Why Guéranger Matters

I obviously agree that Dom Guéranger matters; that's why, every day, I share his entries from his Liturgical Year, both as text and as audio.

From One Peter Five

By Charles Coulombe, STM, KCSS

We need from time to time to take refuge in outposts of reality.

Down with the rosemary and bays,
Down with the misletoe;
Instead of holly, now up-raise
The greener box, for show.

The holly hitherto did sway;
Let box now domineer,
Until the dancing Easter-day,
Or Easter’s eve appear.

Then youthful box, which now hath grace
Your houses to renew,
Grown old, surrender must his place
Unto the crisped yew.

When yew is out, then birch comes in,
And many flowers beside,
Both of a fresh and fragrant kin,
To honour Whitsuntide.

Green rushes then, and sweetest bents,
With cooler oaken boughs,
Come in for comely ornaments,
To re-adorn the house.
Thus times do shift; each thing his turn does hold;
New things succeed, as former things grow old.
—Robert Herrick, “Ceremonies for Candlemas Eve”

The long road which each of us must travel from Cradle to Grave is defined by time quite as much as space.  We wayfarers on the road of life are strengthened by the Waybread of the Angels – the Blessed Sacrament – as we travel from place to place.  In a world which constantly drums into our ears its fantasies of secularism and materialism, we need from time to time to take refuge in outposts of reality.  Some of these are located in space: any church with the Blessed Sacrament in it; shrines, cathedrals, basilicas, and monasteries all come obviously to mind.  But there are others: museums, libraries, historic houses and sites, and places of natural beauty.  All can give a refreshing drink of truth in the midst of the great lie.

But such waystations exist also in time, as well as in space.  Just as the creativity of the faithful, or great actions, or simply the Hand of God can create spatial refuges, so does the turning of the year offer us temporal ones – holidays.  To be sure, every country has secular observances which stir the heart; we Americans love our fireworks on the Fourth of July.  Every true Briton’s heart beats a bit faster on the King’s Birthday, and who doesn’t rejoice on New Year’s Eve?  Doubtless most of us in Western countries feel the poignance of the fallen on November 11.  But it is really the holidays of religious origin that claim even the secular mind’s attention: Christmas, Mardi Gras, Easter, Halloween, and even – in a sense – Thanksgiving.  Although the customs that have grown up around them don’t always match the sanctity of their origins, their memory remains strong. 

Back in the 1950s, Fr. Francis X. Weiser, former pastor of the late, lamented Holy Trinity Gemran Catholic Church, Boston, and sometime chaplain to the Von Trapp family of Sound of Music fame, wrote a series of fascinating books, which became bestsellers – at least in a Catholic sense.  The culminated in the Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs: The Year of the Lord in Liturgy and Folklore.  An introduction to Heortology – the study of Christian festivals –  it boasted a forward by John Cardinal Wright, in which that prelate made the following important remarks:

Each ‘Year of the Lord,’ with its feasts and celebrations, is the living voice of our Christian faith. There is no facet of Divine Revelation that is not somehow reflected in the Church calendar.  Indeed, the passing seasons unfold a colorful tapestry in which are woven the strands of Church history, of Christian cult, of moral and dogmatic theology. And there is always fresh drama as each feast or season tells the ageless story of the life of Christ or recalls the “fullness of Christ” in Mary or other Saints…The Faith of a people is eloquently expressed in national folklore and customs. 

Fr. Weiser himself begins his book by saying this:

This Book was written to explain the origin, history, development, and observance of our Christian feasts throughout the ‘Year of the Lord.’  In addition to the liturgical aspects of these feasts, the celebration in folklore is also presented. The radiation of liturgy has created many symbols, customs, and traditions that have enriched the observance of festive days and seasons in home and community, and remnants of pre-Christian lore have, in most cases, assumed new meanings and motivations through the influence of liturgical thought and celebration.

In some ways, Fr. Weiser was riding a crest; in the post-World War II era many thoughtful Catholics were trying to bring the Faith out of the church and into their homes and the world.  In 1949, Florence P. Berger wrote the Cooking for Christ Cookbook – basically a guide to eating with the Liturgical Year – for the National Catholic Rural Life Conference.  For St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Helen McLoughlin wrote a series of pamphlets I read as a boy: Family Advent Customs (1954), Christmas to Candlemas in the Catholic Home (1955), Easter to Pentecost Family Customs (1956), and My Nameday – Come for Dessert! (1962).  In 1957, Mary Reed Newland came out with The Year and Our Children: Planning Family Activities for Christian Feasts and Seasons.  Much later on, Evelyn Birge Vitz gave us A Continual Feast: A Cookbook to Celebrate the Joys of Family & Faith throughout the Christian Year, while Ann Ball wrote Catholic Traditions in Cooking, published in 1993.  Except for the last two, a great many Catholics prior to Vatican II attempted to “live the Church Year” with the help of such volumes.

Laudable as all such books and efforts were, many of us are not in a position to celebrate the Year in such an effusive fashion.  Even if we are (and I must admit that with the exception of the last two books which had not as yet appeared, in my boyhood I read all of the above-mentioned quite happily, and they gave me a love of the Church Year that has never left me) we need to anchor the Year in our lies spiritually.  This is essential, as another boyhood favourite, Christ in His Mysteries by Blessed Dom Columba Marmion (given to me by my Confessor; I was not so holy as to seek out such stuff on my own!) explains:

Guided by the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of Jesus Himself, the Church unfolds before the eyes of her children, every year from Christmas to the Ascension, the complete cycle of Christ’s mysteries, sometimes greatly abridged, sometimes in their exact chronological order, as during Holy Week and Paschal time. She thus makes each mystery of her Divine Bridegroom to be lived over again by an animated and living representation; she makes us pass through each stage of His life. If we let ourselves be guided by her, we shall infallibly come to know the mysteries of Jesus and above all enter into the thoughts and feelings of His Divine Heart.

Now, while Christ in His Mysteries follows the Church Year, it is only one volume.  One hungers for a daily companion, as staunch as Dom Marmion – and one exists: his brother Benedictine, Venerable Dom Prosper Guéranger.  A multifaceted individual who revived monastic life in France as well as the study of Gregorian Chant and a master liturgist, he wrote the monumental Liturgical Year, a fourteen volume day by day exploration of both the Temporal Cycle and the Sanctoral Cycle of the Church Year.  In his foreword to the work, he explains some important points:

The year thus planned for us by the Church herself produces a drama the sublimest that has ever been offered to the admiration of man. God intervening for the salvation and sanctification of men; the reconciliation of justice with mercy; the humiliations, the sufferings, and the glories of the God-Man; the coming of the Holy Ghost, and His workings in humanity and in the faithful soul; the mission and the action of the Church – and are there portrayed in the most telling and impressive way. Each mystery has its time and place by means of the sublime succession of the respective anniversaries. A divine fact happened nineteen hundred years ago; its anniversary is kept in the liturgy, and its impression is thus reiterated every year in the minds of the faithful, with a freshness, as though God were then doing for the first time what He did so many ages past. Human ingenuity could never have devised a system of such power as this. And those writers who are bold and frivolous enough to assert that Christianity has no longer an influence in the world, and is now but the ruin of an ancient thing – what would they say at seeing these undying realities, this vigour, this endlessness of the liturgical year? For what is the liturgy, but an untiring affirmation of the works of God? A solemn acknowledgement of those divine facts, which, though done but once, are imperishable in man’s remembrance, and are every year renewed by the commemoration he makes of them? Have we not our writings of the apostolic age, our acts of the martyrs, our decrees of ancient Councils, our writings of the fathers, our monuments, taking us to the very origin of Christianity, and testifying to the most explicit tradition regarding our feasts? It is true that the liturgical cycle has its integrity and its development nowhere but in the Catholic Church; but the sects which are separated from her, whether by schism or by heresy, all pay the homage of their testimony to the divine origin of the liturgy by the pertinacity with which they cling to the remnants they have preserved – remnants, by the way, to which they owe whatever vitality they still retain.

Even in this short selection, Dom Guéranger shows his enthusiasm for the subject, which is  extremely infectious.  Moreover, he draws from a great many liturgical sources, ancient and modern, and all commented upon with the same zest.  Indeed, we must quote the next paragraph:

But though the liturgy so deeply impresses us by annually bringing before us the dramatic solemnization of those mysteries which have been accomplished for the salvation of man and for his union with his God, it is nevertheless wonderful how the succession of year after year diminishes not one atom of the freshness and vehemence of those impressions, and each new beginning of the cycle of mystic seasons seems to be our first year. Advent is ever impregnated with the spirit of a sweet and mysterious expectation. Christmas ever charms us with the incomparable joy of the birth of the divine Child. We enter, with the well-known feeling, into the gloom of Septuagesima. Lent comes, and we prostrate ourselves before God’s justice, and our heart is filled with a salutary fear and compunction, which seem so much keener than they were the year before. The Passion of our Redeemer, followed in every minutest detail, does it not seem as though we never knew it till this year? The pageant of Easter makes us so glad, that our former Easters appear to have been only half kept. The triumphant Ascension discloses to us, upon the whole economy of the Incarnation, secrets which we never knew before this year. When the Holy Ghost comes down at Pentecost, is it not the case that we so thrill with the renewal of the great Presence that our emotions of last Whit Sunday seem too tame for this? However habituated we get to the ineffable gift which Jesus made us on the eve of His Passion, the bright dear feast of Corpus Christi brings a strange increase of love to our heart; and the blessed Sacrament seems more our own than ever. The feasts of our blessed Lady come round, each time revealing something more of her greatness; and the saints – with whom we fancied we had become so thoroughly acquainted – each year as they visit us, seem so much grander, we understand them better, we feel more sensibly the link there is between them and ourselves.

Moreover, as he explores the feasts of Our Lady and the Saints, and the Sundays of the Year, he uncover innumerable lessons not merely applicable to spiritual but to cultural and political life as well.  For one example, his commentary of the Gospel for the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost, in which Christ makes His memorable statement, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s,” is a call to arms as stirring now as when it was written:

How great, then, is not the dignity of human Law! It makes the legislator a representative of God, and at the same time, spares the subject the humiliation of feeling himself debased before a fellow man! But in order that the law oblige, that is, be truly a law, it is evident that it must be, first and foremost, conformable to the commands and the prohibitions of that God whose will alone can give it a sacred character, by making it enter into the domain of man’s conscience. It is for this reason that there cannot be a law against God or his Christ or his Church. When God is not with him who governs, the power he exercises is nothing better than brute force. The sovereign, or the parliament, that pretends to govern a country in opposition to the laws of God has no right to aught but revolt and contempt from every upright man; to give the sacred name of law to tyrannical enactments of that kind is a profanation, unworthy not only of Christian, but of every man who is not a slave.

By the same token, the good Benedictine can be as tender as a doting uncle, as we see in his description of a family preparing for midnight mass on Christmas Eve:

We have seen, and it is one of the most pleasing recollections of our childhood, one of these families seated together, after the frugal evening collation, round a blazing fireside, waiting for the hour to come when the whole house was to go to the midnight Mass. A plain but savoury supper, which was to be eaten on their return home, and so add to the joy of holy Christmas Night, was prepared beforehand. A huge piece of wood, called the Yule-Log, was burning cheerfully on the hearth; it would last till the Mass was over, and warm the old men and the little children, as they came in chilled by the sharp frost.

Meanwhile, till it was time for Mass, their conversation was upon the Mystery of this much-loved Night. They compassionated the Blessed Mother and the sweet Babe, exposed to the inclemency of wintry weather, and with no other shelter than that of a wretched stable. Then, too, there were the Christmas Carols, in the practise of which they had spent many a pleasant evening of Advent. The whole soul was evidently in these dear old melodies, and many a tear would fall as the song went on to tell how the Angel Gabriel visited Mary, and declared to her that she was to be Mother of the Most High God; how Mary and Joseph were worn with fatigue, going from street to street in Bethlehem, trying to find a lodging, and no one would take them in; how they were obliged to shelter in a stable, and how the Divine Child was born in it; how the loveliness of the Babe in his little crib was above all the beauty of the Angels; how the Shepherds went to see him, and took their humble gifts, and played their rude music, and adored him in the faith of their simple hearts. And thus they spent the happy Eve, passing from conversation to song, and from one song to another, and all was on Mary or Jesus, Joseph or Bethlehem. Cares of life were forgotten, troubles were gone, melancholy was a sin; but it was time to leave; the village clock had just gone eleven; and of the happy group, there was a little one who had been too young the other years, and this was his first Midnight Mass. There was no brighter face in the procession than his. Would he ever forget that beautiful Night!

The keynote with Dom Guéranger is always the holy reality of the Catholic life.  This writer can testify that he is a reliable daily guide to the spiritual life, and living a life more fully in accord with the Church in all times and places.  It cannot be wondered that St. Thérèse of Lisieux attributed a great deal of her personal devotion to her father having read The Liturgical Year aloud to her family every year through her childhood.  He can do the same for each of us.

Pictured: Dom Prosper Gueranger, OSB