Darmok and Jalod Ad Orientem

An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post was first published 3 December 2016. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

Darmok and Jalod at Tanagra

 I recently re-published a post called “Star Trek, Secularism, and Christian Faith”. It had originally been posted on my first blog, Principium et Finis, where it garnered more page views than anything else on the blog – more than anything else I’ve ever published online, in fact.  There seems to be something about imaginative stories (Star Trek is just one example) that captures our attention, and has done so since our far-distant ancestors gathered around campfires to hear story-tellers recount the communal tales that defined them as a people.

Tamarian Captain and Captain Jean-Luc Picard

     In my earlier post I was somewhat critical of the creators of the television science-fiction franchise on the grounds that they didn’t really understand what religious believers mean by "faith", which was supposed to be a major theme in episode I was discussing.  They are on much firmer ground in the episode called “Darmok”, from the fourth season of the series Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Not only that, I think that this particular story throws an interesting light on some current issues in the Catholic Church.

      In “Darmok” the (mostly human) crew of the starship Enterprise encounters an alien race called the Tamarians, with whom humans have previously had several frustratingly unsuccessful attempts at communication.  It seems that the Earthling’s Universal Translators (ah, the wonders of science fiction!) are able to discover the meaning of the Tamarians’ words, but can’t figure out how the words combine to express meaning.  What is one to make, for instance, of utterances such as “Shaka, when the walls fell”, or “The river Tamarc, in winter”? The aliens seem to be talking in metaphors and allusions drawn from stories known to them and to nobody else.

Data and Troi explain Tamarian Language

     Jean-Luc Picard, the Enterprise’s captain (played by Patrick Stuart) experiences the same frustration as his predecessors in his attempts to communicate with the commander of a Tamarian ship, a frustration clearly shared by his alien counterpart.  Finally, the Tamarian captain holds up two daggers and declares “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!”, at which both he and Picard are transported (more sci-fi wizardry) down to the surface of a planet below.  Picard soon learns that the captain is not challenging him to a duel as he at first supposes, but what he does intend, or what he means by his insistent repetition of “Darmok and Jalod at Tanagra!” remains a mystery.

     Finally, after the two captains together encounter a deadly creature (which mortally wounds Picard’s Tamarian counterpart), Picard puts the puzzle together.  Darmok and Jalod were two heroes, perhaps rivals or enemies, who together fought a beast on an island called Tanagra, and formed a bond of friendship.  The alien captain had hoped that, by putting himself and Picard in a similar situation, they might likewise achieve through shared experience what they couldn't find through mere words.  Understanding too late his counterpart's intent, Picard is able at least to comfort the dying Tamarian by recounting to him the ancient epic of Gil-Gamesh.

We Are Formed by Experience

    The Tamarians, as are all Star Trek aliens, are really humans in disguise (literally, of course, but figuratively as well).  In this particular story the creators of the television show have put their finger on something that goes to the very heart of what it is to be human: we are formed by our experiences, not only as individuals but as peoples.  The “aliens” they have created here view the world only through the lens of the stories that have been passed down about the history of their people, and in their everyday experiences they consciously relive the experiences of their forebears. Their only way to communicate abstractions is through the concrete: people, places, and events.

Picard tells Tamarians about death of their captain

    Now, we Earth-dwellers may not look very much like them at first.  We have a wealth of language that communicates abstractions and ideas . . . and yet we are more Tamarian than we might appear at first glance.  Notice how easily, for example, the name of the Nazi’s hand-picked Norwegian puppet Vidkun Quisling has become the common noun “quisling”, a synonym for “traitor” . . . or how easily we use a metaphorical term such as “puppet”, as I did just now. Often,  we quickly forget that the expressions we are using are metaphors at all.  I remember, for instance during the 1992 presidential campaign when former (and future) California governor Jerry Brown was asked about the “anointed front-runner” Bill Clinton.  Brown asked whether he was running for president, or running for pope. Some allusions are even more deeply buried: how many people even know when they use the word “mentor” they are alluding to Homer’s Odyssey, where the goddess Athena, in the guise of a wise old man named Mentor, accompanies Odysseus’s son Telemachus to provide guidance (or, to speak metaphorically, “show him the ropes”).  

It's a Mystery to Me

    There’s even more going on here than the use of language.  The Tamarian captain understands that actions, experiences, can communicate in ways that words cannot (a point I also discuss in a post I republished this week, “Christ, or Anti-Christ? Art & the Power of Imagination”), which is of course true of human beings as much as it is of the fictional “Children of Tamar”.  This is a large part of why so many religions rely on ritual and formal rites: the actions communicate to us much more deeply than mere words, because we are actually living out what they want to convey.  The true meaning of the term “mystery” (from the Greek μυστήριον) in fact, is not something unknowable, but something that can only be known experientially, through doing. Traditional Christianity tells us that God uses these mysteries as a means not only of imparting His Grace, but of revealing himself to us. Once we understand that, we can more easily see why μυστήριον translates into Latin as sacramentum, because sacraments involve not only knowing or thinking, but acting.

The Mystery of the Eucharist

     Most religions rely, to some degree or other, on mystery.  At the very core of Christianity we find the Profoundest Mystery, the Supreme Sacrament: The Infinite God become Man in order to experience our humanity, and to invite us, in turn, to share in His Divinity.  We live out this mystery concretely when we receive the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist which is, as the Second Vatican Council reminds us, the summit and source of the Christian life.  While Catholic Christianity includes countless lesser ways of living out spiritual realities as well, including the other Sacraments, sacramentals, devotions, and so on, the Eucharist, and the Sacrifice of the Mass in which we receive it, is the most important thing we do.

Turning Toward The Lord

    It can be helpful, I think, to bear these considerations in mind when we look at the suggestion recently made [5 July 2016] by Cardinal Sarah, head of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, that priests start re-introducing the practice of saying the Mass ad orientem, “toward the rising sun”, which is to say facing the altar rather than the congregation.  The Cardinal made the suggestion in a talk delivered at a liturgical conference in London this past summer (full text here).   Cardinal Sarah asked his fellow shepherds in the episcopy to support him in this matter, saying:

I very humbly and fraternally would like to appeal also to my brother bishops: please lead your priests and people towards the Lord in this way, particularly at large celebrations in your dioceses and in your cathedral. Please form your seminarians in the reality that we are not called to the priesthood to be at the centre of liturgical worship ourselves, but to lead Christ’s faithful to him as fellow worshippers united in the one same act of adoration.

Implicit in the part of the quote I have italicized above is the idea that what we do, and what the priest does, during the Mass is a part of the message.

Ad Orientem: facing The Lord Together

    I first came across a similar suggestion in regard to ad orientem worship some years ago in an article by Fr. Joseph Fessio called “The Mass of Vatican II”. In his essay Fr. Fessio explains what the documents of Vatican II actually say about the Mass; for instance, that it should remain mostly in Latin, and that Gregorian Chant “should be given pride of place in liturgical services", and various other directives that appear not to have much influenced the post-conciliar revision of the liturgy. Fr. Fessio points out that one thing that was done does not appear, anywhere, in the Council’s documents, just as it had never been part of the tradition of the Church over the previous 18 centuries: turning the priest at Mass around to face the congregation, rather than having him face the altar, the liturgical East, along with the people he is leading in prayer.  In defending the traditional practice Fr. Fessio more explicitly makes some of the same points that Cardinal Sarah does in his London talk:

It's true that when the priest faces the people for the celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, there may be a sense of greater unity as a community. But there is also a danger of the priest being the performer and you being the spectator - precisely what the Council did not want: priest performers and congregational spectators. But there is something more problematic. You can see it, perhaps, by contrasting Mass facing the people with Mass facing East or facing the Lord. I don't say Mass "with my back to the people" anymore than Patton went through Germany with his "back to the soldiers." Patton led the Third Army across Germany and they followed him to achieve a goal. The Mass is part of the Pilgrim Church on the way to our goal, our heavenly homeland. This world is not our heavenly homeland. We don't sit around in a circle and look at each other. We want to look with each other and with the priest towards the rising sun, the rays of grace, where the Son will come again in glory on the clouds.

The Medium is the Message

    Marshall McLuhan famously said of television that “the medium is the message”.  The same can be said of all media, including sacred media.  How we celebrate the Mass sends a message.  The symbolic “message” of the ad orientem Mass is clear: that all of us together, priest and people, are making an offering to God; we all face our Lord together.  When priest and people face each other, who is offering what to whom? The message seems to be that we are there to see each other, not to turn to Our Lord. The little cartoon to the left (which, I confess, I stole from Fr. Z’s blog) gives a good illustration of the problem. Cardinal Sarah himself recently made the same point in a talk delivered to the bishops of Sri Lanka,

In recent decades in some countries the Sacred Liturgy has become too anthropocentric; man not Almighty God has often become its focus.

But that’s not how it’s supposed to be.  Instead,

In every Catholic liturgy, the Church, made up of both minister and faithful, gives her complete focus – body, heart and mind – to God who is the centre of our lives and the origin of every blessing and grace.

    That’s the beauty of the traditional ad orientem celebration of the Mass: we don’t merely read or hear but experience for ourselves the Truth that God is the center of our lives, and our in our worship we all turn to Him together.

It's Greek to Me

    Which brings me to one of my few real quibbles with “Darmok”. In the final scene of the episode we see Captain Picard reading a book when his first officer, Commander Riker, enters the room.  Riker looks at the book curiously, and says, “Greek, sir?” (did I mention that Captain Picard is the consummate Renaissance man? Starship captain, interstellar warrior, student of Latin and Greek, etc.), which leads to this exchange:

PICARD: Oh, the Homeric Hymns. One of the root metaphors of our own culture.

RIKER: For the next time we encounter the Tamarians?

PICARD: More familiarity with our own mythology might help us to relate to theirs. The Tamarian was willing to risk all of us just for the hope of communication, connection. Now the door is open between our peoples. That commitment meant more to him than his own life. Thank you, Number One.

Now, the Homeric Hymns is not a bad place to start, as far as it goes, but if Picard really wants to get at the “root” of what it is to be human, I have a better suggestion for him, one that goes like this:

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος καὶ ὁ Λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν Θεόν καὶ Θεὸς ἦν ὁ Λόγος

In the beginning was The Word, and The Word was with God, and The Word was God (John 1:1)

Catholicism, Faith, & the Power of Imagination

Catholicism and Cool Stuff

     One of the attractive things about Catholicism is that, traditionally anyway, it has always included a lot of Cool Stuff: gorgeous music and art (a sampling of which I try to showcase on my blog), beautiful churches in which to worship (which are themselves filled with inspiring images), ancient, uplifting prayers with which to praise our creator, and on and on.  There's a vast treasury of beauty, and you can see it, hear, touch it, even smell it.  It's all wonderful but . . . is it really necessary?

   Many non-Catholic Christians and, sadly, even a substantial number of self-identified Catholics, dismiss these tactile and aesthetic riches as pointless frippery.  Many others recognize their power, but misunderstand their purpose.  John Adams, for instance, one of my favorite figures from American history but a man whose formation was thoroughly protestant, once witnessed a Catholic Vespers service when the delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia decided to take turns attending each other's churches.  He was impressed by the impact of the vestments, incense, and chanting, but also highly suspicious of its purpose, remarking "How did Luther ever break the spell?"
     Now, it's no surprise that somebody like Adams, raised in a worldview grounded in Puritanism, should mistrust and misunderstand the aesthetic aspects of Catholic worship, but we should expect better from our fellow Catholics, particularly those who design churches, plan liturgies, and compose or arrange music.  In another recent post [here] we saw how beautiful, well-ordered churches help to teach the Faith.  Today I'd like to discuss in more depth how aesthetic experiences (both inside and out of the church building) can deepen our faith and even, in some cases, help bring the unbelieving to belief.  

It's a Matter of Trust

  Before I go any further, I'd like to stress that bringing about conversion is primarily the work of the Holy Spirit.  Our Lord still wants us to play a role, however: 

 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you (Matthew 28:19-20).

A significant part of that teaching should be directed toward opening minds and hearts so that people are prepared to trust Christ and his message.
          And "Trust" is the key word. In my post "Star Trek, Secularism, And Christian Faith" [here] we looked at another passage from Matthew, in which Jesus walks on the water and then invites Peter to do the same; we saw that when Peter sinks into the waves, it was not so much from a lack of belief as a lack of trust (Matthew 14:25-32). Trust of this sort doesn’t come easily: how quickly Peter, who was a close friend of Jesus, wavered in his faith.  How many of us ordinary believers, even those of us who have had powerful and convincing encounters with the power of God, have found ourselves beginning to doubt, and starting to drift away?  This is, I think, one of the ongoing effects of original sin: that we are prey to doubt, and our emotions can overwhelm our understanding. 

     If believing Christians can be drawn into doubt, what about people with even stronger emotional incentives to disbelieve?  There are those who hope to indulge their favored sins without guilt, for instance, or who work in a profession (such as academia) or live in an environment where Christian Faith marks them out for ridicule and abuse; there are an enormous number of people who know little about the history or teaching of the Catholic Church except the misrepresentations of an uninformed and often hostile popular press; there are those who really have been harmed, or are close to somebody who has been harmed, by someone they identify with Christianity or with the Catholic Church.

The Object of Opening the Mind . . . 

William-Adolphe Bouguereau's "Song of the Angels"

     Sometimes it is possible to overcome emotional barriers with the power of imagination.  It's not  that God or the matter of our Faith is imaginary, quite the opposite. It is that evidence is not self-interpreting, it needs a mind to interpret, a mind open to sometimes unsettling truths.  Things that engage the imagination such as art, music, and stories (including films and television programs) don't simply work on the intellect, they create new emotional experiences that can sometimes shake and loosen habits of mind cemented in place by previous experiences. Jesus took full advantage of this truth about human nature when he taught in parables.  Freed from these old barriers, we are able to see reality in a new light.  The well- known Catholic blogger Fr. John Zuhlsdorf (a.k.a. Fr. Z), for instance, was a Lutheran who, after hearing a beautiful work of sacred polyphony on the radio, started to view Catholicism in a different way; this was the first step in his conversion, and eventual ordination as a Catholic priest.

     G. K. Chesterton once said: "The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid."  An important purpose of so  many of the tangible and beautiful things in Catholic worship, all the chanting, vestments, smells and bells, is to expand the imagination so that our minds are opened large enough to receive the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

      There is, of course, a danger in reliance on the imagination: it can expand the mind in other, less wholesome, directions as well.  The well-meaning but misguided creators of Star Trek, for instance, are just the tip of the iceberg, and much, perhaps most, of what else is on offer in the popular culture is considerably worse. Like our conscience, then, imagination must be properly formed.  We should take seriously the power of works of imagination, both for good and for bad, always bearing in mind St. Paul's advice: "Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things" (Phillipians 4:8).  We might wish to remember the Apostle's words, and feel no guilt when we enjoy the beauty of Catholic music, art, or worship. In fact, it's all part of His plan.

A Tale of Two Sundays: God's Love is Universal

This Throwback Thursday post was first published on Sept 5th 2015

The Universal Church

The Martyrdom of St. Ignatius of Antioch

   The word “catholic”, meaning “universal” (from greek κατά, “according to” and ὅλος, “the whole”) has been associated with the Christian Church almost from the beginning.  It’s first surviving written appearance is in the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch, who was martyred in the year 107 A.D., less than eighty years after the death of Christ.  The matter-of-fact way in which he uses the term suggests that it was already familiar to his readers.  In chapter 8 of his letter to the Smyrnaeans, for instance, he says:

Let that celebration of the Eucharist be considered valid which is held under the bishop or anyone to whom he has committed it. Where the bishop appears, there let the people be, just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.

The term initially was meant to identify the Church, along with all the doctrines and practices, that was authoritative for all Christians, as opposed to heresy, from the Greek αἵρεσις, “a choosing”.  A heretic was someone who chose only certain things from the Universal Church, while rejecting others, thus cutting himself off from the ecclesial body and the tradition established by Jesus Christ himself and handed on by his Apostles.

    We can also say that the Church is "catholic" in other senses as well.  It is “universal” in that it embraces the entire history of Christianity, for instance: not only the experiences of our forebears contained in Holy Scripture and the generations of believers since the Bible was codified, but also those believers themselves, who still participate in the life of the Church as members of the Church Suffering in Purgatory and the Church Triumphant in Heaven.

   The primary place in which those of us alive here on Earth (in the Church Militant) experience the catholicity of the Church is in the Holy Eucharist, where we are all joined to our One Lord by partaking in His Body and Blood (hence the term “Communion”).  I have suggested previously [here] that the use of Latin in the Western Church reinforced, in a very effective, concrete way, the reality of that communion, but it is the Mass itself (and really Christ through the Mass, particularly in the Eucharist) that unites us.  Whether we attend the Extraordinary form in Latin or the Ordinary form in any language you could name, we are participating in the One Sacrifice of Calvary, and also in the liturgy that unfolds eternally before the throne of God in Heaven.  I had a beautiful reminder of how the Mass can embody the catholicity of the Church over the past two Sundays, when I and my family celebrated the Eucharist away from our home parish.

At The VA Hospital

Togus VA Medical Center, Augusta, ME

    The first Mass was was at a Veterans Administration hospital, where every Sunday volunteers from the Knights of Columbus, along with their families, take turns bringing wheelchair-bound veterans to the Eucharistic celebration.  The veterans seemed to appreciate our company, and it was a very moving experience for us.  The Liturgy itself was inspirational as well, in spite of the unadorned, institutional blue cinder block walls of the non-denominational chapel.  There was only one tangible external detail, aside from the priest’s vestments, to remind us of the transcendent nature of what we were doing: father placed a crucifix in front of him on the altar, on which he fixed his gaze as he offered the Eucharistic Sacrifice.  Pope Benedict has recommended this practice in response to the criticism that the Mass versus populum (facing the people) gives the impression that priest and congregation are addressing each other, rather than together directing our prayers to God.  This is the first time, at least that I can recall, that I’ve seen a priest adopting Papa Benedetto’s simple expedient for orienting ourselves toward our Our Lord with this arrangement. The Gospel reading on this particular Sunday was the Bread of Life Discourse from John Chapter 6, and Father spoke eloquently on the True Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  While he didn’t deal explicitly with our surroundings, our gratitude for God’s gift of his own body to us was all the more powerful for the testimony of the severely disabled men worshipping with us, who had also sacrificed their bodies for others.

At The College

The Chapel at Thomas More College

    This past weekend we attended a very different Mass at Thomas More College in Merrimack, New Hampshire.  It was a beautiful celebration of the Ordinary form, simple and understated but still incorporating many traditional details that brought to mind the timelessness of the Eucharistic Liturgy, and which helped to redirect our attention from ourselves to our Lord: celebration ad orientem, some of the prayers in Latin, an altar server holding a patten under the chin while we knelt for communion, etc. (for a fuller discussion, see my post here on a previous Mass, which was the same in most particulars).  On this occasion, the second reading was from the letter of James:

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this:

to care for orphans and widows in their affliction

and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

And Father accordingly spoke in his homily of the need for us to live out our faith, and particularly our obligation to make the love of Christ a reality in our lives.

God Is Love

The Crucifixion by Marco Palmezzano

    There is an interesting symmetry here: in the first Mass, with few external signs of the transcendent, and which many of us were attending for the purpose of “caring for” (as the Apostle James says) the hospital patients, the Gospel and the homily invited us to look beyond the here and now to Jesus Christ. In the second mass, where much loving attention was devoted to the external details that emphasize the reverence due to the Real Presence of the Second Person of the Trinity, we were asked to direct ourselves to the material needs of the less fortunate among us.  

    The common thread is love: Christ’s love in offering himself for us, our love for him as expressed in the reverence of our worship, and our love for each other as manifested in our care for others.  The Beloved Disciple tells us that “God is Love” (1 John 4:8), and Jesus himself says:

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. (John 13:34-35)

Piety and Charity, then, aren’t opposites, or even separate: in fact, for followers of Jesus Christ they are inseparable, two sides of the same coin.  And we encounter them in every Mass, wherever it is offered, and whatever it looks like.  God’s Love is universal.

Darmok and Jalod Ad Orientem

Darmok and Jalod at Tanagra

 I recently re-published a post called “Star Trek, Secularism, and Christian Faith”. It had originally been posted on my first blog, Principium et Finis, where it garnered more page views than anything else on the blog – more than anything else I’ve ever published online, in fact.  There seems to be something about imaginative stories like Star Trek (and similar things) that captures our attention, and has done so since our far-distant ancestors gathered around campfires to hear story-tellers recount the communal tales that defined them as a people.

     In my earlier post I was somewhat critical of the creators of the television science-fiction franchise on the grounds that they didn’t really understand the nature of Faith, which was supposed to be a major theme in episode I was discussing.  They are on much firmer ground, however, in the episode called “Darmok”, from the fourth season of the series Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Not only that, I think that this particular story throws an interesting light on some current issues in the Catholic Church.

      In “Darmok” the (mostly human) crew of the starship Enterprise encounters an alien race called the Tamarians, with whom humans have previously had several frustratingly unsuccessful attempts at communication.  It seems that the Earthling’s Universal Translators (ah, the wonders of science fiction!) are able to discover the meaning of the Tamarians’ words, but can’t figure out how the words combine to express meaning.  What is one to make, for instance, of utterances such as “Shaka, when the walls fell”, or “The river Tamarc, in winter”? The aliens seem to be talking in metaphors and allusions drawn from stories known to them and to nobody else.

Data and Troi explain Tamarian Language

     Jean-Luc Picard, the Enterprise’s captain (played by British actor Patrick Stuart) experiences the same frustration as his predecessors in his attempts to communicate with the commander of a Tamarian ship, a frustration clearly shared by his alien counterpart.  Finally, the Tamarian captain holds up two daggers and declares “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!”, at which both he and Picard are transported (more sci-fi wizardry) down to the surface of a planet below.  Picard soon learns that the captain is not challenging him to a duel as he at first supposes, but what he does intend, or what he means by his insistent repetition of “Darmok and Jalod at Tanagra!” remains a mystery.

     Finally, after the two captains together encounter a deadly creature (which mortally wounds Picard’s Tamarian counterpart), Picard puts the puzzle together.  Darmok and Jalod were two heroes, perhaps rivals or enemies, who together fought a beast on an island called Tanagra, and formed a bond of friendship.  The alien captain had hoped that, by putting himself and Picard in a similar situation, they might likewise achieve through shared experience what they couldn't find through mere words.  Picard then comforts his dying counterpart by recounting to him the ancient epic of Gil-Gamesh.

We Are Formed by Experience

    The Tamarians, as are all the aliens in Star Trek, are humans in disguise.  In this particular story the creators of the television show have put their finger on something that goes to the very heart of what it is to be human: we are formed by our experiences, not only as individuals but as peoples.  The “aliens” they have created here view the world only through the lens of the stories that have been passed down about the history of their people, and in their everyday experiences they consciously relive the experiences of their forebears. Their only way to communicate abstractions is through the concrete: people, places, and events.

Picard tells Tamarians about death of their captain

    Now, we Earth-dwellers may not look very much like them at first.  We have a wealth of language that communicates abstractions and ideas.  We are however, more Tamarian than we appear at first glance.  Notice how easily, for example, the name of the Nazi’s hand-picked Norwegian puppet Vidkun Quisling has become the common noun “quisling”, a synonym for “traitor” . . . or how easily we use a metaphorical term such as “puppet”, as I did just now. Often,  we quickly forget that the expressions we are using are metaphors at all.  I remember, for instance during the 1992 presidential campaign when former (and present) California governor Jerry Brown was asked about the “anointed front-runner” Bill Clinton.  Brown asked whether he was running for president, or running for pope. Some allusions are even more deeply buried: how many people even know when they use the word “mentor” they are alluding to Homer’s Odyssey, where the goddess Athena, in the guise of a wise old man named Mentor, accompanies Odysseus’s son Telemachus to guide him (or, to speak metaphorically, “show him the ropes”).  

It's a Mystery to Me

    There’s even more going on here than the use of language.  The Tamarian captain understands that actions, experiences, can communicate in ways that words cannot (a point I also discuss in a post I republished this week, “Christ, or Anti-Christ? Art & the Power of Imagination”), which is of course true of human beings as much as it is of the fictional “Children of Tamar”.  This is a large part of why so many religions rely on ritual and formal rites: the actions communicate to us much more deeply than mere words, because we are actually living out what they want to convey.  The true meaning of the term “mystery” (from the Greek μυστήριον) in fact, is not something unknowable, but something that can only be known experientially. Traditional Christianity tells us that God uses these mysteries as a means not only of imparting His Grace, but of revealing himself to us. Once we understand that, we can more easily see why μυστήριον translates into Latin as sacramentum, because sacraments involve not only knowing or thinking, but acting.

The Mystery of the Eucharist

     Most religions rely, to some degree or other, on mystery.  At the very core of Christianity we find the Profoundest Mystery, the Supreme Sacrament: The Infinite God become Man in order to experience our humanity, and to invite us, in turn, to share in His Divinity.  We live out this mystery concretely when we receive the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist which is, as the Second Vatican Council reminds us, the summit and source of the Christian life.  While Catholic Christianity includes countless lesser ways of living out spiritual realities as well, including the other Sacraments, sacramentals, devotions, and so on, the Eucharist, and the Sacrifice of the Mass in which we receive it, is the most important thing we do.

Turning Toward The Lord

    It can be helpful, I think, to bear these considerations in mind when we look at the suggestion recently made by Cardinal Sarah, currently head of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments , that priests start re-introducing the practice of saying the Mass ad orientem, “toward the rising sun”, which is to say facing the altar rather than the congregation.  The Cardinal made the suggestion in a talk delivered at a liturgical conference in London this past summer (full text here).   Cardinal Sarah asked his fellow shepherds in the episcopy to support him in this matter, saying:

I very humbly and fraternally would like to appeal also to my brother bishops: please lead your priests and people towards the Lord in this way, particularly at large celebrations in your dioceses and in your cathedral. Please form your seminarians in the reality that we are not called to the priesthood to be at the centre of liturgical worship ourselves, but to lead Christ’s faithful to him as fellow worshippers united in the one same act of adoration.

Implicit in the part of the quote I have italicized above is the idea that what we do, and what the priest does, during the Mass is a part of the message.

Ad Orientem: facing The Lord Together

    I first came across a similar suggestion in regard to ad orientem worship some years ago in an article by Fr. Joseph Fessio called “The Mass of Vatican II”. In his essay Fr. Fessio explains what the documents of Vatican II actually say about the Mass; for instance, that it should remain mostly in Latin, and that Gregorian Chant “should be given pride of place in liturgical services", and various other directives that appear not to have much influenced the post-conciliar revision of the liturgy. Fr. Fessio points out that one thing that was done does not appear, anywhere, in the Council’s documents, just as it had never been part of the tradition of the Church over the previous 18 centuries: turning the priest at Mass around to face the congregation, rather than having him face the altar, the liturgical East, along with the people he is leading in prayer.  In defending the traditional practice Fr. Fessio more explicitly makes some of the same points that Cardinal Sarah does in his London talk:

It's true that when the priest faces the people for the celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, there may be a sense of greater unity as a community. But there is also a danger of the priest being the performer and you being the spectator - precisely what the Council did not want: priest performers and congregational spectators. But there is something more problematic. You can see it, perhaps, by contrasting Mass facing the people with Mass facing East or facing the Lord. I don't say Mass "with my back to the people" anymore than Patton went through Germany with his "back to the soldiers." Patton led the Third Army across Germany and they followed him to achieve a goal. The Mass is part of the Pilgrim Church on the way to our goal, our heavenly homeland. This world is not our heavenly homeland. We don't sit around in a circle and look at each other. We want to look with each other and with the priest towards the rising sun, the rays of grace, where the Son will come again in glory on the clouds.

The Medium is the Message

    Marshall McLuhan famously said of television that “the medium is the message”.  The same can be said of all media, including sacred media.  How we celebrate the Mass sends a message.  The symbolic “message” of the ad orientem Mass is clear: that all of us together, priest and people, are making an offering to God; we all face our Lord together.  When priest and people face each other, who is offering what to whom? The message seems to be that we are there to see each other, not to turn to Our Lord. The little cartoon to the left (which, I confess, I stole from Fr. Z’s blog) gives a good illustration of the problem. Cardinal Sarah himself recently made the same point in a talk delivered to the bishops of Sri Lanka,

In recent decades in some countries the Sacred Liturgy has become too anthropocentric; man not Almighty God has often become its focus.

But that’s not how it’s supposed to be.  Instead,

In every Catholic liturgy, the Church, made up of both minister and faithful, gives her complete focus – body, heart and mind – to God who is the centre of our lives and the origin of every blessing and grace.

    That’s the beauty of the traditional ad orientem celebration of the Mass: we don’t merely read or hear but experience ourselves the Truth that God is the center of our lives, and our in our worship we all turn to Him together.

It's Greek to Me

    Which brings me to my one real quibble with “Darmok”. In the final scene of the episode we see Captain Picard reading a book when his first officer, Commander Riker, enters the room.  Riker looks at the book curiously, and says, “Greek, sir?” (did I mention that Captain Picard is quite a Renaissance man? Starship captain, student of Latin and Greek, etc.), which leads to this exchange:

PICARD: Oh, the Homeric Hymns. One of the root metaphors of our own culture.

RIKER: For the next time we encounter the Tamarians?

PICARD: More familiarity with our own mythology might help us to relate to theirs. The Tamarian was willing to risk all of us just for the hope of communication, connection. Now the door is open between our peoples. That commitment meant more to him than his own life. Thank you, Number One.

Now, the Homeric Hymns is not a bad place to start, as far as it goes, but if Picard really wants to get at the “root” of what it is to be human, I have a better suggestion for him, one that starts out like this:

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος, καὶ ὁ Λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν Θεόν, καὶ Θεὸς ἦν ὁ Λόγος.

In the beginning was The Word, and The Word was with God, and The Word was God (John 1:1)