Meaning and Beauty of Ritual

Dr. Peter Kwasniewski has a splendid article at the NLM website entitled Living the Vita Liturgica: Conditions, Obstacles, Prospects.

http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2018/04/living-vita-liturgica-conditions.html#.WtbY-iMrLpQ

One paragraph among the many helpful sections stands out:

Each of us is supposed to be leading a liturgical life, and we need to find or make the right conditions for doing so, and help others to do it. A first and irreplaceable step in awakening the souls of liturgical orphans to the grandeur of divine worship is simply to invite and encourage them to attend the traditional Latin Mass from time to time. There they will experience something strange and uncomfortable, something directed to a transcendent God and not bending over backwards to include and instruct them, something curiously unmodern and even indifferent to its surroundings, yet utterly in earnest. They might get a taste of what adoration, supplication, and repentance feel like. They will see a visible sacrifice offered up.

Every Catholic's mission is to cooperate with the Holy Spirit to invite and welcome people into an intimate communion with Jesus Christ and His Church. Though, each person may be called by the Spirit to exercise that mission in a unique way appropriate to that person's skill, personality and/or circumstance. When we are docile to the Holy Spirit, God provides the grace to help us be effective witnesses to the Gospel. When we ask, God provides the grace to help us surrender more fully to His will.

With history as a reliable witness, the Holy Spirit uses ritual, the artwork of the spiritual life, i.e., the sacraments, to draw people into communion and to sustain them in communion with Jesus and His Church.

CCC 1189 The liturgical celebration involves signs and symbols relating to creation (candles, water, fire), human life (washing, anointing, breaking bread) and the history of salvation (the rites of the Passover). Integrated into the world of faith and taken up by the power of the Holy Spirit, these cosmic elements, human rituals, and gestures of remembrance of God become bearers of the saving and sanctifying action of Christ.

Ritual is both scaffold (trellis, framework) and progression. The ritual of the Mass provides healthy structure upon which we can rely for guidance into the mystery of salvation in Christ. The Mass, especially Divine Worship of the Ordinariate and the Extraordinary Form Mass, provides clear scaffolding and authentic progression to help nurture in the soul—intellect, memory and will—and body the awareness that we, enfleshed souls created in the image and likeness of God, are creatures of ritual in need of truth, goodness and beauty.

True ritual is an approach, a way into mystery, the Mystery of Christ. Ritual embodies mystery without spiralling into ambiguity, as do many pseudo-rituals of our day. Another name for the sacraments is 'the mysteries'.

We are conceived in the ritual of love between our parents. We grow to maturity in that ritual, i.e., in the forum of self sacrificing love, that is the family.

We encounter ritual everywhere. Not all ritual is good and beautiful, of course. The Mass is too often subject to whimsy in a way that renders the ritual of the Mass dull, opaque or diffuse. Emotionalism in the Liturgy, for example, attenuates opportunities for authentic encounter with the living God. Foreign elements, not the prescribed poetry of the Mass, are distractors, mirrors that only reflect what narcissistic priests and laymen want to see. We need the artwork of the authentic spiritual life to help us grow toward God. Good ritual, like the scaffolding that allows the vine to grasp onto it and grow in the light, allows us to grow toward and in the light of Christ.

Ritual is so important in moving us from the everyday routines of our lives into that other realm where we become aware of who we are in the midst of a grander scheme, and a reality beneath reality. Ritual gives meaning amid the mundane. Christian ritual in prayer connects personal reality to a communal experience of reality involving words, gestures words and objects in response to the presence of Christ among the gathered.

http://www.bne.catholic.edu.au/formationandleadership/prayer/Pages/Understanding-Prayer-Ritual-Liturgy.aspx

Like the soul that is docile to the Holy Spirit, authentic ritual is transparent. Worshippers encounter through right ritual the person of Jesus Christ. When authentic ritual is missing, people invent limp gestures, unpoetic imitations that are more idol than icon. That God still reaches people through or in the midst of shabby liturgies, and becomes present in the Holy Eucharist, is a testimony to God's omnipotence and mercy. Should God's return in the Mass be a cause for our complacency? Hardly. Knowing God is truly present, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, should be immediate cause for the sincere believer to work to ensure the Liturgy reflects the beauty, truth and goodness of God.

When the Liturgy reflects something of the beauty of God, miracles happen. Where there is little beauty, there is little faith. Where there is little faith, there are few miracles (St. Matthew 13:58). That is not to say that God does not work miracles in the darkest of places. Jesus, however, did not work many miracles among people of little or no faith. What would such signs of divine love and mercy mean among those devoid of faith? Pearls before swine (St. Matthew 7:6). People of little or no faith, given the gift, would likely seek more the gifts rather than the Giver of said gifts.

Young people, especially, crave ritual meaning, because they have not lost entirely their childhood, their childlike openness and sense of wonder. To enter into art, one must possess a childlike sense of wonder. True art invites wonder. True art inspires in people a thirst for truth, a hunger for goodness and beauty. If people do not find authentic ritual in the Mass, they look elsewhere, and too often they find a disordered satisfaction in a poor substitute: emotionalism accompanied by a cult of personality.

Provide authentic ritual—which necessarily rubs shoulders with orthodox preaching, and inhabits beautiful spaces and is in dialogue with beautiful art and good music—and people, recognizing what is healthy and inspiring, will come home seeking that/He to whom the Church points: the Lord Jesus Christ.

Truth is a person, the one person who can offer hope, joy and love of a kind that lasts forever. That joy and love begins here, and finds fulfillment in eternity if we are grafted into the Lord and His Church.

To emphasize the need for authentic ritual, let us close with another quote from Dr. Kwasniewski's article:

What was hidden from the learned and clever but is obvious to little ones is that the richer the liturgy’s content, the more incentive and reward there is to work oneself into it. If we apprentice ourselves to Catholic tradition, we will lose something, yes — our contemporary illiteracy and the illusion of our superiority. But we will acquire something far more precious: the rock-solid reality of a bimillenial inheritance, the demanding and delightful school of the saints. We will find ourselves beginning to live the vita liturgica in earnest.