Seasons of Celebration: Meditations on the Cycle of Liturgical Feasts - Softcover

Thomas Merton

3.93

29 ratings by Goodreads

9781594711701: Seasons of Celebration: Meditations on the Cycle of Liturgical Feasts

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1594711704 ISBN 13: 9781594711701

Publisher: Ave Maria Pr, 2009

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Forty years after his death, fans of Thomas Merton—from a wide array of faith traditions—continue to consult the spiritual wisdom found in his voluminous writings. Merton called Seasons of Celebration his "liturgy book" and this edition includes a new foreword by renowned Merton scholar William H. Shannon. These essays remain timely in view of the ongoing liturgical renewal initiated by Vatican II and are a must-read for those seeking to deepen their grasp of the liturgy and the cycles of the Church year.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Seasons of Celebration LITURGY AND SPIRITUAL PERSONALISM 1. The Personal Aspect of Liturgical Renewal

The Second Vatican Council, while recalling that the liturgical worship of the Church “accomplishes the work of our Redemption,” especially emphasizes the fact that the Liturgy is the chief means “whereby the faithful may express in their lives and manifest to others the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true Church.” (Constitution on Liturgy, Introduction, n. 2.) For this reason the Council attaches very great importance to liturgical renewal, considering it to be essential to the frankly admitted aim of the Council: the reform of the entire Church by a renewal of Catholic life in all its depth and all its manifestations. This renewal is itself essential for another aim expressed by the Council “to promote union among all who believe in Christ; to strengthen whatever can help to call the whole of mankind into the household of the Church.” (Ibid., n. 1.)

The Constitution on Liturgy does not merely show the Church’s approval of what has already been done by the Liturgical Movement. It is the beginning of a broad and general Liturgical reform which, it is hoped, will accomplish the most striking and significant changes in every form of Catholic Worship. This is to be, and in fact already is, the greatest development in liturgy since the Patristic age and the most thorough reform in liturgy the Church has ever known.

This reform starts from a basic idea of the nature of Liturgy as public worship, as an activity of the Church carried out by Christ Himself in union with His Church. The very nature of this activity demands the “full, conscious and active participation of all the faithful.” Not only that, but the task of bringing every Catholic to participate actively in Liturgical Worship is one that takes priority over everything else since a liturgical reform imposed by means of constraint from above would lack all genuine significance. Indeed no such authoritarian reform is envisaged by the Council. On the contrary, the Constitution on Liturgy foresees that the great liturgical renewal is to be carried out by the faithful themselves—Bishops, clergy and also laity. Therefore “in the restoration and promotion of the Sacred Liturgy this full and active participation by all the people is the aim to be considered before all else.”

The present essay is concerned with the meaning of liturgical renewal not only as participation in new modes of worship, but as the creative joint effort of all Catholics to attain a new understanding of worship itself.

Liturgy is not just the fulfilment of a natural duty. It is the celebration of our unity in the Redemptive Love and Mystery of Christ. It is the expression of the self-awareness of a redeemed people. If the people themselves are not aware of their status and of their nobility as sons of God in Christ, how can they convincingly affirm and exercise their full spiritual rights as citizens in the Kingdom of God?

To understand this we have to go back to the classic Greek concept of Liturgy.

Liturgy is, in the original and classical sense of the word, a political activity. Leitourgia was a “public work,” a contribution made by a free citizen of the polis to the celebration and manifestation of the visible life of the polis. As such it was distinct from the economic activity or the private and more material concern of making a living and managing the productive enterprises of the “household.” Political life was the public and responsible domain of the free citizen—and was restricted to him alone.

Private life was properly the realm of those who were not considered to be fully “persons,” like women, children and slaves, whose appearance in public was without significance because they had no ability to participate in the life of the city. As far as public life was concerned, they did not exist. In the days of the Athenian republic, public activity was at the same time political and religious, since the life of the city-state was basically religious.

The earliest notion of liturgy does not rest on a distinction between “sacred” and “secular.” An example of “liturgy” in the Athenian democracy, would be the act of providing for the dithyrambic dance and procession, or the representation of the religious drama-cycle which developed out of the dithyramb. Note that here too, “art,” “culture,” and “religion” all coalesce in Leitourgia.

It is important, for our present purpose, to replace the term “liturgy” in its classical, hellenic context, where it is most clear and meaningful. Liturgical celebration in this ancient and original sense is a sacred and public action in which the community, at once religious and political, acknowledges its identity in worship.

This is essential for our theme, “Liturgy and spiritual personalism.” Unless we begin by returning to the root meaning of liturgy, we will be led astray by the repercussions and confusions of modern controversy. Indeed, the superficial opposition so often created between liturgical prayer and “personal” prayer—an opposition which has no basis in reality—makes all genuine understanding of either liturgy or meditation practically impossible: as if liturgy were thinkable without some meditation, and as if meditation did not presuppose and complement the liturgical celebration of the mysteries of our redemption.

Liturgical prayer is, or should be, eminently personal because it is public. To judge by polemical statements made on one side or the other one would almost imagine that there were thought to be two opposing ways of prayer and Christian fulfillment: the one exclusively public and corporate and the other exclusively private and individual. No wonder that the results are confusing! In the Christian city, every mature individual is a free citizen; no one is prevented by a servile condition from participating in the life on the polis, the Holy City, or better, the People of God. Each person, as a member of Christ, has a voice in the public worship of the Church, in that “leitourgia” which is the most exalted and most excellent of “public works” and which is at the same time the most perfect expression of the “economy” of that household which is the family not only of man but of the Heavenly Father. In this family none are slaves, all are “sons” and all have the privilege of free and spontaneous speech (parrhesia) in the Father’s Presence, either alone or in the company of the other children and heirs of the Creator.

Therefore in this essay we are not trying to settle the largely misleading dispute about “public” and “private” prayer. We are not concerned with it at all. Rather, we are concerned with liturgical worship as the action of fully developed Christian persons, free citizens of the Christian polis, which is the City and house of God, the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ. Liturgy is an expression of their personality because in it they affirm their divine sonship and exercise their rights of citizenship in the heavenly Jerusalem; the eschatalogical and redeemed community of those who are one in Love, freed from the bonds of sin and death.

2. Public Service

It is our contention that unless the liturgy is the activity of free and mature persons, intelligently participating together in the corporate cultus which expresses and constitutes their visible spiritual society, it cannot have a real spiritual meaning. That is to say, of course, that from the moment corporate worship ceases to be genuinely communal and becomes, instead merely collective—as soon as it ceases to be the collaboration of free persons, each offering his own irreplaceable contribution, and becomes the mechanical functioning of anonymous units, whose identity and individual contribution are of no special worth—then it loses its right to be called liturgy or Christian worship. It is no longer the public witness of free and responsible personalities—it has become a demonstration by mass-men, or slaves.

It is true that the Lord in the Gospel speaks of His faithful as “sheep,” but that does not entitle us to assume that the liturgy is merely the organized bleating of irrational animals herded together by constraint and trained by an ingenious discipline until they can carry out seemingly human actions which they are not capable of understanding.

On the other hand, liturgy in the full sense of the word cannot be merely the performance of a group of specialists in the presence of passive spectators. It is not merely theater. Liturgy demands the intelligent and active participation of all the mature members of the Assembly. The only spectators and “listeners” are the catechumens or public sinners who join in the liturgy of the word, the foremass, in which presumably all participate by listening and responding, each according to his ability. After this, the catechumens originally left the Assembly, though today they remain as “spectators.” But this does not mean that the faithful are mere spectators like the catechumens. They have work to do. They are free citizens, and they have something very important to say in what is going on. They have responded to a divine summons. They are in a broad sense “celebrating,” together with the officially deputed ministers, the mystery which expresses the unity and the solidarity of all the members of the One Christ. They participate in the eucharistic sacrifice by sacramental communion, and by all the rites and symbolic actions which manifest their ...

Review:

"A quiet joy echoes from its pages, the alleluia of a man who has sensed the glory of the coming of the Lord." --The Catholic World,

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.