A Sunday Thought About Active Participation in The Liturgy

With our Easter Season now behind us, we enter the stretch to our next special holy season: Advent.

The newfangled calendar calls this "Ordinary Time." Our traditional calendar will refer to each Sunday hence as The xth Sunday after Pentecost, preserving for us the central importance of Pentecost in our liturgy and our lives. (What the "Ordinary Time" designation conveys, we'll leave to others to explain.)

Whether we're attending the Novus Ordo Mass or the Mass in the Extraordinary Form (or, better, the Vetus Ordo), we've got some thought about active participation in the liturgy.

The perpetrators of the Novus Ordo Mass claim it allows us to be more active in the liturgy. More than that, they contrast this with a lack of participation. This is, of course, complete nonsense. Having grown up with the older (venerable) Mass, I remember distinctly being actively engaged, indeed participated, in the liturgy far more than is the case when I attend the Novus Ordo.

If you're never attended the Vetus Ordo, you may not know just what this means. So here's something from Father Z that explains it quite well.

(Read the entire post HERE.)

Many people think “active participation” means carrying things around, clapping, singing, etc.  We can do all those things and actually be thinking about the grocery list or wondering what the score of the game is.  We all have the experience of catching ourselves whistling without realizing we were doing it, reading and not remembering what we just read.

We are doing something, but we are not acting as “humanly” as we ought.

That is not the kind of participation we need at Mass.

We must be actively receptive to what is taking place in the sacred action of the liturgy.

Watching carefully and quietly, actively receptive listening to the spoken Word or to sacred music, can be far more active than carrying things around, and so forth.

Active receptivity requires concentration and desire, mind and will.

It looks passive, but it isn’t.

We actively submit to Christ, the true actor in the Mass, and we actively receive from Christ.  He gives us what we need, not as if to passive animals, but as to His actively receptive and engaged images.

Inner participation leads to outward expression. The outward can also spark the inward.  The former, however, has logical priority over the latter.

Participation at Holy Mass in the Extraordinary Form can help us recover a deeper, fuller, more conscious and proper active participation in the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite.

It has the harder elements of deprivation which lead to that indispensable apophatic encounter with Mystery.

This is also why our priests must always be faithful to tradition in the celebration of our rites.

Oh… one more thing.

The most perfect form of active participation is the reception of Holy Communion in the state of grace.

If you desire to participate at Holy Mass and other liturgical rites with full, conscious and actual, active participation, then…

GO TO CONFESSION!

Happy Sunday!