Liturgy and Community: Gathered & Sent Part I & II
This will be two blog posts: one for today (Tuesday) and the other for Thursday.
The Monk Who Could Not Pray
In 1930, a Benedictine at Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, was coming apart. His eyesight was failing. He had severe headaches and could not sleep. By one biographer’s account, he could not read, and he could not bring himself to celebrate Mass.
Four years earlier he had started a magazine. He called it Orate Fratres, the Latin words a priest speaks to the people before the great prayer of thanksgiving: Pray, brethren. The first issue appeared on the First Sunday of Advent 1926, which fell on 28 November. The monk wrote more than a third of the first volume himself. By 1929 the magazine reached readers in 26 countries.
He was baptized George Michel and born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on 26 June 1890. He is remembered as Dom Virgil. He was ordained on 14 June 1916. In 1918, he finished a doctorate at the Catholic University of America, with a dissertation on the nineteenth-century American writer Orestes Brownson. From February 1924 to August 1925, he traveled in Europe on what was supposed to be a philosophy course. He began in Rome at Sant’Anselmo, under Joseph Gredt, and moved on to Louvain. Somewhere in those months, he spent long hours with the Belgian monk Lambert Beauduin, who taught that the liturgy belongs to the whole Body of Christ, not to the clergy alone. He came home convinced that liturgical renewal mattered, and that it mattered most in America.
The plan was to write. By 1930 the writing had left him near exhaustion.
His abbey sent him north, to the Chippewa people of northern Minnesota, to recover.
That is where the story stops for now.
The Turn
A man who had built a movement around praying together could not pray at all.
Hold that image, because it holds the difficulty of this blog post. Whatever lay behind his breakdown, the image carries a warning: a community is not produced by effort alone, however sincere, and the people who work hardest at it are not exempt. The question underneath every parish council meeting and every worship/liturgy committee is the same one.
Who makes this a community, and who is asked only to receive it?
Today we ask that question of ourselves, using a method Joseph Cardijn gave to the young workers of Belgium: see, judge, act. Two days from now, on Thursday, we will go back to the monk and find out what happened to him.
One Sentence on an Index Card
Take out an index card. Write and Finish one sentence: “When I hear the word liturgy, I most immediately think of ______.” Say it out loud; that is important. What we see and hear often are two different experiences. Think of them as one. Do any of your words say Mass, ritual, music, rules, tradition, obligation, beauty, boredom, community, sacraments? Do not correct any of them.
Then ask the question these two days will try to answer: “What makes a group of people gathered in one place into a genuine community?” Let that settle into your mind for a while.
Now name a concern you have in three sentences. Then, think about how a congregation can be physically assembled without becoming a community. Can a community have warmth and familiarity without worship transforming it? Can Liturgy address both? Does God gather a people, form them through Word and sacrament, and send them into the world with a shared vocation? Is the reward for attending Mass the coffee and donuts afterward?
The thesis, spoken once and slowly. Liturgy is not primarily something a community produces for God. God’s action in Christ and the Spirit gathers, reveals, reconciles, feeds, and sends a people into communion and mission. The assembly is not an audience, a voluntary association, or a collection of private spiritual consumers. It is the Body of Christ acting through a shared pattern of listening, responding, giving thanks, interceding, eating, remembering, and being sent.
See: What the Pews Actually Say
Cardijn taught his young workers to begin with what they could see, before anyone told them what it meant. So begin there. Before asking what liturgy should be, ask what worshipping communities actually experience and communicate.
What we often see. Read the list slowly and think about your gut reaction, not your brain.
1. People arrive as individuals and leave as individuals.
2. A small group does the liturgy while the congregation functions as an audience.
3. Participation shrinks to activity: more readers, more music, more movement, more announcements.
4. Some communities treat reverence as passivity, silence, distance, or clerical control. Others treat participation as spontaneity, informality, or constant speech. Both can miss the assembly.
5. Communion can sit comfortably beside social division, economic indifference, political hostility, racism, exclusion, or neglect of the vulnerable.
6. Worship becomes a refuge from the world instead of the place where the world’s wounds are named before God.
7. Parish life becomes program-centered rather than communion-centered: many activities, little mutual responsibility.
If you work in education, or sit on liturgy committees, ask these six questions of any congregation. Put these on a handout.
* Who is visibly participating, and who is missing, silent, marginalized, or unable to take part?
* Does the arrangement of the space say common belonging, hierarchy, spectatorship, or mutual recognition?
* What does the community’s silence reveal: attentive receptivity, awkwardness, exclusion, or prayer?
* Are the poor, the grieving, the ill, the alienated, and the socially invisible present in the assembly’s prayers and practices?
* Does the exchange of peace remain a gesture, or does it press on real estrangement?
* Does “Go in peace” shape how the community lives from Monday through Saturday?
Three Memories, Two Minutes of Silence
Give two minutes of silence. In your liturgy committee, class, or just a group of friends, ask them to recall one recent liturgy and write down three things:
1. One moment when they felt part of a praying body rather than an observer.
2. One moment when the liturgy felt fragmented, rushed, performative, or detached from ordinary life.
3. One communal reality, whether joy, conflict, grief, injustice, or need, that was either named or ignored.
Listen for the pattern. If the second and third answers describe the same gap, say so: the liturgy went on, and part of the community’s real life stayed outside the door.
The central observation. The problem is rarely that people do not understand the liturgy. The deeper problem is that communities struggle to understand themselves as a people called into communion by God.
Thomas Merton saw this in the early 1960s. In his essay “Christian Worship and Social Reform”, written between October 1962 and December 1963 and published long after in The Merton Seasonal, he calls liturgy a “common work”:
“Liturgy therefore expresses a communal responsibility and reciprocity which, after taking a religious form in the sacred cult, afterwards incarnates itself in work characterized by a similar responsibility and reciprocity.”
Thomas Merton
Worship cannot be detached from a congregation’s actual social habits. What the people do on Tuesday with each other’s labor, money, and attention is already a liturgy of its own, and Sunday either contradicts it or confirms it.
Judge: Whose Work Is This?
Now go and read: Acts 2:42–47, then Romans 12:1–2.— no commentary
The Greek word leitourgia can mean public service, a common work. Many Christians stop there and conclude that liturgy is the work of the people, a human project that a competent people can do well or badly. The tradition says something stronger and stranger.
First, liturgy is God’s work before it is ours. Nathan Mitchell, writing in Spirituality Today in March 1982, puts it flatly:
“liturgy is above all God’s work, God’s passionate activity on our behalf.”
Nathan would often say that in class. We were often too busy writing it down to actually reflect on what that meant.
For Mitchell, the work is reconciliation. “In the cross of Jesus, God acted to break the barriers of separation, to reconcile humankind, and to release us from the paralyzing hostility that bound us.” Christians assemble to answer that act with gratitude. They do not assemble to manufacture an experience. Let that sink in for a moment. I often flash back to grade school, going to Mass with my grandmother, who knelt the whole time praying her rosary; it was the 1950s. What question was she answering?
The consequence for community is plain, and it runs counter to most parish planning.
1. Shared preferences, similar demographics, and organizational efficiency do not create a Christian community.
2. Communion begins with God’s initiative. The assembly does not possess Christ. Christ gathers it.
3. Participation is more than self-expression. It is receptivity, consent, response, and conversion.
Here is the teaching sentence for the room or your liturgy committee: we do not come to liturgy chiefly to display that we are a community. We come so that God may make us into one.
Does that cause you any angst? Think about it first with your gut, then your heart, and then your mind. Any difference in the three?
The Second Vatican Council said the same thing in its own idiom. Sacrosanctum Concilium §7 teaches that Christ is present in the liturgy in the assembly itself, and §26 that liturgical services belong to the whole Church as the sacrament of unity. Paragraph 14 asks for the full, conscious, and active participation of all, and grounds the request, like the liturgy, not in a preference for busy congregations.
Let’s return to the monk for a moment. Whatever else his breakdown meant, it pictures what happens when one person tries to carry a communal work alone. The work is received before it is done.
A Meeting, Not a Code
Second, liturgy is a meeting with mystery, not a container of meanings.
In Meeting Mystery: Liturgy, Worship, Sacraments (Orbis Books), Mitchell resists treating ritual as a code to decipher or a lesson to master. His reviewer Peter Fink, writing in America on 21 May 2007, summarizes the claim: “Ritual activity aims to take you deeply into the world around you to the point where the One who is its source is met.“ Mitchell begins, Fink reports, with “the sober recognition that we don’t know what we are doing.”
That admission changes the questions a community asks of its worship.
The limited question The fuller liturgical question
See The graph in my post on my webdsitr allthngscyberspace.com The left column describes a consumer. The right column describes a people.
The strongest objection deserves its full weight here. Someone will say that people come to worship tired, grieving, and short of time, and that asking them to give up the question “what did I get out of it?” is a luxury of the well-fed. That is a fair objection, and the tradition answers it from the other direction. The tired and the grieving are exactly the people who cannot produce a meeting with God by effort. They can only be met. A liturgy that lifts the burden of producing the experience is the best news a depleted person hears all week.
Mitchell also refuses the opposite mistake, in which worship becomes a place of retreat. In the same 1982 essay, he writes that “Christian worship is inherently worldly” and that “worship does not create an ‘alternative world’ to which we can retreat when ordinary life becomes intolerable.” The mystery we meet is already at work in the world’s beauty, suffering, and catastrophe.
What We Carry Out the Door
Take out that index card again and write three sentences on it.
1. A gathering becomes a community when God gathers it, not when it organizes itself.
2. The assembly is a body that receives before it acts.
3. The honest test of a liturgy is what kind of people it is making.
Now in your liturgy committees, or class or discussion groups, ask:
* Where in your own parish or group does the assembly act as a body, and where does it watch?
* Which of the seven things we often see describes your community most accurately? Which one would your community least like to admit?
* Mitchell says we do not know what we are doing. What changes if a community says that out loud?
The hinge.
Return to the monk, and give only the facts. A man who could not pray went north to recover, and by 1933 he was back at his abbey. In 1935 he published an argument about what the liturgy is for. The lecture two days from now begins there.
Ask yourself to answer the question the ‘See’ section left open: which social reality in my community is named in our prayers, and which is not?
More to come on Thursday.
A sidebar here:
I was greatly influenced by the Benedictines during college and graduate school. I read and studied what Aidan Kavanagh, OSB, wrote and what Aurelius Boberek, OSB, taught, and I developed a deep appreciation for Nathan Mitchell, in and out of class, over the years.