Loss of the Sacred and the Sacramental Imagination
I think the thing that’s missing, and the thing that would very much appeal to young people, are rituals that are more rich in what Andrew Greeley (hardly a conservative) calls the sacramental imagination. The Vatican II rediscovery of Scripture was marvelous but I think an unintended consequence was the thought that “Meaning could be conveyed better in word than in gesture, better in print than in procession, better in concept than in image.” (The Four Cultures of the West – John O’Malley, great book.)
As a result, church turned into a didactic exposition of texts rather than an experience of the sacred. In a play, rigorous adherence to the rules of drama, and the audience’s understanding of those rules, lead to the willing suspension of disbelief. I would likewise think that rigorous adherence to the rubrics of liturgy, and the congregation’s understanding of those rubrics, would lead to the creation of belief and to an entering into the liturgy which would allow the individuals in the congregation to let their souls be touched by and enriched by the grace of the goings on. This is exactly the involvement that the constant talking and chumminess of too many liturgies so effectively destroys.
Archbishop Gotfried Danneels has a great article on this and other thoughts on the liturgy in an America Magazine article:
Another good article I found a while back also struck me as capturing what has been lost. The philosopher and liturgist Romano Guardini visited the basilica of Monreale in 1929, and told this story in his “Voyage in Sicily.”
“There are different means of prayerful participation. One is realized by listening, speaking, gesturing. But the other takes place through watching. The first way is a good one, and we northern Europeans know no other. But we have lost something that was still there at Monreale: the capacity for living-in-the-gaze, for resting in the act of seeing, for welcoming the sacred in the form and event, by contemplating them.”
