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| Grand Teton, WY (source) - you won’t see this from Route 80 |
Metaphors are often the best way to grapple with that which is too large or too complex for pure conceptual analysis, or where a full account risks being tedious in its details. A well-chosen metaphor cuts to the heart of the matter. When I first read Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory, I found his metaphors daring and dazzling.
Well, I am not Graham Greene (for good and for ill), so I don’t know if the metaphor I am about to use is well-chosen, let alone daring and dazzling, but it unquestionably captures my experience of the difference between the traditional cycle of pre-Lent / Lent / Passiontide / Holy Week / Easter Week / Eastertide / Ascensiontide, and the replacement cycle of Lent / Holy Week / Easter Week / Eastertide in the new calendar—that is, from a seven-part sacramental drama to a four-stroke engine.
Following the old calendar from Pre-Lent through Ascensiontide is like driving through northern Wyoming into Montana: breathtaking vistas at every turn, a continually changing and highly differentiated landscape of mountains, valleys, rivers, different colors of rock, a vast expanse of sky. Inspiring, humbling, contemplative, exultant, mesmerizing, unfathomable.
Following the new calendar from Lent to the end of Eastertide is like driving on Interstate 80 [*Note] through the center of Nebraska and southern Wyoming. It is mostly straight and dull, with almost nothing appealing to look at—endless cornfields or expanses of usually brown grass, unvarying, flat and uniform, monotonous. In fact, residents of these states have reason to be grateful that this asphalt gash on the face of the Earth was placed along such generally unremarkable terrain. I lived for twelve years in Wyoming and I can testify that if you want to experience the majestic beauty of the state, you have to get off the interstate and push northwards.
In an abstract world where liturgy had never been known and history had started from zero, the Novus Ordo prayers would be “fine”—that is, in the absence of anything else to compare them with. But when we look at them against the backdrop of a longstanding tradition, they are thin gruel; it is feeding husks to the swineherds, when the Father’s house offers all His children and servants comfortable room and board.
In truth, the parable of the Prodigal Son furnishes another powerful metaphor of the Church’s liturgical situation. Returning to ourselves after having squandered our substance on loose living, we should rush back to the Father’s house and grovel in the dust for our sins against His loving provision. He will embrace us and put on the finest robe, like the chasubles of yore, featured week after week at the Liturgical Arts Journal.
The full season from pre-Lent to Pentecost Octave is where you see the old Missal shine most brilliantly. Everything fits together so well, so tightly, made up of inevitable steps; one finds a profusion of variety, a strength of biblical fidelity, an intricate drama of mysteries fully plumbed but also subtly integrated one with another, so that all is well ordered and proportioned.
The reformers who dared to change all this (and, indeed, they left hardly a stone upon a stone) were acting from their extremely limited postwar academic perspective, and the result is, predictably, superficial—clean, obvious, and sterile; you get the sort of workmanlike coverage that might be expected in a diligently prepared government report. It is like a relationship from which romance has been sucked dry, or, more accurately, in which it never had a part.
A friend once wrote to me: “I had to explain to a Baptist friend who greatly admires St. Thomas Aquinas (he’s a philosophy professor) how they moved St. Thomas’s feast day from March 7, the day of his entrance into glory, in order to ‘restore the integrity of Lent,’ yet proceeded to gut Lent of all its ascetical significance, making of it a ghost-season and leaving nothing but a vacuous anticipation of Easter. Real Einsteins at the helm, we had.”
If you want to meet the genius of the once and future Roman Rite, there is only one way to do it: you must immerse yourself in a risky detour. People will look askance at you, but when you find that way, or better, when you peer through that door, you will find a beauty, a fullness, an integrity, that the reign of novelty hasn’t even conceived the possibility of.
[*Note: for non-American readers, the Interstate highways are the major automobile and truck arteries going north-south and east-west across the continent, comparable to the German Autobahnen, Italian Autostrade, and British Motorways.]
Well, I am not Graham Greene (for good and for ill), so I don’t know if the metaphor I am about to use is well-chosen, let alone daring and dazzling, but it unquestionably captures my experience of the difference between the traditional cycle of pre-Lent / Lent / Passiontide / Holy Week / Easter Week / Eastertide / Ascensiontide, and the replacement cycle of Lent / Holy Week / Easter Week / Eastertide in the new calendar—that is, from a seven-part sacramental drama to a four-stroke engine.
Following the old calendar from Pre-Lent through Ascensiontide is like driving through northern Wyoming into Montana: breathtaking vistas at every turn, a continually changing and highly differentiated landscape of mountains, valleys, rivers, different colors of rock, a vast expanse of sky. Inspiring, humbling, contemplative, exultant, mesmerizing, unfathomable.
Following the new calendar from Lent to the end of Eastertide is like driving on Interstate 80 [*Note] through the center of Nebraska and southern Wyoming. It is mostly straight and dull, with almost nothing appealing to look at—endless cornfields or expanses of usually brown grass, unvarying, flat and uniform, monotonous. In fact, residents of these states have reason to be grateful that this asphalt gash on the face of the Earth was placed along such generally unremarkable terrain. I lived for twelve years in Wyoming and I can testify that if you want to experience the majestic beauty of the state, you have to get off the interstate and push northwards.
In an abstract world where liturgy had never been known and history had started from zero, the Novus Ordo prayers would be “fine”—that is, in the absence of anything else to compare them with. But when we look at them against the backdrop of a longstanding tradition, they are thin gruel; it is feeding husks to the swineherds, when the Father’s house offers all His children and servants comfortable room and board.
In truth, the parable of the Prodigal Son furnishes another powerful metaphor of the Church’s liturgical situation. Returning to ourselves after having squandered our substance on loose living, we should rush back to the Father’s house and grovel in the dust for our sins against His loving provision. He will embrace us and put on the finest robe, like the chasubles of yore, featured week after week at the Liturgical Arts Journal.
The full season from pre-Lent to Pentecost Octave is where you see the old Missal shine most brilliantly. Everything fits together so well, so tightly, made up of inevitable steps; one finds a profusion of variety, a strength of biblical fidelity, an intricate drama of mysteries fully plumbed but also subtly integrated one with another, so that all is well ordered and proportioned.
The reformers who dared to change all this (and, indeed, they left hardly a stone upon a stone) were acting from their extremely limited postwar academic perspective, and the result is, predictably, superficial—clean, obvious, and sterile; you get the sort of workmanlike coverage that might be expected in a diligently prepared government report. It is like a relationship from which romance has been sucked dry, or, more accurately, in which it never had a part.
A friend once wrote to me: “I had to explain to a Baptist friend who greatly admires St. Thomas Aquinas (he’s a philosophy professor) how they moved St. Thomas’s feast day from March 7, the day of his entrance into glory, in order to ‘restore the integrity of Lent,’ yet proceeded to gut Lent of all its ascetical significance, making of it a ghost-season and leaving nothing but a vacuous anticipation of Easter. Real Einsteins at the helm, we had.”
If you want to meet the genius of the once and future Roman Rite, there is only one way to do it: you must immerse yourself in a risky detour. People will look askance at you, but when you find that way, or better, when you peer through that door, you will find a beauty, a fullness, an integrity, that the reign of novelty hasn’t even conceived the possibility of.
[*Note: for non-American readers, the Interstate highways are the major automobile and truck arteries going north-south and east-west across the continent, comparable to the German Autobahnen, Italian Autostrade, and British Motorways.]
