Liturgical Stability: A Neglected Consideration

Father Larry Beane, in the pages of this web log, recently wrote something which bears repeating and reflection. Just what does the liturgical innovation, instability, even chaos, which prevails in so many ways in Christ's Church today, do to our children? Fr. Beane wrote, in part:

"Of course, it does have implications for future generations, as younger people no longer have the image of the hoary-headed patriarchs and matriarchs, fonts of wisdom, and examples of dignified Christian piety...It's no wonder the children and grandchildren of these folks have rejected the faith all together or are so rudderless as to be groping around aimlessly in the 'emerging movement' desperately seeking 'authenticity.'"

His words seized my attention, for they drew my thoughts from the particular problem of bizarre worship forms en vogue among radical feminist Catholics to the more general problem of what liturgical innovation can do to our children, both now and down the road, and conversely, to the benefits of traditional and stable liturgy for our children.

Experts in child development have repeatedly warned of the harm that instability can cause to a child, and of the benefits of that which is stable and reliable in a child's life. Children love to learn; even when they try to deny it, their brains love to learn, and so does their heart, especially after you show them what they can accomplish. This includes challenging things like vocabulary and music, as well as rubrics and good manners. They love stable forms and routines as an environment within which to accomplish this learning. Children think they like a lot of television, video games, and web surfing, yet we now know that their brains do not flourish in an environment in which they are bombarded with a heavy diet of electronic sensory images.

Michael Gurian and Kathy Stevens, for example, in their book, The Minds of Boys, report the following disturbing data on p. 113.

"The average American child now spends 900 hours a year in school, but 1,023 hours a year watching TV.
In the average American home, the TV is on 6.7 hours per day.
By the time your son reaches eighteen, he'll have spent 22,000 hours watching TV, more than he spends in any other activity besides sleeping.
The number of videos and DVDs families rent every day is twice the number of books read.
By the age of sixteen, your son will have seen 200,000 acts of violence on television, 33,000 of them acts of murder.
One-fourth of children under two years old now have TVs in their bedrooms.
Two-thirds of preschool boys sit in front of screens for two or more hours per day-more than three times the hours they spend looking at books or being read to."

What does this do to children? One statistic that, in a sense, sums it up is given on page 112 of the same book: "In the April 2004 issue of Pediatrics, Dr. Christakis presented research that followed twenty six hundred children from birth to age seven and discovered that 'for every hour of television watched per day, the incidence of ADD and ADHD increased by 10 percent.'"

Conversely, Gurian and Stevens argue that there are great benefits to encouraging the development of vocabulary among children (130).

Yet "church growth" consultants have whole parishes and offices of church bureaucracy convinced that the way to cater to today's young and seeking churchgoer is to devise worship filled with electronic images, and lots of today's music, music of the most modern and irreverent sort, which contain banal and juvenile vocabulary. "Worship" of this sort is not designed to challenge or inspire. It will only serve to insult and ultimatley bore perhaps everyone but its creators and their egos.

Let me cite another expert, one of my favorite writers in this area lately, Dr. Meg Meeker. In her book, Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters, Meeker's particular concern is the father-daughter relationship, yet in a sense much of what she argues has application for children in general, and parents and authorities in general. She makes the case that daughters long, even when they don't consciously realize or admit it, for examples and role models, and they want and need a reliable, rock solid, environment in which to grow spiritually and intellectually, to learn modesty and faith, and to be challenged in the most healthy ways. A girl will even learn how to worship from the male role models in her life, especially the most important one, her father. Meeker writes, from a purely clinical perspective, on the benefits (especially in chapter eight) of an ongoing religious example for children. In this regard, she compares religious example with the absence of religion in a child's life. Based on these arguments I would suggest that the type of religious example you give your child will have an enormous impact on his view of God. Our "church growth" experts and "emerging church" gurus would have our children act in church as if God were a fickle MTV watching buddy with his own my space account. If you think we are being really creative in this regard, think again. We are simply resurrecting the ancient Greek phenomenon of fashioning gods who look and act like us.

Children need to know they can rest securely in a reliable and predictable environment. Within the safe parameters of that environment, they will then imagine, and grow, and learn, and question, and flourish. Without it, they might be entertained, but they will ultimately find themselves troubled and unable to grow properly. This is illustrated nicely by one of my favorite passages in Proust's Swann's Way:

"At Combray, every day, in the late afternoon, long before the moment when I would have to go to bed and stay there, without sleeping, far away from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom again became the fixed and painful focus of my preoccupations. They had indeed hit upon the idea, to distract me on the evenings when they found me looking too unhappy, of giving me a magic lantern, which, while awaiting the dinner hour, they would set on top of my lamp; and, after the fashin of the first architects and master glaziers of the Gothic age, it replaced the opacity of the walls with impalpable iridescences, supernatural multicolored apparitions, where legends were depicted as in a wavering, momentary stained-glass window. But my sadness was only increased by this since the mere change in lighting destroyed the familiarity which my bedroom had acquired for me and which, exept for the torment of going to bed, had made it tolerable to me. Now I no longer recognized it and I was uneasy there, as in a room in some hotel or 'chalet' to which I had come for the first time straight from the railway train."

The Church needs to inculcate in her children good habits, and before I go on, let me emphasize that habit is a good thing; so, one more time, allow me to continue my habit of quoting Proust in his Swann's Way:

"Habit! That skillful but very slow housekeeper who begins by letting our mind suffer for weeks in a temporary arrangement; but whom we are nevertheless truly happy to discover, for without habit our mind, reduced to no more than its own resources, would be powerless to make a lodging habitable."

A home is a place in which we ought to feel most free, most ourselves, most able to find our identity. In this sense the liturgy of the Church is an invaluable setting in which to foster good habits, so that reverent worship becomes our very habit, that is to say, that in which we live and find our being.

For years now I have done odd things like make the sign of the cross when I worship, or kneel down at the consecration in the Mass. Kneeling is now done by the whole congregation at every Mass at the church I attend, thanks to the pastoral leadership of its current pastor. But for years kneeling was only practiced a few times a year, Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. Yet I knelt down anyway from the consecration through the Agnus Dei, week in and week out. It was a foreign thing, no doubt, for some of those who saw me do this. Nevertheless, I determined that the adults can handle the notion that there are Lutherans outside of this parish, and they don't all have the precisely same practices everywhere. One of the things I did not expect to learn, however, is that the children noticed me, and in the relationships I have been blessed to develop with some of them, in my Sunday School class, for example, they have shown themselves eager to learn and emulate. I have found, as a sobering reality, but also as a delight, that it is not only the hoary-headed senior members of Christ's Body that have an influence on the young. We all do. There is much responsibility, and much potential here, for modeling good manners and reverent worship. I pray we will seize it, and with God's help make good use of it.

My Kind of Liturgy

The modern feminization of the Church takes various forms, some of which are subtle, at least to those who may have grown used to what has become normal in the Novus Ordo. On the other hand, there are forms which still, hopefully, appall the average Christian set of eyes and ears. And it is good, forget for a moment that it is entertaining, it is indeed good, to remind ourselves of such things, to inform ourselves, and to expose these bizarre forms when we learn of them. Therefore, I commend to you the following video clip of a Mass of a "Call To Action" gathering.

Call to Action is an outfit within the Roman Catholic Church that promotes such things as the ordination of women. One of the thoughts that come to my mind as I ponder this Mass is the irony of those who claim I, a traditionalist Lutheran, am really a "Romanist." I am indeed a Catholic, and I am even Roman in the classic sense in which the Augustana itself employs the term. There are certain modern liturgical trends, however, which much better fit the term Romanist than I do. I dare say that the liturgical style of this Call To Action event is frightening to me. So to add irony to irony, perhaps I ought to admit that there is a certain sense in which I now even have a touch of Romophobia. To be sure, I am equally fearful of liturgical near kinsmen to this sort of Christianity, such as Renewal in MIssouri, or any number of "Ablaze" events.

Voting

Here in Fort Wayne we had the Indiana Primary elections today. This will sound bizarre to you, but I personally believe that since 1. voting is an exercise of authority and governance, and that 2. pastors of the Church ought not have their hands in both churchly and civil governance, and that 3. seminary is a time for leaving worldly ambitions aside, and preparing for the life of churchly vocation, that therefore, when I was in seminary, I thought it best to quit voting in political elections.

That is a moot point now, however, since I am not now in seminary; so I voted today. One thing that has not changed, however, is my conviction that theologians in general ought not be politically outspoken, which is not to say that they ought not speak out on political issues where they intersect with moral issues, even speaking out against specific men, or praising others. It is only to say that one's theological and spiritual vocation, one's effectiveness in his use of the Word, indeed, one's theology itself, can become unnecessarily tainted by political concerns, and especially by political partisanship. Therefore, for example, I refuse to give an answer when friends ask me to divulge my votes. Am I a supported of the RNC, and John McCain? Am I a supporter of Ron Paul? Am I a member of Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos," and therefore a supporter of Hilary Clinton in the Primary? Am I one of the audacious hopefuls, who support Obama? I won't tell. That infuriates some of my "seminary type" friends who exuberantly proclaim that the only Christian way to vote is for Ron Paul.

In the case of some of them, I worry that their theological passion, if it ever existed, has been replaced by their political passion. Some seminarians are more willing to argue politics than to wrestle with the Word.

There are many manifestations of what I would call in general the abuse of the voting right. Another is the phenomenon of women who reportedly vote for Hilary Clinton simply because they feel they can identify with her as a woman. Some have even admitted that they vote for Clinton because their parents dislike Hilary, and they find some odd sort of attraction to voting for someone to spite someone else.

I would go so far as to say that the man who is uneducated, in the issues of the day, and also in the Liberal Arts in general, as well as in the teachings of the Church, ought not vote. He ought to educate and inform himself, and then cast his vote in all sobriety.

William F. Buckley, Jr., R I P

I have the day off of work today, so I am in the midst of trying to accomplish several tasks at my desk, tasks which I ought not have let myself get so far underneath in recent days, and in some cases weeks. There are days in which I lack the spirit or energy to sit at my desk very long. I need to jar myself out of that mode, or else the reasons for my lack of spirit these days will not change. Today, as I say, I have had the day to myself, which helps; my productivity has also been helped by the right music on the CD player, and some decent coffee.



One of my more pressing projects is the newsletter for the Society of Saint Polycarp. The new issue, happily, is taking form. Yet I need a little break, so perhaps it is a good time to share a thought or two upon the death of one of the great thinkers and gentlemen of the second half of the twentieth century, William Buckley. I gave up political partisanship a long time ago. It decreased in me as my theological nature increased. I hope these, then, are not taken as politically biased comments. Buckley's contributions to our culture are many, and most of them go beyond the purely political.



In recent days I have reviewed his bibliography, and one of the things that I realize when I look at it is that I have only read about one third of his books. Aside from his regular column, and ocassional anthologies he edited, he wrote some fifty five books. It is a little surprising to see that twenty of them are works of fiction, of which I have read one. In recent years I have read his spiritual autobiography, Nearer My God; a collection of his speeches, Let Us Talk of Many Things; and his literary autobiography, Miles Gone By. Back in the days when I was a much more intense political reader, I immersed myself in some of his collected essays and columns, such as Right Reason, along with an invaluable collection of essays he edited with Charles Kesler, Keeping the Tablets, which includes essays by other great writers such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Sowell, and Whittaker Chambers. Of primary importance will always be Buckley's foundational works, books such as Up From Liberalism, and the book he wrote against his own alma mater right after he graduated, God and Man at Yale. To write a book in critique of one's school, now there's a thought. Once in a while he would write a book meant to give a sort of window into his life at the moment, such as he did in the early 80s with Overdrive. I think I would perhaps recommend Overdrive as a good introduction to his writings. It gives the reader an interesting account of a week in the life of the leader of the modern Conservative Movement at perhaps its, and his, height.



Buckley was a consumate writer. He claimed at one point not to like writing, that it was hard work. I take him at his word, yet I find neither claim easy to believe, considering his constant high level of production. Along with his constant writing, he had a long running television interview program, "The Firing Line." I saw a number of those shows in my time, but since it for the most part predated my adulthood, I have yet to see many of those episodes. I don't know if they have been recorded on DVD, but if so, I sure would be interested in viewing them. (Many of those interviews are available in a very readable format in a book titled, On the Firing Line: The Public Life of Our Public Figures.) He also hosted ocassional debates. These were real, hard hitting, yet gentlemanly, debates, between three or four person teams on each side, debating major issues of the day.

Along with all of these professional activities, he lived a very rich life; I don't mean rich in terms of mere material wealth, though he had this, but rather a culturally rich life. William Buckley loved life, and seized every moment to live a life rich and uplifting for himself and those around him. He flew the Concord jet regularly, took up sailing, and wrote about it, and played the harpsichord. He had a special love of J. S. Bach. There might never be a greater lover of Bach, at least not a Roman Catholic one, after Buckley. For all of his high polyglot culture (English was his third language, as a young boy he first knew only Spanish, and then French), he at times revealed aspects of his personality which display an almost surprising Americanness, like his deep love of peanut butter, or his addiction to the TV show, "All In the Family."

William Buckley's life cannot be summed up in a brief comment, but I would like to reflect that of all the admirable aspects of his public life, the one I personally find most notable and endearing, and worthy of special consideration in a twenty first century America so in need of it, is his capacity for combining passion for his subject with genuine warmth and friendship. His ability to not merely "be friendly," but to truly be friends with so many of his opponents, is a testament to the sort of Christian heart so lacking in American public life today. I even see a lack of it in the Church at times. There are many examples of this dimension of Buckley's personality. One from later in his life is his relationship with the TV interviewer Charlie Rose. Another from an earlier period is his friendship with economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Another that comes to mind is his affection for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Is it possible to fight passionately for what one believes, and yet be a gentleman, with a loving heart? Once in a while, even in modern America, we are graced with examples of just this, and Buckley was one of the great gentlemen of letters of his day.

Another reason Buckley kept my admiration even as my particular political interest was replaced by my "Beatrice," Theology, is that Buckley is in fact a great witness to intelligent traditionalist lay Christianity. He had a deep love of Christ in the Eucharist, and his love of the Latin Mass remained steadfast, even as he had to witness the Latin Mass recede into the distant background of the modern Church. In his book, Nearer My God, which I won't try to quote verbatim, since I don't have the book in front of me, there is a passage in which he wonders at why the New Order of the Mass won't even allow for the priest to give him communion (a most individual and private part of the liturgy) with the old Latin formula. It seems that even in the Church, some things are malum prohibitum, yet non malum in se. In Overdrive he has this to say,

"For many years I have pronounced to myself the traditional words, no longer recited by the priest when placing the host on the tongue of each communicant. He used to say, and now I say it for him, 'Corpus Domini nostri Iesu Christi, custodiat animam tuam, in vitam aeternam, amen.' May the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ safeguard your soul through life everlasting, amen. I long since concluded that no other verbal sequence comes as close as this in documenting human equality. The same words, for prince or for pauper; reminding us, young and old, healthy and sick, rich and poor, of our common dependence on our Maker."

I find such "common dependence" to be a beautiful eucharistic theme. And I find the love of the Latin tradition of the Church on the part of a humble layman like this to be deeply inspiring and admirable.



Buckley still holds my interest as a writer, a thinker, and a key witness to his time. I look forward to his soon to be published book on Barry Goldwater, and I lament that he only seems to have been partially through writing a book on Ronald Reagan when his eventful and faithful sojourn in this world came to an end. Appropriately, he was found in his study, at his desk.

Fortescue on the Church's Worst Enemy

This year is the one hundreth anniversary of Adrian Fortescue's book, The Greek Fathers. So I thought it would be a good time to get back into that fine introduction. I think I became aware of Fortescue by way of his liturgical work before I knew of his patristic scholarship. In fact, for a man who was a parish priest his whole career in England, he had a remarkably keen appreciation for the Church in the East. He was the kind of man who was completely unafraid of making seemingly out of place or outrageous statements. In that way he reminds me of David Scaer. At one point, Fortescue, a Roman Rite priest, mind you, says that Damascus is "the real eternal city." So much more ought to be said about this great churchman. But for now I just wanted to make an observation based on a point he makes in his book, The Greek Fathers.

In his discussion of Saint Athanasius, Fortescue sets the scene by explaining how the age of persecution actually gave way to an even more tragic era, viz., that of the great christological heresies. He writes, for example,

"The great heresies were coming as successors to the great persecutions, and the Church was to be more troubled and to suffer greater evils from her own children than she had from the sword of the Roman magistrates."

The evil of the age of heresies in the fourth and fifth centuries is manifold. First is the obvious evil of good churchmen suffering banishment and exile. Athanasius himself suffered this fate five times. Another evil to result in this situation, though, is perhaps even more troubling, namely, the great confusion it must have caused to the common man. As Fortescue puts it,

"Under five emperors and five popes, he was the one tower of strength and rallying point to all Catholics in that hopeless confusion of synods and anti-synods, banishments and userpations."

And later he writes,

"During the very lifetime of the heroes who could show the glorious wounds they had received under Diocletian, the Christian Church was tossed by a raging storm that nearly wrecked her. Bishops fell on every side, intruders and counter-intruders filled every see, Anathemas and counter-Anathemas thundered across the empire from Tyre to Milan, so that the wretched layman who wanted to serve God in peace may well have wondered whether the old cry of Christianos ad leones were not on the whole pleasanter than the shouts of Homousios and Homoiusios, of which he understood nothing except that, whichever he said, someone was sure to excommunicate him."

"Homousios" and "Homoiusios," by the way, are two different ways of conceiving the Son's relationship with the Father, the former confessing that the they are of the same substance, the latter promoting the false notion that they are of merely similar substance. The next time you say the Nicene Creed in the Mass, think about how deadly important these issues were to the Church of the age that gave us this creed.

Fortescue's discussion on the trouble within the Church in the age of Arianism makes me think of how it tends to always be the case that the Church's worst enemy is herself. I recall Robert Rahn of the Lutheran Heritage Foundation giving a sermon at Zion, Ft. Wayne about forteen or fifteen months ago, in which he made the point that Lutherans around the world are suffering...at the hands of Lutherans. One need only think of the church's situation in Finland, or Sweeden. Of course it happens on much smaller scales as well. Christians can so easily trip across the line bewteen doing the Lord's work and using their power to actually fight the Lord's will. Oh, to have a new Athanasius for the Church today.

Nuffer in hospital, orate pro eo

Pray for Richard Nuffer, professor at Concordia Theological Seminary. He has suffered a heart attack, and is recovering at Parkview Hospital.

Saint Valentine's Day & Tradition

A few days ago our popular Western culture celebrated, in its own way, St. Valentine's Day, and two thoughts struck me.

1. The funny thing about the Lutheran Church (most elements of it) on St. Valentine's Day is that, although you will see it on wall calendars & desk calendars, you will find nothing stirring in your church on that day, not even the church mouse.

2. The funny thing about the modern Roman Catholic Church on St. Valentine's Day is, similarly to what I just observed regarding the Lutherans, the Roman Catholics have forgotten about this feast as well. It has been suppressed, and in its place, the 14th of February in the modern Roman Rite is now the memorial of Saints Cyril and Methodius, whose feast is traditionally kept on the 7th of July.

I find it interesting that our culture knows full well what 14 February is, and to put it the other way, it knows when St. Valentine's Day is. Built into the heart and mind of man is a sense of tradition. Ask the average man on the street when St. Valentine's Day is, and he will tell you: it's the 14th of February. Ask him what the 15th of February is, and he will know that too. Namely, it is not in fact, Philemon and Onesimus' Day; rather, it is the day after the day he was supposed to get some flowers for his wife. And he is, in fact, more right on that count than the makers of modern Lutheran books, like Lutheran Service Book.

Christ's Church has an awesome opportunity before her. She can take full advantage of this basic traditionalist tendency on the part of those who would hear her message. For we in the Church have a great heritage, which we have received, and which is ours to hand on and share. That tradition is a Person, Christ Himself, our Immanuel, who desires to enter men's hearts, by water and the Word, to give them the forgiveness of their sins, and all that goes with it, namely, eternal life with Him, and true and sure salvation. And what better way to impart and inculcate this great tradition than by means of the opportunities given us in the manifold evangelical aspects of the tradition of the Church.

How do we do this? Some would argue that the best way is to follow the latest liturgical trends (like LSB), which have improved in many points upon the practice of our immediate past, such as the inclusion of St. Valentine's commemoration on 14 Feb. There is much else LSB does beside its improvements, but that is for another discussion. I suggest the best way is for the Church itself to employ a traditionalist approach to her own magnificent traditions. As I say, people in general are already prepared for such an approach. They would take the Church's lead. Such an approach does not depend on the latest trends promoted at the offices of church bureaucracy, whether in a Lutheran "synod" of delegates or a Vatican synod of bishops.

Traditionalism will take courage (not exactly heavily promoted at seminary today), study (on this count as well I have seen many seminarians get by without much of that), consistency (hardly found in modern service books), and practice. With the help of Christ, though, these things can be renewed in our time. Such is my prayer.