.Caveat:

Often when we talk about these kind of issues, folks suggest that "You know, things aren’t going to be magically fixed" if we see any of these elements – chant, Latin, etc – more frequently used.

Well, looking back at history, that’s obvious. People are people, messy Church is messy Church. And, I’d say, I don’t see anyone who talks seriously about these things even imagining that there’s any kind of magic fix implied.

(And, I would say…needed. What I mean by that it is authentic and profound Catholic liturgy isn’t dependent on language, posture or music. I know I am treading into murky waters by that statement, in about a million different ways,  but bear with me – Within the limits of the rite as given, most of us, during any given week, experience a spiritually resonant liturgy in the vernacular with the priest facing the people, with music provided by the best OCP has to offer. I would hope we do, at least, considering that when we go to Mass, we are brought into the Body of Christ in a radical, irreplaceable way. And yes, part of the murky waters I tread here involve what we’re supposed to "get out of Mass" and how emotions/aesthetics and spirituality work together and how the "experience" is there no matter what. I really don’t want to get into that discussion, but I feel moved to sort of get this out of the way because any discussion of what is correct and incorrect during liturgy inevitably evokes accusations of snobbery and aestheticism replacing spirituality. Just a couple of things you might look at in that regard: Shawn Tribe’s post here and Michael’s book, How to Get the Most of the Eucharist, which is organized around the first letters in the word "SACRIFICE" – which tells you a lot about its purpose.)

Onward…

The book in question today is a short one. Really, an extended essay, but one that if you’ve been reading liturgy blogs, you’ve heard of: Turning Towards the Lord: Orientation in Liturgical Prayer by scholar/priest Fr. U.M. Lang.

If you want a short version of the argument: An essay by Lang and the forward to the book by Cardinal Ratzinger.

The book, in its present edition, benefits from including responses to critiques offered of Lang’s conclusions, so it really is like a Stage 3 in the discussion.

There are two aspects to the argument: historical and theological. The theological is a little easier for us to grasp, even if we are totally unaccustomed to ad orientem. From the forward:

The Innsbruck liturgist Josef Andreas Jungmann, one of the architects of the Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, was from the, very beginning resolutely opposed to the polemical catchphrase that previously the priest celebrated ‘with his back to the people’; he emphasised that what was at issue was not the priest turning away from the people, but, on the contrary, his facing the same direction as the people. The Liturgy of the Word has the character of proclamation and dialogue, to which address and response can rightly belong. But in the Liturgy of the Eucharist the priest leads the people in prayer and is turned, together with the people, towards the Lord. For this reason, Jungmann argued, the common direction of priest and people is intrinsically fitting and proper to the liturgical action. Louis Bouyer (like Jungmann, one of the Council’s leading liturgists) and Klaus Gainber have each in his own way taken up the same question. Despite their great reputations, they were unable to make their voices heard at first, so strong was the tendency to stress the communality of the liturgical celebration and to regard therefore the face-to-face position of priest and people as absolutely necessary.

Anyone familiar with liturgy knows that ad orientem is not a freakish relic from the past. It is used, in the modern world, by the Orthodox, Eastern Rite Churches, as well as in a surprising number of Lutheran and Anglican churches. We discussed the latter two cases here a while back.

What’s most intriguing to me is Lang’s historical argument. He looks at all the evidence, textual, iconographic and architectural, and concludes that ad orientem was the expected posture for liturgical prayer in Christian churches from early on, and that this – praying to the East, the direction from which the Lord would return – was the crucial element, an element which was constituent in the prayer of individuals and in the liturgy.

There are complications of course – not all churches could or were built facing east, especially in Rome, so you have variations there, as well as eventually the development of the concept of "liturgical east."

But Lang’s point is finally that the whole concept of we as Church turning to the East as we pray together, the priest facing in that same direction, is a physical sign that is powerful and vital to a proper understanding of Christian liturgical prayer.

But…what about that whole meal thing? Wasn’t that what the early Christian liturgies were all about? Celebrating the presence of Jesus in their midst during a meal? Wouldn’t they have been gathered around a table, then?

In short: we don’t know. The evidence we have for the mode of celebrating the eucharistic liturgy for the first two hundred years is very scarce. Scholars have drawn various conclusions from the evidence we have, but as is so often the case, it is hard to tease out the conclusions from the scholarly presuppositions.

What we do know is that in banqueting habits of the time, it was most common for those gathered to be on one side of the table, not on both, with the place of honor, not in the middle, but on the far right side. (61). And further, in those early decades, we cannot be sure how the mix between banquet imagery and imitation of the common, more traditional forms of Jewish prayer worked out. As Lang points out, the earliest churches we have are oriented to the East, structured for ad orientem. Some scholars suggest that is because of a shift in theology from banquet to sacrifice, but that is a presupposition that might or might not be so. It is more fruitful to ask (even though there’s no answer at this point) – why the natural move, once Christians had their own public spaces to adapt and build, did they build them in the way they did?

There’s a lot more, of course, in this brief book, which teaches you about much more than liturgical positioning. And no, there’s no magic fix. Finally, another point to be made, hard to admit, but true, is that in the experience of most ordinary people before the Second Vatican Council, ad orientem was not understood or presented as "we are facing the East together." Coupled with the Silent Canon and all of the other obscuring elements in the liturgy, ad orientem was widely understood, popularly, as an expression, to put it bluntly, of clerical privilege: all that the priest did was hidden because the rest of us are not worthy to see or hear it. If you examine what the laity and, as Ratzinger points out, even liturgists were saying during the period, the reaction was against that understanding – which means that the proper understanding had been obscured.

If you think about it, then, the past decades, as off-track as they have gotten at times in this regard, as much as "facing the people" has, in its turn, obscured the proper role of the celebrant, rendering him as an MC whose personality is much more in the center of things than the liturgy calls for:

At one time–a time this author remembers well–it was popularly considered desirable for the one presiding to be as anonymous as possible. The less of oneself that showed through, the better. The ideal was pretty much an obliteration of self in liturgical celebration, if that isn’t putting it too crudely (from Robert Hovda’s 1976 booklet on presiding in liturgy, quoted in this new article at Ignatius Insight)

….it was an understandable reaction to a profound principle whose real meaning had been obscured for everyone, even, I daresay, those whose position was the issue. 

ww.