This is a little reflection that has been percolating in my mind a while, and now that I am preparing a short talk on the Liturgy of the Hours, it is back on the front burner: the concept of "rubrics" as a liturgical language, a form of speech.
Language is about communication. Rubrics are not a kind of decoration, there for their own sakes or as a sort of embellishment. They are at the service of some other, higher good. I get kind of creeped out when participants (or celebrants!) in the Liturgy adopt stiff, formal postures, or speak with unnatural cadences. Sometimes you see priests with their hands held at an awkward angle, fingers ramrod straight and close together (or, heaven help us! the really young ones with their thumbs and index fingers touching after the Consecration, as if they weren't later going to give the Eucharist to the faithful, as the Church Fathers did, in their hands)... I wonder if it is just that they are still acquiring the liturgical language of posture, gesture and expression--and so making, as it were, a careful effort to spell the words correctly, or if (an unsettling thought when it is a matter of someone who has been around the liturgical track a few times) all the focus really were on orthography and not on the message!
Liturgy is life, communication, communion. Rubrics are like the letters and punctuation. But the point is worship. If our attention is so fixed on doing things with precision, what have we done with the presence of God? It would be quite a feat for the devil to get people worked up about rubrics to the point that they turned from the worship of God to a cult of rubrics.
2 comments:
You so clearly capture the essence of this -- how easy it is to get caught up in the performance of the posture and lose sight of the purpose of it all!
As someone who has been considered a liturgist and simply as a believer/seeker, for me posture is a means, not an ends, and the idea of posture as language really resonates with me. -- Thanks!
Lisa
It might be that these celibrants were exposed to liturgical practices that were so bad they don't want make the same mistake, or that they want to reclaim the supernatural elements that many feel we have lost.
However, your point that rubrics are the punctuation in the language of devotion is really helpful to someone like me--prone to err in over-devotion to the GIRM. Thank you for the food for thought!
Post a Comment