The work of the people: how to succeed at liturgy.

If asked what parish service was most important to you, what would you respond? If you're like most Catholics, you'd first say "the liturgy."

Liturgical expert Father Ron Lewinski, has interviewed hundreds of Catholics during a recent study of successful parishes.

He says, It's not enough to get good musicians, presiders, and liturgical space if we haven"t developed the spirituality of people to understand that it is an obligation to participate in the liturgy."

Lewinski recently completed ten years as head of the Chicago archdiocese Office of Divine Worship. He is currently serving as the senior liturgical consultant for the archdiocese and acting director of the Cardinal Stritch Retreat House in Mundelein, Illinois. Our liturgies lie at the heart of what the church is all about. The mystery of God is revealed in the liturgy and we, in turn, respond to that mystery with praise and thanksgiving.

The definition of the Greek word for liturgy is "the work of the people." Liturgy really is the public expression of the church at prayer a opposed to private devotions. Liturgy gives us an identity as a Catholic people.

If you want to know what the church believes, look at the liturgy because it's embodied there in ritual form and in the language. That's why liturgical reform takes so long. Anytime something is going to be changed, it goes through this great scrutiny - do those words and the ritual really express what we believe as Catholics? It's not just a matter of doing something interesting or different; it is our credo.

Do Catholics really see it

that way?

The average Catholic probably has not gone to workshops on the Catholic funeral rite, but by celebrating Catholic funerals I think the average Catholic could tell you what the church has to say about death. To stand around a casket, to sing alleluia, to incense the casket - all of those things are saying something about our attitude about death, our reverence for the deceased, and our hope for eternal life.

I just finished doing a study of 12 parishes across the country on liturgy and pastoral leadership. In every place I interviewed Catholics - and I interviewed hundreds - I asked them what was important to them and their parishes. The first thing they would say was "the liturgy." They're not going to their parishes for their social life or therapy, for the most part. They're looking for some place where they can go to find meaning in their lives. They're looking for something beyond the computer screen, something more than just facts and data and the jobs that they do.

How does going to Mass on

Sunday help someone make sense

of the stress of being an

accountant, for example?

Certainly the most obvious way is the homily. I think people are looking for homilies that connect their experiences and their world - as wacky as that can be - with the gospel.

The liturgy is also where the community gathers. I think one of the things they sense when they come to liturgy is that they're not alone, that there are others who believe there is something more important than all of the papers they carry in their briefcases, that there is something more to life. The liturgy, when it's celebrated well, gives people a sense of solidarity. At the liturgy we get a taste of the mystery of life that goes beyond the ordinariness of things.

One of the things that became very clear in the study that I did is that the more bold and extensive the social outreach in the parish, the better the liturgy was. When the parish put words into action, then all of a sudden that action made sense at the liturgy. Things like the Eucharistic Prayer - "that we might become a living sacrifice of praise" - make sense then.

What makes a good liturgy?

One important characteristic is the quality of the ministers. During my study of successful parishes, it was very clear that they had been trained, knew what they were doing, and did it prayerfully. The homilies were connected with people. Not abstract, theological lectures or pious thoughts but homilies that dealt with the stuff of life.

Another characteristic is the quality of the music. Even in the poorest of parishes there was a commitment to good music, so they found finances for it. Music is able to communicate something that words alone cannot. Imagine celebrating a birthday with everybody just reciting the words, happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. It just doesn't work.

Music has the ability to pull us together. It speaks to the heart as well as to the head. During my study of parishes, I was often invited to people's homes, and on one occasion a young was walking through the house singing the refrain from Sunday's responsorial psalm - kind of unconsciously doing it. Music has that ability to grab you and carry you into the next day.

What is good liturgical music?

Music is a matter of trial and error. Sometimes you just don't know what's really going to be good until it's been used a few times and people say, "This fits."

One of the difficulties I've often found in parishes is the musician may be just wonderful, but they're performers rather than real leaders of prayer. It's something you can't fake. You either pray it or you don't.

But many people enjoy listening

to well-performed music rather than

having everyone singing off-key.

There's a place for choir music, where I can participate by prayfully listening, but liturgy is not a passive activity. We are a priestly people and have a mandate to offer praise and thanksgiving to God by virtue of our baptism. It is not the priest's thing, but our thing to do together. After 30 years, people have all heard that, but the collaborative, communal mentality is still often missing. People say, "I don't sin." But it's not an option.

People think, "I can come late and leave early because I am not the one who is offering this worship. It's the priest who is doing it." But what if I said, as a presider, "I think next Sunday I'll come in after the first reading"?

It's not enough to get good musicians, presiders, and liturgical space if we haven't developed the spirituality of people to understand that it is an obligation to participate in liturgy. God didn't say, "Only those who now have perfect pitch, please sing verse two and three." No, God gave you the voice, and God is going to have to listen to it.

What could help improve liturgies,

aside from everybody singing along

and participating in the prayers?

One of the difficulties with the revision of the liturgy is that we're trying to celebrate new liturgy in old space, which doesn't work. You can't convince people that they are gathered as the celebrants of the liturgy in solidarity around the table of the Lord when they are seated in 99 pews in long fashion staring at the back of someone else's head. When a church is renovated, for instance, there is often a great chorus of discontent. All of a sudden people are looking at one another at worship. They say, "I don't like this; I'm distracted." But what the space is saying is that we can encounter the Real Presence of Christ where two or three are gathered with one another. It force us to see our participation that wa

What is distinctive

about Catholic liturgies?

You can find good homilies and good music at any good Christian church, but what is distinctly Catholic is our ritual, particularly our whole sign and symbol tradition. Our liturgy is, or should be, an earthy, not a cerebral, experience.

When we anoint somebody, we pour oil on their bodies. When we baptize someone, we plunge them into water. We extend hands. We fill the church with incense. While other churches share that tradition to some extent, Catholicism is especially rich in that regard. Our human flesh and experience can be a doorway to the sacred. Part of liturgical renewal is to enhance all of that so that our symbols and gestures are authentic and robust.

For example, in a parish in Santa Ana, California comprised of Samoan, Hispanic, and Anglo parishioners, each community finds cultural expression in the liturgies. One of the things that they've done is, right before the gospel alleluia, two men come forward in Samoan dress and blow conch shells, because in Samoa the conch shell is blown before an important announcement in the village. The Hispanics and Anglos have made it part of their own tradition as well.

Why is it so hard for parishes

to renew their liturgies?

It starts with the presider. He must be willing to work with the community. He has to have an attitude that this is the community's worship and not his Mass.

Another difficulty is economic. Some parishes give lip service to the fact that music is important, but there may be more spent on evergreens than on the Sunday worship.

Liturgy is also hard work. It is not a matter of being innovative and inventive but simply doing it well and with meaning.

I think a false definition of good liturgy is that we leave feeling wonderful. Sometimes we need to leave the liturgy feeling unsettled, because we have been made aware of the sinfulness in our lives or the injustices in our communities or how far we have to go to build God's kingdom. If your expectation of liturgy is just to get a pat on the back or a quick fix, I don't think it's going to last long.

What mistakes do parishes make

in trying to improve their liturgies?

Liturgists need to understand the differences in urban, suburban, and rural experiences. What I would do in a church with 4,000 families would be different from what I might do in a community of 100 families. There might be a suburban church that has three full-time paid musicians and a wonderful choir. A rural minister sees this and says, "This is wonderful. We've got to do this back home." But he can't have three musicians and a big choir. I think sometimes parishes are too ambitious.

For instance, this past Easter I volunteered to serve a little parish in Skagway, Alaska. They have a priest for services only once a month. For the Easter Vigil I had 13 people. As a liturgist from the city, it was quite a challenge for me. I thought to myself, what can I do here that I can't do at home? So we did the liturgy in three different spaces - one for the liturgy of the fire, another for the Word, and another for the Eucharist. It might be difficult to do with 1,500 people, but it was wonderful with 13. Good liturgies come from knowing how to use the space, the circumstances, and the resources you have.

Whats your view on changing

liturgical language?

I prefer that people use what is there. The church has provided us with good rituals and texts. However, most people don't know how to use them well or make use of the options that are available. Some of the innovations that have been done with language, for instance, I find to be pretty awful - not from a legalistic point of view, but just from a stylistic and artistic point of view. Even when people try to change exclusive language into inclusive language, they often end up with a hodgepodge that is jarring.

Some of the language does need to be changed. The liturgy is not perfect. If we don't do something at the professional level, with liturgists and the bishops working together, it's going to get far worse.

What revisions would you like

to see?

One of the commitments after the Second Vatican Council was that we would continually revise the liturgical books so that we don't get ourselves in the position that we were in the last time - that from 1570 to 1964 there was no change.

There are still inconsistencies in the liturgy. We say the Eucharistic Prayer is the peak moment of the Mass. The language is we, we, we - not I, I, I. Yet the priest is standing, and we're kneeling. If it's our prayer and we're doing it together, shouldn't we have the same posture?

I would also like to see options for the opening prayer of the Mass, so that it would match the lectionary cycle and the language from scripture for any given Sunday would be reflected in the opening prayers.

The liturgy also needs better translation. When we were told that we could have an English liturgy, we raced to get it translated, and now we're beginning to see that we could have done a better job. Plus, in 30 years, language has changed. Certain words don't mean to us what they once did. We must account for that.

What turned the tide for the parishes

you studied and enabled them

to renew their liturgy?

In each of the parishes I studied, they had established a very clear mission. It had an effect upon the quality of the liturgy. Once a parish determines its mission, some people choose to leave because they feel it isn't what they want to get invested in. On the other hand, new people come because it is clear what the parish stands for.

Is it necessary for parishes to develop

a formal mission statement?

The process of creating a mission statement is more valuable than the statement itself. The people of a community get together and ask themselves what they stand for and what are they are committed to. In one Santa Monica, California parish, their whole mission statement basically comes down to "St. Monica Parish, a home for everyone." It sounds like a Hallmark card, but there were a lot of fights over the implications of what it meant. It's not only a sense of direction, but it's the glue that keeps them together - their identity as a community.

What do you think about parishes

that have a main liturgy in the

church and then an alternate liturgy

downstairs?

It seems to me, that as a Catholic people, our liturgies should be a sign of unity, not divisiveness. I suggest a listening process that involves sitting down with people who like what you might call a folk Mass in the lower church and say, "What is it about that liturgy that you like? What it is about that style that speaks to you?" Decide how some of that can be incorporated into the upper church. It's not easy to do that because the upper church perhaps has found its own style, too. Catholics have to learn that there may be some things that they just don't care for at a particular liturgy, but that's okay if it's meaningful for other folks. We have to be able to have some give-and-take in all of this.

What is wrong with offering liturgies

with different degrees of formality,

especially for young kids who

perhaps can act up a bit more in

the downstairs Mass?

I wouldn't use the word wrong, but we need to discern what it is that the upstairs people don't want to deal with - all these kids running around. If that is the reason, then we need the kids there because we've got to face that kids are part of our community. We can't be people who talk about prolife and then don't want kids at Mass with us. This is one of the implications of being prolife - screaming babies.

What's the role of the community

in planning the liturgy?

I've seen many successful liturgies come out of parishes where the preachers meet during the week with a handful of parishioners to look over the scripture readings for the coming Sunday and everyone shares his or her insights. The parishioners not only have reflected upon the Word that they're going to hear and celebrate on Sunday, they've probably contributed to a good homily. As parishes invest more of their resources in musicians or even a full-time liturgist, it's the staff itself that does most of the work putting the liturgy together, but the community contributes by sharing its thoughts and concerns.

How can the parish help people

bring their experience of the liturgy

into their everyday lives?

Education is really important in this area because it not only introduces new things but helps people learn how to pray the liturgy. Catechesis should address the questions: how do we integrate the liturgy into our lives? How do we take it home with us? How do we pray at home so that it connects with what we're doing on Sunday?

John Paul II's document on the laity, The Lay Members of Christ's Faithful People, was very radical. It says that the parish exists to support the family. Our usual definition of a good Catholic is someone who supports the parish. That document turns it around. If that's true, though, and I believe it is, then we also have to help families - however you understand the word family - to pray and be in tune with the whole liturgical cycle of the church's life. Likewise, households need to share with the larger church the spirituality found in the home.

We don't practice our faith in our parish and live a secular life at home. The first church is really at home, and parishes should help people recognize their own family rituals - birthdays and anniversaries - and see how the church's rituals are connected to them.

The U.S. bishops issued a wonderful resource for the home, Household Blessings and Prayers. The intention was not to impose institutional rituals on the household, but to provide a resource where the special moments in the household can be given ritual form and celebration in prayer. For example, it suggests that parents bless their children and practice table blessings and prayers to mark transitions in a family - engagements or children leaving for school. These kinds of experiences build a momentum of prayer that leads to the Eucharist. The Eucharistic liturgy then becomes the grand celebration of the full church, drawing together all the joy and hopes, fears and burdens of a people who live their lives in the spirit of Jesus.

How does U.S. culture affect Catholic liturgy?

One often hears that Americans are addicted to happiness and that liturgical reforms in the U.S. since the council have focused on joy and the Resurrection. I think we're not only addicted to happiness but to entertainment. It leaves us a passive people. Our individualism can work against us - by people thinking, "I can have it my way," and not knowing how to work together as a community.

Part of the difficulty in U.S. culture is the loss of imagination. Everything is on the computer screen. We're into facts, we're into data. That requires a different kind of a mentality than the symbol and metaphor of liturgy.

The lack of imagination in our culture makes it more difficult to enter into a symbol system. People have a hard time answering when asked what bread, wine, oil, and water mean to them. We have become fundamentalists and literalists in that sense. Part of religious education is massaging imagination in people's lives so that they can celebrate better.

I think there are also some positive pieces in our culture that help. There's a real hunger in America for people to be in communion with one another. Americans feel alienated and alone out there. Our talk shows are a good example of that - they are an indication that people don't have somebody else that will listen.

Americans have a belief in inclusivity, that all people are one and should live together. This belief serves as an entryway into worship; liturgy is where we can begin to practice that concept.