Saturday, April 18, 2015

Divine Office: For God's Sake Alone

After Spy Wednesday evening's Tenebrae services, I conversed with a small clique about our upcoming plans for the rest of the Triduum. We agreed to attend one of the area's Byzantine rite churches on Friday for Vespers, the procession, and the burial service (Slavic tradition, different from the Greek and Arab praxis). A woman proximate to us inquired as to what the service entail. After explaining it, she asked, "So what, there's no Communion? I'll go to [Tradistan] instead. There's Communion here." Retrospectively, this was a formative moment in my understanding of why the Divine Office's popularity tapered off in recent generations: because we expect something whenever we go to church.

In the Mass or Divine Liturgy, we take bread and wine and the Lord gives us His Body and Blood which we offer "for the sins of all Christians, living and dead" (Roman offertory), "we offer You Your own from what is Your own, from all and for all" (Anaphora of St. John Chrysostom). In return, we are permitted to partake of the Lord's mystical supper and benefit definitely from the propitiatory sacrifice made. The result satisfies our prehensile souls. 

The Divine Office has no such trait. In it we pray for many things, including the specific intentions of the litanies of the Eastern rites as well as the preces and suffrages of the Latin tradition. Still, nothing concrete is given in return, which we have grown accustomed to expect. For centuries people attended weekday low Masses in the Western Church without any distribution of Communion at all. Perhaps this was a deviation from the purpose of confecting the Sacrament, but the point stands: the congregants attended the Mass not because they were expecting something to be given to them, but because they wanted to see the "Miracle of the Mass," they believed that the action itself had value before God. 

The same is true of the Office. Nothing tangible and immanent should be expected in return for praying it. Praying the Divine Office is praising God for God's own sake alone. 

Or I could be wrong!

9 comments:

  1. This reminds me of my experience that, in Novus Ordo parishes, Palm Sunday and Ash Wednesday are two of the most highly attended days of the year. Those are two days when we go to Church and get something concrete in return.

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    1. In the USA the most attended days of the year are Ash Wednesday and Christmas: telling yourself not to eat chocolate for 40 days and saying "happy birthday" to a baby in most cases, sadly.

      The Orthodox, more than Eastern Catholics, also have a problem of people floating in to get their bit. People will enter during the Divine Liturgy, put in their dollar, light a candle in front of an icon, and leave. At Pascha, most Greek Orthodox leave after the Hajmeh, procession, and service at the door outside.

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  2. I'm stuck on "I conversed with a small clique about our upcoming plans for the rest of the Triduum." Who is this clique and why is it not trying to infiltrate '62ville and restore the real Triduum?

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    1. Just a small group of friends who make special plans for Holy Week every year.

      Some of us are adoptive Byzantines or Anglican-Use and, while fully supportive of wanting to restore the real thing, found something else that spoke deeply to us rather than a Rite we have never known.

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    2. The '62ville parish here is FSSP....

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  3. At our Novus Ordo parish, we have multiple Novus Ordo services (by which I mean apart from mass) without communion during Holy Week that are well attended. Stations of the Cross is also always well-attended. I definitely don't think this is a Novus Ordo problem (not that anyone said so). I will also note that in many Protestant ecclesial communities, they celebrate what they call communion infrequently if at all, and so almost never really receive anything material from their services at all. This is not an issue where it's one group versus another. It's just a reflection of the innate human desire for free stuff.

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  4. This is a problem even worse in Tradistan than in NO parishes: the only important thing for many people is to communicate; the other parts of the Liturgy are disregarded as mere superfluous details. In addition we have become so accustomed to have 3 or 4 Masses every day that we no longer remember there is something outside that.
    K. e.

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    1. Wow, 3 or 4 Masses a day? What part of Tradistan are you from?

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    2. I was not talking of any particular community; I pointed to what was custom in some places in the 40s and 50s, where clergy and Mass attendance allowed it. Of course, I was not baming any concrete group, but rather using an extreme (and probably rare) example of abuse of the Eucharistic liturgy during the pre-conciliar "golden age" to suggest that the current oblivion of the Office is but the logical consequence of that atmosphere.

      The 3/4-Sunday-Mass parish was named somewhere in J. M. O'Toole. The Faithful. A History of Catholics in America. Harvard University Press, 2010. There's a link to it:
      http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674034884

      I don't have the book at hand now, so I cannot give you the exact reference.

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