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When we gather for worship, we always find ourselves in a strange place.

On the one hand, the God we worship transcends the whole creation.

Usually expressed using a shorthand that was a brilliant joke in the mid-second century – creatio ex nihilo – this is a phrase that for us is often less than clear, but it is as close to an absolute as we can get.

We do not know what we mean by the word “god” and if we once imagine we understand, at that moment we land ourselves in nonsense. Yet we still must address God!

On the other hand, we are also firmly within the created order. And we bring all our human nature to our worship. God is beyond the creation; we are firmly within it.

This means that all liturgy must be in a state of purification and reform – all the time.

Here lies the foolishness of those who imagine that some ancient rite (such as that promulgated in 1570) can continue without improvement.

Likewise, the notion that “change and experimentation” ended after Vatican Council II (1962-65) at some legally defined moment is nonsense because that would assume a perfection that will only occur at the conclusion of our human journey.

The process of purification is also different for the two aspects of our worship. We have to try to remove from our vision of God everything that is confusing and unworthy.

A confusion, for example, is to imagine that the solemn is identical with the sacred. Another confusion is to imagine that we can contain God or buy his love or favour.

We live most of our lives as traders and consumers – and so we bring this baggage with us to worship, and we falsify God (at best) or create an idol or blaspheme (at worse).

We also forget to shake off our hang-ups. Nationalists always assume that God and their flag are intimately related. Conservatives think they are serving God when they advance their political agenda. The list is endless.

The process of reform means that the liturgy must be rooted in our humanity and speak to it. Only then will we be able to speak what is deepest within us to one another and to God.

The liturgy must be rooted and re-rooted in our experience – for when this link is damaged, then our liturgy becomes a duty, a bore, something that we do but which is lifeless.

Any liturgy that is not speaking to us in our depths as humans, will soon be a depopulated liturgy – we see the empty church-buildings – and becomes just a set of formulae that are drained of vitality.

Liturgia semper reformanda

We all know the tag ecclesia semper reformanda. Change and improvement must not stop.

But fewer people realize that if liturgy is at the heart of the Church’s life, then there is another basic truth: liturgia semper reformanda.

This means that any criterion for liturgy that is based on repeating an earlier pattern is almost certainly wrong-headed: each situation generates a liturgy, and as the situation changes, so must its liturgy.

A very simple expression of this is the use of elaborate vestments.

In a world where the rich and socially significant displayed their place by special dress and by degrees of elaborateness in dress, so too the liturgy took on that form. Whether or not it should have done so is irrelevant: it happened!

But just as the grades of nobility were demonstrated by their costume and the ranks of an army by ever more splendid uniforms, so too the clergy.

But we live in a world where such dress codes now have little value. In terms of dress, there is little difference between the suit worn by Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Joe Biden, or the guy who tried to sell me a new car a few weeks ago!

So – if you were designing a liturgy from scratch, you would not have vestments, much less those brocaded in the style of Renaissance court-dress or Napoleonic officers.

In a world where that language of elaborate dress is not used, to spend time using it merely says that you do not realize that the world has moved on.

The few clerics who still use it may think they are saying something useful, but actually, they are speaking in a dead language. They are sending a message: this is just of antiquarian interest.

Or it could be worse: they are doing it because they think it is fun. If this is the case, we need to pray for them.

They are using worship, and the ministry they claim they have to serve the people, to serve their own whims. This is the antithesis of liturgy which means, literally, the work of the people.

The liturgy must speak in today’s language of the deepest needs of human beings – and this means constant reform – so that those needs can be seen to be brought before God.

And in creating an image of God in this process, all concerned should be getting an ever-less-contaminated understanding of that Mystery beyond words – more constant reform.

The Spirit is at work

This continual renewal of the liturgy, plumbing the depths of the human spirit and the depths of the Divine, is the work of the Holy Spirit.

Creative in the beginning, the Spirit is creative now in each human heart. And we continually renew our liturgy to give expression and incarnate reality to this ongoing re-creation by the Spirit.

Our liturgical renewal is a response to the Spirit for which we pray:

Veni sancta Spiritus,

reple tuorum corda fidelium …

et renovabis faciem terrae.

Come, Holy Spirit, fill-up the faithful’s hearts … and you will renew the face of the earth.

Greatest challenge

In our society, the greatest challenge facing all who lead the Church’s worship is that many Western, urban, First-World people see all liturgy as simply a show.

It might be useful at funerals – though ever fewer people opt even for this minimal involvement with the Church – and the odd event you cannot avoid (such as Confirmation if your child is in a Church-run school), but it is of little real worth. If you have to attend, then you do so as a spectator.

And you hope that the performance will not be too long – it all feels rather pompous and artificial. Luckily, if you are discreet you can use your phone to catch up on messages – no one minds, it is at least a good use of time!

So before we can do anything else we have to offer our sisters and brother an opportunity to move from being a passive spectator to an active participant.

Walter Gropius

Nearly a century ago, the great architect Walter Gropius (1883-1969) faced the same questions when asked to design a theatre that would give new life to performances that seemed lifeless after that great triumph of nationalism: the First World War.

Gropius is now famous as an architect and as the founder of the Bauhaus, but he was also a profound philosopher.

Faced with reforming theatre, he came up with the notion of “the theatre in the round” where the division between stage and auditorium, between actors and audience, between “them” and “us” was blurred.

Asked why he did this, Gropius said it was “a response to our unconscious need to create again a vita communis, a form of life which transforms the passive spectator into an active participant”.

The vita communis

I wish everyone who leads liturgy would remind themselves of this every time they preside.

A basic human need – and so an authentic starting point for liturgy – is to experience a common life. This is life that Cain rejected in the story in Genesis, this is the antithesis of contemporary individualism, but it is also a basis for all liturgy.

We worship in common. Liturgy is an expression of the vita communis. Liturgy is the antidote to self-centeredness.

But note that Gropius also knew something else — we are often unconscious of this need. We want to recreate a vita communis, but we do not know this. And, frequently, we reject the idea as a silly one!

What does it look like?

If we can create a real sense of being at the Lord’s Table, then we have liturgy in the round. If we are assembled in the round, then we are faced with a choice: do I participate or do I not? I cannot simply spectate and play with my phone.

Liturgy in the round poses to each an existential choice.

Am I here to take part in a common celebration of our common life before a loving God?

Or am I here just because it is expected of me and I want nothing to do with either those around me or the religious stuff?

If we can create a space where these become real questions, we will have a living liturgy.

Renewal and reform is the task of helping people to move from being passive spectators to being active participants.

Anything less – no matter how elaborate or solemn or packed full of inherited symbols – is just a performance. And a failure.

• Thomas O’Loughlin is a presbyter of the Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton and professor-emeritus of historical theology at the University of Nottingham (UK). His latest book is Eating Together, Becoming One: Taking Up Pope Francis’s Call to Theologians (Liturgical Press, 2019).

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