Universalis, your very own breviary in pixels...

Friday 29 June 2012

Clay Trying To Be a Potter

Kathy Pluth, (whose contributions to Chant Cafe are among my favorites, useful, thought-provoking, charitable, and equally profound and accessible - surely a result of her having honed her hymnist's craft,) had a video of a Father Driscoll that is very good a while back.
I am struck by the quote from his presentation that she uses as her post title - [The Liturgy] forms us, and it is always bigger than any given community that celebrates it.

How hard that seems to be for us, us musicians and liturgists and priests grinding away at St Thewaywedoithere's, as if the Mass were ours to create.
Putting our stamp on things?
Sometimes we seem are little better than dogs when it comes to marking our territory.

I remember reading a movie critic once, who had written about how very differently he and his children looked at film.
He had a viewing room, with an almost theater-sized screen to put at their disposal, but his young'ns seemed to prefer looking at tiny stars on the tiny screen of a tiny hand-held device.
He marveled at how his love of film manifested itself in a desire to be overwhelmed by the experience, while their desire was to control the medium.
That's not a generational thing, either - some wish to possess, others to be possessed.
You see it in human love all the time.

Do we have a similar disconnect in the various approaches to the Liturgy... in fact, in our approach to trying to understand the ineffable, our approach to God?

Very often this week, it has seemed as if, not that I am doing something, but as if Something is doing me.
As is right, I think.

2 comments:

D.M. SOLIS said...

Ah, I like the way you end this. You're spot on, you know. The thing about teaching and spirituality (if that's possible) is that we have to present opportunities for listening and receiving, and get our egos out of the way. Thank you, peace and all good,

Diane

Scelata said...

Thanks for visiting, Diane.

(Save the Liturgy, Save the World)