Attention & praise.

Worship "is the metabolism of Christian life," wrote Yale historian Jaroslay Pelikan. Its lifeblood, soul, and pulse. No wonder the reform of the Roman liturgy remains such a point of contention among Catholics, thirty years after the close of Vatican II. As this issue of Commonweal illustrates, Catholics seem enmeshed in an unending quest for the right liturgical chemistry.

The areas of concern--and sometimes controversy--are manifold: language, music, deportment, gender, even the nature of ecclesiology. Why such upheaval? First, as the late Mark Searle once observed in these pages ("Renewing the Liturgy--again," November 18, 1988), Vatican II changed not only the way Catholics do liturgy but the way they think about it. For the council (re)envisioned the Christian community as the worshiping body of Christ. The liturgical changes that Vatican II inaugurated were meant to underscore Christ's presence not simply in the ordained priest and the eucharistic species, but in the Scripture proclamations and in the assembly itself. The latter was to be transformed from a group of passive and often isolated individual spectators into a community activated, in Searle's words, by its "conscious participation in the redemptive work of Christ." From now on, the community was to experience the Red Sea waters, the hill of Calvary, the road to Emmaus.

Such statements as Searle's are evocative and deeply challenging, but despite their eloquence and correctness, they can still leave one with a sense that the basic liturgical dilemma the church faces has not been addressed. That dilemma, Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann observed in For the Life of the World (Saint Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1973), is that we live, move, and pay our taxes in an all-encompassing secular age, one that questions the very notion of worship. Schmemann described secularism as a type of heresy, not because it is concerned with denying the attributes or even the existence of God, but because it seeks to delimit the nature of the human person. For the secularist, human beings-their drives, emotions, personal teleologies--can be understood entirely in terms of molecules and neutrons.

Liturgical reform in a secularized ethos, then, requires dealing with very sticky issues at very high stakes, as both Thomas Day (page 1 1) and Frederick C. Bauerschmidt (page 14) illustrate. Renewing the liturgy is not simply a matter of "cleaning up" old rites or concocting "relevant" language and new choreographies (see, Ralph Thibodeau, John C. Cort, and David O'Rourke, also in this issue). As difficult and sometimes distracting as such work can be, however, it is necessary. For each generation must rediscover the power of worship. Only when we have tasted it and been transformed by it will we want to share it with and "for" the world.

During the conclusion of his address at the United Nations last month, Pope John Paul II spoke of "the radiant humanity of Christ" as being the basis of Christian hope for the world and care for each human person. The pope's own sense of that radiant humanity" was clearly in evidence two days later when he presided over the liturgy at New York's Central Park. Paul Elie's engaging description of that event (page 9) catches both the occasion's ordinariness and its transcendence. For good liturgy is not an escape from reality, it is an engagement with it, a heightening of it.

"You are here not out of simple curiosity to see the pope," John Paul instructed, "but because of the Mass," the "most sacred rite of our faith." Solemn and vital was the liturgy that foggy morning, with processions, rock and operatic voices, a polyglot of prayers, readings, and faces, and splendid silences. And after it was all over, as he prepared to leave the park, the pope told the throng: "This has been a wonderful occasion. First, for me ... to have seen and prayed with so many people, especially so many young people [applause]. I hope it was also an important moment for all of you ... a time to renew your commitment to Christ and to the church, to strengthen your service to those in need.- In a sentence or two he had summarized the purpose of liturgy and the point of renewal. "We are all together in Christ," he said, his strong voice rising. And no one who heard him that morning doubted it.

"I thank you for that secret praise/ Which bums in every creature," writes the poet Anne Porter (see review, page 23), and her own words are an exquisitely rendered act of attention and praise. When we are tempted to give up on the reform of the liturgy, of ever recovering the sacred and the beautiful in our worship, we should listen to poets like Porter. They tell us that by our work and patience we will win our souls.