Dear Friends,
The last two Sundays have given us a sample of the Church’s liturgical year that often go unnoticed by most because they fell, accidentally, on a Sunday. The first one, All Souls, invited us to remember our loved ones who have died and to hold them close to us through prayer. The second, Dedication of St. John Lateran, invited us to celebrate the regular gathering of disciples in church buildings. Today, we are back into Ordinary Time with the last Sunday of Ordinary Time. Next Sunday, we celebrate Christ the King.
All of which is a reminder to us of the power of our regular Sunday liturgies and the importance of our participation in those liturgies. The philosopher, James K. A. Smith, wrote a three-volume series exploring how rituals, liturgies, and worship have tremendous influence over our lives. But that influence is subtle and shapes us over the long haul. He would say that liturgies are not limited to churches but happen often in our lives. There are cultural liturgies such as sporting events, shopping malls, television, gaming, etc. He says that what we learn in the liturgies of our lives can undo what we learn in other settings. This is one of the reasons why a parent can give a child all the correct doctrine and that child may still stop going to church and believing. In some cases, the parents’ daily liturgies undo their teaching. How they live speaks louder than the words they speak.
He says that these worldly liturgies take hold of the head, so to speak; it aims at the heart, for our guts, our kardia. It is a pedagogy of desire that gets hold of us through the body. So what would it take to resist the alluring formation of our desire – and hence – our identity – that is offered by the market and the mall….Because our hearts are oriented primarily by desire, by what we love, and because those desires are shaped and molded by habit forming practices in which we participate, it is rituals and practices that shape our imaginations and we orient ourselves to the world. Embedded in them is a common set of assumptions about the shape of human flourishing, which becomes an implicit telos, or goal, of our own desires and actions. That is, the visions of the good life embedded in these practices become surreptitiously embedded in us through our participation in the rituals and rhythms of these institutions….Liturgies—whether “sacred” or “secular”—shape and constitute our identities by forming our most fundamental desires and our most basic attunement to the world. In short, liturgies make us certain kinds of people, and what defines us is what we love. They do this because we are the sorts of animals whose orientation to the world is shaped from the body up more than from the head down. Liturgies aim our love to different ends precisely by training our hearts through our bodies. In short, every liturgy constitutes a pedagogy that teaches us, in all sorts of precognitive ways, to be a certain kind of person. Hence every liturgy is an education, and embedded in every liturgy is an implicit worldview or “understanding” of the world.
Those of us who regularly participate in liturgy, Sunday after Sunday, know the truth of what Professor Smith is saying, we become a certain kind of person. We have been shaped by the liturgy. You feel this when you encounter Catholics who do not regularly come to Mass. They think and act differently than you do. Shaped by a weekly encounter with Christ through the liturgy, we become what we love. The liturgy at its very depth is preparing us for our heavenly home where we will participate in a liturgy surrounded by saints and angels. We will not be out of place there because we have been formed by a liturgy that has always united heaven and earth.
Peace,
Fr. Damian