Haiti—Does liturgy matter?
I arrived in Houston a couple of hours ago for the 48th(!) Southwest Liturgical Conference Study Week. I’ve been on a plane all day, and I was famished. I fled the high-priced and too-glossy hotel restaurants in search of a neighborhood bar. The Holy Spirit has led me to a hole-in-the-wall place with over a hundred microbrews, a delicious and suitably unorganic bar menu, free wifi, and a garage band playing in front of 30-foot screen showing college basketball highlights.
My topics tomorrow are “Liturgy and Catechesis: A Practical Method for Teaching the Faith” and “Whole Community Liturgy.” As I was tweaking my slides in between bites of dinner, I realized they are really the same topic from two different starting points. The first one looks at the liturgy from the point of view of the catechist. If I’m a teacher, what do I need the liturgy to do so I can teach from it. And the second looks at liturgy from the point of view of everyone else. If I’m a parish leader, how does the liturgy give flesh to and embody who we are as a parish?
What is common to both workshops, of course, is the liturgy. When I was starting out in ministry, it was pretty much a given that liturgy was the central and most important enterprise of the parish. Nowadays, that idea almost seems passé in some circles. But not to me. The world is crying out for the hope and liberation we celebrate and manifest in the liturgy.
The recent earthquake in Haiti is a painful example. How can the church provide any kind of solace for such a horrible tragedy? I saws a new report at the end of the day today, the combined Catholic effort from around the world had collected $5 million in relief funds. That’s laudable and important. But Bill Gates donated a fifth of that by himself. Catholics are required to provide as much physical relief as we can, but that is not the unique gift we bring to this, or any, crisis. We bring hope. We bring the good news that death cannot last. We bring salvation from all darkness, pain, and suffering.
And there is one way—only one—in which we bring that good news. When we offer our sacrifice of praise in the liturgy, we make present a new reality, a new reign, that is in, but not of, this world. It is our priestly sacrifice that reorders the world. Or rather, reconciles the world to its original order.
If you’ve been to Sunday Mass lately, its relevance to the situation in Haiti may not seem clear. If that’s so, I submit it is not because the liturgy has nothing to say to our situation today. Rather, it is because we are not saying the liturgy well. If we are letting our own agendas filter through on Sunday, the good news can be muted. If we are easing up a bit on the two-edged sword of the gospel so as not to give offense, then neither are we giving a clear message of liberation.
So by all means, let’s dig deep and give as much material relief as we possibly can over these next weeks and months. But at the same time, let us invest in music that stirs the soul, preaching that shakes us to the bone, ritual that moves us to holy awe, and a warm embrace of the strangers who are not only on a far-away island but also sitting in the pew right behind us.
At liturgy, children learn the sharing that should flow from the Lord’s table. Here, I challenged the kids to give to a small orphanage in Haiti. It is important for children to put a face on their giving; to know who and how they help. I offered to match what they gave up to $250 and my pastoral associate chipped in too. Within an hour of Mass, ten parishioners had joined the matching gifts. If a child gave a dollar, we can send twelve. A dollar feeds and clothes an orphan for a day at Maison Fortune. One teen gave half his allowance, another her babysitting money from the night before, a little girl asked if she could open her piggy bank. The little ones literally danced up the aisle to give – they brought about an explosion of giving among the adults. It was a great moment in liturgy, and helped many to feel less helpless before the enormity of this suffering. Liturgy always matters. This week shows that the Lord forms at our table a community of love and service, of generosity, of every race, language, and way of life.