Vigilant for the Bridegroom in the Night of Faith: Beyond Conscious Participation in the Liturgy

Vigilant for the Bridegroom in the Night of Faith: Beyond Conscious Participation in the Liturgy1 Anthony Lilles Make room in the spirit for the enkindling and burning of the love that this dark and secret contemplation bears and communicates to the soul. For contemplation is nothing else than a secret and peaceful and loving inflow of God, which, if not hampered, fires the soul in the spirit of love...2 Juan de Yepes y Álvarez, better known to the world as St John of the Cross (1542-91), in his commentary on his poem The Dark Night, advocates a kind of prayer in which the soul does not understand or feel what God is doing. Rather than a result of human industry or any other conscious technique, this sort of prayer is characterized by the coming of the Bridegroom, the inflowing of divine Love. To give full welcome to this divine visitation, the soul needs to make spiritual room for God. That is, it needs to free itself from any preoccupation with what lies within its power to control or manipulate. Rather than dissipating its strength on what it understands in the narrow confines of its consciousness, the soul that seeks the Lord must remain vigilantly vulnerable to the astonishing mystery of Jesus Christ. In the holy silence of a spiritual night resounds the Father’s eternal Word. The soul forgetful of itself is lifted beyond the natural light of its conscious awareness and drawn into a supernatural, mysterious knowledge that God alone can give. From the perspective of making room for this sheer grace, St John of the Cross advocates cultivating 1 Adapted from a paper delivered at the 2012 general conference of The Society for Catholic Liturgy, held 26-28 January in St Louis, Missouri. 2 John of the Cross, The Dark Night, 1.10.6, in The Collected Works of St John of the Cross, revised edition, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1991) 382. Antiphon 16.2 (2012): 100-113 101 Vigilant for the Bridegroom in the Night of Faith prayerful vigilance even in devotional and liturgical practices.3 Our modern preoccupation with the external forms of worship stands at odds with the contemplative liturgical participation found in the writings of the Carmelite Doctor. Incessant liturgical housekeeping cannot yield lasting spiritual fruit: only union with God makes the Church fecund. The visible aspects of the liturgy have value to the extent that they point beyond themselves to what cannot be seen or fully grasped. A deeper encounter with God lingers in the hopefilled silence long after words have fallen short. We propose that the spiritual doctrine of St John of the Cross can contribute to ongoing liturgical renewal; for when the assembly orients its participation in the liturgy towards contemplation, or “holy silence,” it renders itself vulnerable to the One who made himself vulnerable to us. St John’s teachings make the case that the secret to the renewal of the Church lies hidden in this kind of public prayer—liturgy prayed out of deep contemplation. He understands mental prayer and liturgy as intrinsically ordered to each other. He builds on an ancient synthesis , which envisions the liturgy as the source and summit of deep prayer and, at the same time, this contemplation as opening liturgy to deeper access to divine life. From this contemplative vantage point, St. John of the Cross helps us see how full liturgical participation requires loving vigilance beyond what can be comprehended or manipulated in the liturgy. This liturgical asceticism makes space in the darkness of faith to welcome the coming of the Bridegroom. Prejudice Distorts Liturgy and Contemplation It is a popular prejudice that regards the wisdom of the mystic as extraliturgical and the work of the liturgist as principally pragmatic. On the contrary, contemplative and liturgical practices are neither opposed nor even intrinsically in tension. We need only consider the Church’s living experience to expose this false opposition and validate approaches to liturgical asceticism that make space for contemplation in the liturgy. Every morning, high atop the Chartreuse Mountains in southeastern France, out of the silent darkness that shrouds that sacred place...