The Church Alive in Her Liturgy. This talk was delivered on March 13 in 1959 to students at Columbia University at the invitation of the Newman Club. As part of a series in which different speakers talk about the general theme, the church alive, and then in various fields. So the church alive in her liturgy. My dear friends, the place of this lecture, a university, and the audience in front of me, students, And a Benedictine monk, as the speaker, cannot fail to evoke in me memories of 30 years ago when I was a student at the University of Göttingen in Germany, sitting in a small auditorium and listening for the first time in my life to a Benedictine monk

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Father Albert Hammond stated, the prayer of the Abbey of Mariella in the Rhineland. Father Albert was the first to open to me the riches of the Church's liturgy. It turned out to be the most decisive hour in my life. After the talk, I went home, repeating all through the night in my heart the first line of the song, Holy God, we praise thy name. The following morning I went to see the prior and told him that I wanted to become a monk. Now, my dear friends, don't misunderstand me. I have not come here with the intention of charming you into a monastic vocation. But I mention this incident because it has an immediate bearing on what I have to say about tonight's subject, the church alive in her liturgy.

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Entering Maria Lach meant to enter into the center of the liturgical movement in Germany. The entire life of this monastery was geared to the liturgy as the primary and essential source of its spiritual life. The community was guided by the two golden principles of Saint Benedict's rule, the one that nothing should be preferred to the divine office. means the daily public performance of the worship of the Church, the celebration of the holy sacrifice of the Mass and the canonical hours. And the second, that this divine office should be performed in such a way that the mind should be in harmony with the Word.

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Following these principles, one can really say the monks of Mariala lived the liturgy. And they contributed a great deal to the most recent developments, which took place during the reign of Pope Pius XII of blessed memory, they started with the two basic encyclicals, one on the essence of the Church, Corporis Mystici, and the other on the essence of the liturgy, Mediato Dei. The principles laid down in these two documents were later implemented in a series of reforms. The New Holy Week, and down to the latest directives issued by the Congregation of Rites about the active participation of the faithful in the Mass.

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The fact that my own life was deeply affected by this liturgical revival encourages me tonight to speak about the Church alive in her liturgy. and also makes this talk of mine a confession. I have during the thirty-seven years of my monastic life never for a moment regretted the decision of that fatal evening at Göttingen. On the contrary, I must say The liturgy has kept its promise. It has been and still is the essential source of my spiritual life, my strength in adversities, my light, my peace, and my joy. Naturally, this might also be a handicap in speaking to you tonight.

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because I might take too much for granted, not realizing enough the difficulties which those among my listeners who have an entirely different background might experience in the attempt to grasp the vital importance of the liturgy for the Church and for their own spiritual life. However, I must confess that 38 years ago I did not come to the liturgy as an innocent apprentice, but burdened myself with the obstacles which are part of the age in which we live. I remember very clearly the doubts which arose in my mind when I was first exposed to the daily intimate contact with the liturgy which the monastic life involves.

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At times the practice of the liturgy seemed to be ruled by the letter, and by a rather dead letter at that. The anticipation of the Easter vigil on Holy Saturday, for example, was one of them. How could one sing, This is the night, at eight o'clock on Saturday morning? It just did not get into my head. Also our practice in Lent, to keep the law that Mass should be after noon, and that the meal should be taken only after Vespers, peaking such a law simply by pushing known ahead and saying it at 9 o'clock in the morning and transferring vespers from the end of the day also to the morning, saying it at 11.30.

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This was another thing which caused my admiration. Now, I've formulated my doubts about the many liturgical ceremonies which seem to have outlived their meaning in a little essay entitled Form and Life, in which I wrestled with the conflict between the conservative tendency innate in liturgical forms and the essentially dynamic character of life. So, you see, I am not entirely unaware of the difficulties which one encounters when one wants to understand the liturgy as a living thing. One is hindered very often by a too formalistic idea of the liturgy as a set of external rules, according to which the public official worship of the Church has to be performed.

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If this approach to the liturgy, this legalistic approach, would predominate with the basic principle that nothing should be changed, that the liturgy should be the same, ceremonial, always and everywhere, then one would indeed be tempted to consider the liturgy an enemy rather than a source of life. The right answer to the whole problem of the relation between liturgy and life depends really on two things. On the question, what is true life? And on the other, what is the essence of the liturgy? And this is now what I would like to do first. Let us try to grasp what is true life.

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In order to do so, we have to penetrate beneath the surface of today's rushed existence. We have to reach some degree of personal depth, and then we shall be in a much better position to perceive that the Church is truly alive in her liturgy. Our concept of life today is unconsciously influenced by the pattern and the rhythm of our civilization, which is a technical one, and which hums with locomotion, with speed, physical power and energy. Life is indeed, according to the scholastic definition, sui motio.

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It is self-motion. Therefore, the very term and concept of motion enters into the definition of life. And this fact is apt to influence our idea of life because motion is the field the proper field of technical perfection and so the idea of locomotion may influence and throw our concept of life off balance as for example A modern poet like Ernst Jünger is unable to figure things, modern man, eternal life, only in another way than on the pattern of the humming of an electrical power station.

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It is certainly true locomotion brings restlessness. Through locomotion, change becomes the ever-available means of escape, the easiest way of a new experience, of seeing something different. On the background of a life filled with locomotion, the sameness of the liturgy is apt to be boring. A life is what changes. The liturgy never changes, and therefore the liturgy is not a life.

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That is one danger which this technical age brings to us and our concept of life. But it is not only locomotion. It is also the overfeeding of imagination with constantly new, overpowering, bewildering impressions which is brought to us by technical means. The radios. television, which becomes a kind of dope and dulls the senses by constant over-excitement. In one of his sermons on the idea of a university entitled A Form of Infidelity, John Henry Newman speaks of the problem I have in mind. He says, let him, it means modern man, take in and master the vastness of the view afforded him of nature, its infinite complexity, its awful comprehensiveness, and its diversified yet harmonious colouring,

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And then, when he has for years drank in and fed upon this vision, let him turn around to peruse the inspired records, or listen to the authoritative teaching of Revelation, the book of Genesis, or the warnings and prophecies of the Gospels, or the life of St. Anthony or St. Hilarion, and he may certainly experience a most distressing reversion of feeling. Not that his reason really deduces anything from his much-logged studies contrary to the faith, but that his imagination is bewildered and swims with the sense of the ineffable distance of that faith from the view of things which is familiar to him, with its strangeness and then again its rude simplicity, as he considers it, and its apparent poverty, contrasted with the exuberant life and reality of his own world.

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One simply has to call a halt to this inner speed. One has deliberately to take a step into greater depth and silence in order to reach a more adequate and deeper concept of life. It is evidence that speed, as such, cannot be the true life of man, nor can change, as such, be the true life of man. There are obviously two kinds of changes, one for the better, one for the worse. Ageing, for example, is a change, but not for the better. What then decides about the vitality of change?

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It is the question of the end. Where does it lead to? St. Augustine, in one of his sermons directed against the heresy of his time, the Donatists, who were spreading all over Africa, throwing life into turmoil and causing great excitement all over the place, St. Augustine said this very good and significant word, Look at them! Marvellous the speed! Overwhelming the energy! But, alas, they move on the wrong track. One could apply such a word maybe to communism as a movement in our days.

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Yes, life is emotion. But it is truly life only when it leads to and is consummated in perfection. For man, consummated in true happiness, in beatitude, Philip nearby, this good and sympathetic guide of enthusiastic young men, once was confronted with one of those hasty, enthusiastic youths who told him that he was engaged. And Philip Neary said, Oh, that's wonderful. Now and then? He said, Now the next thing is, as soon as it's possible, I get married.

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Philip Neary said, Fine. And then? And then the young man said, I shall have a family. I become a father. And Philip Neary said, Wonderful. And then? He said, Oh. then my children grow up and then my children get married and then I become a grandfather Philip nearly said again very well but then and then the young man got a little confused but he kept on and he said oh and then my grandchildren grow up and they have children and I become a great grandfather And Philip Neri again said, Wonderful. But then the young man became more or less speechless.

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And so Philip Neri came and helped him and said, And then, my dear friend, Paradiso, Paradiso. Yes, life is motion, but it is that means emotion from within towards the perfection of the one that lives. Now, this self-perfection of life perhaps becomes on a lower stage of our thinking, most evident in the excitements, the passions of sense life.

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And these passions of sense life center around two poles. We call them in scholastic philosophy the irascibilis and the concupiscibilis. One can say the ecstasy of rage and the ecstasy of love. The best example of the evaluation of life in the sense of animal vitality is fascism. While communism is the interpretation of life in terms of quantity, speed, energy, fascism is the interpretation of human life on the level of animal vitality. Let us not deceive ourselves, my dear friends.

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There is a fascist in every man, because every man is an animal. Animal rationale, yes, but still an animal. And therefore every human being experiences life most intensely on the animal level, where it centers around those two poles, rage and love, war and the woman. It is the mystique of the blood. This was the philosophy, as you know, of Hitler. This was also the philosophy of Mussolini. I shall never forget The first trip that I made to Rome as a student for Maria Lach was just one year after Mussolini had taken over in Italy.

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And there one can see in the streets of Rome on the big billboards written the sentence meglio vivere un anno da leone che cento anni da pecore. It is better to live one year as a lion than hundred years as sheep. We have to transcend the magic of the blood if we want to appreciate the depth of life in the liturgy of the Church. This was done, as you know, in the process of the history of Western thought by Plato, by the discovery of the ideas or of the higher reality of the spiritual soul.

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in comparison to the body. In the dialogue Fido, Plato describes the last day of Socrates, who ends his bodily life in great peace and serenity in the superiority of the philosophical conviction that through the death of the body, he passes into the life of the spirit. In a similar way, Plato describes in his other famous dialogue, The Banquet, the idea of spiritual love, what we call the platonic love.

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And there he describes for the first time in the history of human thought the ladder of ascent on which spiritual love rises from the corruptible things to the eternal realities of the spirit. For Plato, the incorruptible evidently is better than the corruptible, but everything bodily is corruptible. Only the soul, is incorruptible because it is simple and not like the body composed. And therefore, man has to strive here in this life after simplicity in order then to reach the incorruptible eternity of the Spirit.

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because it also is evidently better to live in eternity than to live in a life of passing moments. So Plato has there established the superiority of the intellect over the senses. And it is necessary from now on to the human mind to be purified from the corruption and the changes which the bodily life carries as it were into the soul which is bound to this bodily life. So man, especially the highest kind of man, and that is the philosopher, has the obligation to rise above the bodily so that his soul, a spiritual immortal soul, may be tuned to the fullness of the spiritual.

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We all know the description which Saint Augustine, in his Confessions, has given of his own way, from the material to the spiritual, from the temporal to the eternal. Now it was Saint Augustine who describes in commenting on the difference between Martha and Mary and the difference between St. Peter and St. John in the Gospel, who explains the difference of the active and the contemplative life. And Saint Augustine leads us a step further in the rise above the temple and the passing.

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He explains how the so-called active life, which is lived in the service of good causes is still lower than the contemplative life, which is essentially a life in man's last end. The active life, the service of good causes, consists in our being useful here in this world to others, to help our neighbors. St. Augustine emphasizes that the Martha service in this bodily life is a good and is a necessary thing, but

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that this active life, out of its very nature, tends to make itself superfluous, to eliminate itself. The service, for example, of the poor in charity tends to eliminate poverty. The art of medicine to cure sickness tends to eliminate, to overcome sickness. Now, what happens to the social worker or to the physician when there are no needy people or no sick people anymore.

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It was Spencer who put to himself this question. If all my dreams for the social betterment of human life and human society If all these institutions I'm dreaming of would be realized, then what is there any more to do? And it suddenly came to his attention, and then indeed his life would be a complete vacuum. He would not know what to do with himself. once his life was deprived of its good causes. That is the typical reaction of the Anglo-Saxon or Germanic temperament to the contemplative life.

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The Germanic or Nordic temperament is by nature active, It wants to work. The idea of the dolce far niente seems to be rather remote. The Nordic temperament wants action. As Faust says in Goethe's drama, In the beginning was the action. Now, that is very different, however, from the Mediterranean and also and especially from the Christian idea. The Christian idea is expressed by a man like St. Gregory the Great, who as a monk enjoyed the calm and peace of the contemplative life in his monastery, and as a pope were thrown into the tempests of the active life.

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And he, in one of his letters, exclaims with a sigh, Redire post causas ad cor desidero. I long to be able to turn away from the causes and sink into my heart. Therefore, contemplative life is the recovery of the true self, our sinking into the inwardness of the heart. In contemplative life, we experience the uniqueness of man as a person in his confrontation with God. Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, has so well shown that man, essentially the human person,

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is essentially caught, as it were, in a dialogue, in a dialogue with the absolute person, with God, so that a human person reaches the depth of his own self only in this inner personal speaking to God. to God not only as the eternal absolute being, not only as the just judge, but as the holy God. Confrontation with the holy God, that is the inner meaning of the contemplative life, And that is where the human person transcends all passing purposes and enters into the fullness of its last and eternal destiny.

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Meeting, being confronted with the holiness of God, but there the first reaction of every human creature. He is expressed by the Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament in that one fatal sentence, No man can see God and live. Before you I am dust and ashes, Abraham says. Or Isaiah, in front of the divine glory, listening to the holy, holy, holy of the angels, says, I am a man of unclean lips. Now here, my dear friends, we enter really into a completely new dimension.

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This is the dimension of grace, the dimension of salvation, the dimension of God's descending love. And here we have reached the point where alone we can understand the life of the church and the life of the liturgy. Here alone we enter into the realm of the priest. Here where a new life and a new beginning is made with us, where out of the dust and the ashes of a sinful human creature a new spirit rises through the power of God's life-giving mercy.

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This is the field of the church and of the liturgy. And nobody who has not passed through this basic experience of a troubled mind and of a contrite heart will ever be able to realize the vitality of the liturgy, which simply does not consist in the rallying or the harnessing of energies which we own, which are part of ourselves, of our nature. But the life that that liturgy gives to us is a new life, a life into which we enter only through conversion.

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It is therefore, as you see right away, not an intensification, not a perfection of our innate energies, but it is a change of heart. Repentance is the beginning, is the birth of this new life. which is given to us in and through the liturgy of the Church. It begins, as we can see in this Lenten season, in the preparation of the rebirth of Easter. It begins with a return, with the return of the prodigal son. prodigality, waste, that waste of human pride, of wrong self-assurance, that prodigality and that waste, that is really part of our animal life.

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It is maybe a vitality, yes, but a vitality which turns necessarily into disgust. The fruit of it is depression and death. And the prodigal son of the gospel parable experiences just that. sinking from stage to stage down to the level of the swine, he then remembers in this exile the love that surrounded him in his father's home. There rises in his heart the longing for the fullness and the blessedness of love, spiritual love, fatherly love, motherly love, that love that raised him, that love that kissed him, that love that embraced him.

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Father, I am not worthy to be called thy son. This sentence is the death sentence which the sinner speaks over himself, pronounces over himself. That is his voluntary humiliation. That is his surrender. That is his letting himself go. But this death sentence of the repenting sinner pronounced against himself is also his transformation. It is the beginning. It opens the door for the flood of fatherly love that now pours into him from above

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The father hugs the son. Those of you who have been to Mass on this day, on Friday, of the fourth week in Lent, you have read the lesson from the third book of Kings, the seventeenth chapter, where the only son of the widow is dead. And she turns in bitterness of heart to Elias, her guest. Give me my son. What have I to do with thee, thou man of God? Art thou come to me that my iniquities should be remembered? and that thou shouldst kill my son. But then Elias said to her, Give me thy son.

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And he took him out of her bosom, carried him into the upper chamber, where he abode, and laid him upon his own bed. And he cried to the Lord and said, O Lord, my God, hast thou afflicted also the widow with whom I am after a sword maintained so as to kill her son? And he stretched and measured himself upon the child three times and cried to the Lord and said, O Lord, my God, let the soul of this child I beseech thee return into his body. And the Lord heard the voice of Elias, and the soul of the child returned unto him, and he revived. And Elias took the child, brought him down from the upper chamber to the house below, and delivered him to his mother, and said to her, Behold thy son live.

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This, my dear friends, is the essence of that life which the liturgy gives to us. It is that life with which God revives the one who has died in sin and returns to him in repentance. The prophet in the Old Testament is the one who extends himself over the dead youth. But in the New Testament, and there I refer to today's gospel, in the New Testament it is Jesus, Jesus the Son of God made man, who weeps over dead Lazarus. frame with spirit too.

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He trembled in the depth of his spirit. There it is, the Son of God, who did not think his robbery to be equal to God, but descended and took on the form of the slave. That means he extended himself with this whole divine being all the length and the breadth and the depth of our human fallen nature by taking on the likeness of sinful human flesh. Here, my dear friends, here we are at the source of the liturgy. and the sacrifice of the Son of God made man, in which he offered himself on the cross, that he may reconcile God's enemies, us, to his eternal Father, that he may become our peace.

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And that indeed is the essence of the liturgy. It is the sacramentum pacis, the sacrament of peace. The very essence of the liturgy is the mysterium, that divine work of redemption. The Father sent his Son that he may give his life for us, so that by accepting his death, the Son's death, we may live. And this death, life-giving death of the Son, that is represented, made present again, in the liturgical sacramental action, first of all in the action of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

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Out of this fullness of Christ's work of redemption, his death and his resurrection, out of this fullness we live through the medium of the liturgy. In the liturgy, the divine absolute love reaches us. In the liturgy, baptism, the Eucharist, and the other sacraments, the water of the Spirit of the risen Christ descends upon us from above, and we receive it, we drink it, but Be mindful of the fact that only those who thirst, and that means those who are poor according to the Spirit, that means those who realize their vital need for this love that descends from above,

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they are the only one who can receive it, who can drink it. Therefore, in tomorrow's Mass, the Saturday of the fourth week in Lent, we sing in the intro it, All you that thirst, come to the waters, says the Lord, and you that have no money, come and drink with joy. You see, the essence of the liturgy, the Christian liturgy, is not that we offer a sacrifice, that we contribute something. It is not our contribution which makes the essence of the liturgy. But we are those who buy without money.

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The water that the mercy of the Heavenly Father sends to us. To buy without money, that is an expression for believing, for our faith. The water that we buy without money is the water of grace. It's the water of that motherly love which is described again in tomorrow's Mass in the Epistle, in the words which are taken from the 49th chapter of Isaiah, in which it is said, Can a woman forget her infant so as not to have pity on the son of her womb? And if she should forget, yet will not I forget thee, says the Lord Almighty.

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The life of the liturgy is the life of the Heavenly Father's son. The essence of the Son is not to glorify himself. As we hear our Lord saying solemnly on this coming Sunday, on the Gospel of Passion Sunday, my glory is nothing. It is my Father that glorifies me. He, the Son, glorifies the Father in his death, and the Father glorifies the Son in the resurrection. And those two, the Son's glorification of the Father through his death, and the Father's glorification of the Son through the resurrection,

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Those two constitute the full day of Christ. And it is the essence of the liturgy to make us see, to transport us into the day of Christ. Jesus said to them, Abraham, your father, rejoice, that he might see my day. He saw it and was glad. The Jews therefore said to him, Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham? Jesus said to them, Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham was made, I have. This Jesus, the I Am, speaks to us in the liturgy.

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And more than that, he gives himself to us in the liturgy. That is why on this coming Sunday, we sing at the moment when we go to the altar to receive the body and the blood of the Saviour. We say his words, this is my body. which shall be delivered for you. This charis is the New Testament in my blood, says the Lord. And then he continues, Do this as often as you receive it in commemoration of me. Do this. That is his invitation now to answer, to give the response, to make his work our own by doing it ourselves. And that indeed, my dear friends, now is the fullness of the life of the liturgy.

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It is not only to be willing to receive the life from the hands of the Son, but it is also then the eagerness in the power of this newly received life, to respond, respond to the gift, to work with the talents that we receive. All that the Church formulates in the last greeting with which we are dismissed at the end of the Liturgy of the Mass, Ete Missa Est, Go now and missa est. You are sent, one may translate the meaning of that word. Now you go and you do this, what you have received, and share it with others.

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Spread it, make it spread all over the world. Here, my dear friends, then we enter and descend, as it were, from the heights of the contemplative life, which is fulfilled, as it were, in the liturgy of the canon of the Mass, and reaches its climax in the meal of Holy Communion. From here we descend now again into the vita activa, And from this height of liturgical contemplation, the active life receives its true fullness. I remind you of Holy Thursday, the washing of the feet. There the charity of Christ that we receive presses us. There, the social meaning of the liturgy becomes clear to us.

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There stands before us the altar as the source of charity. I remember always that beautiful Christmas. I once... experienced in the Benedictine Abbey of St. Matthias in Trier in Germany. There stood the abbot as the celebrant, and at the moment of the offertory, the faithful of the parish would come, and they all brought their gifts. The gifts are for the poor of the parish, Christmas gifts for the poor of the parish. and these mountains of gifts were rising all around the altar, so that the abbot as the representative of Christ and the one who blesses the food for this whole family which surrounds the altar also is seen there as the one who dispenses the gifts of charity of the faithful for the poor, so that

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active and contemplative life in the deepest sense of the word meet at the altar of the church. But not only that, one can also say that the intensity and beauty even of the vitality of the senses is consecrated and transformed by the new life which we receive in the liturgy of the church. there is the one pole, the pole of the concupisciblis, of sense love, which is consecrated in holy virginity. Virginal life fulfills, as the Church says in the beautiful text of the consecration of a virgin, fulfills and does not destroy the mysterium amoris, the mystery of love, which has been manifested to us in the love with which Christ loved his church and gave himself for it that he might sanctify and cleanse it.

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This love reaches us through the sacrament. as St. Paul continues in the text from the fifth chapter of the Ephesians, which I have just been quoting, that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the Word. In baptism we are planted into the likeness of Christ's dead dying with him, we may also rise with him and walk in the newness of life, thinking the things that are above, where Christ is enthroned at the right hand of the Father. Through baptism we become children of the resurrection. We belong to the new age,

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We are virgins clothed in the white garment of newness of life, that we may carry it unspotted to the judgment seat of God. In the banquet of the Holy Eucharist, we receive the bread of life. and the wine which, as the liturgy says, makes us...

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