By Timothy Brunk, August 18, 2025
The point of liturgy is to worship God. Doing so is a matter of handing oneself over to God present and active in the liturgy. “To it,” writes Romano Guardini, “[one] must surrender [one’s] independence, pray with others, and not alone.”1 I understand this claim to mean that one should not recite the Rosary quietly to oneself during the proclamation of the Eucharistic Prayer, for example. If the assembly is singing “In the Breaking of the Bread,” one should not sing “I Am the Bread of Life,” and so on.
I suggest, though, that the kind of surrender Guardini has in mind need not require in all cases singing and praying verbatim with the rest of the assembly. I think that sometimes “surrender” can mean acknowledging one’s inability to sing and pray along if that acknowledgment includes a deep sense of being borne up by the singing and praying of others.
I offer an example. My mother died in June. At her funeral, when the cantor led the assembly in the Song of Farewell, I was unable to sing the words—or any words. All I could do was weep and say quietly, “Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye!” My words and my mindset were aligned with the meaning of the Song of Farewell insofar as I was letting go of my mother and entrusting her to God’s mercy, but my grief required of me an independence from the lyrics. I had to entrust the singing of the lyrics to others, a form of surrendering to the liturgical current as it carried me.
I wonder about times when perhaps my singing “Alleluia” or my speaking the Lord’s Prayer has contributed to an assembly bearing up someone who has lost for the moment the capacity to sing or speak. In the end, of course, worship of God is not my endeavor alone nor a human endeavor alone. The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy holds that “in the liturgy the whole public worship is performed by the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, that is, by the Head and His members.”2 Even when all of us sing or pray aloud the same words, our singing and praying is worship only insofar as Christ is in and among us, bearing our need and our praise and our gratitude to the Father.
1 Romano Guardini, The Spirit of the Liturgy, with an introduction by Joanne M. Pierce (New York: Crossroad, 1998; English orig. London: Sheed and Ward, 1930), 38.
2Sacrosanctum Concilium 7 at https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19631204_sacrosanctum-concilium_en.html