The Recovering Choir Director

From Antiphon: A Journal for Liturgical Renewal comes this essay by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. Excerpt:

What happened, contrary to the constituting vision of the liturgical movement that was so clearly affirmed by Vatican II, can be described in many ways. One apt way of describing it is that we have witnessed the destabilizing of the sacramental and liturgical order. Renewal was confused with change, reform with innovation. In language, gesture, and symbol, clarity was thought to mean transparency, and transparency produced banality. Rationalized liturgical expertise was impatient with the familiar habits of piety inherent in authentic ritual. A declared war on ritual’s tendency toward routine largely destroyed the continuities essential to a living cult. An accent on the subjective and affective eclipsed the objective and effective of ex opere operato and its blessed liberation from that most anti-liturgical question, “How do you feel about this?”

My dear friend, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, would tell the story of the woman who complained to him after a synagogue service, “The service does not say what I mean.” To which he responded, “Madam, your job and mine is to mean what the service says.” And so also, mutatis mutandis, among Catholics.