2. This means that universality is an essential feature of Christian worship. It is the worship of an open heaven. It is never just an event in the life of a community that finds itself in a particular place. No, to celebrate the Eucharist means to enter into the openness of a glorification of God that embraces both heaven and earth, an openness effected by the Cross and Resurrection. Christian liturgy is never just an event organized by a particular group or set of people or even by a particular local Church. Mankind’s movement toward Christ meets Christ’s movement toward men. He wants to unite mankind and bring about the one Church, the one divine assembly, of all men. Everything, then, comes together: the horizontal and the vertical, the uniqueness of God and the unity of mankind, the communion of all who worship in spirit and in truth.
(Ratzinger, J. (2000). The Spirit of the Liturgy (J. Saward, Trans.; p. 49). Ignatius Press.)
- This point can help lead to an important reflection on how the liturgy incorporates temporal and otherwise chronastic elements into something timeless and universal. One of the features of true art and true art forms is timelessness and universal appeal. Beauty, understood as an expression of the underlying harmony, proportion, and splendor of the sensible qualities of the natural world can draw the mind and heart, by means of something that is the product of a given time and place, into the contemplation of the source of that created world.
- The true character of liturgy is neither a statement of something rigidly stuck in the past, nor something exclusively connected to a particular place. The true character of liturgy is also not a statement of the present without reference to the past, nor something devoid of any connection to particular cultures and ways of life.
- The God whom we worship is the God common to all the human beings and creatures He created. The liturgical worship of this God – in spirit and in truth – must reflect the universality of the human spirit. At the same time, the Incarnation of the Word happened in a particular place in the world and at a particular time.
