By Martin Steffens
When I converted, I was warned: “It’s a generational issue.” This seemed logical to me. There is an age, isn’t there, when it’s less easy to kneel – or at least to get back up after kneeling. In reality, as everyone knows, the resistant generation was so regardless of their old bones. In kneeling (both knees to the ground) or genuflecting (one knee, preferably the right), they rejected the worship of the Most High, the God who condescends to our mediocrity. The issue was to free themselves from a unilaterally vertical religion.
On the other hand, the younger generation seemed to be asking for more… Unless they had integrated the fruits of this liberation without finding any fundamental incompatibility with more demonstrative gestures. In the end, everyone agrees that God’s glory is the standing man.
However, for some, the act of standing expresses the Good News best. Isn’t this the posture of dialogue with God (Ez 2:1)? Isn’t the Christian one who lets themselves be told, “Do not fear” and “get up”? But indeed, those who, come what may, kneel at mass, even if it means contemplating the backsides of the bench in front more than the host being consecrated, say they experience this rising up more physically.
“To pray is to bend. To pray is to plead.”
The need to kneel… Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic who died in England in 1943 at age 34, said she felt it in the Basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels, in Assisi. In her notes, she compared genuflection to the gesture by which one finally admits defeat at the end of a fight. Our body then becomes a prayer: not just a request but an offering to the unprecedented, unexpected possibility of being raised. To pray is to bend. To pray is to plead, to “await from outside life or death. Kneeling, head bowed, in the most convenient position for the victor to cut off the head with a sword.”
“In silence, a few minutes of waiting pass like this. The heart empties of all attachments, chilled by the imminent touch of death. A new life is received, made purely of mercy.”
Simone Weil
We relinquish all our possessions and worries to the source of everything. “In silence, a few minutes of waiting pass like this. The heart empties of all attachments, chilled by the imminent touch of death. A new life is received, made purely of mercy.” Who, in trusting like this, ever truly trusts? Thus, Simone Weil concludes: “We should pray to God like this.” “Like this,” meaning feeling our fragility better to measure how much we are given to ourselves, heartbeat after heartbeat, second after second.
“We should pray to God like this…” She does not say she achieves it. One can kneel very low while believing oneself superior to those with stiff legs. When the body becomes a symbol, no one can be sure the soul has followed it well. Irony: if you type “kneeling” into a search engine, you will first find neither religious prescriptions nor advice for marriage proposals—but warnings to motorcyclists thrilled by this way of negotiating curves. There is a risk. And a time for everything—even for penance.
If, in The Spirit of the Liturgy, Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI, could not imagine a faithful person not kneeling during the service, it is worth recalling that the early Church forbade kneeling throughout the Easter season. – La Croix International
