The Spirit of the Liturgy
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Benedict XVI)
Ignatius Press, 2000, ISBN 0-89870-784-6 (HB)

I was re-reading this book and am once again amazed at the both Cardinal Ratzinger’s (now Pope Benedict XVI) scholarly insight and eloquence. There is much for all to learn from his writings and I recommend them highly.

I had just come again to Part IV – Liturgical Form and the section “Rite” and would like to offer a longish excerpt:

We know how we should truly glorify God – by praying and living in communion with the Paschal journey of Jesus Christ, by accomplishing with him his Eucharistia, in which Incarnation leads to Resurrection – along the way of the Cross. To adopt a saying of Kant, liturgy “covers everything” from the Incarnation to the Resurrection, but only on the way of the Cross. For Christians, then, “rite” means the practical arrangements made by the community, in time and space, for the basic type of worship received from God in faith. And, of course, … worship always includes the whole conduct of one’s life. Thus rite has its primary place in the liturgy, but not only in the liturgy. It is also expressed in a particular way of doing theology, in the form of spiritual life, and in the juridical ordering of ecclesiastical life.

First, it is important that the individual rites have a relationship to the places where Christianity originated and the apostles preached: they are anchored in the time and place of the event of divine revelation. Here again “once for all” and “always” belong together. The Christian faith can never be separated from the soil of sacred events, from the choice made by God, who wanted to speak to us, to become man, to die and rise again, in a particular place and at a particular time. “Always” can only come from “once for all”. The Church does not pray in some kind of mythical omnitemporality. She cannot forsake her roots. She recognizes the true utterance of God precisely in the concreteness of its history, in time and place: to those God ties us , and by these we are all tied together. The diachronic aspect, praying with the Fathers and the apostles, is part of what we mean by rite, but it also includes a local aspect, extending from Jerusalem to Antioch, Rome, Alexandria, and Constantinople. Rites are not, therefore, just the products of inculturation, however much they may have incorporated elements from different cultures. They are forms of the apostolic Tradition and of its unfolding in the great places of the Tradition.

… In the first millennium there was still liturgical exchange between East and West. Then, of course, the rites hardened into their definitive forms, which allowed hardly any cross-fertilization. What is important is that the great forms of rite embrace many cultures. They not only incorporate the diachronic aspect, but also create communion among different cultures and languages. They elude control by any individual, local community, or regional Church. Unspontaneity is of their essence. In these rites I discover that something is approaching me here that I did not produce myself, that I am entering into something greater than myself, which ultimately derives from divine revelation. That is why the Christian East calls the liturgy the “Divine Liturgy”, expressing thereby the liturgy’s independence from human control.

Excerpt from pages 160-165.