Father Dwight Longenecker over at Standing on My Head reflects and opines on what he refers to as the "healthy and creative tension" between the horizontal and vertical aspects of a life of faith.

Surely, the recent context that he gives the consideration is important, but it's more certainly a tension that extends all the way back to the birth of the Church after Christ rose from the dead.

It's not really a chicken-or-the-egg type of consideration, of course, since the vertical love of God and acceptance of His grace is a necessary precursor to true horizontal love of fellow man.  In this situation, we really do know which came first, if only through our natural intuition.

In my garden, it would be silly for me to say "This year, I am only going to plant vegetables, because it is more important for me to focus on serving a temporal need (of food) and sharing them with my fellow man."  Conversely, it would be silly for me to say "This year, there will be no vegetables in my garden. I wish to focus on the beauty and extravagance of my flowers and let them elevate my thoughts to God. My neighbor in need of food and help will just have to wait until next year."

Likewise, the Church isn't fully "the Church" without both aspects of faith in a constant yin and yang.  And thus, as Father (and many before him) rightly points out, we have the cross - with its crossing beams, one in the vertical and one in the horizontal, as a perfect example of the intersection of vertical and horizontal love.

I don't buy the classification of "conservative" or "progressive" (or "liberal") in generalizing those who tend toward the vertical or the horizontal.  But I do see a strong push toward the horizontal in what evolved out of (and within) the celebration of the Novus Ordo after the Second Vatican Council.  And, of course, what we've been "missing" in our worship is a steadfast, forced, focus upon the vertical.  It's certainly there - just consider those who prayerfully whisper and exclaim "My Lord and My God!" at the sacrifice.

But the horizonal is certainly most predominate in many places - just consider the sheer quantity of parishes where holding hands during the Lord's Prayer isn't just encouraged, but has become the norm.  If you will, just after the moment of consecration, we've taken a very vertical moment in the movement of our liturgy and forced a (not in the rubrics, I might add) very horizontal moment upon it.  This, of course, just moments before the vertical acceptance of Christ and His Father in the beautiful prayer he taught us is to be rightly followed by the horizontal sharing of that love with others in the Sign of Peace.  We've really forced the horizontal onto the vertical and perhaps even diluted the subsequent horizontal, in fact, as a result.

But then again, aren't we called to find ways to bring the old and the new together... to mix the vertical and the horizontal in every moment of our faith?  To be a Church and a people always at the intersection of those two expressions of true love?  That is what he means by the "healthy and creative tension."  For it's not in the finger-pointing and the disparaging of one "camp" or the other that we find the unity, peace, and love that Christ prayed for.

As the Church brings forth and encourages the fullness of the liturgy as has always been intended - and was surely intended to be made even more beautiful by the fathers of Vatican II - let's pray for unity and respect for both sides of this fence.  For the old and the new.  For the vertical and the horizontal.

Matt 13:52: "And he replied, "Then every scribe who has been instructed in the kingdom of heaven is like the head of a household who brings from his storeroom both the new and the old."