The Sacred Liturgy And Time

By JAMES MONTI

Throughout the Sacred Scriptures, from the first page of the Book of Genesis to the concluding words of the Book of Revelation, we find God prefacing the great events of salvation history with times of preparation. The creation of man comes at the conclusion of the six days of creation. When God punishes the world with a flood, the rain lasts forty days and forty nights, at the end of which Noah, his family, and the animals he has taken emerge from the ark to “restart” life on Earth. The odyssey of the people of Israel from bondage in Egypt to the Promised Land proves to be a journey of forty years.
And it is after three days and three nights in the belly of the whale that Jonah is at last free to see again the light of day and begin his mission as a prophet to Nineveh.
In the New Testament, our Lord spent thirty years living a hidden life with our Lady before embarking upon His public ministry of three years. With the beginning of the Passion, the supreme moment of human history that took untold centuries to prepare for unfolds almost as swiftly as a stroke of lightning. Within a matter of hours, the God-Man Jesus Christ is betrayed, arrested, tried, tortured, put to death and buried for the salvation of the world, to pay the ransom for every sin of mankind from the beginning of time to its conclusion.
And after the sublime day of the Passion, there comes the sublime “Third Day,” the Sunday of Christ’s Resurrection from the dead. Just forty days later, our Lord draws to a close His visible ministry on Earth with His Ascension, beginning the era in which we now still find ourselves, an era already almost two thousand years long, the era of awaiting His return in glory at the end of time.
The end of the Bible, the Book of Revelation, foretells this time to come, encircling the closing scenes of time with a veil of sacred, reverential mystery that fills us with awe. And it is in the pages of the Apocalypse that Christ declares Himself the Lord of all time: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Rev. 22:13).
The Sacred Liturgy bears the imprint of all these different timescales of salvation history. If we are truly to enter deeply into the liturgy, if it is to penetrate and permeate the innermost fiber of our souls, we must be willing to accept and cooperate with the time the liturgy needs to accomplish its sacred purpose.
For just as God prepared mankind over time for the coming of the Savior, and He is preparing us now, over time, for the Second Coming of His Divine Son, so too, there are intervals of preparation within the Mass for its highest gifts, most especially the Gospel, the consecration, and Holy Communion.
In the liturgical rites for the administration of the other sacraments, there are comparable ritualized intervals of preparation — the rite of priestly Ordination being a prime example of this, a rite that is and has been for very many centuries a lengthy ceremony. The passage of time is marked by the feasts and preparatory seasons of the liturgical year.
For several decades now, secular culture has been hostile to the taking of time for the things of God. Unfortunately, there has been a tendency to make all too many concessions to this secular impatience with the sacred. We see this in the harmful mentality of what could be called the “drive-through Mass” — the implementation of practices aimed at getting the Mass over with as soon as possible, to make the Mass as “inconvenient” as possible for the worldly minded Catholic, to reduce to a bare minimum the time spent in church through such measures as the reduction of holy days of obligation, the cutting of Scripture readings, the employment of veritable armies of extraordinary ministers to finish Holy Communion as quickly as possible, and so on.
The whole idea of “convenient liturgy” is problematic to say the least. Can any genuine love be expressed by doing no more than what is most convenient? Where is the sacrificial love in this?
The very idea of making the liturgy as short as possible, as fast as possible, as convenient to us as possible, is inimical to the command that we are to love God with all our hearts, all our souls, all our minds, and all our strength. Such a stingy and miserly attitude in what we are willing to give God is alien to the spirit of worship for the greater glory of God.
In his classic on the spiritual life Transformation in Christ, Dietrich von Hildebrand observes that “man needs an appropriate space of time for all deep and great things” (Transformation in Christ, Manchester, NH, Sophia Institute Press, 1990, p. 329). This is particularly so in the Sacred Liturgy, within which we encounter in the most intimate manner the loftiest mysteries of our faith, and ascend Jacob’s ladder (Gen. 28:12-13), as it were. In the Sacred Liturgy time meets the restful stillness of eternity.
Most of us arrive at church with a head full of preoccupations. Human nature being what it is, we need time to bring this cacophony of earthly thoughts and worries to a grinding halt in order to raise our minds to God, to hear Him, to speak with Him, to love Him, to adore Him.
As von Hildebrand explains, “Without recollection, without this ‘coming to ourselves,’ which implies that we emerge from our actual occupations to the very meaning of our existence in the sight of God, we remain on the periphery and, as it were, deep events and happenings cannot become full realities for us. They march before our eyes like television. We are not able to assimilate them” (New Tower of Babel: Modern Man’s Flight from God, Manchester, NH, Sophia Institute Press, 1994, p. 39).
When the Mass begins, we enter a sacred realm. The successive words and actions of the Mass lead us ever deeper, ever higher, into this sacred realm. We need to walk this path toward the Holy of Holies, to make this ascent of Mount Carmel, with the utmost circumspection. We need to pause and ponder where we are and what we are doing, and just who it is we shall be worshipping and adoring when He descends upon the altar and when we receive Him in Holy Communion. Such things command a spirit of reverence. This is no time for haste, for rushing, for “a hurried march,” lest we forget “the awe in which we must always make our approach to God” (Dietrich von Hildebrand, Liturgy and Personality, Steubenville, OH, Hildebrand Project, 2016, pp. 87, 41, respectively).
For centuries, the intervals of preparation within the Sacred Liturgy have been marked by ceremonial actions, some quite complex. They are a powerful summons to the soul to “stop, look, and listen.” They say to us what was said to Moses, “…put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5).
Such ceremonies awaken us to the grandeur of what is unfolding before us, a succession of sacred moments that deserve our unhurried reflection and contemplation. Von Hildebrand has described such important moments both within the liturgy and beyond — in daily life — as solemn “now” moments:
“. . . The inner fullness and scope of certain moments, of the full ‘now’ in which an inner development reaches its culminating point and in which something prodigious attains completion…these moments in our life which may be compared to what in the evolution of the world are called ‘historical moments’. . . the inner solemnity of a moment charged with meaning . . . the decisive, solemn ‘now’ of such a moment as when a bridge is suddenly established between themselves and another person through a first loving glance . . . the ‘now’ of a farewell before a long separation, or a meeting after a long absence…the ‘now’ of a man’s birth and death, the ‘now’ of baptism and conversion, a deep breakthrough or a great decision” (Liturgy and Personality, p. 120).

Sorry Consequences

The mistaken interpretation of what “active participation” in the Sacred Liturgy is, that it should mean lots of lay people bustling about in the sanctuary doing lots of functional things, has had among its sorry consequences the added misfortune of depriving the laity of one of their only opportunities in their busy lives for an interval of meditative prayer and reflection.
From my experience many years ago as an altar boy and my limited experiences of participation in church choirs, I know how very “distracting” it can be to have active duties to attend to during the Mass. This must be especially so for priests, but of course it is essential, integral to their vocation to have such duties and the unavoidable, inescapable “distractions” that they bring. But such things are not integral to the lay vocation — if it were so, then everyone in a congregation of hundreds or even thousands would be obliged to run into the sanctuary and “do” something, an obviously absurd scenario.
Of course, genuine active participation in the Sacred Liturgy is first and foremost a matter of the soul, our interior, spiritual participation in the Sacrifice of the Mass, with the body actively participating through gestures and postures of reverence. For such truly active participation to flourish, we need to be generous in the time we give to God. For He is the “Lord of Time” (von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ, p. 333).