The balance of man and God in liturgy
You may need to read this one a couple times. I had to. This talk of Christ in liturgy is often lacking in our presentation of liturgical thought. We ask “this is what works for me” rather than “this is what God would have us do.” It seems the scale is often tipped to the human end of cooperation rather the divine end of gift.
Church music with artistic pretensions is not opposed to the essence of
Christian liturgy, but is rather a necessary way of expressing belief in the
world-filling glory of Jesus Christ. The Church’s liturgy has a compelling
mandate to reveal in resonant sound the glorification of God which lies
hidden in the cosmos. This, then, is the liturgy’s essence : to transpose
the cosmos, to spiritualise it into the gesture of praise through song and
thus to redeem it; to ‘humanise’ the world…. the liturgy demands an
artistic transposition out of the spirit of the faith, an artistic
transposition into human music which glorifies the Word made flesh. Such
music must obey a stricter law than the commonplace music of everyday life :
such music is beholden to the Word and must lead to the Spirit.
Hence church music must find its way whilst constantly contending in two
directions : in the face of puritanical pride she must justify the necessary
incarnation of the spirit in music, and vis-a-vis the commonplace she must
seek to point the spirit and the cosmos in the direction of the Divine. When
the effort is successful, it is of course a gift; but the gift is not
bestowed without the preparation which we offer through our own effort. When
this takes place, then it is not a matter of exercising a mere hobby without
obligation, but rather of living out a necessary dimension of Christian
faith and in so doing, retaining a necessary dimension of what it means to
be a human being. Without both of these dimensions, culture and humanity
irresistibly decay from within.
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (1977)
( source: http://www.ordoantiquus.org/musica.html )
HT: Rev. Tim May and the Lutheran Liturgy Yahoo group…
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