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| Life & Liturgy | | Date Created: Jan 26, 2004, 01:19 PM |
I read through a portion of Louis Bouyer's Life and Liturgy (Sheed and Ward, 1956) again a few weeks ago, mainly because I was interested in his take on the church year. He deals with this in chapter 14, "The Mystery of the Liturgical Year: The Easter Liturgy." This is some really fascinating stuff. I'll summarize and then copy a few paragraphs from a particularly insightful section. He is answering a question about whether the cyclical nature of the yearly cycle of feasts interferes with the once for all character of Christ's work for us. I've head this argument voiced by some Presbyterians against the notion of a yearly church year cycle. Bouyer attempts to explain the meaning which time has for Christianity. "More exactly, what is the relationship between that cyclical time in which nature operates and causes man to operate, and that irreversible historic time in which God has intervened once and for all and brought about a decisive change in man and in the whole human world?"
He notes that there are three ways that we meet or actualize this work of God in our time-bound lives. (I will summarize this part in my own words.) First, there is baptism, the once for all beginning of this new life in us, a definitive passage from death to life. Second, there is the daily and weekly cycles of worship, specifically the Eucharist which unites us weekly to the reality of Christ crucified and resurrected (weekly death and resurrection). Third, as we pass through the seasons of the year, our annual time is sanctified by association with the progression of Jesus life, death, resurrection, and ascension (yearly death and resurrection). Thus, we participate in the Mystery of Christ's death and resurrection for us in these three layers of temporal life.
Now here's the good anti-Gnostic part. I quote:
"The necessity for these three different ways of meeting the mystery is a consequence of the very nature of time. Our created nature is so bound up with this created time in which all living beings live that our being cannot be taken up into the divine life unless the time which is connatural to us is also in some way taken up. And, we might add, the natural rhythms of time, the days and months and years in which life develops, are not merely some external frame for time, but are of its very essence.
"Thus every man--every living creature on earth--is brought into existence by a process which is accomplished at birth once and for all, and can never be repeated. And, we might say, this process of human birth is itself a kind of death, since it involves the end of one mode of living and the beginning of a higher mode, the passage from one to the other being fraught with a kind of agony, both for mother and child.
"And our lives, which have begun with this kind of 'death,' are made up of days which all begin with the 'birth' of waking and end with the 'death' of sleep. . . . Moreover, while our days go through this same cycle, they are all organized in larger and similarly recurring cycles, of which the years are the most elementary form. More generally, each of us must go through the periods of childhood, youth, maturity, and in each of them in some way be born anew, develop the potentialities of that period to the full, and in some way 'die' to the perfection achieved in one period in order to begin afresh to work for the perfection of the next period.
"When God became man, then, so that man (as the Fathers say) could in some way become God, His decisive intervention was not designed to interfere with this natural process of human development in time, with all of its inner complexity, but rather to assume it. An incarnation which had not been an incarnation into our time as well as into our flesh would not have been an incarnation at all. For, as our brief survey of the cycles of human life shows, our human life is organically bound up with time, and, as we have just said, the natural rhythms of time are not a detail added on to time, but of it's essence. Time is not an abstract frame, uniform in itself, neither is it independent of the beings who live immersed in its flow. Only the modern idea of an artificial universe made like our machines has caused us to be convinced of these two related errors. To dispel them, we need only to go back and look at the real universe of God's creation, and to live once more the full life that we share with all living creatures in it." |
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