Where is the mysticism?

[tata888]

Do you think the Catholic church in modern time has lost her sense of mystery and wonder and replaced it instead with mere convenience?

 

[corsair]

It appears that way to me.

 

[tata888]

Most masses go too quickly, people seem to be more interested in finishing mass and go home than contemplating the Lord.

 

[georget]

Somewhat, it’s there, but understated.

 

[latingirl]

I think we have lost our appreciation of mystery, yes. However there are signs that the Church is moving back to transcendence and beauty.

 

[sw85]

Do you think the Catholic church in modern time has lost her sense of mystery and wonder and replaced it instead with mere convenience?

Take a look at this (Catholic) church:



Was this cheap, easy to build, or terribly convenient? No.

Yet someone decided to build it, anyway. Why?

 

[tata888]

Take a look at this (Catholic) church:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2046/2071697160_2769cc80cb.jpg

Was this cheap, easy to build, or terribly convenient? No.

Yet someone decided to build it, anyway. Why?

What church is this? This doesn’t even remotely look like a church, it looks like a badly assembled Transformer. I agree with you. A lot of minimalist churches cost as much, sometimes even more to build, yet many prefer it. I personally have no qualm with modern looking Catholic churches as long as they can express an atmosphere of reverence.

 

[Julia_Mae]

Do you think the Catholic church in modern time has lost her sense of mystery and wonder and replaced it instead with mere convenience?

Not at all. But as in all times, only a small portion of the faithful have any affinity for mysticism.

 

[Julia_Mae]

Take a look at this (Catholic) church:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2046/2071697160_2769cc80cb.jpg

Was this cheap, easy to build, or terribly convenient? No.

Yet someone decided to build it, anyway. Why?

Link to something that says this is a church?

 

[TimothyH]

Do you think the Catholic church in modern time has lost her sense of mystery and wonder and replaced it instead with mere convenience?

Not replaced with convenience, but with the force of reason and Aristotlean philosophy. These have been granted pride of place in western Catholicism, to the detriment and sometimes to the exclusion of mysticism.

Any mention of the fact that Christianity existed for 1000 years before Aristotlean philosphy was even accepted in the western world, and that theology was mystical, based on prayerful reading and meditation on Scripture intead of systematic, is taken as a personal rejection of Thomas Aquinas himself.

The lesson of Babel hasn’t been learned. We are a culture of engineers trying to reason our way through faith. Many seem to want to understand God but few seem to want to sit still, learn to pray, and have a converstation with him.

The rapid plummet of this thread into an argument about Church architecture, as if architecture is mystery, proves my point.

-Tim-

 

[The_Reginator]

Do you think the Catholic church in modern time has lost her sense of mystery and wonder and replaced it instead with mere convenience?

I certainly feel that way.

I picture a protestant entering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and hearing everyday language, etc.
Then I think of the reaction of hearing the Mass in Latin, the mysterious silence during the consecration, everyone kneeling to receive.

As a convert I was really “blown away” when the priest whispered the prayer of consecration. It reminded me of reading in the bible about the Jewish priests entering the Holy of Holies.

 

[TimothyH]

I see now what this thread is about…

It is about mystery only being available in the Latin Mass using Gregorian chant in cruciform shaped Churches.

Glad to know it. I always thought that mystery was experiencing God in prayer, being touched by God in a personal way, intimate communion with God, things like that.

-Tim-

 

[OxygenMan]

I see now what this thread is about…

It is about mystery only being available in the Latin Mass using Gregorian chant in cruciform shaped Churches.

Glad to know it. I always thought that mystery was experiencing God in prayer, being touched by God in a personal way, intimate communion with God, things like that.

-Tim-

I know what you mean. Logic, reason, and well-defined arguments have certainly helped me build a strong faith.

But the moments which have left the greatest impact on me were not measurable, calculated things. They were the moments in which I was deep in prayer, or when I was confirmed, and I felt a trembling awareness of the spiritual world.

Sometimes, deep in prayer, it’s almost like I feel a small lick of God’s power. It’s an amazing experience. I’d hardly call myself a mystic, though. That takes a lifetime.

 

[Layp3rs0n]

I have said it once and i’ll say it again: the argument that the NO is an atrocity compared to the EF is baseless. I am so sick of reading about how all the “traditionalists” lament Novus Ordo. I am myself a traditionalist. I LOVE the EF, its beautiful, but Novus Ordo is still of INFINITE VALUE as it is the SAME Sacrifice of Christ re-represented on the Altar. The One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church with the approval of the Vicar of Christ has ordained the Novus Ordo as a good and holy Thing. If God did not want Mass to be said in venacular at all, He would not have permitted Pope John XXIII to call an Ecumenical Council that would proliferate the Novus Ordo Mass. Rome has spoken.

 

[LilyM]

I certainly feel that way.

I picture a protestant entering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and hearing everyday language, etc.
Then I think of the reaction of hearing the Mass in Latin, the mysterious silence during the consecration, everyone kneeling to receive.

As a convert I was really “blown away” when the priest whispered the prayer of consecration. It reminded me of reading in the bible about the Jewish priests entering the Holy of Holies.

Which is hysterically funny given that the language of the liturgy went from the original Greek to Latin precisely because Latin WAS at that time the everyday language (ie most people could at least somewhat understand it, whereas Greek was for the intellectual snobbish minority).

 

[sw85]

Link to something that says this is a church?

It’s the Church of the Most Holy Trinity, also called the Wotruba Church, in Vienna.

 

[EphelDuath]

Which is hysterically funny given that the language of the liturgy went from the original Greek to Latin precisely because Latin WAS at that time the everyday language (ie most people could at least somewhat understand it, whereas Greek was for the intellectual snobbish minority).

I do not know in what way you intended this comment, but it truly comes off to me as being thoroughly derogative of Latin as a liturgical language.

Yes, the Holy Mass was celebrated in many languages and dialects before Latin became the official language of the Western Church. But, there’s a huge difference between the “intellectual snobbish minority” language(s!) of the first centuries of the Church that could practically only be learned by aristocrats or clergy that could afford to be tutored, and modern-day ecclesiastical Latin, which almost every human being can teach themselves due to the prevalence of the Internet, mass-printed Latin textbooks, audiobooks, braille books, and uh, oh yeah, the polylingual Missal guides that are in every pew of 99% of parishes that celebrate the EF

And while it can take hours of study to memorize the Ordinary in Latin, the fruits of this is that you’re not limited by your native tongue if you want to celebrate Holy Mass across the world. I hope you’ve memorized the entire Missal if you’re taking a vacation anywhere where there isn’t a priest to celebrate the OF in your vernacular, because otherwise you’re not participating at all in the way Vatican II has asked you to.

 

[TimothyH]

I had hoped that this thread would be about genuine mysticism and not architecture, vernaculars and EF vs OF. For me, mysticism trancends all that.

To answer the question posed in the title of the thread, “Where is the mysticsim?”, I have found a great source of mysicism in the monasteries, particularly the school of Cistercian spirituality.

One of the best books I have read is The Cistercian Way by Andr Louf. But the book which is really blowing me away right now is “The Sun at Midnight: Monastic Experience of the Christian Mystery” by Bernado Olivera OSCO. Bernardo Olivera was the Abbot General of the Cistercian Order from 2000 to 2008.

bks0.books.google.com/books?id=VL2wCc3V4ekC&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&imgtk=AFLRE70espJAHT1DsVQL-6Bf4P__8c61xERwqaSebmAs8Q_5ZF_b-taDKLhRRxqjcgLzYUzA6xWJnJBqcDpAjBVZtaomEPvQYViCWrA22eufGZvnuQ_iSljWCclEUN3IN8_zmqM9Q4pm

The early desert fathers went out into the desert to experience God. Moses went up on a mountain to meet God. Jesus himself went to the wilderness for 40 days and often went to a “Lonely place” to be in communion with the Father. For me personally, that’s what mysticism is - intimate communion with the Father.

The one thing I have found is that in order to truly experience God in a visceral, palpable way, one has to remove clutter from one’s life, and one has to become a lover of silence. Silence is not the absence of sound, but is a complex emotional and physchological state. Silence scares most people. We put DVD players in minivans and fill our lives with sound and business and email and the TV has to be on constantly because we can’t stand silence. Most people can’t sit still and silence terrifies most people. Silence and prayer certainly aren’t convenient, and the Eucharist for some has become a magic pill.

Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestions of advertising and propaganda. The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis. Even our monasteries are not free from the smell and clatter of our world.
(No Man is an Island, Thomas Merton)

Art, architecure, music, language, smells and sights can all provide opportunities to begin to enter into the myestery of God but being in deep communion with the Father - true mysticism - transcends all that. True mysticism is found in prayer, and communion with the Father can be found as easily on a quiet afternoon on the deck as it can in a great cathedral.

I have repeated over and over on these threads that if there is a crisis in the Church, it is not because of lack of catechesis but because we lack mystery, and we lack mystery because people are either too busy or too distracted to pray.

-Tim-

 

[sw85]

I had hoped that this thread would be about genuine mysticism and not architecture, vernaculars and EF vs OF. For me, mysticism trancends all that.

As is often the case with posts on CAF, the title of the thread has nothing to do with the question actually asked by the OP, which concerned not mysticism but the sense of the mystical and wondrous.

 

[HelenRose]

Not at all. But as in all times, only a small portion of the faithful have any affinity for mysticism.

How do you know that? Are you in a position to judge the prayer life of souls. It is my understanding of Christ’s teaching that we do not go around announcing our prayers. You would not see a true mystic advertising their mysticism. A Catholic mystic could be the business man with a brief case, a mother at a soccer game, a homeless person on the streets. You can not possibly know who does and how many souls “have any affinity for mysticism”.