Cardinal Danneels on the Liturgy

Fr Z has done a bit of a critique of this article in the America Magazine by Cardinal Godfried Danneels "Liturgy 40 Years After the Council: High point or regression?" (free registration required), so I won't go into the details. The article shows some signs of not quite being within the guard-rails of a "hermeneutic of continuity", and there is rather too much tendancy to talk in terms of "symbolism", nevertheless, there are some amazingly insightful statements which I would like to highlight for us all to contemplate (Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox and Protestant alike):

• The liturgy is God’s work on us before it is our work on God. The celebrating community enters into it as into a pre-established, divine and spiritual architecture.
• We are not creators of the liturgy; we are servants and guardians of its mysteries. We do not own them, nor did we author them.
• If the liturgy is not simply a structuring of common human religiosity, but rather the epiphany of God in human history (from Abraham to Christ), then we cannot avoid the need for catechesis and initiation. Because it is both proclamation and the celebration of mysteries that have occurred in the history of Judaism and Christianity, liturgy demands schooling.
• Our contemporaries often conceive of “understanding” as the ability to grasp at first hearing. Something is understandable if we can grasp it immediately. Such an approach is valid for the ordinary objects of our knowledge, which can only be grasped at a purely cognitive level. But where the depths of human and divine reality are concerned, this approach does not work. Love, death, joy, solidarity, knowledge of God can never be grasped at once or on first inspection. Profound realities only gradually yield their full significance.
• [When] The liturgy is turned into an unstoppable succession of words [there is] no time for interiorization.
• Liturgy is neither the time nor the place for catechesis... Nor should liturgy be used as a means for disseminating information, no matter how essential that information might be.
• Liturgy belongs to the order of the “playful.” The uniqueness of “play” is that one plays for the sake of playing. Liturgy’s end is in itself.
• Celebrate first, then understand.
• the sense of smell is almost completely unused in the liturgy. It is not to our advantage that the use of incense has been pushed aside into the domain of superfluity and hindrance.
• The life of the Christian is built on cultus and caritas. Liturgy does not coincide with life; rather, it has a dialectical relationship with life. Sunday is not Monday, nor vice versa. What we do throughout the week in a varied and diluted way we also do in the liturgy but in a more concentrated and purified fashion: we live for God and for others.