Make Room For Mystery

 Because my journey to Christ has come by way of influence from both the East and the West--both inside and outside the Church--I have a bit of a "Tex-Mex" spirituality. My first experience of Catholicism was in the Eastern-rite of the Church, attending the Divine Liturgy with my father from time to time when he would go. I experienced liturgical plainsong (chant), sometimes known as prostopinije, incense, iconography and iconostasis, and a sense of the sacred. When I came into the Church and received the Sacred Mysteries (Sacraments) of Confirmation, Confession, and Holy Eucharist, it was by way of the Byzantine Rite. On the way to a monastery in New Mexico after a year of being a Catholic I sat next to an Orthodox priest on the plane and he gifted me a prayer rope on which to pray the Jesus Prayer which is a hallmark of Orthodox spirituality. It's simple and meditative: with each breath in, you pray Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God...and with each breath out, "be merciful to me a sinner" on each bead. Whereas rosary beads are generally of a hard, solid material, even the beads of a Orthodox prayer rope themselves are made from cloth, so have a flexible dexterity reflective of Orthodox spirituality. I prayed the Jesus prayer with that prayer rope for many years, and later discovered the classic The Way of the Pilgrim which recounts one Russian peasant's experience of the Jesus prayer in his quest to learn to "pray without ceasing," as St. Paul encourages us to do.

One thing I think the Church of the East is more comfortable with in general is the sense of mystery. Not that this doesn't exist in the Latin Church or in the mystical theology of the Western saints, but the influence of scholasticism and neo-scholasticism in the West was so formative to the Latin Church that this kind of mystical and liturgical fluidity can be a different experience for those who experience a Byzantine (or even Orthodox) liturgy for the first time. 

Of course, we have been attending the Tridentine Mass for the past three years now--neither the Divine Liturgy of the East or the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in the Latin Church is especially foreign or novel to us at this point. When my son serves mass and I observe his movements and those of the altar servers, I can see they reflect this scholastic influence in liturgical physicality--movements and transitions are crisp and clearly defined, with sometimes military precision. Contrast this in observation with the way a Byzantine or Orthodox priest and congregants bless themselves (thrice, right to left)--there is a rounded fluidity to the movements from head to navel to shoulders, almost like an oval in motion rather than a perfectly delineated cross. I think in the context of liturgy, this may reflect the greater comfort with which the East "sits in mystery" rather than having to tie up and resolve it and assign it to its appropriate clearly defined box. 

For those who have come to Tradition by way of the Latin Mass, there can be a kind of 'tunnel vision' in mindset that liturgical integrity must be invested in this kind of Western scholastic expression in the expression of its physicality in the liturgy. The Latin Mass may sometimes feel like the "article-objection-reply" format of the Summa in liturgical form, leaving no rock of objection unturned or corner rounded. 

It can also be reflected in spiritual practice of those in the Eastern and Western traditions. Mystery is not always a comfortable place to be for the scholastic mind. We are comfortable with checking the boxes--morning offering, mass, rosary, divine office, etc. The temptation to "figure things out" and have everything in its preassigned box can sometimes rob us of the experience of the mystical. I don't know enough about traditionalist Catholics to know what defines their spirituality. I try to have some structure to my prayer life but for myself, I have always been comfortable with the idea of mystery and was also never especially drawn to Thomistic scholasticism as a way to understand and experience God. 

Of course this is just general observation and not meant to put one above the other. Certainly the sense of mystery transcends East and West, and no one tradition can hold exclusive claim to it. When we pray the rosary, ideally we enter into the MYSTERIES of the rosary and meditate on them. We pray with our heart as well as our head and lips and fingers. The heart is where mystery roots itself. And the heart can sometimes be messy, not clearly delineated and defined. Mary "keep all these things in her heart" at the Annunciation (Lk 2:19) and "wisdom enters the heart," as scripture says (Prov 2:10)

I like Tex-Mex. I like Asian Fusion. I like the Divine Liturgy and I like the Tridentine Mass. I respect intellectual formidability of the West and the deep mysticism of the East. And I love Catholicism because it is a "both/and" religion, not an "either/or" religion. If you're a neo-scholastic type (or as one of my professors in grad school referred to himself jokingly as, a "filthy Thomist"), don't be afraid to engage the heart and make some room for mystery.