Sunday: Learning Our Part

Learning to pray and to celebrate at liturgy is like swimming. One learns to swim by swimming. We can talk about it, discuss the process, theorize about it. Prayer and worship is best discovered and learned in the doing.

Each Sunday we come to church to pray. Many pray each day to begin and end the day in God’s Presence. Not infrequently in our Catholic community, we hear “I’ll pray for you” or “please pray for me.” Prayer is something which we all do and is at the center of our spiritual life.

Most of us within the Church learned how to pray within the liturgical community by being led to worship by our parents and accompanied by our brothers and sisters. Long before we knew the intimacies of the rituals, the words, the prayers, and the hymns we patterned ourselves after our families and other believers who surrounded us at worship.

Our sacramental catechesis for children presumes that families pray at home, that they gather for meals, that they have conversations among the family members. Our religious rituals spring from very human so-called natural rhythms. We have rituals of gathering and greeting. We have normative ways of conversing, where we learn to address each other, listen, and respond. We have codified ways of acting as we share food and drink at our tables. Often enough we don’t think about these, but they are real ways of interacting. When we codify these natural rhythms and ways of acting we call them rituals or, on a popular level, “manners”.

Ways of Showing Respect
These manners, whether how we address each other, how we engage in orderly conversation, how we share food, what is appropriate attire, are the interactive stuff of human living. We learn, for example, that when someone is speaking, it is impolite to speak at the same time. There is a give and take to speaking and listening. Another example, we don’t speak with our mouth full of food or chew with our mouths open. A lack of such behavior would fail to respect another person.

Rituals or manners show that we share common values as we engage in common, shared behaviors. When we are invited to dinner, the host or hostess indicates where we are to sit and invites us as guests to be seated. Only then does the meal begin.

Liturgical Roles
As members of the Church we are members of the liturgical community each Sunday. We share common faith, common baptism, common

affection for one another. We show this in various ways:

+ We share space for silent prayer and for shared moments of celebration. These are orchestrated by the ritual. As we enter the church, we note that others are already engaged in prayer and adoration. They are genuflecting, or they are kneeling, or they are quietly seated with their eyes closed. We need to honor these prayerful moments.

+ The Liturgy of the Word is the primary moment when the community hears God’s Word. The proper liturgical rhythm is that the reader proclaims and the Assembly listens. Faith comes through understanding and God is present as each believer takes time to listen with one’s ears and in one’s heart. Silence is normative except when we respond with psalms or the alleluia acclamation.

+ The Liturgy of the Eucharist is primarily a moment of praise and acclamation. For which reason we sing the various acclamation: The Holy, the Memorial Acclamation, and the Great Amen. We actively listen and pray along with the priest.

+ Communion is a time when the community becomes the Body of Christ. The whole community moves forward to the Table. They sing as they approach. Each believer is asked to demonstrate their faith by reverent reception of the Eucharist and by their firm “Amen”. The remaining time is a mix of silence and joyful thanksgiving in song.

+ In our Catholic tradition the space, the art, the furnishings all speak of God among us. The Altar is kissed by the priest as the sign of Christ among us. The Ambo is set apart as the revelation place of God’s Word. The baptismal font is where the community first encountered Christ in his death and rising. It is there that we remember that every time when we come to Church.

+ How Church people dress says much about who they are. At one and the same time we say we are brothers and sisters in Christ, we are People made holy in our encounter with the Lord, we are people who love and respect each other.

Liturgical Learning
Within the Sunday Assembly, we are all learners and teachers of prayer and worship. Liturgical roles demonstrate a richness of God’s gifts and actions: some preside, others read, others sing, still others distribute the Eucharist, others offer hospitality. In all of these gifts we learn to pray and worship by doing what we do best as Church, we pray and we worship, for that is who we are.

CDH