Prayer The Role of Liturgy and Ritual

PrayerThe Role of Liturgy and Ritual

To the ancient Greeks who coined the term Liturgy meant "public work," that is, any work undertaken in service of the general populace. The word referred, for instance, to the efforts of the shipbuilder who equipped a warship to defend their shores, to the service given by civic leaders and to the work of the folks who underwrote the Olympic games.

Liturgy: The Church's 'Work' of Praising God Centuries ago, when the Church was still in its infancy, the same word was applied to Christian worship —and the name has stuck. Liturgy—worship is the Church's "public work.” Liturgy isn't the only work the Church does But worship is the Church's central activity, the work which serves the people by affirming who they are.

Liturgy is all those rites —words and actions— through which the Church publicly praises God in Jesus' name. • It includes the Mass, baptisms, weddings and all the other sacraments. • It also includes the Liturgy of the Hours and many other rites, such as Christian burial, the consecration of churches, vow ceremonies for religious, the blessing of water, palms, ashes and the like.

Its focus is the event which has changed human history: the Easter event The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We will explore this "public work," focusing on the twin centers of liturgical activity: The Eucharist and The Liturgy of the Hours. These two stand at the center of Catholic worship and inspire our prayer and the good work we do.

How is liturgy 'work'? Most people find it curious to speak of worshiping God as work (except, perhaps, reluctant teenagers who find Sunday Mass a chore). We Americans are accustomed to thinking of work as "heavy labor” as an effort which yields some tangible result. Liturgy doesn't seem to fit any part of that definition. Getting to church on Sunday morning —even participating wholeheartedly— doesn't seem to take the same kind of effort as cleaning out the garage or standing behind a sales counter.

How is liturgy 'work'? Consider the results We speak of grace, but that elusive quality is harder to measure than the number of parts moving off an assembly line or the shine on a kitchen floor.

How is liturgy 'work'? Sometimes we don't even seem to get results. We pray for peace on earth and go home to read the morning headlines. We raise our voices at Evensong (the Church's evening prayer) and wonder if God is still listening when we cry out from pain or anxiety.

If liturgy is work, then obviously it must be work of a different sort than what we face when the alarm clock goes off. The work of liturgy —the work of the Church— is giving praise to God through Jesus Christ. Not because God needs our praise; God could manage very well without us. We are the needy ones, incomplete creatures who look for meaning in our lives.

That's why we can apply that old Greek word liturgy to our worship: It serves us by turning our attention to God. By drawing us ever deeper into the death and resurrection of Jesus —his "work" in praise of God— liturgy draws us into the holiness that is God's. As St. Irenaeus put it centuries ago, “The highest praise of God is a holy —fully alive—person.”

We don't, of course, praise God only at liturgy. Whenever we help build God's Kingdom on earth, we are offering worship to the King. In these ways we carry on the work of the Church —praising God— apart from the liturgy, so to speak. But it is at liturgy that we do this work most publicly.

How is liturgy 'public'? Liturgy is public in the same sense a beach or a restroom or a golf course is public: Open to all. Admission is free (more accurately, prepaid, purchased for us on Calvary).

The right to participate is ours by citizenship —and citizenship is ours by Baptism. We need no special knowledge, no devotion to a particular saint or fondness for a particular form of prayer to participate on the Church's liturgy, only membership in Jesus' living Body. How is liturgy 'public'?

Liturgy is public in another sense, too: It is ritual, a set of words and actions with universal meaning. Liturgy celebrates God's presence in the most ordinary human things. The miracle of birth, the bonds of love, a healing touch, a shared meal How is liturgy 'public'?

These human experiences are recognizable in the sacraments: Baptism, Matrimony, Anointing of the Sick, Eucharist. A visitor from Germany can recognize the breaking of bread in Jesus' name whether the Mass is celebrated in English or Japanese. The music may be African drums or Gregorian chant, songs accompanied by guitar or by organ; the church may be an oriental shrine or a medieval French cathedral or someone's living room. In richly diverse ways, Christians everywhere do the same thing: They give thanks to God in Jesus' name.

By ritual, we mean that repeated action that makes up the framework, or skeleton, for our prayer. While various prayers, readings and songs change each week at Mass, the basic structure of the liturgy, including the Liturgy of the Word, and the Liturgy of the Eucharist, remains the same. On a practical level, this means that we don’t have to re-invent the wheel each time we gather as a community. Instead we can enter into a space of familiarity and comfort, knowing basically what comes next.

This is particularly important in the context of prayer, where it is not only we as community who are active. In prayer, we are always striving to create a space of hospitality, in our midst and in our hearts, where God can enter in.

The repeated action of ritual does this for us. Ritual is something that our society often doesn’t value. In the marketing-driven world that surrounds us, we would be led to believe that the new is always better, and that we must be entertained and surprised at every turn, just to keep our attention. Anything else, we are told, would be boring.

One powerful example of this is the ritual of the Communion Procession. Week after week, we process up to receive the same Lord, the same Savior, his Body and Blood under forms of bread and wine. We don’t need to vary the menu, for nothing could be more valuable to us. We don’t need to devise new ways of getting to the front of Church, since the ritual of the procession has a value all it’s own. It is familiar, and comfortable, and creates the space where we can encounter God, and one another, in prayer.

This Communion Procession, Sunday after Sunday, also teaches us something about who we are, who we are called to be. The Church is often spoken of as a Pilgrim People, a people on the way. We are reminded of the Israelites preparing to leave Egypt, told to share the Passover meal standing up, staff in hand, ready to move out where God would lead.

As we journey forward to receive the Lord, and move on, we are reminded that we have a mission. We do not come only to receive the Lord, and be with him. We come also to be enriched, empowered and enabled, so that we can move out into the world, there to do the will of the Father as Jesus did.

And at the end of Mass, in another part of our ritual, we are dismissed; we are sent out, to continue this Communion procession, bringing the Christ we have received out into the world. We do this every week. This is our ritual.

Even Protestants can find some sense of home in Catholic liturgy. One of the strongest testimonies to the unity which endures among Christians in spite of centuries-old doctrinal quarrels is the remarkable similarity in public worship. One would be hard-pressed to distinguish between Roman Catholics and Anglicans celebrating the Liturgy of the Hours. Even Churches whose "Communion Sunday" is a monthly event use a eucharistic prayer that would startle Catholic ears with its familiarity; Roman Catholics and many major Protestant denominations follow the same sequence of Sunday Scripture readings.

Liturgy is public in still one more sense: It is open to view—as open as the church building itself. However strange Sunday morning goings-on may be to nonbelievers, even casual observers know that Christian worship is what Christians do.

In the Church's infancy, that public recognition was dangerous. • The Roman persecutions drove believers underground—literally—into the catacombs. • Throughout the centuries, legal prohibition or the neighbors' prejudices have made believers wary of attracting too much attention. • Even in these United States, where the freedom of worship is written into the Constitution, old-timers in some areas tell stories of buying land under false pretexts in order to build their churches.

And build them they did. They had to—just as their ancestors had to file into the cemeteries under Rome's streets, just as small groups in oppressed countries today must find ways to come together for liturgy. Because it is at liturgy that Christians both affirm and discover who they are.

Liturgy makes us who we are Our American sense of work is not so out of tune with the "work" of the liturgy after all; it brings us to the very heart of why we do this "work." We know full well that what we do is an essential part of who we are. That's why it's part of getting acquainted. "What do you do?" we ask the newly introduced stranger. Or the question full-time homemakers hate slips through our lips: "Do you work?" We exchange introductions in the same way: "What a great workshop/kitchen/sewing room/computer system/garden! I've got a project going myself..."

Liturgy makes us who we are At liturgy, Christians define themselves by what they do. Vatican II put it this way: "The liturgy is the means whereby we express and manifest to others the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true Church" (Constitution on the Liturgy, #2).

In other words, liturgy is our self-expression of who we really are: A people who take time out from all the pressures of earthly life to rejoice in God's nearness. The "work" of liturgy is much more like play a celebration of who we are because of all that God has done for us.

Celebrating a new view of history: Eucharist "There's nothing new on the face of the earth," we say. And the observation that "history repeats itself" is older than written history. When a band of Hebrew ex-slaves made their way into Canaan, they saw that a cyclic view of history ruled the lives of their new neighbors.

Those neighbors were farmers locked in the cycle of nature. To them the turn of the seasons and the earth's fertility were life-and-death matters reflected in their religious practices. Canaanite worship was, by our standards, obsessed with fertility. Their god was Baal; their rites reminded this god to fertilize the earth each year by presenting human sexual activity as a model.

When our Jewish ancestors settled in Canaan, they brought with them not only a different God, but a different sense of time. Their God was not a prisoner of nature but had interrupted history and set it on a new course. Delivering a people from slavery, leading them across the desert and giving the Law from the top of a thundering mountain,

The God of Israel gave time a new meaning. Instead of being slaves to an endlessly recurring cycle of events, this people was in the vanguard of ascending time— time ruled by the Lord of history and destined to proceed toward full intimacy with God.

Christian belief affirms an even more startling departure from the cyclical turn of pagan time. Our God entered human history in a new way as one of our own kind, the human Jesus. Broken in death on Calvary, Jesus rose on Easter morning, and the world has never been the same.

Ever since his resurrection, his followers have conceived history in terms never before heard on earth. We live in the final age, we say; We strain forward to the Lord's return in glory and the end—the perfection—of time.

Living in the final age makes us a kind of time travelers. At Eucharist, the event we see as the peak of past history —the death and resurrection of Jesus— is an eternally present moment.

At Eucharist we step into an event which has rent the fabric of time like a worn-out shirt. There we remember Jesus' dying and rising not only as his story, but also as our own. With him, we are propelled into a new age, a new creation. Eucharist is our food for that journey into the future; the Liturgy of the Hours is our ongoing response of praise to the God who daily leads us into freedom.

A Resurrection-based calendar The liturgy resounds with a sense that the time we measure by clocks and calendars is moving us toward a glorious future. Easter morning stands at its peak, shaping our weeks, our years and our days.

A Resurrection-based calendar The week: The first Christians gathered to break bread in Jesus' name on Sunday, the "little Easter." (Daily celebration of Eucharist is a centuries-later practice.) The day the Lord rose gave a new shape to the week, to the endless turn of everyday life.

This day was different from any other day The day of resurrection stands at the center of Christian belief that time is not circular after all, but ascending moments leading believers face-to-face with God.

In the sense of time inspired by faith, the week and the year are holy; our public prayer "hallows" them —that is, proclaims and reveals to us the holiness of the time as we know it.

A Resurrection-based calendar The year: The Church year developed over many centuries. • Today we mark its beginning on the first Sunday of Advent with anticipation: waiting for the long-ago birth of the Messiah and for the Lord's future return in glory. • The Church year continues with the beginning of Jesus' ministry of teaching and healing, • Slows in Lent to recall the meaning of discipleship • Follows Jesus to death and risen glory at Easter • And picks up his life in the season of "ordinary time" • Until we celebrate his Lordship over heaven and earth on the last Sunday of the year, the feast of Christ the King.

The season we know as Lent was the first of the liturgical seasons to take shape as a time of preparation for Baptism. Then (as now, in the new Rite of Christian Initiation), catechumens moved deeper into the life of the community, learning the Creed and the Lord's Prayer in preparation for Baptism at the Easter Vigil.

Easter, the day of the Lord's resurrection, stands at the peak of time and at the peak of the Church's year. From that peak, believers viewed the rest of the year and, over the centuries, developed what we now know as the Church year.

A Resurrection-based calendar The day: If the week and the year are holy, so too is each and every day. That conviction takes ritual form in the other major element of the Church's liturgy: The Liturgy of the Hours. Celebrating the day: Hours

A Resurrection-based calendar The day: Hours is considerably less familiar to lay people than Eucharist. Apart from an occasional parish celebration of Morning Prayer and Evensong, we know it better as the "Office" priests and religious are supposed to recite each day. But it was first the daily prayer of all Christians.

Borrowing from the habits of their Jewish ancestors, the first Christians marked the hours of the day with prayer. They came together to stretch their experience of the Eucharist —that moment of suspended time which they celebrated on Sundays— over the everyday turn of the clock. They marked the rising and setting of the sun —and all the hours between— by praying the Psalms and exploring Scripture.

Those two moments —Morning Praise and Evensong— are the "hinges" of Hours, which also includes prayer during the day and during the night.

Prayer The Role of Liturgy and Ritual