Sometimes the liturgy can seem boring or empty. Maybe the music is dreadful, the people about us talking, the church architecture modern and ugly and meaningless, the words repetitive, or our minds merely distracted.
In response, many have tried to update it—to make it more exciting. They shortened it, demanded our verbal participation, and cut out repetition. Now they add drums and rock music. Sometimes they diverge from the rubrics laid down for the liturgy, trying to make it more relaxed and inclusive, trying to make it more welcoming.
Yet do they succeed?
I think of theatre. My professor often repeated this phrase: "If something is boring, slow it down." It seems counter-intuitive, as he explained, but actually something is not necessarily boring because it is too slow. It might be boring because it was shabbily done or because the important moments were skipped over. Good acting requires slowing down in rehearsal to go back over each moment's transition and each moment's experience of crisis or choice. The performance then will contain those crucial details even at a regular pace. The audience may not catch each moment, but will certainly judge the performance by it, even though only at a subconscious level.
Theatre springs in some fashion from liturgy, so why should liturgy be any different?
If the priest leads us in the worship of God, taking into his hands God Himself, then how could it possibly be boring? If we recognize that we are in the presence of God and we worship Him in each moment of our presence at the Mass, how could we be bored? Is it because we have rushed over each moment of importance?
Before I leave you only with these questions to ponder, I would like to add one more thing: a beautiful paragraph on the living water that is the liturgy:
"The coming of the Word of life into our flesh and into the very abyss of our death alone deserves to be called an event, because due to it all the walls of death have collapsed, and life has sprung up in their place. The hour in which the Word with a loud cry handed over his Breath of love so that men might live is no longer in the past; it is, it abides, it lives on through history and sustains it. This unprecedented power that the river of life exercises in the humanity of the risen Christ - that is the liturgy! In it all the promises of the Father find their fulfillment. Since that moment the communion of the Blessed Trinity has ceaselessly been spreading throughout our world and flooding our time with its fullness. In the living Christ who 'is not here' but is risen and who fills all things and holds the keys of death, the heart of God and the heart of man are as it were the two heartbeats of the heart of history. There the wellspring flows." ~Father Jean Corbon, The Wellspring of Worship
