Blog 3: Liturgical Time, Far From Ordinary.
How is Romano Guardini’s liturgical theology aesthetic?
“We must allow the liturgy to let us enter into its time.” These words struck me, bringing back vivid memories of my time as an altar boy. Once, Fr. Nassau caught me checking my watch during a weekday morning Mass, as that 7:15am Mass had not yet ended at 8:00am. After Mass he approached me and asked that I refrain from wearing a watch while serving in the future. When I asked why, he told me “you are on Jesus’ time now. Allow that time to be fruitful, and experience it.” While Father was known for being very cheerful all the time, the sternness and seriousness with which he commanded me this caught my attention. It then, is the first time where I felt a “conversion” of sorts, turning myself and my attention to Christ in the Mass.
This approach, to see the time in Mass as just that, “Mass-time,” is frequented by Guardini’s The Spirit of the Liturgy. Guardini explains the Liturgy as where “man is to be induced to determine correctly his essential relation to God, and to put himself right in regard to reverence for God, love and faith, atonement and the desire for sacrifice” (86). But Guardini spends pages and pages in this book discussing the attitude with which we are to approach worship, seeing it at once as serious, playful, and festive. Guardini’s liturgical theology is aesthetic in that he views the time, people, and experience of the Mass as beautiful, and invites us into contemplating this beautiful action of the Liturgy as an experience with God.
Time
In a world where time is money (and everything is about money), it can be hard to justify spending simply an hour with God at Mass on Sundays. I know for my students (and sometimes myself the thought “why spend a portion of a rare day off sitting and hearing some old guy talk about how Jesus shows us how to live” enters the mind. And this thought makes sense, from an “expressive individualist,” raised on a celebration of the Liturgy where the eternal redeeming act of God in the Church is diminished to moral platitudes talked at a crowd. In contrast, Guardini posits that “the individual yields place to the universal” (44) in the Liturgy, and hence reductions to the place of the liturgy as a mere hour of worship diminish in our minds the eternal importance of celebration. Liturgy, thus, forces us into a slow movement, requiring patience and humility, wherein it captures our minds and hearts and we (as those worshipping) must let it happen. We need time, as we need to be fully enraptured by the Liturgy.
People
In fact, those of us who are present in seeing the Liturgy unfold, are present in making the beauty known to the world. We are not “important” as a crowd is important to a theatre production, but rather we use our spiritual aspect, via symbol, to push the material outwards. A symbol originates when the spiritual transposes itself “in material terms because it is vital and essential that it should do so”, Guardini writes on page 57. This connects nicely with a similar idea, phrased on page 38, explaining that man is “obliged to take part in exercises which do not respond to the particular needs of which he is conscious.” Where an attendee at Mass is not a ticket holder for a sought-after club, but where a congregant in the Church is commanded to share Love with all. Despite the limitations of English in expressing the beautiful language of the Mass, our response of “Thanks be to God” at the Ite, Misse est is our thanksgiving at a sending out, a commission of sorts, to continue our lives, forever changed from gazing upon Christ for such a short, though liturgical, time.
Contemplation and Experience
Regarding contemplation, Guardini is very clear that the Liturgy is about contemplation at its core. He writes, “In the liturgy man is no longer concerned with himself; his gaze is directed towards God. In it man is not so much intended to edify himself as to contemplate God’s majesty” (87). One ought to be careful, though, as if Mass were solely about transcendent experiences, one could earn these by hiking in the mountains (as many Utahns do). Rather, in the Mass, given that we devote our time to God, our actions and thoughts outside ourselves, we are offering up something so small to the massive Love of God. This is an experience, a contemplation, that we never fully understand, no matter the metaphorical “elevation gain” one may earn on a strenuous hike. No, it is contemplation preparing us for the beatific vision at the highest “elevation” of Heaven; it is contemplation we find in the elevation of Christ’s Body for us; it is found in the elevation of our Brothers and Sisters in Christ in the “needs of the community at large” (38).
I thoroughly enjoyed thinking on the words of Guardini in this book, as he connected and explained the aesthetics of liturgical theology. The journey of seeing Mass as something more than an obligatory time of listening to a pastor’s thoughts on his previous week is a journey hard traveled, in a culture of American Catholicism where “Suburbanism” becomes the figurehead. And yet, the universality that Guardini examines in the Mass, as something so beyond us yet so impactful on us, invites me, challenges me, to allow the Liturgy to capture my thoughts. To hold my person captive for a time, to return me to that childlike state of faith where I exercise my “youthful powers” in existing for a time, surrounded by the power, mercy, and love of the Father.
