Pope St. John Paul II’s refrain alerts us to something most Catholics sense only dimly—that the Church is a communion of sister Churches, Eastern and Western, each bearing its own particular patrimony and spiritual traditions. The saintly pope’s point was that the Church is most alive when her members embrace that richness.
It can be easy to forget, or never to know in the first place, the paradox that in her unity, the Catholic Church is so richly varied—a flotilla of ocean liners and galleons, icebreakers and clippers, longships and junks, frigates and dhows, all sailing together as one body of many diverse parts (1 Cor. 12:12).
As a cradle Catholic of the Roman Rite in the Anglosphere, I had little exposure to other rites. The nearest I came was the memory of my grandparents’ ethnic parish—the Mass still being Novus Ordo though with its own customs and language. I was always dimly aware that there were Catholics in far-off places whose rites differed to a greater degree even than that, but it was as far from my experience as the moon.
Then came a moment in my young adult life when I found myself burned out and spiritually displaced. I’d heard that the Sunday obligation could be fulfilled in any Catholic church of any rite. So, in something akin to a desire for fresh air, I took myself one Sunday morning to a large Maronite church as a spiritual refugee looking for something worth clinging to, though not exactly sure what I was expecting.
That Sunday morning as the Divine Liturgy washed over me—of which I understood not a word, it being in Arabic with a smattering of Aramaic—I felt, inexplicably, that I’d not left home. Not understanding the words was unexpectedly liberating. I noticed myself being more aware of the shape of the liturgy as well as its spiritual undertow.
It felt like I was seeing a room I knew very well, but seeing it through the window, instead of coming in through the door as I always had—or perhaps seeing my own room through a mirror. As the liturgy carried me along, I recognized each element as though for the first time and the internal logic of the whole seemed suddenly plain. For the first time in my life, I was not trying to act the liturgy; the liturgy was acting on me.
For several months I attended the Maronite liturgy most Sundays, and the beauty and logic of the Divine Liturgy continued to lift me. I also attended two different forms of Byzantine liturgy, and my experience was similar. In these rites, I was experiencing the timeless and universal liturgy of the Church but viewed through subtly different windows. In more than merely theoretical terms, the liturgy seemed more like a foretaste of Heaven than it ever had before—albeit through a glass darkly—and glimpses of the eternal Divine Liturgy were becoming visible.
When I drifted back to my own parish, I brought with me that freedom—the presuppositions and preoccupations that had always crowded my experience at Mass had receded permanently.
I’d started to breathe with both lungs, and I was breathing easier for it.
The Catholic Church is properly universal—a flotilla, not a monolith, comprising at least two dozen distinct rites and liturgical uses, Eastern and Western, each vessel in the fleet carrying the mysteries of salvation to the world today.
This is not to say I recommend that Catholics act like liturgical tourists—that would reduce the Church’s treasury of liturgical rites to mere attractions to be admired from behind a cordon. The liturgy is a divine encounter, to be experienced from within.
Immersing oneself, even briefly, in another rite is like encountering a branch of one’s family who were hitherto unknown—their customs are distinct, and their vocabulary may be different, but the family resemblances are unmistakable. To encounter long-lost family is to find a part of oneself one never knew was missing. It is the start of breathing with both lungs.
Photo by Zulfugar Karimov on Unsplash
