Neal Obstat Theological Opining

Distracted into Silence
I have blanked out for a while here as a blogger, largely because my work load has been so demanding. Because I need a certain amount of ‘space’ to think prayerfully before I blog, when I am frenetic in my work and home commitments that space shrinks.

Not that this is of interest, but there it is.

Over the Top
We have left the paschal season of Eastertide. This year I experienced its excessive character more than usual. Excessive in its call to bask in glory, to rejoice in the resurrection and to recall the white hot fire that burned in the first hours, days and years of the Church’s existence.

A Study in Contrast
It’s really an interesting tension that fills one who wishes to live from within the unique grace of liturgical time. On one hand, the liturgy cultivates its own attitudes toward life – Lenten penance or Easter glory; Advent longing or Christmas joy. On the other hand, one’s life in the world cultivates its own attitudes toward life – work and family; life’s seasons and stresses. They often do not find between them facile reconciliation.

What to do?

Let me venture a few gestures toward an answer.

Are we there yet?
First, as liturgy is truly the intersection between time and eternity, between the ‘already’ and ‘not yet,’ it is inherently tense, restless, conflicted. Pilgrims on a journey always wrestle with the fact that they are ‘not yet’ where they wish to be, and have to constantly read their present pilgrim plight through the lens of the goal that awaits them. They are buoyed by desire and hope, knowing that the goal of their pilgrimage surely awaits them.

Erosion, Eruption
Second, I find that the graces and attitudes proper to every liturgical season are often only experienced in the midst of the actual liturgical celebrations of that season. In the Mass, in praying the breviary, in my lectio time with the Mass readings I find a time and place where I can allow the joy or sorrow, the desire or praise to take hold of me. While I will not be consciously attentive throughout the day to the unique liturgical grace, it has left its mark on me and has shaped me. While this grace sometimes surprisingly intrudes into the earthen clay of my day with existential verve, mostly I see it only in retrospect. I am being changed, mostly at imperceptible rates, in ways that in retrospect amaze me. I am being broken down – metabolized – by the Spirit who inhabits the liturgy in a most remarkable and unremarkable way. Broken, only to be refashioned. Knit afresh in the womb of the liturgy.

Here it is who I am becoming that allows the liturgical celebrations' grace to overflow into the discontinuities of my life in the world.

As a mentor of mine once said of himself, after 46 years of being the priestly celebrant of the liturgy, "Joy fills everything now, even sorrow and pain."

He was a metabolized man, who now, having died several years ago, no doubt smiles knowingly as he gazes on the Cause of that joy.

Hollow Be Thy Name
Third, there is a certain disconnect between liturgy and life which is the unfortunate consequence of living in a de-sacralized, secularized world – a world that ever-more thoroughly evacuates the sacred from culture, and so makes any attempt to discover a harmony between life and liturgy, grace and nature, ever-more difficult. It creates not a tension but a disconnect. The chasm between a God-less world and a God-drenched liturgy is not one that is natural to Christian life in the world. Overcoming this chasm, and reversing the relentless process of sanitizing the divine from the cosmos is an imperative built into those final words of the Mass: Ite, Missa est. Go, be sent.

Three’s a crowd already, so I will stop here at point three. But how apropos to our impending Feast!

Wow, Wow, Wow
I hope your celebration of the dogmatic feast this Sunday – Trinity Sunday – gives you ‘space’ to gaze on, reflect on, and step into the most astounding truth that a human mind can seize upon: that dizzying, astounding mystery of God’s own supreme secret about Himself. A secret into which we dare to peer.

I dare you.

Let us worship.