ON TEACHING AND LITURGY

We have recently been asked to consider the way in which we teach the faith and our strengths and weaknesses in this regard. It seem to me that we have available to us a great strength in one area in particular, the liturgy.

The liturgy enacts on a small scale (microcosmically) the journey to God of our whole lives. Liturgy has a movement, a building up of ideas and awareness that prepares us for the Eucharistic feast and the feast of the Kingdom. Each liturgy has this character and the liturgical cycle of seasons and feasts does the same on an even larger scale. Even the hymns are more than just songs of praise – many contain important theological teachings and foci for meditation.

The liturgy is more than just empty ritual, more than just a way to worship God but also a well rounded education in what it means to be Christian and the promise of salvation granted to us. Learning from the liturgy is not like learning from a book nor is it like classroom teaching. It is not learning facts and figures, dates and names. It is not the rote learning of multiplication tables (which I could never remember anyway!). Rote learning has its place in liturgy, true, but it is preparatory: we can learn most effectively from the liturgy when we know it by heart, when the prayers and responses spring up within us naturally, when we anticipate the movement of the liturgy, the movement of ourselves in the liturgy, towards union with God.

But, this achieved, we learn from the liturgy by direct experience: it engages all the senses of the body, the intellect, the heart, the will. When we hear the readings from Scripture it is as though we are listening, for the first time, to Christ, the apostles and prophets themselves. The liturgy lifts us out of time and space and instead we are present with God in sacred eternity, and the infinitude of Heaven. If we can carry the liturgy out of Church and into our daily lives then we are well on the way to preparing ourselves for Paradise.

Perhaps this seems odd, that is not surprising: most of the teaching in liturgy is beneath (or rather beyond) the conscious mind and it takes great effort to become aware of how the liturgy changes us. We are, perhaps, not used to learning changing us so profoundly; school learning, for example, is something we do alongside life – we take a break from the life of our souls to learn. But that is not the way of the liturgy. Instead, the liturgy confronts us with the reality of God and, rather than telling us what this means, dares to ask us, ‘What do you make of this?' It is something we must struggle with: to uncover the meaning of the reality that liturgy symbolically and often wordlessly reveals to us. We must be active in this education, we must respond and, like Jacob, wrestle with God to uncover the meaning that the liturgy can have in our individual lives. It took the apostles and then the ‘Church Fathers' centuries to understand their response to Christ and the meaning of the Incarnation and, in the liturgy, this knowledge is distilled so that we might learn in the short span of our mortal lives. I don't believe that the power of the liturgy could be crafted by human hands alone; it is God's work, a part of the bridge that spans the infinite abyss between the created and Uncreated, an abyss that can only be spanned by God Himself.

Graeme Castleman

Parts of Praise - Examining the Liturgy. CLICK HERE