Ad some orientem and the world will be saved?

That's basically what Christopher West thinks.

During his seminar on November the 9th. 2013 in Surrey, British Columbia, Christopher West made an orthodox-sounding appeal in the course of his third talk on how we are "disoriented", and how we need to be "reoriented". Because we are disoriented we are heading in the wrong direction. You know, his whole rocket-pack thing.

Christopher West actually made reference - just like the folks who say that our sea of iniquity is traceable to 1962, or to 1968, or to 1972, or to 1955 when Emmit Brown came up with the key component for making that infernal and catastrophic time machine (the flux capacitor!), after which it was nothing but time-paradox disaster after time-paradox disaster! - to how we used to face east and that it pointed us towards heaven and towards the coming of the bridegroom, but the sign was done away with, and now we are disoriented. That was straight from the man himself.

It gave me a good chuckle as I sat on the bench farthest to the rear that's reserved for confession line to hear the Zhuldorf axiom on the lips of Christopher West. It made me realize I was perhaps sort of onto something when I wrote this post.

I hold no contention with what Ratzinger/Benedict has written regarding the intrinsic link of the crisis in the Church to a crisis in liturgy. The conclusions ("solutions") that people draw from that - the link of crisis in liturgy to crisis in the Church - as propagandized on the internet, inevitably prove to take the virtual position of superseding the Church herself, whose wisdom we must always learn from anew. For to learn from the Church is to veritably be renewed. She's not a museum or a university.

And anyways, to those who actually read Benedict/Ratzinger, rather than just quoting him out of context in the outdated museum archives of their on-the-blogspot fabrications, would know that "crisis of liturgy" includes liturgy in pre-reform time, before Vatican II, when many were - to use Ratzinger's words - not in touch with the Mass (which does not mean lack of catechesis or liturgical formation but a kind of very unhealthy mutual exacerbation, which is the perennial call for reform), and in which - to use Ratzinger's words - it was as though there were two liturgies: the liturgy of the priest and the liturgy of the people. They were saying the black and doing the red. The people were hearing the Mass. They were facing the liturgical east. It was the Mass of the ages. Down from the Council of Trent. There were no guitars. No felt banners. No clowns. No balloons. No puppets. No ideological tinkering. No polyester vestments. I mean, shouldn't the world have been, like, saved or something? What crisis was there exactly before Vatican II? Pray do tell, eh?

Anyways, don't ask me. I wasn't alive during that time, nor do I feel like pretending I was. Ask Benedict about pre-conciliar times. Read his writings. He affirms that liturgical crisis includes pre-conciliar times.

But how could "disorientation" exist when all the signs were in place? I mean, the Mass forms us, right? How could the crisis of a fractured dichotomy exist in the very context of saying the black and doing the red?

I'm not interested in anyone answering that question. I'm asking rhetorically. The questions answer themselves.


"...and even when you saw it, you did not afterward repent and believe him."