UNDERSTANDING THE LITURGY by John J. O'Brien, C.P.

REVEL IN GOD'S HOLY NAME, DELIGHT IN SEEKING THE LORD (Psalm 104:4): full, active and conscious participation

I want to talk about how we Catholic Christians participate in our liturgies. I shall address the goal of full, conscious, and active participation by making three statements.

The first statement comes from Jim White, the Methodist liturgical scholar. He said, " if you want to move the soul, you have to move the body."

Secondly, he commented on pews in Protestant churches. Pews first came to be used extensively after the sixteenth-century Reformations. White said, "pews allowed Christians to sit down on the job." Pews were arranged like the lines of the printing press, row after row. The printing press gave Bibles in English, German, and French to the Reformers, along with hymnals or psalm books. Reformation Christians not only sat down on the job. They put their noses into books in worship and treated liturgical experience like it was school.

Lastly, St. Thomas Aquinas said, "nihil est in intellectu nisi primus in sensibus - nothing is understood unless it is first experienced through our senses."

These three statements directly relate to our Church's desire that we worship with full, conscious, and active participation.

First, we participate as people who are soul-spirited bodies. Body movement and body posture enable our whole selves to revel in God's holy name.

Secondly, the privileged job of worship is not done by sitting down on the job, but by walking, sitting, standing, kneeling, and stretching out our open and upraised hands in seeking the Lord.

Lastly, because the Word became flesh, our senses are holy. Each Sunday our senses tutor our souls as we repeat ritual patterns of touching and tasting, talking and singing, silence and stillness, seeing and smelling, hearing and listening, and walking and bowing. The spiritual is expressed through the sensual. Understanding is shaped by the senses.

In brief, full, conscious, and active participation means our liturgical assembly uses our baptism-blessed bodies, both disabled and abled, and all our senses to delight in God, our creator and redeemer. First we experience, then we explain. Smell incense, then explain how it rises up in praise before God. Feel refreshing waters, then explain being washed and saved. Taste delicious bread and drink savory wine, then explain about the Eucharistic meal. Lay hands tenderly on a sick person's head, then explain about caring for those who are ill.

The ancients in our church followed a simple method: explain only a little beforehand, then experience as fully as possible, and finally explain through shared conversations. Experience and explanation was the traditional way of learning and participating. It is only we moderns who stress primarily the cognitive and downplay the human experience.

Each of us experiences liturgies that deeply touch, delight, and inspire us. For example, many can remember when Jennifer, our catechumen, was accepted into the catechumenate at a 12 noon Sunday Eucharist. Everyone came out of the pews at the beginning to surround her as her catechists signed her senses with the sign of the cross. We responded in song and we all extended hands in blessing. People later commented on the powerful feeling of closeness, solidarity and support they felt. The experience was charged with meaning; it explained itself beautifully.