Each year for the last 12 years or so, during the week of
Columbus Day, I have traveled to a different part of the United
States to attend a conference on liturgy. Many of you may have
heard me speak of this annual meeting from the days when I
was Diocesan Director of Worship in Providence. While I have
been out of the Diocesan Office for a couple of years now, I still
attend the workshop. It is always good to connect with people
“in the field” that I would otherwise never see, and to learn
something new about what we all do so frequently, celebrate
Mass and pray together.
This year’s conference was held in Hartford, CT, and
hosted by representatives from each New England state. The
topic for this year’s efforts was, “Liturgy: The Privileged Place of
Catechesis” and brought together the two worlds of liturgy and
catechesis in a cohesive and comprehensive way. All of us
were encouraged to take a hard look at what we do in our
ministry and see if there were not ways to connect with others,
within our own parishes and on our own staffs perhaps.
Sometimes we stick to our own areas of expertise without
reflecting on how our work impacts that of others around us, nor
considering what we might learn from one another in ministry.
The liturgical life of the parish, that is, Masses, prayer services
and sacramental celebrations, rarely become part of our faith
formation process, at least directly.
I have often noted that in CCD classes of old, we seldom
made reference in class to what we just did at Mass. It was as if
they were too disconnected spheres of faith that coexisted in the
same parish. This is one of the main reasons I felt so strongly
about moving toward a new way of connecting church, class and
home in such things as our GIFT program.
But whether a person “only” comes to Mass, or is involved
in some form of ongoing faith formation, wants more from their
lived faith, or is content with things the way they are, our liturgies
can be the best place to form and inform our faith. The symbols
that are used, the prayers that are written and or chosen, the
place of music and silence along with gesture and posture, can
teach us so much about what we believe. When Mass is not
celebrated well and appears to be ill-prepared, we all may
question how important is the God we praise if we have not
spent much time in the praising. When the prayers and words
spoken or sung together, do not speak to our particular
community and common concerns, they convey an emptiness of
spirit, rather than a Spirit alive and personal to us all. When we
kneel before the presence of God, and stand again redeemed
and sanctified through His most gracious of gifts, we learn so
much of our own relationship with that God we cannot see, but
whom we know to be with us always.
Lex orandi, lex credendi is the Latin phrase that sums up
what we do in our liturgy together: We pray what we believe!
We should also be able to reverse that phrase and still find it to
hold true for us: We believe what we pray.
Our liturgy does indeed need to teach us about our faith
each time we celebrate some aspect of our faith and life, and
our liturgy must be formed by our lives lived in faith. As one
presenter last week put so well, we need to embrace our faith as
a dance, two partners moving seamlessly together, so that in
seeing the beauty of celebration, all might come to know the
beauty being celebrated.
