No one makes meanings in a vacuum. Meanings which are available to one generation are no longer so in the next, and vice versa. One might regard these simply as ‘fashions’, except that that suggests some sort of superficial change on a perduring base. The availability of meanings, contrariwise, has to do with the basic materials from which people fabricate an habitable world (‘lifeworld’). Generally speaking, the axioms and viewpoints from which people fashion these ‘webs of significance’ are less than apparent to them. They have opinions. But why and how they reached these opinions is – again, generally speaking – unapparent. The forces, historical and cultural, which formed their opinions are deeply concealed; such dicta seem ‘simply obvious’. In brief: meaning is made as emergent events are configured in relation to the meanings already available – though not overtly so – in any given cultural system. These considerations apply no less to the ways in which people engage with the meanings being proposed in the liturgy (the world before the liturgy).

Postmodernity?

In so far as one can generalize about such enveloping structures as the cultural patterns of industrialized societies, the end of the twentieth century presented itself as a period of great mobility (i.e., instability) with respect to the availability of meanings. I have made the point that at some period soon after the middle of the century the major intellectual methods – whose roots were fixed in an era antedating the twentieth century by two or three centuries, the period we are accustomed to call ‘modern’ – collapsed under the weight they were being asked to bear.