Father Gonzalo Meza
Liturgy, the church that prays and offers sacrifice
Romano Guardini (1885-1960) is one of the greatest theologians of all the times, a precursor of Vatican Council II. With his studies on worship he marked decisively a path to follow in liturgical studies.
One of his biographers, Hanna-Barbara Gerl, describes him as the "father of the 20th-century church." Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said about him: "As a student, Romano Guardini had himself experienced the drama of liberalism and its collapse, and with a few friends he set out to find a new path for theology. What came to impress him in the course of this search was the experience of the liturgy as the place of encounter with Jesus. It is above all in the liturgy that Jesus is among us, here it is that he speaks to us, here he lives." (R. Guardini, The Lord, Introduction by J. Ratzinger, Gateway editions)
For Guardini, the preeminence of life was not acting but being; and the one who lives out his days in liturgy is into the way of being, of possessing the truth, the supra natural health and the most intimate and fruitful peace.
Guardini was born in Verona, Italy, but left it in his early childhood to live in Germany most of his life. He was ordained priest in 1910 and obtained his doctorate in Theology from Freiburg. He was a professor in the Universities of Berlin, Munich and Tübingen. In 1918 he published Vom Geist der Liturgie (The spirit of the liturgy); four years later appears Vom heiligen Zeichen (The sacred signs). In 1923 he prints Liturgische Bildung (Liturgical formation). His work also includes Der Herr (The Lord) published in 1937 a book that "has helped more than one generation of Christians enter into a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ." (Ibidem, J. Ratzinger)
Reason, the base of the liturgical prayer
In his short book, The Spirit of the Liturgy, Guardini presents his vision of the liturgy, the public and official worship of the church, exercised and regulated by her ministers, the priests. Liturgy teaches us that reason is the essential base of liturgical prayer; it is full of dogma and vivified by thought; therefore it becomes the prayed dogma, the truth at prayer: "the truth clothed with prayers, interwoven with the filaments of fundamental truths such as immensity, greatness, reality, plenitude of God; unity, trinity, providence, omnipotence, justice, redemption, rescue and justification, salvation and the Kingdom of God; in one phrase, all the supreme realities..." (R. Guardini, The spirit of the liturgy)
The subject of the liturgy: community of the faithful
For Guardini the church is a perfect society by itself, composed of different elements, and linked by a living reality: Jesus Christ. In the liturgical assembly the person is before God, not as an isolated or independent member, but as a factor of one unity; that is why liturgy is the place where one lives fully the communion with the church. For the German theologian, liturgy implies sacrifice because the individual person gives up his own "me" to be open to the "us," and that requires humility: "The perfect liturgical assembly consists of the participation in the same spirit, in the same words and thoughts; where the hearts and the eyes follow accordingly the same path towards the same goal; it also consists of the effective union of all the members in the same faith … However the individuals that compose the community, in their quality of distinct corporal entities, autonomous, do not intrude upon each other's inner life, but respect their respective inner life." (Cf. Ibidem)
The liturgical style
The liturgical language is made not only of words, but of gestures, objects, colors. All of them leave their own specificity in order to be lifted to a more universal meaning. In liturgy we have a crystal clear language (e.g. the prayers said by the priest), a harmonious measurement of gestures, a perfect structure of space, of the instruments used to worship. For Guardini, the personal prayer corresponds to both the inner disposition and spiritual background of each person; however in liturgical prayer, we pray in group, as members of the one church, through which we are all together lifted up to the eternal kingdom.
The liturgical symbolism
Guardini asks himself: If God is spirit and our duty is to worship him in spirit and in truth, what do we need the material expressions for? The answer is found in the symbol. A symbol emerges when the inner being finds its own expression in its outside. It is not that man makes up an idea, a concept, and then he imposes it to an object to represent what he wants it to be. In liturgy symbols express what is present already on the inside, and becomes evident its essence; for instance the body is the natural symbol of the soul: "Material objects are used to reinforce the expressiveness of the body and its movements, and at the same time form an extension of the permanent bodily powers. Thus, for instance, in a sacrifice the victim is offered, not only by the hands, but in a vessel or dish. The smooth surface of the dish emphasizes the expressive motion of the hand; it forms a wide and open plane, displayed before the Godhead, and throwing into powerful relief the upward straining line of the arm." (R. Guardini, The Spirit of the Liturgy, translated by Ada Lane)
Playfulness of the liturgy
"Then I was beside him, like a master workman; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the sons of men." (Prv 8:30-31) When a child plays, he has no other purpose than to exercise his youthful powers, to pour forth his life in an aimless series of movements, words and actions. And because it does not aim at anything in particular, because it streams unbroken and spontaneously forth, its utterance will be harmonious. The essence of the play is the overflow of the life, which gives full significance and expresses the plenitude of that same life. "The liturgy has laid down the serious rules of the sacred game which the soul plays before God." (Ibidem)
The seriousness of liturgy
Beauty is the splendor of truth, and there is a connection between beauty, truth and good. However, the key point of liturgy is not beauty because liturgy is art that became life. The church has symbols to give expression to the events of the Christian's inner life: "the assimilation, through the Holy Spirit, of the life of the creature to the life of God in Christ; the actual and genuine rebirth of the creature into a new existence; the development and nourishment of this life, its stretching forth from God in the Blessed Sacrament and the means of grace, towards God in prayer and sacrifice; and all this in the continual mystic renewal of Christ's life in the course of the ecclesiastical year." (Ibidem)
Guardini's contribution to liturgical studies
Although it was too early for him to reach a liturgical method, as we have it now, he contributed enormously to it. For him, the objective of liturgical science was to reveal to men the sense of what is happening in the liturgical action. The object of liturgical theology is determined both by textual data (Sacramentaries, magisterial documents, the rites) and the concrete experience of the liturgical life. To me, this is the most important one, because as Guardini said, the object of the liturgical research is the living church that carries out the mysteries of grace through worship, and its manifestations. According to him the method of liturgical research then is structured in three parts:
1. to collect the material;
2. to register the data; and
3. to globally synthesize that data.
For Guardini, liturgy is not the science of absolute affirmations, such as mathematics, because in liturgy we are before a living being, the church that prays and offers the sacrifice: "Look with favor on your Church's offering, and see the victim whose death has reconciled us to yourself." (Sacramentary, Eucharistic Prayer III)
Cardinal Joseph Ratziner said about Guardini's The Spirit of the Liturgy: "It made a crucial contribution to ensuring that the liturgy, with its beauty, hidden riches and grandeur that crosses time, was rediscovered as the vital centre of the church and of Christian life. … What he desired was an understanding of the liturgy based on its nature and inner form as an inspired prayer and guided by the Holy Spirit himself, in which Christ continues to become our contemporary and come into our lives." (S. Zucal, The Intellectual Relationship between Joseph Ratzinger and Romano Guardini, L'Osservatore Romano, Weekly English edition, Dec. 10, 2008)