amilies have always been the places where not only personal but also corporate identity is developed. In fact, to understand oneself as a member of a family is to have a corporate or group identity. “We Smiths have always been a proud people,” a patriarch or matriarch of the Smith family would say to the younger Smiths at the beginning of a family story. In that word, “we,” are contained both the beginning of a lesson on the Smith history and the conferral of an identity. The word “we” says, “You belong to us; you are one of us.”
As children grow, they begin to think of themselves as a Smith or a Jones, or whatever family to which they belong. The character of the family, for good or ill, becomes part of their identity. Children naturally yearn to be like those they look up to, again, for good or ill. If the Smith family is made up of people with impressive accomplishments, young Smiths are likely to strive to reach and even surpass those marks. Over time, the Smith standard becomes their own standard: “We don't do that sort of thing.” “We're better than that.” If the Smiths are all thieves and murderers, that standard might more likely be: “We Smiths have never amounted to anything.”1
The Catholic liturgy, which is the official worship of the Church, contains instances of the same kind. The Creed we profess at Mass begins, “We believe.” The Liturgies of the Word, as celebrated in the sacraments, are family stories of the Church by which we are introduced into the corporate identity of the Church. The aim of all this storytelling in the liturgy is to instill a yearning in young Christians (of whatever age!) to be “one of us,” to join us in the Family of God which looks to none other than God Himself—in the Person of Jesus Christ—as our standard of family behavior and accomplishment. The Family of God tells its story over and over again to instill a hunger, a yearning in its members for the holiness of Christ and for eternal beatitude with Him in heaven.
Liturgy is the official prayer of the Church, as distinguished from private devotions and prayers. “Pedagogy” needs a word of explanation too. This term usually refers to the science or art of teaching, the method itself. However, it derives from the Greek word paidagogos, who was a person, often a slave, who was given custody of the sons of a household. That function may have included some rudimentary instruction in academics, but primarily would have involved the actual training of a boy in those disciplines and virtues that prepared him to take his proper place in the family and society. The paidagogos was not so much a teacher but a moral guide—literally, a child-leader. One of his tasks would be to lead or escort a young boy to school. As an esteemed member of the household, he was charged with the vital task of forming the character of the heirs of that household.
In Galatians, Saint Paul uses paidagogos in metaphorical reference to the law of Moses. He says that Christians no longer need the law—our paidagogos—after the coming of Christ (3:23-26). Saint Paul intends that the Galatians think of themselves as adult heirs, as having attained the inheritance promised but never received under the Mosaic law. But knowing what we do about our need to grow continually in Christian faith, we could extend Paul's metaphor a little. Having arrived at the school of the Teacher, the paidagogos is no longer needed to get us to school, but we still have much need of the discipline he taught. The pedagogy referred to in the title of this chapter is, of course, that of Christ Himself. In the liturgy, He teaches us the disciplines of our new life of grace and the family history of the People of God.
That family history, the history of Israel, and the lessons it teaches are not voided by Christ's coming. He said specifically that His mission was not to abolish but to fulfill what had come before (Mt. 5:17). Speaking of the perpetual value of the older part of our family story, Pope John Paul II noted in his apostolic letter preparing for the new millennium:
The economy of the Old Testament, in fact, was essentially ordered to preparing and proclaiming the coming of Christ, the Redeemer of the universe, and of his Messianic Kingdom. The books of the Old Covenant are thus a permanent witness to a careful divine pedagogy. In Christ this pedagogy achieves its purpose.2
I do not mean to imply that liturgy is merely a pedagogy. I would not want to even suggest that the sacraments of the Church, the subset of liturgy under discussion, do no more than teach us what to believe or how to behave. That would be to deny that they are primarily channels of life-changing grace. The Church has always taught that not only is perfect worship offered to God in the sacraments, but God also perfects us by our sacramental worship. He bestows, ex
opere operato—from the very action of the sacrament itself—the grace to heal,
perfect, and elevate our human nature. One of the effects of the sacraments is to instill a yearning for holiness.
The Church, however, does want us to learn something from the sacraments. The very form of the liturgical life of the Church, the form of liturgical prayer, is vocal and bodily communication. A very large part of our liturgical prayer consists of petitions in which we voice our needs to God. We do so without any misconception that He does not already know them. In stating our needs we remind ourselves of our dependence on God's providence for everything. And, we may believe, it pleases Him, both that we call this to mind, and that we bring even our smallest concerns to Him, befitting the little children to whom He has promised the kingdom of heaven (cf. Mt. 19:14). Apart from the worship implied by prayers of petition, we also express contrition, thanksgiving, adoration, and all the shades of possible human response to the Divinity. Even Catholics who are familiar with the reasons and rhythms of the Church's liturgical worship learn something new about their God and themselves each time they participate in liturgical prayer.
The reason I am so quick to try to settle any possible misunderstandings about our topic is that some of the prayers we hear voiced in our churches today seem more to be designed to inform only ourselves of our obligations in justice to one another than to offer our worship to God. God seems not to come into the picture at all, unless as a kind of silent witness to our own good intentions. Jesus, so the current mood suggests, is relevant only as an example of “doing justice,” not as Savior, as the Source of all saving grace.
There is no arguing that our liturgies today are often conducted as though they were aimed solely at individual or communal fulfillment. I read a parish bulletin some months ago that reminded the parishioners that “the liturgy is for the people, not the people for the liturgy.” In many parishes that I've visited around the country, it is clear that we, or “the community,” is the focus of the whole liturgical enterprise.
However, the root of the word “liturgy” suggests that it is a work of the people, not for the people. Worship implies an object and that ought not to be ourselves. With all the talk we hear about justice today, we have forgotten that the virtue of religion is a species of justice. We owe God worship; it is His due. As an act of worship, the liturgy is for God. Not that He needs it in any
necessary sense, but our intent should be to conduct it for Him as a gift, however insufficient it appears to be. The Mass is Christ's own perfect act of worship of the Father and that makes up for all our insufficiency at worship, and superabundantly at that.
This reminder is offered because, if Catholic liturgy is anything other than worship—to the exclusion of true worship—it is, at best, a waste of time or, at worst, idolatrous. If either of these is the case, it would be better to stay home. I apologize to those of you to whom this is obvious, and therefore tiresome. No one ought to have to say that liturgy is for the worship of God, but we live in an age when the self-evident sometimes has to be explained.
Liturgy is truly pedagogical; it teaches us something. But what? In the context of the worship of God and in the midst of the transformation worked by His grace, the sacraments of the liturgy teach us about the God of the covenant and how to keep that covenant with Him. In those two things, really, consist the whole of the catechism. The creed, the sacraments themselves, the moral life, and prayer—the traditional four pillars of the catechism—all express in different modes these two things: the God of the covenant and covenant keeping.
The first part of that description is really the most important. That the liturgy is primarily worship of the God of the covenant, we have already touched upon. That God works a transformation in us by grace is vital to our concern with the liturgy as pedagogy because one cannot simply “learn” to be a saint. One can learn the science of the saints, but to be a saint one must will it. To will it effectively one must have one's will transformed by grace. Only by that grace can we live in accord with the covenant outlined by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.
Pope John Paul II tells us,
Catechesis is intrinsically linked with the whole of liturgical and sacramental activity, for it is in the sacraments, especially in the Eucharist, that Christ Jesus works in fullness for the transformation of human beings.3
He reminds us that the aim of all catechetical pedagogy is
to put people not only in touch but in communion, in intimacy, with Jesus Christ: only He can lead us to the love of the Father in the Spirit and make us share in the life of the Holy Trinity.4
A loving, intimate communion with Christ not only teaches but transforms us in a way that no other lesson or teaching method can. This is what Saint Paul urges upon the Romans in saying, “[B]e transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God” (Rom. 12:2). By the grace of Christ in the liturgy, we are not merely informed but transformed.
What is left to us, then, is to examine the method God uses in the liturgy to work that transformation. The principle captured in the Latin phrase ex opere
operato (from the work itself) expresses the manner in which grace is imparted
through the sacraments. What we have yet to see is His modus operandi, His way of working in the sacraments, whereby He uses a gradual process which appeals to the intellect and the will—in fact, all our human powers. In the liturgy, we do not simply step under some sort of transformation ray which works a change on us passively. No, God the Father, through the instrumentality of the Church which His Son has formed and His Spirit filled, appeals through the use of human instruments to all the capacities of the human person, with the intention of