What fuels the craving?

So Pope Leo actually stumbled upon a profound observation:  I think sometimes the, say, ‘abuse’ of the liturgy from what we call the Vatican II Mass, was not helpful for people who were looking for a deeper experience of prayer, of contact with the mystery of faith that they seemed to find in the celebration of the Tridentine Mass.

That is Leospeak for if the new Mass were celebrated reverently and rightly, there would be no hankering for the old Mass.  Perhaps he is right.  I would assume that the foolish and casual manner in which most Novus Ordo Masses are celebrated and even the perfunctory attention given to non-scandalous celebrations have fueled the desire for the old.  Yet I am not sure it would be quite that simple.  Stealing what people knew and replacing it with something radically different remains part of the issue.  Yet, as interested as I am, it is not my problem.

I do wonder, however, if that might not be applicable to the Lutheran situation.  While there was uniformity of rites among nearly all Lutherans in the 1940s and 1950s, these were not golden years for the liturgy.  While we followed the Common Service, we did not practice what we confessed.  The Eucharist was a once a quarter add on to the dry Mass that had become normal.  Pastors did not preach from the lectionary but from a cycle of preaching texts different from the appointed pericopes.  Private confession was never spoken of and practiced even less.  We prided ourselves in being liturgical in the same way a health nut gloats over his impossible bean burger but wants it to taste like real meat.  Pastors wore academic gowns or the black gown of the Reformed.  We sang Methodist hymns with gusto and stole the rhythm from Lutheran chorales until they sang like the Methodist ones.  Who knows if Lutheranism would have had a real liturgical renewal or needed one if we had approached preaching and leading the Divine Service like our confessional documents expected?

Perhaps the quest for contemporary worship and music was born more of the desire to worship in an interesting manner as much as a relevant one.  It just might be that we would not have looked with such longing on the Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Fundamentalists for our worship cues if we had been actually practicing what we preached.  I know that my interest in contemporary worship in college was fueled by the boredom with the lackluster celebrations of the Divine Service I grew up with -- long on formality but not quite confident that we wanted to be there doing what we were doing.  Naturally I looked at those who were genuinely excited to be in Church on Sunday morning as do most.  It was my experience with high church folks (what is what they were called then) that led me away from singing Amazing Grace to the melody of The House of the Rising Sun to chant and the Lutheran chorales that remain my favorites to this day.  I saw in these folks a reverence not of formality but of confidence that what we were doing was real and it was really delivering what it said.

Sadly, liturgical renewal betrayed us not with faulty forms as much as a fake idea of informality and what it meant to participate in the liturgy (we all get to be leaders).  Reverence and confidence in the liturgy to deliver what is being signed are the only way to satisfy our longing for relevance and reality, for honest food and a present feast upon the eternal miracle.  It is still appealing to me and, apparently to many folks far younger than my oldest vestments.  Smoke and mirrors will not satisfy but incense and mystery born of a conviction that God is here delivering His gifts and fitting us for eternity will satisfy and do it every week -- over and over again.  I am not looking for a deeper experience but I am expecting to receive what the words say and the means of grace promise.  Nothing more and nothing less -- except a presiding minister, choir, organist, and others who know this and want it, too.

There is sort of a cult rising up over Divine Service III.  In Rome it is the Latin Mass.  I do not get it.  It is not the rite that will rescue us from our desires to be happy clappy or casual or relevant.  While it is true we are our rites, this is true of the doctrine in them.  This is lex orandi lex credendi.  You cannot confess rightly what you worship wrongly.  And the other way around.  However, it is still possible to be formally correct yet without awareness of or confidence in the things that the liturgy says, does, and delivers.  Lackadaisical preaching and presiding will kill the grandest of liturgical acts.  It is reverence and the conviction that words matter, words deliver what they say, and the signs convey what they signify.  Where that happens, people will be fed and go home full to the brim of the foretaste of the eternal.