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The Spirit of the Liturgy
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Week 2: Chapter 2 - Liturgy - Cosmos - History
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This is such a powerful chapter!"But everything is bound up with freedom, and the creature has the freedom to turn the positive exitus of its creation around, as it were, to rupture it in the Fall: this is the refusal to be dependent, saying No to the reditus. Love is seen as dependence and is rejected. In its place come autonomy and autarchy: existing from oneself and in oneself, being a god of one’s own making. The arch from exitus to reditus is broken. The return is no longer desired, and ascent by one’s powers proves to be impossible."
"Worship is directed to the Other in himself, to his all-sufficiency, but now it refers itself to the Other who alone can extricate me from the knot that I myself cannot untie. Redemption now needs the Redeemer."
And isn't this beautiful?"The goal of creation is the covenant, the love story of God and man."
I'm weeks behind but... An image of the sun came to mind. A flare shoots from the sun and then, bc of the sun's gravity, loops back to enter (and participate in) the fire again. A flare that broke free from the gravity of the sun would simply burn out into non-existence.
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Speaking of being behind... I'll get us back on track this week! After a full week of family visiting and cooking and feasting, and a jolly time was had by all - I have mostly put my house back together, lol.
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You guys understood this chapter on first read?
No! I had to keep rereading different passages.
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I had to write the synopsis, lol. Yes, I spend extra time with the text.
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Unlike the incomprehensible scribblings of philosophers such as Hume or Nitzsche, one can actually grasp what Ratzinger is writing. It completely eludes me how people draw any sense out of those others, my brain hurts reading them, so I quit. Give me Ratzinger any day!
Chapter 2: Liturgy – Cosmos – History
In this chapter Joseph Ratzinger teaches how history, worship, and cosmos are connected.
• “The Sabbath is the sign of the covenant between God and man”
• “Creation and history, creation, history, and worship are in a relationship of reciprocity. Creation looks toward the covenant, but the covenant completes creation and does not simply exist along with it. Now if worship, rightly understood, is the soul of the covenant, then it not only saves mankind but also meant to draw the whole of reality into communion with God.”
• “…the goal of worship and the goal of creation as a whole are one and the same – divinization, a world of freedom and love…the transubstantiated Host is the anticipation of the transformation and divinization of matter…”
• Ratzinger illustrates the reciprocal nature and “geography” of the cosmos in the form of two intersecting circles, one horizontal (history + worship), and one vertical (fall + redemption). As they intersect they form a cross. The movement along these circles he calls exitus (departure) and reditus (return). This is the ideal state.
Lets stop a moment and visualize what is happening here. If there is continuous movement horizontally and vertically at the same time you have a sphere.
• God gave man free will, and with that he can decide whether or not he wants to participate in this divine structure. By not participating the circle gets ruptured, you have a departure without the return, in other words, the Fall. The Fall introduces a finite state, “Finitude is already a kind of sin, something negative, which has to be brought back into the infinite…redemption means liberation from finitude, which is the real burden of our existence.”
• Since the cosmic structure has been ruptured it needs to be restored by a cosmic healer. “Redemption now needs a Redeemer…[it] takes the form of the Cross of Christ, of the love that in dying makes a gift of itself. Such sacrifice has nothing to do with destruction. It is an act of new creation, the restauration of creation to its true identity.”