THE PSYCHOSOCIOLOGICAL ASPECT OF THE LITURGY

INTRODUCTION

The liturgy as the action of Christ himself within the assembly which is the church has different dimensions. It is not just a body of ceremonies; it has the capacity to bring about the development of Christian spirit. It is the epiphany of people gathered to worship.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT OF LITURGY

An indispensible aspect of humanity in its pursuit for survival and identity is its ability to live faith and induce it. Faith however is a psychological process within which a person and the community in general place an unreserved trust in absolute ideals. To this effect, a prior condition of being able to meaningfully recall the series of events that led to the emergence of the ideals is necessary. Any lack to this regard will initiate a descent to self-destruction. Therefore the urgency of transferring down generations the ideals and values of its tradition is realized in every society. The realities of the evolution, formation and development are so rich that they cannot be contained adequately in gestures; therefore symbolic languages are employed in the process of socialization.

Symbologies constitute a religion when God is the object of Faith. Religion allows the experience of the need for meaning and transcendence that characterizes the human person. However the case with Christianity is not a direct reference to a generic transcendence. Transcendence in Christianity is towards a specific Modality of the self manifestation of God in incarnation which constitutes the foundational reference of the Christian religious experiences. The ecclesial community draws its spiritual horizon and life blood from this foundation. To this regard, the catholic liturgy is considered as a process within which the ecclesial community commemorates their salvific experiences.

BASIC ASSUMPTIONS

These assumptions bother majorly on psychology and theology. The psychological model makes it presentation based on a dynamic psychology. This focused on the motivational and symbolical aspect of the experience; conscious or unconscious. Within this model, the theory of C. G. Jung is most functional for the understanding of our religious experiences. In the theological model, God’s action in history is fundamental. This model sets the law of incarnation, and the autonomy of the human and divine spheres as a hermeneutic principle. However, the relation between the human person and the divine is considered as a reciprocal autonomy. Based on a static concept of nature, the theological model lacks suitability.

LITURGY AND SOCIALIZATION

From a psychological viewpoint, liturgy is the process of socialization constituted in a ritual sequence by which the ecclesial community recalls, clarifies and reformulates the foundational basis of its faith in comparison to their culture. This involves the use of symbols through which the community grows, celebrates its faith and transmits it to others. However, liturgy as a process of socialization is realized when the efficacy of the symbols used is guaranteed to be able to transmit without reservations the ideals and practices.

BASIC PSYCHOLOGICAL CONDITIONS FOR CELEBRATING THE LITURGY

Liturgy permits living and interpretation within the different tonalities of human condition, so as to successfully bring out meanings that enable living all historical situations in a peaceable by directing them towards the paschal mystery. The fundamental premises which are the basic psychological conditions to be met for the achievement of full self-realization include: firstly, the consciousness of human creatureliness which deals with the experiences of the maturing process, stating that humans have neither the reason nor sufficient forces for becoming a person completely. Secondly, Existential precariousness which with the fact that our historical form of existence is marked by a deep tendency towards death within which we set our personal identity definitively. However, learning to die is paradoxically the only developmental possibility adequate for living in fullness. Thirdly, need for transcendence which deals with the fact that historical reality cannot give an exhaustive answer to the tensions; desires, plans and ethical dimension experiences by each person. Thus there is a need for a transcendent referral.

The doctrinal aspects of the Christian liturgy do not contain primarily its values. The values primarily reside in the efficacy of its rites. It communicates a truth of experience that have a transformative power that serves as a catalyst for self realization. References to the paschal mystery open the consciousness the reading of reality. Here, in the ecclesial community, the dignity of the call to life is concretized, enabling the believer to become a channel of this gift of life to others. This brings to the consciousness the fact that everything human have meaning which witnesses to the continual possibility offered by the faith in Christ, tuning historical circumstances as opportunities of love. This instills among the people a feeling of authentic solidarity, hope and trust, because it reflects God’s listening to humanity and an expression of his creative Fatherhood in accordance to the revelation of Christ.

RITE

Rite is a codified and regulated sequence of gestures used in order to perform cognitive and communicative functions in rituals. It can also be considered the basic unit of the liturgical process. The human person notices the need for transcendence which from the experiential-behavioral viewpoint translates to an attraction towards mystery which results in the strong presence of our emotional nature. This however has incisive repercussions. However, from the cognitive viewpoint, rite tends to exalt contradictory and meaningless things, both within and without the subject.

Rite contextually presents itself as formal symbolic procedures that involve codes of communication believed to possess efficacy and a transformative power if performed and experienced in provided conditions. The diversity of roles in ritual actions expresses in a clear manner the social structure of the group and builds its protective capacity. However, in religious rite some elements enable the community to maintain the transcendent and universal nature of the religious event. The premises for the celebration and understanding, in a symbolic sense the meaning of religious rite is found in psychological structure.

From a personal view point, ritual ability develops from early childhood where experiences in relation to significant figures and environment overcome the functionality of behavior to give them a symbolic value. However, with maturing functions one becomes aware of some instances of the collective unconscious that stimulates the achievement of a full and authentic identity. For example Jung postulates a specific archetype of transformation which stimulates the individual to consciously be inserted into the changing rhythm of existence. The intensity and the ambiguity of the stimulus, if accepted, can bring the awareness that transformation cannot be satisfied by settling on the ego level but require quantitative leap; the activation of the transcendent function. The individual thus searches for a suitable setting for individuation, which indeed can be a religion with its own rite.

They psychodynamic viewpoint maintains that religious rite is linked to myth in its proclamation which aims at explaining reality through symbolic narration which verifies the subjectification and objectification of the external reality and the interior world respectively. In every myth there is a specific phase of the development of collective social conscience shines through, but it is atemporal.

The quality of myth is modified by Christian rite bearing reference to the logos. On one hand it historicizes it based on the life of Jesus, on the other hand it redefines the experience of time. The complexity of Christian rite is based on the myth of Jesus following two itineraries: the first sacralizes the five great rites of passage in the life of each person endowing them with meaning for the Christian proclamation. The liturgical calendar is structure with the transitional moments of Jesus’ life consciously inserted the celebrating community and the whole of humanity through a symbolic translation into the divine creative action. The second symbolic itinerary the Eucharist, by symbolically ritualizing the moments of the transition-initiation of Jesus, constantly stimulates the activation of Christian individuation. Therefore Christian rite presupposes and establishes a bond between the supercreatural and the creatural reality bonded in the divinized humanity of Jesus. The constant appeal to this myth communicates to the assembly the transforming power, and rendering him symbolically present is gradually accepting God’s transforming action until salvation is attained. Rite expresses the faith of the community towards the preserved, accepted and verified ideals. The rite also anticipates the ideals and the promises yet to be effected by appealing to the future as a horizon to measure historical pledge. By appealing to Christ, rite constitute the cognizance and the striving the community experience and express correctly the relational modalities and the vital offerings that anticipate and prepare in history the fullness of time.

BODY AND RITE

The body of the rite is the most significant and symbolic. It communicates constantly in a perceptible manner the transformative action of rite. The body is the repository of memory without which liturgy won’t be possible. Through the body rite expresses and effects the transformation of the person and establishes communion among the celebrants and train them towards the expression of the cosmic direction of the sacred. In the body, rite inscribes the premonition of the victory over death and the sign of supernatural identity. The gestures allow for the unveiling of latent meanings and transform them into newness. The body is the symbolic place for composing the conflict between self-realization and self destruction; salvation and sin. The reference to Jesus’ body is granted to us to experience the spirit-matter. The intimate contact in the Eucharistic incorporation is an immediate memory of the law of incarnation; it doesn’t evade the human but surpasses habitual human responses. In the body and with the body, rite invites us not to remove the breadth and depth of human desire, but to experience it with great awareness in order to tend towards the source and not the outlet of the desire, towards the radicalness of the question and not the persistence of the answer. Living this experience of the unification of life is only corporal, however, it does not end with the spirit-body split but in intuition which is mysterious, until we attain the perfect stature of the children of God.

MEMORY

This is the chain of remembrances which allows the person identity and ideation. Remembering the primary undertaking and task of rite is a recall that engenders unity from dispersion. Our subjectivity succeeds in effecting the differentiation between self and outer reality that builds and allow the stabilization of identity only in unity. Without the process of activating memory which enable us to recognize our own thoughts, sentiments and gestures there would be no identity or reality perceived as a sequence related to one another. By recalling, one comes to the awareness of his own peculiarity. From the personal point of view it offers a clear perception of ephemeral character of all action which is precisely a search for meaning. Destroying the memory is same as destroying the basis of identity and t continuity of time; memory is not passive but constructive; recalling a memory rebuilds, selects, chooses, transforms, searches, makes history and opens the continuity of the future. The efficacy and influence of the past depends on the decision of the present, to remove or to assume it.  Disregarding it imply the temptation to forget and deactivate the creative-transformative potential of memory.  Recalling a memory pre-figures the future and creates history so that the emerging newness can be deciphered and freed from cultural backwardness in order to liberate perceptible and efficacious energies capable of giving consistent form with the present culture. This implies the actualization of the salvific experience that are transmitted by the tradition, with this we can take decisions adequate to the demands of life and make the ideals, values and behavioral models lived and proposed by Christ historically present.

EMOTIONS

The action of rite which is transformative sinks into the emotions and makes them constructively incisive factors in life orientation. Liturgy does not Passover fundamental emotions and avoids reducing them too. However, the potentiality of liturgical celebration in supporting identity and guiding towards the recovery of meaning are very evident in the rites that bedeck the liturgy of the dead. They show that one who finds death, the interruption of affective bonds, in his path can express emotions without the fear of losing identity. The ecclesial community deal with the emotive resonance connected to empathic understanding, and also acts by faith as a container that hinders the flow of emotion into despair or disintegration of identity. This function of liturgical celebration stands out in the Eucharist through the constant reference to the paschal mystery, where the priest plays a role of activating and monitoring a composite whole for which the ritual structure serves as the organizer.

SACRIFICE

The Eucharist as the liturgical celebration per excellence constitutes one of the problematic knots in contemporary religious experience. The Eucharistic rite is hinge on the banquet-sacrifice pair; the first element is easy for us to experience while the second is remote to contemporary experience. The path of historical explanation is always too rational while the psychological understanding can provide some help; it helps us to understand that the psychodynamic essence of sacrifice is destruction of relation with things and their affective and symbolic content. By destroying the relation sacrifice upsets an order to create a void by separating us from the bonds that are ineluctable and creating conditions for the newness of life to emerge. By representing extreme destruction (death), sacrifice imposes a potential uselessness on the values that are the basis for reality and their meanings too. Our habitual reality calls for the need for a symbolic order. To this regard, cultural change is important; a projection onto the sacrificial victim is not suggested but rather sacrifices as a separation and annulment of the ego and its habitual world.

This allows us to pass from one order to another that is not contrary to the sacrificial order. This dynamic generates a confusion of meaning and indicates the effective readiness for sacrifice.  Room is made for something that is not a repetition of the past but a source of a new meaning; this is attained only if one is always ready to lose one’s life. It is necessary that the renunciation of one’s role identity should not abolish a constant reference that helps us to understand and contain, in other that experience lived in depth and authenticity might not resolve in madness. This is possible in the Eucharistic celebration when the community experiences a passage towards a transcendent level where we learn no to live for ourselves but for Christ who died for us. With constant demolition of old structures, the ego becomes suitable for hosting perennial newness that is offered in communion with Christ.

CONCLUSION

Essential elements for a psychology of the liturgy have been outlined here. A coherent confrontation with the epochal changes that characterize today’s cultural horizon is very important. Difficulties emerge regarding the liturgy, both as a ritual complex and as a symbolic language. There is a tendency to reduce the expressive ambit of the liturgy and take up a concrete language that makes the celebration immediately usable for example as it happens in the television.