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SUSTAINING AN ARS CELEBRANDI
So how do we sustain this ars celebrandi, which defines and directs our priesthood?
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Two suggestions: Prayer and the Poor.
Sure, we also celebrate the liturgy with authenticity, proclaim the Gospel with courage, cling to the truth, forgive sins, seek out sinners….but most of all we pray and we seek out the poor.
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First, praying.
Sadly, the one thing which most often brings about the rot of a once priestly soul, is when he stops praying to do all the other “important things” in his parish.
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Remember how you prayed when you were young? the earnestness, the fervor, the trust? That is how it can be again. The same God who formed you in perfect love is waiting for you to come home.
How does the priest pray? Certainly he prays the Liturgy, as we have seen, and he prays the Psalms throughout the hours of the day, as I will soon propose. But how does he recollect, meditate, and rest in the Lord?
How does he bring to Christ the needs of the flock which has been placed into his hands, along with his own needs, and the needs of the whole world?
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Near the end of the Prayer of Ordination of a Priest, there is a hint in the words the Bishop prays on behalf of the newly ordained:
May he be joined with us, Lord,
in imploring your mercy
for the people entrusted to his care
and for all the world.
At the heart of the ministry of the parish priest is his concrete intercession for the people entrusted to his care and for all the world.
the Vailettes at 103 and 100.
Kristine who had her knee replaced this morning
Francis who is getting a new valve for his heart…
This is because one of the questions I was asked before I was ordained a priest was whether I will be resolved “to implore with us God's mercy upon the people entrusted to your care by observing the command to pray without ceasing?”
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Like Christ the High Priest, the priest is called upon to ever intercede for his people. So important is this obligation that in the former covenant the priest Samuel saw the failure to pray for the people as a sin.
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Nor should we forget the example of Job, who after his sons and daughters had returned from a night of revelry would rise early in the morning and “sacrifice a burnt offering for each of them, thinking, ‘Perhaps my children have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.’”
Of course this intercession is always carried out in union with the Bishop. For it is only in union with the Bishop that the priest may carry out his ministry of priestly sanctification.
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On a practical note, the Bishop himself bears a special responsibility to see that the priest is not so burdened by other tasks that he is unable to make intercession for those under his care. In a general audience address, Pope John Paul II reminded the entire Church that such intercession is the priest’s privilege and responsibility, “for he has been ordained to represent his people before the Lord and to intercede on their behalf before the throne of grace.
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This intercession at the throne of grace takes many forms, but one of the most easily neglected is Morning and Evening Prayer, the Liturgy of the Hours.
Now, to be honest, the breviary is frequently experienced as a burden. As if the Priest’s day weren’t busy enough, running from a funeral, a wake, CCD, the Parish Council and endless letters from the chancery…now I’m supposed to sit down and devoutly prayer morning prayer, mid-day prayer, evening prayer, night prayer, and one of the daytime hours! Not to mention the Office of Readings!
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Such a reaction is understandable and real. Yet the Psalms can also be an oasis in the desert, a respite from the hurriedness of life, and a beautiful place to take deep breaths and rest with God. Because the Psalms are beautiful.
Just like life is beautiful. But life can also disappoint, distract with pain, and confuse with everyday agonies. The Psalmist knew that only too well. He tells us of days he’d rather be dead, of hearts that moan de profundis and of enemies hiding around every corner. Which is why the Psalm can be such a consolation. Because it is so close to us..so close to the joys and the pains of the human heart that it can give voice to the struggles of human flesh.
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A few years ago I buried an elderly friend whom I had previously introduced to the Psalms. She sat for hours with that little Psalter and read the Psalms over and over. One day I asked her what she was getting out of that little book which had proved to be such a good gift. I read these old prayers, she smiled, and they’re all about me.
The night she died, they found her small breviary and her rosary in the bed with her. The rosary was wrapped around her fingers, and the ribbon for morning prayer was set at the twenty-third Psalm: Though I walk through the valley of death, I shall fear no evil, for you are at my side. She read those old prayers, and they were all about her.
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As Saint Ambrose said of the Psalm:
It soothes the temper, distracts from care, lightens the burden of sorrow. It is a source of security at night, a lesson in wisdom by day. It is a shield when we are afraid, a celebration of holiness, a vision of serenity, a promise of peace and harmony. It is like a lyre, evoking harmony from a blend of notes.
Day begins to the music of a psalm. Day closes to the echo of a psalm.
And the Psalms are beautiful because they are true. Pope Benedict XVI called them “a musical instrument which plays all the virtues.”
The Psalmist uses the dead gut string of a lyre to create harmony from a variety of notes and send up to heaven a hymn of truth and of passion.
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The Psalms are capable of giving voice to the heart of the parish priest in any time or circumstance. As Thomas Merton once wrote, “There is no aspect of the interior life, no kind of religious experience, no spiritual need of man that is not depicted and lived out in the Psalms.”
There are Psalms for the days when everything is perfect and submission to God’s will seems easy. (For in God our hearts rejoice; in your holy name we trust.) And Psalms of luminous peace seen through a life of perfect obedience!
There are Psalms for the days when all of life (parish council, Bishop, bills, etc.) are ganging up on you, and that unjust steward is beating you about the head (See how many are my enemies, see how fiercely they hate me!) Or for those moments when the inmates seem to be running the asylum, and the stupidest people are making the most unjust decisions: (God looks down from heaven upon the human race, to see if even one is wise, if even one seeks God!)
When it gets really bad, there are Psalms which prefigure the agony of Christ (My heart pounds within me; death's terrors fall upon me), while others rejoice at unexpected mercy or amazement that something really worked! (Praise the LORD, my soul; I shall praise the LORD all my life, sing praise to my God while I live).
All these Psalms await us as a healing balm and a cause to action. When the Psalms become a part of our regular spiritual diet, a dynamic tension is established between our inner world of prayer and the outer world of our daily lives.
When We Get Old
People think priests pray all day long. They’re right, but you do other things too. You meet with people, do paperwork, visit the sick, and schedule ministers. You make sure the bulletins done and the diocese is paid and you show up at all those meetings. You write your homily, settle those disputes, and worry about the boiler. You envy, you fight, you resent, you gossip. You listen, you forgive, you care for, you nourish. You love, you stave off hate, you worry and you wonder. In short, the priest’s life is just like everyone else’s, except he has willingly placed it under God’s microscope.
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What is it like to have been a priest for 25 or 40 or 60 years? To have prayed those same Psalms over and over and over. Admittedly it can sometimes be a bit like a desert. The great Carlo Caretto once wrote of what it was like to get old in such a desert, if I might paraphrase him:
I used to think that when I grew old, things would get easier. That God’s love, and old and tried companion, would embrace me gently and warm me tenderly and console all the rough parts. But as I have grown old, winter by spring, the love he offers me is often a harsh and a bitter love, filled with pain, newfound uncertainties and tinged with fear. But the difference is, I no longer wish to break the appointment!
Sustaining the Ars Celebrandi, then, is all about no longer wishing to break the appointment. Morning by evening, winter by spring, to pray. To pray the liturgy of the Church with you whole heart and soul, the Mass, the Sacraments and the breviary…and to pray for the people in the quiet of your room. To be a friend to Jesus, and to his mother, as well.
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For his mother teaches us, in the words of one liturgical book, “to celebrate the mysteries of Christ with that same spirit of reverent devotion with which she took part in the birth of her son, in his epiphanies, and in his death and resurrection.
In particular, Mary’s example urges [us] to treasure the word of God in their hearts...to praise God exultantly...to offer [ourselves] generously...to pray with perseverance...to act in all things with mercy and humility...to cherish the law of God and embrace it with love...to love God in everything and above everything else; to be ready to meet Christ when he comes.
As Mary was a servant of the divine Word whom she carried in her womb, so we must be a servant of the divine liturgy and the Church who articulates it, not its master.
Which leads me to the final prescription for sustaining an ars celebrandi: Hanging around with the poor.
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Priests Need the Poor
And finally, we need the poor. Jesus said they were blessed, but we who need them are far more blessed by them than they are by us.
The centrality of the Mass was crucial to Dorothy, and she considered it the greatest work of the day. In the early 1940’s, when she addressed a group of “would-be Catholic Workers ,” she admonished them that “the Mass is the Work”! All their activities were first to be offered and then united frequently with the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross and on the altar, because Dorothy felt that “ all life flowed from worship; only thus would their work be a success, irrespective of its external attainment”.
NATIONAL LITURGICAL CONF AND CATHOLIC WORKERS … social workers and interior designers!
We’re always trying to drive the poor away because they remind us of our own fragility: that we are never really in control. That we could be as they are but for the grace of God. That in what really matters, selfishness and sin, we’re probably poorer than they are.
And yet Jesus calls them blessed. The same Jesus who said “judge not, lest ye be judged,” and means it. The same Jesus who says ‘whatever you do to the least, you do to me,’ and means it. The same Jesus who says, if they slap you on one side, give them the other,’ and means it. The same Jesus who says, ‘love one another as I have loved you,’ and then dies on the cross for us.
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That means that the priests must always be a home for the poor: the poor in heart, the poor in stomach, the poor in love. It means that we are truly priests of Jesus Christ if we attract the lonely, the crazy, the dysfunctional, the addicted, the hungry, the guilty, the broken and those who have learned how to alienate almost everyone else in the world.
Any church modeled on the person of Jesus Christ is a place where the weird, the queer and the rejected of the world find a home. And any priest who serves in such a parish must be so in touch with his own sinfulness, his own weirdness, his own brokenness that they he is ready to welcome other broken little ones with open arms and a heart filled with compassion and understanding.
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SELMA AND THE ALTAR CLOTHS
Selma may not have known the medieval origins of the altar cloth or its proper color or liturgical function. She probably could not translate the rubrics which referred to it, but she did know what it was for: to cloth the Lord. And she understood something else, as well: that we are little and God is big. That our poor attempts to praise and adore him in the Sacred mysteries are just that. Poor attempts to articulate the ineffable, to use creaturely rites to glorify our creator.
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We are little and God is big. A realization indispensable to maintaining a grateful and obedient heart as we prepare to go to the altar of God, the God who gives joy to our youth.
Thank you.
