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Liturgy: The Church's Spirituality
Bruce T. Morrill, S.J.
A LITURGICAL SEASON OF PENANCE
The Second Vatican Council mandated that the Church
renew the two primary characteristics of the Season of Lent: the
baptismal and penitential elements. For more than three decades
the wisdom and action of the Holy Spirit in this call to renewal
has become increasingly evident. Lent
is emerging once again as a liturgical season, a time not
so much of individual feats of self-abnegation as of working together
to share with joy the boundless mercy and forgiveness, grace and
favor, God continuously extends to us in Christ Jesus. The Rite
of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) has certainly played a
major role in reconstructing Lent. This liturgical process reaches
its climax over the great forty days, arriving finally at the sacraments
of initiation (baptism, confirmation, Eucharist) during the Easter
Vigil. During Lent, the sacramental presence at each Sunday Mass
of those elected for baptism, as well as other candidates for full
communion in the Roman Catholic Church, calls all the assembly to
reflect on the dignity of their own baptism and to embrace anew
the grace of the Gospel.
The action of God’s grace, however, constitutes
a twofold movement in our lives, a movement at once toward God and
away from sin. In this Gospel perspective activities of penitence
and self-denial find life-giving meaning. Christian faith recognizes
the initiative for repentance as always coming from God. It is the
attractiveness of God’s love, mercy and forgiveness revealed
in Jesus that fosters in us the desire to be close to him, to walk
near him in the company of his disciples, to enjoy doing what Christ
and his followers do because this way of life quietly rings of
genuine
peace and happiness. Our world steadily markets so many other images
of happiness, preying on our senses of emptiness and inadequacy,
pressing on us products and activities promising to fill us to
the
brim with satisfaction. The sad, even sinful, irony in our consumer
culture is that it identifies in us the deep human hunger for fulfillment
only to exploit it by promising that if we only take into ourselves
more (bigger and better, new and improved) goods (including other
human bodies) we can each fully satisfy ourselves. It never works.
We can eat ourselves to obesity, drink ourselves to inebriation,
glue ourselves to television and movie screens for new heights
of
violence and sexual exhibition, but none is ever enough. As Saint
Augustine so eloquently wrote at the outset of his Confessions,
our hearts are restless until they rest in God.
And God wants our hearts—our souls and
bodies, as well. For this to be Good News, and not merely another
empty promise, we find ourselves turning again to the community
of faith, which is the sacrament of Christ’s body now in the
world. Lent is God’s invitation to us through the Church,
in the fellowship of this body of Christ, to know the peace
of God, a peace beyond our utmost understanding, found and shared
in the communion of believers gathered around the tables of God’s
Word and Eucharist. Each Ash Wednesday we proclaim from the Gospel
of Matthew Jesus’ instruction for how we are to go about praying,
fasting, and giving alms to the poor (Mt 6:1-6,16-18). We draw
strength
and encouragement from the community of faith in knowing that we
undertake penitential practices not as rugged individualists
but as fellow disciples, encouraging one another to leave behind
whatever burdens us with false promises and to take up the search
for the Jesus just waiting to meet us in the poor. Praying, fasting,
and almsgiving, as our communal act of worship in Lent, is
anything but a program in self-improvement. It is, rather, a loving
service of mutual encouragement.
In celebrating liturgies of the Word and Eucharist,
morning and evening prayer, rites of reconciliation with individual
confession and absolution, ritual masses for anointing the sick,
we share with one another living signs of our bodies and words,
food and drink, singing and touching, that reveal the genuine meaning
of all created things, including ourselves: All are gifts from God
given for us to enjoy with reverence and mutual esteem. The Gospel irony
lies in the truth that whenever we turn to the people and places
that our world condemns as godless and worthless, whenever
we take up the Christ-like pattern of comforting the sorrowful,
healing the sick, befriending the stranger, feeding the hungry,
visiting the prisoner, we discover the soul-satisfying grace of
God. In sharing God’s self-giving love with one another, our
entire lives become the worship of God, the liturgy becomes a recasting
of our world.
Jesuit Father Bruce
Morrill teaches in the Department of Theology at Boston
College.
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