On Palm Sunday, in the middle of the Divine Liturgy, dazzling in its beauty, my three year old daughter, Maria, turned to me and asked "Is this Heaven?"
Yes, I told her, on Sundays we get to visit Heaven.
A lot has been written about the beauty of the Byzantine Liturgy, but Maria’s wonder sums it up better than any scholarly tome.
The traditional Latin liturgy has a very different, if still transcendent, spirit. Restrained rather than exuberant, meditative rather than ecstatic, it possesses a different, Western sensibility.
I have often remarked that the Western liturgical tradition is one designed by grown ups: a direct, no nonsense, focused approach to God.
The East, on the other hand, has a liturgy that seems to be made up by children. Is something worth doing? Then do it over and over again. I think of Chesterton’s comment that God is like a child in this regard. If an adult is performing some act that delights a child, like tossing the child up into the air, the adult’s arms will ache before the child becomes bored. "Do it again!" is the child’s tireless refrain. And so, Chesterton says, God makes the sun rise day after day, saying "Do it again!" in His delight.
And so the Byzantine liturgy. The West, businesslike, opens and closes the Mass with the sign of the cross. In Byzantine liturgy, we cross ourselves over and over, every time the Holy Trinity is invoked. Prayers and petitions are repeated, the phrase "Lord have mercy" a refrain throughout the Liturgy.
There is a childlike sensibility, too, in the Byzantine approach to the senses. Do we have incense burning? Yes, of course: incense is used at every Divine Liturgy, not just on feast days, and the sweet smell delights our senses even in Lent.
But this evidently wasn’t enough. What else can we do? "I know," someone said, deep in our history, "Let’s add some bells to the censer!" And so they did, and the sound of jingle bells accompanies the act of censing to this day.
I have heard it said that the spirit of the West and the spirit of the East are incarnate in their respective archetypal architectural forms: the spire for the West, and the dome for the East.
The spire is masculine, reaching upward, piercing the sky, transcending the earth. The interior of the archetypal Western Church draws the heart, the mind, the eyes upward. God is transcendent.
The dome is feminine, womblike, enwrapping and overshadowing the congregation. Traditionally the interior of the dome bears the image of Christ the Pantocrator, the ruler of all, His gaze enveloping the worshipers. God is immanent.
Like most generalizations, this is no doubt an oversimplification, but there is truth in it.
This difference in sensibility is reflected, too, in the forms of traditional chant which accompany the liturgy.
In the West, Gregorian chant is austere and severe, otherworldly. When I was in a Gregorian schola we were taught to sing without stress or emotion, deliberately ethereal.
Eastern chant, though is emotionally rich and expressive, whether Slavic, Arabic, Greek, or Romanian. Slavonic hymns about the Passion are mournful, dirgelike, spooky. Hymns about the Mother of God are sweet, tender, loving.
It is not that one or the other of these very different ways of worship is superior, contrary to the claims of some of their partisans. The West, with its restraint, and the East, with its celebratory excess, can both bring the soul to God. While I have embraced the intoxicating exuberance of the Christian East, I
recognize and remember the beauty of the West.
It is easy for me to imagine a little girl, surrounded by the ethereal sound of Gregorian chant, gazing at the distant and mostly silent priest, turning to her father in awe to whisper Maria’s question: "Is this Heaven?"
What I can’t imagine is a child doing this in the banal liturgies which have replaced the austere solemnity of the traditional West in many modern Roman Catholic churches.
I am not painting with too broad a brush here; I recognize that the so-called Novus Ordo rite is capable of beauty and transcendence. But too often the rude tribe of modern liturgists has rejected the traditional restraint of the West and replaced it, not with the celebratory sense of the folkways of,
well, folks, but with a need for novelty and stimulation apparently acquired from the entertainment industry. The child, watching the glad-handing game show model of priest, and the earnest but ersatz folk singer with his Tin Pan alley hymns is more likely to wonder "Is this Broadway?"
It is evident to me that any form of worship which does not evoke Maria’s Question, or at least aspire to do so, is hardly worthy of being called "worship" at all. Worship is a great Mystery, suffused with Beauty, and it shouldn’t take an act of blind faith to believe this.
–Daniel Nichols
Excellent.
“Daddy, is this the Pizza Hut?”
“Daddy, is this the Pizza Hut”? – GOOD ONE!
I live in an area with no Byzantine parishes, so I am pretty ignorant of the rite. But our priest recently did a Byzantine “blessing of icons” that I attended. I agree with you – it was lovely. And very much more leisurely than the quick prayer, sign of the cross, and splash of holy water you normally get when having something blessed. I was ready to convert (that’s probably not the correct verb . . . should it be “switch”?) to Eastern Rite by the end . . . if I only had somewhere to go!!
Beautifully written. I felt at peace just reading it.
Thankyou, Daniel, for putting these thoughts down in such a beautiful piece. You reflect many of my own experience since we became Eastern Rite Catholics. For me, the Divine Liturgy helps me understand, embrace, and strive for Christ’s words, “Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.” You articulated it so well!
Is this Heaven?
Still basking in the glow of Sunday\’s Easter celebration, I came across Daniel Nichols\’ recent post on the beauty of the liturgy of Eastern Rite Catholics. I think it is a wonderful post which captures an important aspect of our worship, namely that …
At its best, the Anglican Liturgy combines the best of both!
Amen, Cris. An Anglican Rite, or at least a local Anglican Use parish, is what I long for. I don’t doubt the beauty of the Eastern / Orthodox liturgy, but I don’t think it could ever connect with me on the level that the Anglican liturgy does.
I often wonder if it’s genetic. Like most Americans whose ancestry goes back to the British Isles, I’m sort of Anglo-Celt, but I suspect that the Anglo genes dominate the mix in me.
I don’t know Maclin; the Eastern churches are full of Irish Melkites, English Byzantines and others with no Slavic, Greek or Arabic ancestry.
I do think the Byzantine liturgy connects with the Celtic side of my Anglo-Celtic ancestry; it is often commented on, at any rate.
I worshiped for a while in an Episcopalian parish in rural Maryland; Evangelical in its theology but fairly high church in its liturgy. It was lovely liturgy, but definitely in the more restrained Western tradition.
Yeah, I don’t mean to be generalizing. There are a lot of folks moving over to Eastern worship of one strain or another who aren’t native to the ethnic tradition. And I’m sure I would respond, I just find it hard to imagine anything striking as deep a nerve as the Anglican.
It’s a moot point, though, unless I move, as there’s no Eastern rite church anywhere near me. Probably one in New Orleans, 2+ hours away. There’s actually a group of Lebanese families here, very prominent in the Catholic community (the community, period, for that matter) who have been here since the late 1800s at least and were of course originally Maronite, but they switched rites, I suppose of necessity.