Inside ML

Will work for homage

I read “clericalist” to include anyone with a master’s degree, anyone who has been certified by the diocese, anyone who has been to a workshop, or even anyone who reads ML and then uses what he or she has learned to give the impression that he or she is an “expert” in liturgy or catechesis or ministry.

I suspect that this need to become one of the keepers of knowledge, to be the one that people have to come to for answers, is more than simple human ego at work. I suspect it is an element of our Catholic upbringing. Before the Second Vatican Council, we had a very clear understanding of who had knowledge about our faith and who did not. Do any of us remember the time when, in some places, Catholics were encouraged to not read the Bible because it would confuse us? Do any of us remember a time when the usual answer to our most probing, disturbing questions was, “It’s a mystery”? Do any of us remember a time when, if we didn’t like or agree with what Sister said, we went to ask Father because, being a priest, he obviously knew more about the faith? Do any of us remember a time when a communion rail and a priest’s back hid from us from the breaking of the bread — the very action that revealed the mystery of Christ to disciples on the road to Emmaus?

The Second Vatican Council intended to shatter that cult of clericalism. The Council said clearly that the liturgy is the action that constitutes the church: “[All] must be convinced that the preeminent manifestation of the Church is present in the full, active participation of all God’s holy people in these liturgical celebrations, especially in the same eucharist …” (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy 41).

Or, as Nathan Mitchell said, “The eucharist creates the church …” (Assembly 25:2). 

If we want liturgy to work — if we want it to be the work of “all God’s holy people” — we can no longer act as though we are guardians of the oracle. Our degrees and certificates and magazine subscriptions give us no more insight into the divine than do changing diapers, turning in homework, installing software, or talking to our mothers on the phone. The daily interactions of life and the various struggles each of us endures and the joys each of us celebrates are what we bring to the altar of sacrifice on Sunday. When I bring my interactions to the table and I share them with you — and when you bring your interactions to the table and you share them with me — we are making liturgy. We are becoming the Body of Christ. We are both experiencing and effecting revelation.

For those of us who are used to thinking it is our job to reveal God’s mystery to the faithful, the idea that any old member of “God’s holy people” can experience the divine is both frightening and liberating. For our children, however, it is neither. It is natural for them. In “Post-modern Liturgy," I point out what I believe to be a shift in the way we understand ourselves as church. In the next generation, experts will be out of jobs if we continue to use our expertise as a way to control access to the mysteries. I can hardly wait to be unemployed.

ML

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