Worship And Learning

Although liturgy and learning have been linked since the birth of the Christian era, this link has not always been maintained throughout the church's history. It is essential to restore the historical connection between liturgy and catechesis, as the entire congregation, including young and old, participates in worship.

Regretfully, religious educators and liturgists have gone their separate ways. Attempts to reunite their various concerns have tended to confuse the issue and distort important distinctions between them. Some religious educators have made the serious mistake of speaking of teaching by or with the liturgy, thereby reducing the liturgy to a didactic act. To use the liturgy is to do it violence. Of course, we learn through the liturgy; our rituals shape and form us in fundamental ways. But our liturgies should be understood properly as ends and not as means. Nevertheless, both liturgy and catechesis are pastoral activities through which divine revelation is made known, mature faith is enhanced and enlivened, and people are prepared and stimulated for their vocation in the world. Perhaps the best way to differentiate between the two is by understanding that liturgy embraces the actions and catechesis the reflections of the community of faith. Together they form the praxis (reflective action) by which the community is made aware of who and whose it is; learns that for which and by which it is called to live and die; and comes to understand why life is as it is, as well as what it is to become. Liturgy nurtures the community of faith through celebrative symbolic acts of faith. Catechesis nurtures the community of faith through mindful attempts to communicate and reflect upon the story which underlies and informs these acts of faith. One is not the other. But the life of faith and the community of faith cannot exist without both. And faithful life implies their integration. Catechesis and Ritual Catechesis is essentially a pastoral activity intended to enable the people of God to meet the twofold responsibility which Christian faith requires of them, the responsibility for community with God and neighbor. It is the process by which people come to know, internalize, and apply God's Word in their individual and corporate lives. Catechesis includes knowing, loving, and obeying God's Word. Social service and action are the church addressing the individual and corporate needs of those denied the benefits of God's intentions. Evangelism is the church witnessing in word and deed its faith in God's Good News. Stewardship is the church expressing God's will for individual and corporate life in the world. Pastoral care is the church ministering to the material and spiritual needs of all people. Fellowship is the church providing a sign of God's kingdom. Administration is the church ordering and organizing its common life of mission and ministry. Worship is the church providing a context for confrontation with, commitment to, and empowerment by the Word of God. Catechesis is the means by which the community becomes aware of God's revelation, comes to faith, and acquires mature knowledge, understanding, and commitment so as to judge and evaluate its life of social action, evangelism, stewardship, pastoral care, administration, worship, and fellowship. It prepares and stimulates individuals and the community for faithful mission and ministry through every aspect of its corporate life. Catechesis is the means by which the church seeks to understand faith's requirements for its liturgical life, to evaluate and reform its liturgies from the perspective of this faith, and to prepare the community for faithful participation in its liturgies. Perhaps no aspect of community life is more important than its rites and rituals. We humans are made for ritual; and, in turn, our rituals make us. No culture is complete without common beliefs and ceremonial practices. A community's understandings and ways are invariably objectified in ceremonial observances. No people group has ever been discovered, which fails to share some articulated set of beliefs about the world and their place in it, expressed in community myths. And nowhere is there a people who fail to engage in symbolic acts to sustain and transmit their myths. Faith and ritual cannot be separated. Worship is at the center of the church's life. Orthodoxy implies right ritual. The rites and rituals of a Christian faith community are central to the church's life. Perhaps that is why our rituals are so difficult to change. We, Christians, all know that it is easier and more acceptable to preach a radical sermon, than it is to change the order of worship. The structures of our rituals provide us with a means for ordering and reordering our lives. Our rituals telescope our understandings and ways, unite us in community, give meaning and purpose to our lives, and provide us with purposes, guides, and goals for living. That explains why, when our understandings and ways of life change, we will very likely cease to participate in the rituals that once inspired and sustained us. It is also why, after casting aside old rituals, we seek to form new ones. Without the support of meaningful rituals (symbolic actions), there is no meaningful personal life or political social action. Liturgy, the activity of the community, unites symbolic and social actions. Each needs and supports the other. To deny either one is to deny the whole. Because we have failed to understand the important unity between our rituals and our lives, we have improperly prepared people for meaningful participation in the faith community's ceremonial life. Liturgy: The Work of God's Visionary People Ritual (symbolic action) is an essential aspect of all life. Indeed, it is our orderly, predictable, repetitive, symbolic actions, which give life shape and form, meaning, and purpose. Without ritual, we lack a means for building and establishing community, identity, and at-one-ness in the world. Without ritual, we are without a means for making the changes in our lives meaningful and integrating. And without ritual, we are devoid of our most significant means for sustaining and transmitting our understandings and ways. Indeed, there is no choice between ritual and no ritual, but only what our rituals will be. Ritual is foundational to life. In those historic moments when the church had lost its soul, it had also neglected its ritual. Correspondingly, every reform in the history of the church has been at its core a reformation of ritual. When our rituals change, our lives change. Furthermore when we change our understandings and ways, we change our rituals. The chief problem for life in a pluralistic, secular, technological, urban world is attaining, owning, and maintaining one's identity as a follower of Jesus Christ. The claims for loyalty are legion; and the diverse communities which ask our allegiance are many. Only an identity-conscious, tradition-bearing community, rich in meaningful ritual, can help us to know and remember who we are. Life is fragmented and compartmentalized. We search for wholeness and at-one-ness in what is often an alienating world. Vital community rituals alone can prevent us from spiritual dislocation and lostness. The church cannot live with rituals that divide the generations as if they had nothing in common. We cannot afford to accept the separation of children, youth, and adults for distinctive rituals. Community is the gift of shared rituals. The needs of various individuals may differ, but we grow only when we share our differences in community. Peer group isolation prevents growth. When we permit our rites of community to address the needs of some particular age group alone, everyone suffers. The norm for the church's community rite is the Lord's Supper or Eucharist, which by its very nature is inclusive of all. The current trend, in which people are encouraged to create separate rituals for various age groups, can be divisive. The function of community rites is to form unity, not division. Besides, each generation needs the insights, experiences, and contributions of the others if any are to grow. We need to conserve a memory and maintain a tradition, just as we need to nurture visions and the incarnation of futuristic expressions. Without both continuity and change, we cannot maintain security and identity in the present. If our community rituals have ignored the needs of any generation or have been dominated by any particular generation, they need to be reformed and reshaped until all feel at home in them and all are stretched to newness of faith and life. We do not need special rites of community for children or youth, but we do need a place within our regular community rituals that speaks to children, youth, and adults. A Liturgical Catechesis One challenge confronting the church is that of integrating education, worship, fellowship, and service. At the core of this unified understanding of ministry is worship. And at the center of worship is God's Word. What follows, however, is not a program, but images of the corporate life of children, youth, and adults in the church, which speaks to this integration. But first, we must reconsider the Eucharist. The norm for Christian life is the celebration of the Eucharist. This celebration is best understood as a joyful gathering of God's storytelling people to proclaim their faith and share a common meal with their risen Lord so as to be united in community and be refreshed and empowered for ministry in the world. This festive gathering is not so much a private, passive, individualistic occasion as it is a public, active, corporate activity. It is not a subjective act, in which we do something either for or to ourselves. Neither is it an objective act, through which we do something either for or to God. Rather, it is an occasion for the community to gratefully encounter God in Jesus Christ and act with God in the transformation of life and of our lives. In the most recent past, we have tended to think of this Holy Communion in terms of our extreme unworthiness, depravity, and sin, a memorial for a dead friend or a solemn wake to mourn our condition. Is it not also necessary to understand Holy Communion in terms of our having been made worthy by Christ's passion and resurrection to stand joyfully before God—a cheerful thanksgiving, a victory party to celebrate God's Good News? Imagine a congregation in which such a festive Eucharist is at the heart of its common life. Within such a congregation, children, youth, and adults, along with their minister, might gather regularly to reflect upon and plan for its weekly celebration. Imagine a congregation gathering for an hour of catechesis before the morning family Eucharist. The Eucharist is then followed by a family fellowship meal, at which reports and intentions for ministry in the world could be made and celebrated. Only our imaginations hinder the development of creative, corporate life in a learning and witnessing community of Christian faith. The challenge we face is clear. We need to integrate our lives of ministry and mission within a Spirit-filled body of committed, baptized Christians, who weekly gather to prepare and celebrate the Eucharist meaningfully and then scatter refreshed to live the Eucharist in the world. That is what it means to unite catechesis and liturgy within a faithful community of Christian faith.