The last chapter of Romano Guardini’s The Spirit of Liturgy is titled “The Primacy of The Logos Before Ethos.” He affirmed, “What ultimately matters is not activity, but development. The roots of and the perfection of everything lie, not in time, but in eternity. Finally, not the moral, but the metaphysical conception of the world is binding, not the worth-judgment, but the import-judgment, not struggle, but worship.” Liturgy must aim at progress, the becoming of the Christian community. Guardini writes, “What the liturgical work needs is time. A lot of work must be done and the tasks are difficult… It is certainly very desirable to leave everything floating for the moment. Otherwise the outcome cannot be anything good.” There is no hurry, there is plenty of time. It can afford to wait to progress – the desire to lead liturgy back from the sphere of private devotion to its original meaning and importance and to give it back its purity and meaningfulness. There must be research and social debate prior to making a decision. The research must not concentrate exclusively on praxis. It is imperative that the whole of revelation is expressed in the liturgy and, at the same time, it should also be directed to the spiritual welfare of the faithful. Progress in liturgy is not merely theoretical matter, directed only by historical or theological methods, it must also take into consideration those who take part in the liturgical celebrations, the celebrating Church as it concretises in local communities. Liturgy is the place for a deep union with God, and the levels of this union are mysterious. The pragmatic view of the liturgy must be changed for a spiritual or even mystical one for it to be transformative in the depth of the human being. We must acknowledge that liturgy is a reality within history with all the attributes that belong to historicity: it develops and changes. It must be a constant question in liturgical historiology and theology, whether liturgical forms or texts of a certain period are valid for subsequent times, or whether certain motives can result in false interpretations in different periods. The work of the renewal, he said “must not be realized according to subjective judgement and preference, but conforming to the lex orandi of the Church; at the same time however with a real freedom of creation and formulation, where the law of the Church makes this possible.” In Guardini’s view, the typical man or woman of the nineteenth century was not capable of understanding and performing the liturgical act. The lack of this was probably caused by the significant impact of technological culture on people’s ability to engage in communal activity. Religious life had become primarily individual inner life, and its official celebration was the liturgy. The implementation of the conciliar reform must focus therefore on learning once again to perform liturgy: to become capable of the liturgical act as human beings.
Guardini wrote in 1965 in a short book The Lord’s Church – Meditations on the Nature and Mission of the Church (Die Kirche des Herrn. Meditationen über Wesen und Auftrag der Kirche): “For example, with regard to the relationship between the priest and laypeople, the new possibility of celebrating the Eucharist facing the people, and also the increasing use of the vernacular seem to symbolize the fact that the congregation becomes conscious of itself and enters into the liturgy as a congregation. What we understand by the expression‚ liturgical renewal implies that while the implementation of a liturgical service proceeds from the office of the priest, it is at the same time everybody’s affair” (aber zugleich sache aller sein soll). Two things become all the more grave issues that concern not only the priests but also the People of God, the laity. The recent struggle with the leadership of the Syro-Malabar Church had started with priests of the archeparchy of Ernakulam-Angamaly and it was taken over then by the laity. It may look very strange that the laity wanted the liturgy to be in the vernacular and facing the people. In this book Guardini goes further, and requests that “the Church respects the judgement of those to whom responsibility in the world is given, the laypeople, and it hands over to them what belongs to them.” So we can say that the question of liturgical renewal is a matter of the whole parish community. The liturgical renewal is as much a communitarian understanding of the Church as a liturgy wherein every member has their own role in the celebration of life in the parish. So Guardini wrote, “The people who really live by the liturgy will come to learn that the bodily movements, the actions, and the material objects which it employs are all of the highest significance.”