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Liturgy and the Child

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2024

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Liturgy may too easily be thought to include nothing more than a somewhat archaic formula of public and official worship in the Church confined to the Mass and the Office of the day. It is true that these latter constitute the essence or core of the liturgy; but if we care to probe deeper than a mere study of chant and formulae and rubrics will take us, we discover beneath these a spirit emanating organically from the fundamental doctrines of the Church and the more primitive outlook of Christians upon life as a whole. The liturgical rites and ceremonies we now know did not spring from an early and undisciplined urge to worship such as is common in all primitive peoples. Though based upon this universal instinct, they were evolved through well-defined motives for worshipping in a particular way the personal God Whom divine revelation had made known to them with certitude and much understanding. The liturgy as we have it came into being gradually as the expression of a desire at once human, being based on a specifically human urge to worship, and at the same time intensely Christian, being the development and perfecting of that urge by the light of Faith and the inspiration of the Holy Ghost coupled with the human rendering of divine truth in the Incarnation. Thus the liturgy was the direct expression of the Christian mind, somewhat as the music of Grieg was, within a much narrower compass, an expression of the Norse mind and the literature of Shakespeare of the English mind. We might add that in the same way the very absence of effective liturgy is an expression of the Nonconformist ethos and the plain table and severe interior of the Scottish kirk the reflection of the Puritan attitude to life.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1939 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 In his recent book, Liturgy and Life, Dons Theodore Wesseling has emphasised the spirit which inspired the origins and development of the liturgy; his well‐found conclusions seem to call for a revision of the general outlook on the liturgical revival.