Liturgy: The Church's Spirituality
Bruce T. Morrill, S.J.

A RENEWED SEASON OF RENEWAL

Lent is first and foremost a liturgical season. What does the Church mean by that? We might recognize how Lent begins with a ritual action, namely, the marking of believers with ashes. As Catholics go about their affairs on Ash Wednesday we often notice other people with black smudges on their foreheads. The ritual of Ash Wednesday moves out of church buildings into the commerce of our world. The ritual action thus extends into what for many members of the Church amounts to a day proclaiming not only our human frailty and sin but also our identity as Roman Catholics and, more fundamentally, as Christians.

But would we readily identify Lent as a celebration? As an extended liturgical action—an entire season—Lent’s meaning rests in the larger context of the entire renewal of the liturgy inaugurated by the Second Vatican Council. By briefly considering how the Council (1962-1965) returned the Church’s liturgy to its deepest traditional roots, we can go on to appreciate why Lent so powerfully shapes our Catholic identity as Christians.

"It is the goal of this most sacred Council to intensify the daily growth of Catholics in Christian living; to make more responsive to the requirements of our times those Church observances which are open to adaptation; to nurture whatever can contribute to the unity of all who believe in Christ; and to strengthen those aspects of the Church which can summon all of humankind into her embrace" (Sacrosanctum Concilium, no. 1). With these opening words of their first document, the Council Fathers were proclaiming that the work of renewing the Church for service to the modern world was an invitation from God.

The heart of the Holy Spirit’s renewal of the Church, the bishops of the Council discerned, lay in the reform of the Sacred Liturgy, "the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed . . . the fountain from which all her power flows" (SC, no. 10). And the key to renewing the Church’s rites, they taught, lay in recovering what is most sound in ancient tradition. This may seem ironic. To serve the modern world better, the Church must find ways to embrace authentically and creatively her deepest traditions. In one sense, this has amounted to Catholicism’s getting back to basics. Although divinely empowered, liturgy is also a human act of ritual. Like all ritual, the Church’s liturgy has tended to accumulate multiple practices. Ritual can collapse under an excess of such accumulation, leaving the people who do it unable to recognize the forest for the trees. Isolated attention to rubrics or devotions sometimes made it difficult for the faithful to enter into the larger mystery of salvation that the liturgy celebrates: In the liturgy, Christ’s dying and rising becomes our dying and rising. The Spirit of Christ gives us a share in the pattern and fabric of the divine life revealed in Jesus.

The newly restored Season of Lent forms us to share in the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection. For this reason Lent has, according to the Council, "a twofold character" (SC, no. 109). First, Lent focuses every member of the Church on baptism, the sacrament whereby believers are joined eternally to Christ’s pattern of life and death. For those already baptized, Lent is a time for recalling their baptism. For those who will be baptized at Easter ("the elect"), it is the time of final preparation for receiving the sacraments of initiation (Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist). This baptismal focus gives rise to the second aspect of Lent: a spirit of penitence. For the elect Lent amounts to an intense retreat during which the Church shows them Christ’s generous call away from the darkness of sin into his own marvelous light. For the full members of the Church, therefore, Lent is also a forty-day retreat. As they gather around the elect in prayer each Sunday, the liturgy reminds them of their own temptations away from the Light they received in baptism.

Repent and believe the Good News. Turn away from sin and live the Gospel. Such are the basics of this season. Whatever practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving the faithful undertake during Lent, these need to be done with this liturgical focus in mind: Together we are celebrating the remarkable truth that neither we nor our world are left to our own wilderness wanderings. The Spirit of Christ is leading us forward through the waters of death into life at Easter. Therein lies our Christian identity.

Jesuit Father Bruce Morrill teaches in the Department of Theology at Boston College.