has issues

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Jan 12, 2004

Ex-monk, ex-priest, and bender of the tenderer gender Nathan Mitchell explains why they're wrong who "claim that our postconciliar worship lacks beauty." This from the January 19, 2004, issue of America:

Liturgy is an ecstatic, even erotic act that embodies God’s own passionate, excessive self-gift by repeating it in our own time and place. Ecstatic, erotic? Yes, indeed: it is God’s own excessive generosity, that finally draws us toward those "stars" that Dante invited us to look up and see.

God is thus present among us as eros, ecstasy and excess, and God’s unconditional generosity summons our own. In liturgy, the commerce between God and us achieves almost embarrassing intensity and intimacy, for there the Holy One is revealed in breath, bone and blood, in saliva and stammering word, in songs sung off-key, in hands roughened by work and worry.

Odd, but "Eagles Wings" never affected me in quite this way. As to the discovery of eros, ecstasy and excess (not to mention saliva) in the enactment of the Novus Ordo, many of us will be thereby moved less to piety than to wearing elbow-length latex gloves at the Sign of Peace.