U. M. Lang’s Turning Towards the Lord: Orientation in Liturgical Prayer


Uwe Michael Lang is a member of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in London and holds degrees in theology from the universities of Vienna and Oxford. His recently published book, Turning Towards the Lord, published in 2004, has the following endorsement:

I hope that this book, the work of a young scholar, will help the struggle – which is necessary in every generation – for the right understanding and worthy celebration of the Sacred Liturgy. I wish the book a wide and attentive readership. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.

Somewhere along the way someone recommended this book to me, but I only picked it up to read after I heard the report of, yet again, in some workshop or seminar, the retelling of a gross falsehood, presented as if from the soundest scholarship: that the custom of the priest offering Mass facing the same way as the congregation was a rather late development in the Church’s liturgical life and was motivated by a desire on the part of clergy to distinguish and distance themselves from the laity. Such a misunderstanding is often these days encapsulated in the inaccurate phrase, “the priest turning his back to the people.” I heard this often in seminary – where I heard a lot of strange things – and at the time I could not help but sense that the repetition of this erroneous idea was motivated by a desire to equip seminarians with a pre-ordination guilt trip as well as to stir up contention and resentment, not only between laity and clergy but between them both together and the Church’s “dark” past (especially those awful Medieval times!).

Lang’s study sets the record straight. Working from literary and architectural evidence from the earliest available sources, the author shows convincingly that priest and people facing the same direction during the Liturgy, especially for the central prayer of the Mass, goes back to the earliest of times and was the general practice throughout the Christian world of antiquity. Setting aside the present day polemics about the liturgy, Lang intrigued me with his descriptions of the early, faithful Christians’ deep and genuine concern with prayer: they all together, as if of one mind, laity and clergy, seemed to really yearn for communing with God in prayer; and their all facing the same way – most often eastward – was their bodily means of expressing what the title of Lang’s book conveys – a real “turning towards the Lord.” In post-Vatican II days this whole subject has been reduced to whether “the priest faces me or turns his back on me.” Me, me, me. Whereas in the early records of worshipping Christians we find very little concern, if any, about the position of the celebrant, but a vital concern about appropriately worshipping the Triune God.

Numerous liturgical scholars, including Lang, have noted the possible connection between the priest facing the people and the “worshipping” community’s growing concern more about itself than the proper adoration of God. Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, has in the past more than once commented on some of the problems of the new form of the liturgy, especially the priest facing the people for the Eucharistic Prayer: that this tends to center on the priest-celebrant himself too much as well as to sort of turn the gathered community into a closed-off circle – all of us just dialoguing among ourselves.

Whatever the position of the priest, Catholics, I think, need to be reminded that we gather at the Mass, which is the memorial of Christ’s death until He comes again in glory, to draw near together to God the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. Has this proper understanding of the Holy Sacrifice been enhanced by the changes over the past few decades? is a question that urgently needs to be addressed. And if the priest-celebrant’s facing the same direction as the congregation would aid in that proper understanding, then we should be willing to return to that ancient and longstanding practice of the Church in her central liturgical rite. Some of the Eastern Rite Churches are doing just that; after incorporating some of the liturgical changes introduced into the Roman Rite, they are returning to their own traditional practices, finding in them a better expression of Christian worship.

I do not really know what motivates people who lead seminars and workshops on Church history and liturgy to so malign the Church’s past concerning this subject. Perhaps they are simply handing on inherited ignorance. But I cannot help but note, after reading their work and notes and after speaking with many of them, a certain distaste and disregard for the sacred, for the holy. They seem to want to portray things liturgical as just another political arena of gaining rights and privileges with hardly a thought to what might just please God and aid us to encounter Him. Whatever their possible personal grievances with something from the past, it would be kind and charitable of them to refuse the temptation to foster and spread their malcontent.

After all, it was the Church of the first few centuries, free from petty liturgical battles, united in prayer and belief (expressed at worship in their all facing and prayerfully “moving” towards the Lord) – it was this early Church who won over the multitudes to the love of Christ. Perhaps in the growing darkness of an ever less Christian world in the West, we should ask ourselves what is lacking in us. Maybe we really do need to personally and liturgically (they go together) turn “towards the Lord.”