Liturgy and Spirituality

 

INTRODUCTION

Liturgy and spirituality are intrinsically connected. There has been an increasing interest in spirituality, and studies have been undertaken on the relationship between spirituality and the liturgy. However the question that demands an answer from us is not so much how believers experience the liturgy, but whether believers live from the liturgy they celebrate. Believers can celebrate the liturgy throughout their lifetimes without ever really drawing their lives from it. And this is true of all believers; laity, clergy, or monastics. More than a century after the start of the liturgical movement and half a century after the start of the post-conciliar liturgical reform, we must ask the difficult question of whether the liturgy has or has not become the source of the spiritual life of believers. For only by living from the liturgy can they receive the nourishment necessary to maintain a life of faith in today’s world. This work is focused on the liturgy and spirituality; however it would be of primary importance to clarify the concept of liturgy and spirituality, giving them an individual consideration firstly.

LITURGY

Worship is a relationship with God individually and communally. There are times of private prayer and times when we pray as a Church in the name of Christ. This prayer of the Church is called liturgy. The word liturgy means the “people’s work.” In the Church this expression has come to mean the work of God’s people as they worship. In liturgy we ritualize or symbolize the great events of Jesus’ life, bringing these events into the present, and powerfully linking them with our daily lives. When we come together as a community of faith to celebrate the Paschal Mystery of Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension, it is through the grace of the Holy Spirit that we are renewed in faith. God speaks to us in the scripture readings. We speak to him through our prayers, songs, responses, and active participation in the Mass. The Eucharistic celebration is a sacrament of love. Holy Communion is the Bread of Life that nourishes our souls and fills us with grace. In all of this, the liturgy embraces our celebration of Mass and the sacraments, the Liturgy of the Hours, and the liturgical year, music and art.[1]

Liturgy is a public act done by someone for the benefit of others.  Catholic liturgy comes from the great liturgy of Christ’s life.  As we learn how to worship God, we have a pattern for us to follow: the life, death, and resurrection, of Jesus, what He did, and how He did it. The more that our own personal response is liturgical, the more it participates in the power of the principal liturgist, Jesus Christ. How we worship constitutes our response to God’s revealing himself to us.  You can worship God on your own. The Church as a communion of people is to worship God together.  Liturgy is used principally to describe how we worship God as a Body of people.  Our Spiritual Worship of God is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in us, and the Holy Spirit moves us from within to worship God. Liturgy is initiated by God on humankind’s behalf.[2] “At the heart of liturgy”, writes Schaefer, “God offers the gift of self to human beings through the agency of the Incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, and anoints them with the Spirit of holiness”.[3] All Liturgy is intrinsically Trinitarian; involving the work of Jesus Christ who prays to God on behalf of the world, and the Spirit of God who empowers persons with new life.[4] Irwin states that “the important place of Christ in liturgical prayer should be underscored and emphasized when understanding the important place of the Trinity in the liturgy.” Such liturgy, with its Trinitarian basis, recognizes that all creation has come from “a three-Personed God, who maintains it in being and nurtures it.”[5] Accordingly, invoking the names of God the Father, the Son, and the Spirit plays an important part in the liturgy.[6] The purpose of liturgy is to enable humans to enter into a relationship with the divine Mystery who ever works for, with, and in humans.[7]

SPIRITUALITY

 While the understanding of liturgy is relatively unproblematic, the understanding of spirituality has undergone some changes.[8] In view of the fact that the meaning of spirituality has not remained the same over the centuries, Dirk Smit argues that it is, therefore, not so easy to say what spirituality actually means.

Spirituality is the experience of one’s relationship with God in faith (coming to know God), and the ways in which one lives out that faith (one’s response to God, including the prayer and work performed in faith).[9] Spirituality may also be described as the way one responds to the Spirit of God, both in one’s prayer and actions.[10] Griffith adds that “the word ‘spirituality’ can be traced to the letters of Paul where he uses the Greek term pneuma to signal a life lived in harmony with God’s spirit”.[11] Sheldrake states that spirituality “is the whole of human life viewed in terms of a conscious relationship with God, in Jesus Christ, through the indwelling of the Spirit, and within the community of believers”.[12] Simply put, spirituality is that which brings a person to inner transformation.[13] Since Christian spirituality is formed within the community of the Church,[14] in that context one can conclude with Ford who writes that “a lived liturgy is all the spirituality one needs”.[15]

LITURGY AND SPIRITUALITY

Christian life, according to Downey, demands not only that liturgy should have a formative role in Christian living, but that the spirituality of the person and community should shape liturgy.[16] Liturgy and spirituality are to be shaped by one another. Worship is dead if it is cut off from daily life. When it becomes detached from reality, either from the realities of the world or from the reality of God, it becomes irrelevant.[17] “The Church’s self-offering takes place in the daily lives of its members, as we offer ourselves to God and to our neighbours in acts of love and justice and mercy and goodness”.[18] The liturgy is the continuation of God’s action in the world, and in turn, God’s actions in the world are the continuation of God’s action in the liturgy.[19] The vision set forth in the Church’s liturgy is the primary vision that must shape any authentic Christian spirituality and the primary context in which any specific Christian spirituality must understand itself.[20] This means that liturgy provides a paradigm for spirituality and ought never to be separated from the formation of humanity. The “old mood” in liturgy, as James says, concerned prescribed services in a prescribed building, while the “new mood” concerns the participation of the people in the life of a community;  a community which as part of its spirituality, draws people to maturity.[21]

Liturgy has no “practical” purpose. Its purpose is simply to adore God and to elevate man into the life of God. Its active “work” is to receive the words of God and the grace of God. Its words come from the silence in which it hears and echoes God’s Word. Liturgy trains us to hear the voice of God, by creating in us the interior silence in which that voice can be heard in the soul. For God’s voice is not loud and obvious, but more like a subtle whisper as Elijah discovered long ago: And a great and strong wind rent the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks…but the Lord was not in the wind, and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake, and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still, small voice. And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle (1 Kings 19:11-13). The point of the words and music of the liturgy is to create the silence in which we hear God, to protect and surround the silence as a frame surrounds a picture. Liturgy helps us develop the art of listening throughout our lives. For we can hear God (and the deepest hearts of our fellowmen too) only in the spaces between the louder passions, in subtle and shy whispers. For love is both subtle and shy, and God is love.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LITURGY AND SPIRITUALITY

There are a variety of spiritualities in the Church today: Benedictine, Franciscan, Jesuit, etc. but the one spirituality that is common to all of us is liturgical spirituality. The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy tells is that “the liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed, at the same time is the fount from which all the Church’s power flows (SC 10)

Many scholars with an interest in liturgy and spirituality have, through their writings, enriched the discussion on its connectedness. Michael Downey is of the opinion that worship impinges on spirituality and that Christian spirituality is not just a dimension of the Christian life, but is the Christian life itself.[22] He also affirms that spirituality concerns absolutely every dimension of life: “mind and body, intimacy and sexuality, work and leisure, economic accountability and political responsibility, domestic life and civic duty, the rising costs of health care, and the plight of the poor and wounded both at home and abroad”.[23] Absolutely every dimension of life is to be integrated and transformed by the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, Downey believes. Vatican II, which was a watershed in the life of the Roman Catholic Church, also presented valuable contributions to the discussion on liturgy and spirituality. According to Downey, Vatican II emphasized that liturgy indeed has a formative role to play in spirituality.[24] Agreeing with this, Downey further suggests that contemporary understanding of Christian spirituality rests upon the premise that spirituality needs to be informed by liturgy. Christian spirituality is given shape by communal worship, common prayer and praise, celebration in Word and sacrament.[25]

Susan White is of the opinion that liturgy offers a variety of resources for the spiritual formation of Christian people.[26] Another way in which the liturgy undergirds Christian spirituality, White says, is by providing a context within which worshippers can experience the encounter with God. For her, entering into the spirit of the liturgy is to enter into “the arena within which the triune God is actively engaged in restoring and renewing worshippers as they make themselves available to divine power”. At the same time, “worshipping in faith, hope and love allow participants to make their relationship with God visible through the signs and gestures, words, and songs of worship. By giving voice to the praise of God, to the petition for forgiveness, to thanksgiving and offering, the Christian liturgy gives participants an opportunity to express the subtleties and complexities of the divine-human relationship, and thereby to deepen it”.[27]

CONCLUSION

There has been an enormous groundswell of interest in Christian spirituality in the period following the Vatican Council. This is due in part to the council’s clear affirmation of the universal call to holiness (Lumen Gentium nos. 40-41). Spirituality is concerned with the human person in relation to God, and in the liturgy we relate to God, led by Christ our head. The liturgy shapes spirituality and spirituality enhances liturgical disposition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Jacobus Bezuidenhoud, Liturgy and Spirituality in The Ecumenical Movement: A Systematic-Theological Evaluation, Stellenbosch University 2010.

 

M. Schaefer, “Trinity: Source and Goal of Liturgy, Spirituality, Life”, Liturgical Ministry 4, (Spring 1995).

 

Odo Casel, “Mystery and Liturgy”, in Primary Sources of Liturgical Theology: A Reader, ed. W. V. Dwight, Liturgical Press, Collegeville, 2000.

 

K. Irwin, Liturgy, Prayer and Spirituality, Paulist Press, New York 1984.

 

Phillip Sheldrake, Spirituality and Theology: Christian Living and the Doctrine of God, Longman & Todd, Darten 1998.

 

R. W. Miller ed, Spirituality for the 21st Century: Experiencing God in the Catholic Tradition,  Missouri: Ligouri, 2006.

 

M. Senter, The Praises of God, in Liturgy for a New Century, Whitstable Litho, Kent 1991.

 

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[1] www.stanthony-yonkers.org/liturgy-committee

[2] M. M. Schaefer, “Trinity: Source and Goal of Liturgy, Spirituality, Life”, Liturgical Ministry 4 (Spring 1995): 67 and Odo Casel, “Mystery and Liturgy”, in Primary Sources of Liturgical Theology: A Reader, ed. W. V. Dwight (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2000) 31.

[3] Ibid, 67

[4] K. Irwin, Liturgy, Prayer and Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), 235.

[5] M. M. Schaefer, “Trinity: Source and Goal of Liturgy, Spirituality, Life”, Liturgical Ministry 4 (Spring 1995):68

[6] K. Irwin, Liturgy, Prayer and Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), 231

[7] M. M. Schaefer, “Trinity: Source and Goal of Liturgy, Spirituality, Life”, Liturgical Ministry 4 (Spring 1995):67

[8] Phillip Sheldrake, Spirituality and Theology: Christian Living and the Doctrine of God, (Darten: Longman & Todd, 1998), p. 35.

[9] Moynahan, “The Disclosive Actions of Liturgical Spirituality”, 69

[10] Ibid

[11] C. M. Griffith, “What Is Spirituality?”, in Spirituality for the 21st Century: Experiencing God in the Catholic Tradition, ed. R. W. Miller II (Missouri: Ligouri, 2006), 7

[12] Ibid, 7

[13] Moynahan, “The Disclosive Actions of Liturgical Spirituality”, 69.

[14] Ibid

[15] P. F. Ford, “Lived Liturgy, First Spirituality”, Liturgical Ministry 10 (Fall 2001): 186,193.

[16] Michael Downey, Understanding Christian Spirituality, p. 82

[17] M. Senter, The Praises of God, in Liturgy for a New Century, ed. by M. Perham, (Whitstable, Kent: Whitstable Litho, 1991), pp. 1 – 2.

[18] Ibid., p.5

[19] Dirk Smit, “Liturgy and Life? On the importance of worship for Christian ethics”, in Scriptura, p. 270.

[20] Peter Fink, “Liturgy and Spirituality: A Timely Intersection” in Liturgy and Spirituality in Context: Perspective in Prayer and Cultures, p. 61.

[21] Eric James, “Liturgy and Spirituality for Today” in Spirituality for Today: Papers from the 1967 Parish and People Conference, p. 132.

[22] Understanding Christian Spirituality, (New York/Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1997), p. 45.

[23] Ibid

[24] Ibid, p.81

[25] Ibid

[26] Susan White, “Spirituality, Liturgy and Worship”, in The New SCM Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, p. 44.

[27] Ibid