This is the first post in what perhaps will become a series on comparisons between the Catholic and Protestant traditions. Perhaps I’ll add some thoughts on the Easter Orthodox tradition as well. The purpose here is reflective rather than polemical.
For this post, I offer a quote from Thomas Howard’s book On Being Catholic. Tom was my freshman English literature professor in college. He converted to Catholicism during my sophomore or junior year and had to leave our school because of its evangelical-Reformed confessional posture. What a shame — he was a brilliant and warm teacher. So here he is on the nature of the worship service:
But we were speaking of the obvious differences between Protestant worship services and the Mass, the most immediately obvious one, to a casual glance, being the difference between a meeting, on the one hand, organized around the idea of people listening to a lecture and, on the other, an enactment. And enactment, of course, takes ritual and ceremonial form — a principle we see when we mortals come up to the great moments of human existence, namely, birth, marriage, and death, and attempt to ‘enter into’ the mysteries at stake in these events. We do not settle for speaking to each other about these things. In some profound sense that belongs to our humanity itself, we know that we must ‘enter into’ the significance of these events, and this entering into, inevitably, takes ritual and ceremonial form.
Enactment and entering into events that transcend language. Does that stir a longing in your soul?
I just bought a book by Thomas Howard. He wrote an homage/commentary on TS Eliot’s Four Quatrtets and it is hard to find anyone who writes about Eliot. it is even harder to find Christians who write about Eliot. Interestingly I found the book in the Gordon College bookstore on the “Faculty” shelf.
To be fair with Howard’s comments on worship I think we have to say that Protestant services are gatherings that can easily become a group of people listening to a lecture. Catholic services are enactments that can easily devolve into empty formalism. Both traditions often feel empty and both traditions can be deeply moving.
Hey, this looks like an interesting series. Good idea, I think.
I should note that many of the Reformed branches also have the concept of ritual as central to the service… Baptists (my background) are the most adverse to the idea, while Anglicans/Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Presbyterians seem most amenable (in broad generality, of the mainline denominations). It’s true that all of them have much FEWER rituals — for example, marriage isn’t seen as anything special to the Church, but as a social occasion that God uses to speak to all of us. It’s also true that some of them (Baptists) treat the rituals as of lower import (although not less important), and thus worth discussing.
Great! Thanks.
-Wm
Ritual and ceremony seem to be integral inescapable parts of any culture. If not demonstrated in the “sacred”, it will be in the “profane.” Either in a liturgy or watching the “big ball” slowly drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
I feel that the structure that is repeated every Sunday in a protestant worship service reflects the need for ritual. My church begins the service with three songs followed by a prophetic message, an offertory, a corporate prayer tiime, a lesson, and, finally a call to the altar.
This repetitive action can only be construed as ritual and ceremony.