“an already reconciled and engraced abyss…”

First off….are blogs back?

Did Traditiones Custodes reinforce the value of media that’s just a bit more permanent than Instagram posts and Twitter fights?

If so, thanks, Pope Francis!

Just a quick link and reflection on a blog post (yes) by Larry Chapp, found here:

My claim is that the controversy is not so much an argument over liturgy, which is merely a proximate provocation, but is rather a renewed eruption of the seemingly never-ending debate over the proper reception of Vatican II….

….In other words, the stakes are high in this debate and go far beyond arguments over liturgy, which are merely a symptom of a much deeper pathology.

And what is the debate about?

….the Church has failed to recognize that the anomic and nihilistic cosmos of post-modernity has laid waste to all of our standard structures of meaning, all of the traditions that embodied and made “real” that meaning, and all of the moral and spiritual weight of everything that came before five minutes ago

In short: the abyss. The abyss of life on earth without God, characterized by impermanence, transience and in the end, meaninglessness.

Ours is a Church that has failed to ask the right questions and has therefore failed to flip the script of our culture’s lies and deceptions. We asked for bread. We got stones. And thus did some in the sheepfold seek bread elsewhere in the alternative Catholic communities made possible by Summorum Pontificum. And if some have fled to such havens with a goodly amount of undifferentiated bitterness it should be understood not as the bitterness of hatred, but rather as the bitterness of the desperate.

And here’s his sentence from which I took the title of this post:

The progressives at least also recognized the abyss below. But they wanted to embrace it as an “always already reconciled and engraced abyss.”

This is brilliant and precise wording, and resonates with one of the points I’ve been mulling over for years: how the meaning of salvation has changed in recent decades into not much more than self-acceptance. We are lost, we are told, because we don’t recognize how good we are and how much God loves us. Salvation lies in accepting God’s love for us just as we are.

Which then, of course, has implications for liturgy – which becomes a celebration of God with and among us now just because it’s all good and we’re all good, not because anyone or anything needs to change or be reconciled.

I have a few quibbles and a more agreements with Larry’s post, but I’ll just end this with the question that struck me at the end, a question emanating from similar questions I’ve been reflecting on.

The generation that set all this into motion – the generation that produced the generally optimistic documents and Spirit of Vatican II was a generation that had actually looked into the abyss.

It was the generation that had suffered through the ravages of the Second World War right where many of them lived, that had fought in it, been imprisoned by it, that had rebuilt from the rubble – rebuilt the structures which had to be rebuilt from the previous war to end all wars, that had seen tens of millions killed by totalitarian regimes all over the world, that lived, at the moment of the Council in the shadow of possible nuclear destruction, which was keenly felt by all.

I’m endlessly fascinated by that question.

Where did the Council Fathers’ optimism about the “human family,” come from?

We’re sixty years past that now, and there are different motivations at work, all worth exploring. But the failure to critique and radically stand in opposition to nihilistic modernity and offer what Christ offers – and has always offered – didn’t begin today. This particular failure (because the Church has failed to answer urgent questions of the moment with great regularity through its history) has its roots in the decisions of men who knew what horrors human beings were capable of.

The question to me, is – why, then, did they decide that what they had inherited was inadequate, and, with the liturgy as it developed over the decade following the Council, actually stood in the way to human wholeness in the face of the abyss? Was it simply that they saw the destruction of the old world all of a piece that included the Church within it, and that if it were all rebuilt, the abyss could be breached?