Jeg nevnte nylig boka “The Mass and Modernity” av P. Jonathan Robinson. Der innleder han et oppsummerende kapittel slik:
I will now spell out some of the consequences of my contention that the celebration of the Novus Ordo must be developed to include characteristics of the Old Rite. The most important of these characteristics is the capacity of the Old Rite to teach the transcendence of God and at the same time to inculcate a sense of Christ’s salvific work in the Mass through the operation of the Holy Spirit. The Old Rite does this in a variety of ways that lead the worshipper beyond the immediate ceremonies of the Rite itself to a contemplative encounter with «the nameless God of many names».
By contemplative here I mean an experience that is a largely wordless, serene, and attentive prayer to the presence of God. There is nothing extraordinary about this, and it is common to most people who pray and participate in the sacraments; the development of their prayer follows the traditional map of progress in prayer that is to move from the complex to the more simple. At the beginning, prayer consists in petition, meditation, and thanksgiving; but as it develops, it becomes less and less a matter of words, acts of the imagination, and motions of the will and develops into a loving attention to God ….
… This sort of prayer is not a substitute for liturgical prayer, but liturgical prayer should lead to it, and there ought to be enough silence and serenity in liturgical celebrations to allow it to develop. The liturgy is not supposed to lead to a mindless submersion of the individual in a communal experience; it should, on the contrary, leave the individual with a heightened sense of his own self and lead him deeper into the mystery of the God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ and who shares himself with us in the sacraments.
It is not solely the verbal aspects of the Mass that should help to develop this contemplative attitude. In the Eucharist the reality of the presence of the Paschal Mystery is impressed on the worshipper by the structure of the rite itself, by the position of the priest for the Eucharistic Prayer, by the choice of the readings from Scripture, by the use of a formal archaic language (Latin), as well as by the controlled movements and gestures of the officiants; and all these characteristics of the Eucharist help to develop the contemplative attitude. It is from this perspective on liturgy that von Balthasar speaks of the liturgical attitude as one «silent, recollected adoration».
A supporter of a more community-oriented liturgy ought to be quite willing to admit that the Old Rite did in fact encourage a liturgical attitude of «silent, recollected adoration» and that this is precisely what was wrong with it. …