Paradox as the Interpretive Key to Christmas
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Pope Leo, in talking with the Eastern Rite Catholics today, talked about a great need to recover mystery, beauty, wonder and majesty... like what they have in their ancient liturgies. He said,
A need to recover something implies that it was lost or stolen from us. In the West we have been losing the sense of the sacred for a long time.
The Enlightenment killed off a widespread acceptance of the supernatural. Eventually religious explanations were replaced by scientific ones. It caused a gradual separation of spirit and matter. The end result being an atheistic totalitarianism of matter alone, referred to as atheistic materialism and later unethical scientism.
The urgency or the greatness of the need to recover the sense of mystery, beauty and wonder in the liturgy is to appreciate God as the source of holiness. But perhaps more urgent, it is also a safeguard for seeing our own humanity as sacred too. After all, we are the only creatures that can offer true worship to God and as a result become God-like.
The Holy Father continued, 'We need a liturgy that engages the human person in his or her entirety'. The brutal cost of the secular, atheistic worldview has been the devaluing of and the reduction of the human person as a clump of cells motivated by no more than chemical reactions in the brain. As Catholics we know that in our entirety we are a body-soul composite with the potential to become saints.
The culmination of the loss of the sacred and the consequent cheapening of human life reached its zenith during the 20th century. Two world wars, the holocaust, the detonation of two atomic bombs in crowded cities, the rise of communism and the mass murder perpetrated by genocidal maniacs such as Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot and others. We've been through a lot: the sexual revolution, the breakdown of the family and now the life sucking pornographic mire that envelopes us like quicksand.
Even in non-communist, capitalist societies, like America, human beings have become absorbed into an economic, utilitarian machine. Materialism of the post-industrial age has reduced us to a mere commodity to be used to the point of disposal. The last 'Pope Leo' dedicated his encyclical, Rerum Novarum to remind us of the hierarchy of creation, that human beings, even dirty factory workers, are the crown of creation who alone are made in the image of God. Therefore we must protect the wonder, mystery and awe innate to each person.
Pope St. Paul VI confirmed this idea, “For when a man works he not only alters things and society, he develops himself as well. He learns much, he cultivates his resources, he goes outside of himself and beyond himself. Rightly understood this kind of growth is of greater value than any external riches which can be garnered. A man is more precious for what he is than for what he has” (Gaudium et Spes, 35).
We live in a post-Christian culture that has lost sight of both the sacred and the humane. To use the words of the last three popes, we live in a...
They all echoed Hobbes who warned us that a life without structure and order brought about first by natural law devolves into lives that are ‘nasty, brutish, and short’. The kind of liturgy that Pope Leo desires is not escapism for those who need a break. Instead, it offers a way to rise above the the flood of a profane culture and be who we were created to be. Through liturgy we exit time and enter into an eternal promise of communion with God as a foretaste of our final home. Something we hope is radically different than where we are now.
In the work-a-day world, where we clock in and clock out, many of us find solace and unwinding through our phones. In search of the next dopamine hit, we scroll endlessly looking for a spectacle to get lost in. After which we turn to Netflix. The late German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper called it when he said, “... the greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.” We are overworked and over stimulated. Consequently, we are, at the same time, both bored and boring.
The liturgy is supposed to be the antidote to our disenchanted world, the groundzero of meaning, mystery and holiness. It is supposed to be the most non-utilitarian thing we do. "Aristotle said that the best activities are the most useless. This is because such things are not simply means to a further end but are done entirely for their own sake. Thus watching a baseball game is more important than getting a haircut, and cultivating a friendship is more valuable than making money. The game and the friendship are goods that are excellent in themselves, while getting a haircut and making money are in service of something beyond themselves… In this sense, the most useless activity of all is the celebration of the Liturgy, which is another way of saying that it is the most important thing we could possibly do. There is no higher good than to rest in God, to honor him for his kindness, to savor his sweetness–in a word, to praise him”- Bishop Robert Barron.
For many people today sitting through the banality of a liturgy centered on human generated spectacle increases their boredom. They stop going because it looks and sounds just like the utilitarian, grey, dismal world that they are trapped in. They become stuck in a hopeless cycle of meaninglessness as the God-shaped hole within remains empty. “The vacancy left by absence of worship is filled by mere killing of time and by boredom, which is directly related to inability to enjoy leisure; for one can only be bored if the spiritual power to be leisurely has been lost”-Josef Peiper.
Our new Holy Father, Pope Leo seems to get this. “Moreover, the Church should resist the temptation to believe that it can compete with modern mass media by turning the sacred liturgy into spectacle. Here again, church fathers such as Tertullian remind us today that visual spectacle is the domain of the saeculum, and that our proper mission is to introduce people to the nature of mystery as an antidote to spectacle. As a consequence, evangelization in the modern world must find the appropriate means for redirecting public attention away from spectacle and into mystery” -Pope Leo XIV.
With this previous comment, combined with what he said today about the need to recover mystery and beauty, he seems to be calling for the ‘re-enchantment’ of the Catholic Liturgy.
Peiper said, “ …in divine worship a certain definite space of time is set aside from working hours and days... and like the space allotted to the temple, is not used, is withdrawn from all merely utilitarian ends.” In other words, stepping into the church and experiencing liturgy is supposed to be a timeless immersion into heaven.
Consider what Romano Guardini said about walking through a church door. “Every time we enter a church, if we but notice it, a question is put to us. Why has a church doors? It seems a foolish question. Naturally, to go in by. Yes, but doors are not necessary--only a doorway. An opening with a board partition to close it off would be a cheap and practical convenience of letting people out and in. But the door serves more than a practical use; it is a reminder.
When you step through the doorway of a church you are leaving the outer-world behind and entering an inner world. The outside world is a fair place abounding in life and activity, but also a place with a mingling of the base and ugly. It is a sort of market place, crossed and re-crossed by all and sundry. Perhaps "unholy" is not quite the word for it, yet there is something profane about the world. Behind the church doors is an inner place, separated from the market place, a silent, consecrated and holy spot. It is very certain that the whole world is the work of God and his gift to us, that we may meet Him anywhere, that everything we receive is from God's hand, and, when received religiously, is holy. Nevertheless men have always felt that certain precincts were in a special manner set apart and dedicated to God.
Between the outer and the inner world are the doors. They are the barriers between the marketplace and the sanctuary, between what belongs to the world at large and what has become consecrated to God. And the door warns the man who opens it to go inside that he must now leave behind the thoughts, wishes and cares which here are out of place, his curiosity, his vanity, his worldly interests, his secular self. "Make yourself clean. The ground you tread is holy ground."
Do not rush through the doors. Let us take time to open our hearts to their meaning and pause a moment beforehand so as to make our entering-in a fully intended and recollected act. It is the doors that admit us to this mysterious place. Lay aside, they say, all that cramps and narrows, all that sinks the mind. Open your heart, lift up your eyes. Let your soul be free, for this is God's temple. It is likewise the representation of you, yourself. For you, your soul and your body, are the living temple of God. Open up that temple, make it spacious, give it height.
Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in. Heed the cry of the doors. Of small use to you is a house of wood and stone unless you yourself are God's living dwelling. The high arched gates may be lifted up, and the portals parted wide, but unless the doors of your heart are open, how can the King of Glory enter in?’ - R. Guardini, Sacred Signs
We humans need unusual rituals that are set apart from our everyday experience of informality, irreverence, and ugliness. We need thurifers, chanting, crossings, bowings, genuflections, fire, holy water, incense and kneeling. We desire more than a communal meal with colloquial language expressing a half-hearted religious intent.
From the moment we enter the church, we need to be led upward by the bread crumbs of liturgical mystery, to be built up in faith, so that when we behold the Real Presence of our Lord, it’s not just another part of the Mass or worse, an indicator that we are closer to the Mass ending, to going home and watching the game.
Dare we hope that this American pope will be the one to help us recover a sense of Mystery, Beauty, Wonder and Majesty not only in the liturgy but by extension in every person we encounter.
I am a life-long Catholic, husband, dad, teacher and former football coach. I've been teaching the Catholic Faith to young men, religious educators and catechists since 1998. My academic background, MA is in Theology and Catechetics. Email: gary@apexcatechetics.com
