Did You Know?

The word ‘liturgy’ comes from the Greek word meaning ‘the people working together’ and was, originally, a secular term to describe a community activity meant to benefit the whole community – such as repairing a road or digging a communal well. Because Christian worship – unlike pagan worship - was a shared experience with everyone present taking part, the word ‘liturgy’ was soon applied to our corporate worship: the Sacred Liturgy! Now the comparison of the Sacred Liturgy to a symphony (from the Greek: ‘coming together in harmonious sound’) perhaps helps us to think how all of our voices together, expresses a unity of mind, heart and voices in the shared experience of praise. This Unity which is one of the four ‘marks’ of the Church (“ONE, holy, catholic and apostolic) is given expression in our harmonious blending of our many different voices in prayer, praise and thanksgiving, especially in the Sacred Liturgy! One of the great gifts of the Second Vatican Council was to ‘restore’ this sense of the corporate/shared experience of worship – of Liturgy – rather than a passive observing by the Faithful of what was occurring at the altar by the Priest, perhaps supported by a Choir. Returning to the idea of Sacred Liturgy as a symphony, the role of the Priest-Celebrant would be like that of the “conductor”: setting the tempo, directing so that every instrument and every section of the orchestra can be heard as a harmonious whole, and always ‘directing’ according to the musical score. Where is this going? Simply this, when individual worshipers ‘assert’ their unique expression, change the tempo/pace according to their personal preferences, and ‘conduct their own liturgy’ apart from the whole assembly, it is not only distracting and dis-harmonious, but it weakens the Unity which the Sacred Liturgy is meant to express. (There cannot be two or three separate Masses going on at the same time!) Recently one of our Priests said that at the Mass that he was celebrating, part of the congregation began praying of the Our Father without him! Disharmony resulted and, of course, the expression of Unity was undermined. This is a very important matter. . .please reflect on this and pray for a deeper understanding of the purpose, meaning, and the impact of the Sacred Liturgy, in which we are all to take part!