Mystery and Liturgy
The 8th Sunday in Ordinary Time C
March 2nd, 2025
The meditations on the pedagogical dimension of the Catholic liturgies are rich and full of valuable reflections with tremendous practical consequences for our Christian lives. Today, I want to address an emerging problem in our culture. The liturgy introduces us to God’s mystery and helps us enter the charity conversation.
The celebration of sacred mysteries has a mystical dimension. However, the idea of mysticism and mystery is crucial. Modern and postmodern philosophy promote a relativistic and irrationalist idea of mystery. In fact, relativism, present in almost every account of modern and postmodern philosophy, claims that the whole of reality is an unknowable mystery. Hence, human reason is unable to know it.
According to this account, we can only know appearances, whereas what reality is, beyond our perception, is unknown and unknowable. Therefore, nobody should claim to know the truth. What we know is a product of the structures of subjective perception or our impulses or tendencies. The truth is relativized to the human subject in different ways.
A peculiar idea of mysticism imported from Eastern philosophies arises within this line of thought that has become popular culture. The mystic is the one who has access to the mystery in an affective manner. From that contact, different rationalizations of the mystery are given birth. However, those dogmatic rationalizations will always be partial and relative.
Through this path, new-age spirituality increasingly claims to be above religions, which are ultimately just dogmatic, ritualistic, and moralistic manifestations of the mystic's authentic contact with the mystery, the impersonal energies of the universe, the soul of the world, or whatever name they want to use to describe that primordial reality that replaces the idea of a personal God Who is the transcendent creator and governor of the universe.
The replacement of God by this impersonal mystery of which there is a spark in each one of us or in every creature excludes the possibility of a personal God Who eventually can teach and command us so that we have to believe and obey Him.
How is this related to some understandings of the Christian liturgy? We must be aware of the powerful influence of the culture we are immersed in. Sometimes, without our full awareness, the dominant ideas and worldviews permeate our mindset, conditioning how we think, even about our faith.
I have heard some people who claim to be traditionalists in the Catholic Church that it is better to attend the Mass in Latin because they cannot understand it. They argue that this helps them become more immersed in the celebrated mystery and promotes more due reverence to God in the Eucharist.
Be alert about this attitude! It is not Catholic but modernist. It perfectly fits the new age mindset that is so diffused in our culture. The truth is displaced, and then different forms of weird mysticism and aestheticism impose themselves as the primordial elements of the liturgy. That is not the authentic Tradition in the Catholic Church.
I love the Latin Mass and the Traditional Latin Mass. I firmly believe priests need to know Latin and Greek to access our immense and rich Christian Tradition. The multiplicity of rites of the Catholic Church is astonishingly rich and manifests the profundity of the mysteries of our Faith. However, claiming that the Mass in an unknown language is more valuable than a liturgy in which we can understand and learn the language of the Church is not healthy for spiritual life.
God wants to be worshiped not only with our lips but also with our hearts. The interior and exterior dimensions of our acts of religion must be present, profoundly united, like the soul and the matter of our organism. The absence of the mind in the ritual celebration cannot produce but a soulless liturgy.
Let us conclude this reflection with a beautiful discourse of Pope Benedict about the ars celebrandi and the importance of the interior understanding of the heart, animating the exterior recitation of the words in our liturgies.
The fundamental element of the true ars celebrandi is this consonance, this harmony between what we say with our lips and what we think with our heart. The “Sursum corda,” which is a very ancient word of the Liturgy, should come before the Preface, before the Liturgy, as the “path” for our speaking and thinking. We must raise our heart to the Lord, not only as a ritual response but as an expression of what is happening in this heart that is uplifted, and also lifts up others. In other words, the ars celebrandi is not intended as an invitation to some sort of theatre or show, but to an interiority that makes itself felt and becomes acceptable and evident to the people taking part. Only if they see that this is not an exterior or spectacular ars - we are not actors! - but the expression of the journey of our heart that attracts their hearts too, will the Liturgy become beautiful, will it become the communion with the Lord of all who are present. Of course, external things must also be associated with this fundamental condition, expressed in St Benedict's words: "Mens concordet voci" - the heart is truly raised, uplifted to the Lord. We must learn to say the words properly. (Pope Benedict XVI, Meeting with the Priests of the Diocese of Albano. Swiss Hall at the Papal Summer Residence, Castel Gandolfo, Thursday, 31 August 2006)
I pray we can celebrate more and more beautiful liturgies in our Parish. But there is no true beauty without order and harmony. Thus, no matter what ornaments we use, what music we play, or what language we use, if there is no interior devotion and prayer, our mind and hearts will not be present as they should be: the most profound animating principle of our spiritual sacrifice united to Jesus’ sacrifice by the grace of the Holy Spirit and for the Glory of the Father.
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