changed the fact that the Church does indeed permit this posture as an option in the celebration of the Ordinary Form of the Mass, as expressly stated in a letter of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments dated September 25, 2000.
Many Wanderer readers are already well familiar with the very strong case for the advantages of the ad orientem posture of the priest that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI made in his book The Spirit of the Liturgy: that “facing east” had been the Church’s practice from the very beginning; that turning in a particular physical direction to face the Lord is a reflection of the “incarnational” and Christological focus of our prayer insofar as the rising sun is the premier cosmological symbol of Christ coming to us; and that the Mass is more than merely a shared meal in which everyone looks at each other but above all the re-presentation of the sacrifice of Calvary (The Spirit of the Liturgy, Ignatius Press, 2000, pp. 74-84).
The very concept of turning toward the Lord is biblical. “Turn to the Lord and forsake your sins; pray in his presence and lessen your offenses” (Sirach 27:25). “Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God. . . .” (Hosea 14:1).
To the Prophet Jeremiah God protests that His people have turned their backs and not their faces toward Him (Jer. 2:27; 32:33). In Psalm 63, this turning in spirit toward the Lord is given a liturgical association: “So I have looked upon thee in the sanctuary, beholding thy power and glory” (Psalm 63:2)
The definitive study of ad orientem as a liturgical posture was penned by the Oratorian liturgist Fr. Uwe Michael Lang in his 2004 book, Turning Towards the Lord (Ignatius Press). Among the many pieces of evidence that Fr. Lang assembles to show the antiquity and prevalence of the ad orientem tradition is the evidence from fourth-century baptismal rites, wherein the catechumen, after having faced west to renounce Satan, would turn toward the east to make his profession of faith before being baptized (Lang, p. 53).
Opponents of the ad orientem posture of the priest say the priest shouldn’t “turn his back” to the people but rather face them and make eye contact with them. There are even some chasubles that have clearly been designed to impose this view, for they are devoid of any imagery or decoration whatsoever on the back side, as if to say that this side of the vestment should never be seen by the people.
But the priest is not the moderator of some social event addressing an audience from the altar as if it were a speakers’ dais. The Mass is about God, not about us, as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has observed (preface to Dom Alcuin Reid, OSB, The Organic Development of the Liturgy, Ignatius Press, 2005, p. 13).
In human conversation, it is the norm that we should face the person to whom we are speaking. Similarly in the Mass it is fitting that our external posture should express a sense of who it is we are addressing. And in the Mass are we not speaking to God? Are we not adoring Him who made us? Or are we just talking to ourselves? As the 13th-century Roman prelate and liturgist William Durandus (+1296) succinctly put it, the priest “directs his face to the east and his mind to God” (Durandus, Rationale divinorum officiorum, book 4, chapter 57, n. 5).
By casting the ad orientem posture in terms of the priest “turning his back” to the congregation, detractors also imply that this posture distances and estranges the priest from his people. They fail to recognize that in turning to face in the same direction as the congregation is facing the priest is manifesting his solidarity with the people — the priest and his people are one in turning together ad orientem, toward the Lord.
Then too, insofar as the Mass is an essential component of our earthly pilgrimage to the Heavenly Jerusalem, it is fitting that just as travelers making a journey together all walk in the same direction, so too the priest and his people should all face forward as they make this journey in the Mass.
There is something deeply moving about seeing the priest, from behind, bending low over the altar to pronounce the words of consecration. The back of his chasuble at that particular moment bears a certain resemblance to the pall over a casket, bringing to mind how Christ laid down His life on the altar of the cross and how the priest as an alter Christus, by his very state of life, is laying down his life for his people.
Celebrating ad orientem does not mean that a priest never faces the people. There are words of the Mass that are addressed directly to the faithful, and for these, even when celebrating ad orientem, the priest turns from the altar to face the congregation.
This is the practice not only in the Ordinary Form but also in the Extraordinary Form, the Traditional Latin Mass, wherein the priest at multiple points during the sacred liturgy turns to the people to say “Oremus,” “Let us pray,” and turns to them at other points as well (for example, to invite them immediately before Holy Communion to adore the Holy Eucharist by turning toward them with the sacrament in his hands and saying, “Ecce Agnus Dei, ecce qui tollit peccata mundi” — “Behold the Lamb of God. . . .” — followed by “Domine, non sum dignus. . . .” — “Lord, I am not worthy. . . .”).
And of course, when delivering the homily, the priest always faces the people.
In a church with a traditional sanctuary, in which the tabernacle is situated at the center with a crucifix directly above it, the priest by celebrating ad orientem is in a heightened sense turned toward the Lord — the Lord really, truly present in the tabernacle and visually symbolized by the crucifix.
In this context it is important to recall Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s recommendation that even in churches within which the orientation of the floor plan is not directed toward the physical compass point of the east the crucifix can serve as a symbolic “interior ‘east’” that the priest and the people can all face (The Spirit of the Liturgy, pp. 83-84).
Drawing upon an observation made by St. Augustine (+430), Fr. Uwe Michael Lang points out that orienting ourselves toward the Lord is something that should determine not only the physical posture of our prayer but also the interior disposition that directs the course of our daily lives (Turning Towards the Lord, p. 52).
It was while being interrogated as a prisoner in the Tower of London (June 3, 1535) that St. Thomas More recounted a remarkable piece of spiritual counsel that King Henry VIII had given him in happier times, when the monarch was still a genuine man of faith:
“. . . I had always from the beginning truly used myself to looking first upon God and next upon the King according to the lesson that his Highness taught me at my first coming to his noble service, the most virtuous lesson that ever prince taught his servant….” (letter to Margaret Roper, June 3, 1535, in Elizabeth Rogers, ed., The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, Princeton University Press, 1947, n. 216, p. 557).
In everything we do, therefore, we are called to look ad orientem, that is, toward the Lord. We must navigate the waters of this world with our eyes fixed upon Him. And just as in the Mass turning ad orientem serves to remind the priest that the Mass is ordered to the worship of God rather than the celebration of ourselves, so too, habitually directing our hearts and minds toward the Lord sets our lives in order:
“You shall be careful to do therefore as the Lord your God has commanded you; you shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left” (Deut. 5:32).
Aligned With God’s Will
Many readers may remember from their grade school science studies the iron filings experiment that demonstrates the phenomenon of magnetic fields: when a magnet is placed amid a sprinkling of metal filings, the metal filings all align themselves into orderly lines curving toward the magnet’s south pole and away from its north pole.
There is in this a metaphor of what happens when we truly set the Lord in His rightful place in our lives: everything else, our thoughts, our words, our actions, and our affections will be properly ordered and aligned to point toward Him, to be aligned according to the magnetic force of His holy will.
In our Advent pilgrimage, we journey toward Christmas with the one who like her divine Son comes to us from the east as the Morning Star in our lives, Mary most pure. May she assist us in keeping our eyes upon Him in this world until we come to see Him face to face in the next.
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