Longing for Liturgy?

It is the year 1535 A.D.  In the Tower of London, one of the prisoners prays with an inexpensive Book of Hours which he was able to take with him when arrested.  At the back of this Book of Hours is a Latin Psalter, in which the prisoner has highlighted and annotated passages that hold particular meaning for him.  Psalm 22 [21], for example, has a line next to the verses in which the psalmist reminds God of the care and midwifery God extended since before birth. At the beginning of Psalm 84 [83], words are scribbled alongside the psalm verses, expressing a deep longing to be able to attend worship again.  The prisoner at prayer is Sir Thomas More, Catholic layman, former Lord Chancellor of England, husband and father, and soon-to-be martyr for his Roman Catholic faith.

This past summer, I held Thomas More’s Book of Hours (which is now at Yale’s Beinecke library[i]) in my hands.  Besides my sheer amazement at being able to peruse this book, I also began to wonder — in the face of Thomas More’s deep desire to join others in worship again – about our own longings when it comes to liturgy.  I will be the first to admit that “longing for liturgy” is not what motivates me on any given Sunday morning.  If anything, I long for a good cup of coffee, and for the mercifully slow beginning to a day.  I delight in a long walk to the lake and in the newspaper and novel awaiting me.  What would it mean to long for liturgy, to delight in joining others for worship?  Sometimes I wonder whether liturgical planning, formation, and preparation do not need to begin right there – in creating desire. There is a saying in my native German tongue: Hunger ist der beste Koch – hunger is the best cook.  In other words:  what you eat tastes best if you are truly, deeply hungry.  What has to happen for us to come to liturgy truly hungry, truly longing?  For Thomas More, being a prisoner in the Tower of London clearly made him long in this way.  But for us, what will help us shape our Sundays so that we come to worship with longing hearts?

[i] Beinecke Library, Yale University, RSTC 15963, Ms Vault, More, Psalter, folio xvj.  In the 1969 facsimile edition, the marginalia are much more readable than they are in the original, see Thomas More’s Prayer Book: A Facsimile Reproduction of The Annotated Pages, ed. Louis L. Martz and Richard S. Sylvester, The Elizabethan Club Series 4 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, for the Elizabethan Club), here p. 40.

Teresa Berger

Teresa Berger is Professor of Liturgical Studies at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School in New Haven, CT, USA, where she also serves as the Thomas E. Golden Jr. Professor of Catholic Theology. She holds doctorates in both theology and in liturgical studies. Recent publications include an edited volume, Full of Your Glory: Liturgy, Cosmos, Creation (2019), and a monograph titled @ Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds (2018). Earlier publications include Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History (2011), Fragments of Real Presence (2005), and a video documentary, Worship in Women’s Hands (2007).

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5 responses to “Longing for Liturgy?”

  1. Barry Hudock

    Thanks for this reflection. Would you happen to have the exact words St. Thomas wrote there at the beginning of Psalm 48?

    Reply
    1. Teresa Berger

      Thomas More scribbled a Latin interpretation next to Ps 84/83:2 in his prayer book, which basically said: “this is the prayer either of someone who is shut up in prison or who is sick, longing to go to church…” The Latin original is best read not in Thomas More’s own fading Book of Hours, but in a facsimile reproduction of the annotated pages, made forty years ago (published for the Elizabethan Club by Yale University Press, 1969), here pp. 139 and 200.

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  2. N. Depew

    “But for us, what will help us shape our Sundays so that we come to worship with longing hearts?”

    Preparation. As a lector I have to preview the readings I am to do for the next Sunday, and even though I do not work particularly hard at this (frankly, I mainly practice so as to deliver the words smoothly), I find that the meaning of the sacred texts has quite an impact on me every time.

    This point about this part of the mass applies to the whole thing. Is there a lesson here for catechesis? I think so. The Faithful–meaning all of us–need to learn about the meaning of the mass, and learn to prepare for it spiritually every week.

    For those with the learning and the preparation, there is always more of it to be had at deeper and deeper levels, and as always we need to be open to the Spirit, for nothing good happens without that.

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  3. Rita Ferrone

    While I agree that longing is important, I don’t think it is something that can be instilled by planning or even by spiritual disciplines or catechetical exercises, though these things are all valuable and good. It’s rather the fruit of having had an experience–what Richard Giles describes in his post below (The Challenge of Non-Liturgical Churches) as “a taste of heaven, and lives changed”–that leaves one with an enlarged sense of God, self, and neighbor. If ever one tastes that, one always longs for it.

    Sadly, there are many people who have never had that experience, or never connected it with the liturgy.

    After all, you can only long for something if deprived of it, but you can’t long for something if you’ve never even tasted it. I’ve tasted the goodness of the Lord in my parish. There I not only know, but am known. And so when I am away from that community, I long to be there. Some will say, Tut, tut, that’s congregationalism. But nothing could be further from the truth. Liturgical worship, though “the same” partakes of the wonderful particularity, sacramentality if you will, of God’s people in given times and places. This isn’t rehearsed or planned. It’s the fruit of Christian community, of a life lived together.

    It’s also one of the keys to the question, istm, of how celebrating the liturgy increases our longing–for God’s kingdom to come in its fullness, for the heavenly banquet, and so on. I daresay that for most people our grasp of these realities, or our glimpses of them, are profoundly relational. When I’m at liturgy, I’m aware of the generations that have come before: family members who have died, venerated saints, Mary, Jesus himself–and I long for a deeper communion with them, which I taste in the Eucharistic banquet. That longing–for the “distant” celebrants of the liturgy, as well as for the “near”–resides at the core of my life, and informs a different attitude from the “filling station mentality” or “suburban ideal” in which other people are kept at a distance while fulfilling an individualistic dream.

    What Thomas More would say about all this, I have no idea. But I envy you the opportunity to hold his prayerbook in your hands, Teresa!

    Reply
  4. Teresa

    I appreciated all our good thoughts. I am left wondering whether “longing for liturgy” ultimately is not something that needs to be created in us, ever anew, by the Spirit — and thus needs to be prayed for, as a gift (“Come Holy Spirit”). In my experience at least, neither preparation, nor theological truths (e.g., I come to meet Christ in the Eucharist), nor the most wonderful liturgical parish community have ever been enough to make me long for liturgy, in quite the same way I long for a good cup of coffee in the morning…
    Confessions of a liturgical scholar, on this Ash Wednesday.
    Teresa

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