Kev note: This article was handed to me as "recommended reading" by Bishop Melczek! Liturgy as Lens for Postmodern Youth Ministry
For many years, Catholic young people in the United States were raised in a Catholic culture supported by ethic parishes and neighborhoods. Times have changed: young people no longer grow up in an environment thoroughly ingrained with Catholic identity and culture. Many young people in the United States today—including Catholic young people—have taken on a postmodern religiosity that has been called “moralistic therapeutic deism,” something far from Catholic (see Robert J. McCarty, A Brief Summary of “The National Study of Youth and Religion,” p.4). At the same time, postmodern adolescents display a remarkable predisposition to ritual. By nature, adolescents are experiential. They have entered a developmental period that requires experiential learning, apprenticeship, community building, and the development of social skills. Further, today’s young people prefer subjectivity to objectivity, pluralism to grand narratives, and authenticity to relevance. Postmodern culture leaves them seeking authentic meaning, constancy and a sense of belonging in relationships, culture, and in all of life. One the one hand, they have little sense of Catholic culture, and they have even less Catholic language with which to work. On the other hand, the richness of Catholic liturgical theology and a sacramental view of the world hold great potential for meeting their postmodern needs. In 1994, the USCCB published Renewing the Vision: A Framework for Catholic Youth Ministry, presenting Catholic youth ministry as goal-centered and rooted in the mission of the Church. It is a direct response to the many needs of adolescents, and its seven themes and eight components provide a comprehensive structure for facilitating their appropriation of the varied aspects of life in Christ. The Bishops’ vision and goals are comprehensive and thoroughly Catholic: we seek to empower young people to live as disciples of Jesus who engage our world, participate fully in the life and mission of the Church, and to be personally and spiritually mature. This holistic approach is vital to the overall growth and development of young people. It is my proposition that, in order to minister specifically to postmodern adolescents, we must use a comprehensive yet also wholly liturgical or sacramental model of youth ministry, cultivating among young people what I chose to call a liturgical asceticism. In other words, I think that liturgy has the greatest capacity for meeting postmodern youth “where they are” and for providing them with a doorway into Catholic culture. Therefore, I suggest not to abandon the comprehensive model, but to filter all of its eight components through a liturgical lens, so as to more fully engage the new generation of specifically postmodern young people. Liturgy is the place to find Catholic culture in concentrated form. It hands on Catholic culture to the baptized. Liturgy has the inherent ability to form or shape our lives in the tradition of the Church through our participation. In it we experience and enact with out bodies the language of Catholic Christianity. It is the place where Christ makes Christians, where Christ forms us into his Body. Liturgy not only catechizes through direct experience, it also ascetically incorporates persons into the most authentic mode of existence (life in Christ) and reframes our world view in light of Christ’s life, cross, and Resurrection. It does this simply through our participation. This is what is meant by liturgical asceticism. As such, liturgy’s ability to provide meaning and shape to the lives to today’s youth in their search for authentic and meaningful existence makes it the most effective means by which to catechize postmodern adolescents. Orienting our comprehensive model toward things liturgical and fostering a liturgical spirituality will engage today’s youth and enable them to experience, understand, and appropriate Catholic language that is at the same time postmodern and Catholic. This enables the liturgy of the Church to do what it does to all of us: it naturally and ascetically facilitates conversion. Therefore, in an attempt to better meet the three goals of Renewing the Vision, I suggest that comprehensive youth ministry be viewed through the lens of liturgy, allowing what is the source and summit of our faith to become the mode of inculturation of the Gospel message for young people today. The Postmodern Adolescent To begin, we must briefly address the meaning of this amorphous term postmodern. Young people today are frequently grouped into the generations known as the Millennials, Generation Y, or the Mosaics, those born roughly between 1980 and the present. Unlike any previous generation, the Millennials have grown up entirely in a postmodern culture. Postmodern culture is understood in many different ways, and cannot be grasped except in contrast to its predecessor, modernism, to which it has reacted. Modernism displayed a high level of confidence in the abilities of humanity. Rooted in the Enlightenment, it attempted to rid itself of religion and things spiritual so as to focus purely on scientific, empirical fact. As such, it believed that humanity could build a perfect society founded on human principles and structure. It was idealistic, and its breakdown was painful to the generation that experienced it. Generation X was the consequence of the modern project. Tom Beaudoin describes Generation X as “hung up” on 1980s pop culture, which became for them a form of rebellious religiosity. They came from broken families, resulting in the belief that all commitments are fragile. They came to adulthood prematurely, living as “latch-key kids,” and lacking mentors or adult supervision. They also experimented with many spiritualities, having a distinct distaste for institutional religions. Theirs was a time of political turmoil, growing up amid the anxiety of the cold war. All of this resulted in depression, loneliness and disunity (Beaudoin, Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X, pp. 8-11). Postmodernism is the cultural reaction to this. Youth minister Sean Reynolds describes five challenges that face youth ministry leaders today. These five key summations of the postmodern reaction will allow us to begin to make connections between youth ministry and liturgy (Reynolds, “The State of Catholic Adolescents,” in Robert J. McCarty, ed. The Vision of Catholic Youth Ministry, pp. 40-55). First, postmodern young people give primacy to personal experience. Use of logic and persuasive arguments do not work with youth as they did in the modern period. Rather, we must provide meaningful and engaging experience of Christ. This suggests a need for meaningful relationships and personal contact with the Christian tradition. More importantly, liturgy can provide a certain balance that can both meet the need for personal encounter and challenge youth to move into the fullness of community life. Second, this generation prefers authenticity to relevance, “Postmoderns are hungry for authenticity, for personal and meaningful connections with sources of deep and substantial wisdom” (Reynolds, p. 45). Millennials desire authenticity and meaning, and our Catholic heritage can provide contact with sources of both. Among the many Catholic sources of meaning, the Eucharistic liturgy holds primacy of place; it is the source and summit of our faith, and as such provides the heart of our theology and spiritual knowledge. There is no more authentic mode of existence, or deeper source of meaning in the universe, than the life-giving, formative encounter with the Trinity in the Eucharist. Third, Millennials have a great trust in people’s authentic stories, but not in any claims of grand narratives. Therefore, personal witness talks are better heard and internalized than when claims are made to be the sole source of Truth. Although this distrust often leads to relativism, it is in fact another touchpoint for liturgy and youth ministry. For example, the story of salvation history, proclaimed as God’s own word to us, speaks of God’s action in different peoples and cultures throughout history. Our liturgical catechesis, homilies, and other forms of evangelization can speak to the heart of this generation by subtly weaving young people’s life stories into the story of God’s love for us. Liturgies of the Word, both inside and outside of Mass, could emphasize this connection. Fourth, as opposed to the modern scientific and objective outlook, Generation Y displays a surprising openness to personal, spiritual, and mystical experiences. In Reynolds’s own words, “this can take the form of interest in the sacraments, devotions, sacramentals, new ways to pray (provided they’re not ‘gimmicky’ or transparently trying hard to be relevant), and authentic, heartfelt communal worship” (Reynolds, p. 46). Unfortunately, young people often seek to fulfill their desire for such experiences in at-risk behavior or non-Christian religious traditions. They also find it in Protestant mega-churches that cater to individual experiences of God. Again, our Catholic heritage has much to offer: liturgy is indeed the ultimate in spiritual and mystical experiences, the mystery in which we commune with the Holy One. There are five challenges that face youth ministry leaders today. Finally, due to their distrust in truth claims and relativism, this generation hungers for clarity and ultimates, seeking solid answers to life’s problems. “Traditional religions like Catholicism, with long history and rich, deep traditions, can offer that kind of solidity” (Reynolds, p.46). The presence of the Church throughout two millennia can speak volumes to this generation, provided that the tradition is presented as active and alive. Youth ministry can provide stability through a liturgical catechesis that cultivates a liturgical spirituality or sacramental view of life, helping young people find the presence of God in all of creation. An example will help bring Reynold’s conclusions about postmodern, Catholic youth together. For the modern generations, someone like C.S. Lewis could easily have persuaded a young person to live the Christian life through sound logic and argumentation. Faith was something to be reasoned to, and once persuaded, there was no longer reason to argue. It was right or wrong: you simply gave assent with your mind, and you followed through with the rest of life. Quite differently, the Millennials needs to experience God before they will believe God is real. You can argue and reason all you like, but the response will be the same: “That might work for you, but not for me”. Instead, what works with this generation are experiential, subjective encounters with Christ. An important manifestation of this postmodern sensibility found among today’s Catholic youth is the resurgence in popularity of adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and other traditional devotions. To the chagrin of some Catholics with modernist inclinations who view adoration as a devotion of at the past that fosters pre-Vatican II theology, it has made a tremendous popular comeback. What may be needed now are creative ways, perhaps through use of scripture and preaching, to ensure the connections between experience of Christ in adoration and becoming the Body of Christ in daily life. Nonetheless, this revival is one of many markers of the transition from modernity to postmodernity among Catholic young people.
Lex orandi statuat lex credendi is the basis for the type of ministry with postmodern adolescents that I am suggesting. It states that what we pray establishes at at the most fundamental level what we believe. In other words, the way a community worships establishes the content of its faith. Or again, when the Church prays rightly, it fosters right belief and practice. Father Aidan Kavanagh provides us with a helpful sociological definition of culture: it is “the continuous and cohesive lifestyle by which a particular group conceives of and enacts what its values mean” (Kavanagh, “The Role of Ritual in Personal Development,” in James D. O’Shaughnassy, ed. The Roots of Ritual, p.148). Culture is the lifestyle or way of living that is the outcome of cult. In human cult, people conceive and enact the values of their particular group. Cult is where a group’s lex orandi (their law of prayer, their rituals, the way that they pray) enacts, establishes, or makes a statement regarding their lex credendi (their law of belief, their myths and creeds). Kavanagh labels the enacting function ritual and the conceiving function myth. In other words, cult is described as rituals that put into being, and are the very source of, a group’s myths. In this light, Tom Beaudoin rightly argues that, for example, participation in 1980s popular culture was the way Generation X enacted its values, beliefs, or myths. These rituals—listening to Madonna, playing Pac-Man, or getting a body piercing—enacted that generation’s struggle to find God in the midst of their abandonment, broken homes, and experience of political strife (Beaudoin, pp. 21-36, and throughout). However, the problem with Beaudoin’s argument is that he attempts to call these practices sacramental or liturgical. He is right to say that youth gave a cult, i.e., their own rituals and beliefs. Yet these are sociological expressions, merely human cult, despite Beaudoin’s effort to call them liturgy, or Christian cult. Kavanaugh’s above definition of cult never spoke specifically of Christian cult, which he understood as yet a different thing. And liturgy, the place where Christian rituals enact Christian myths, is also much more than these tow simple functions. In fact, its true function achieves a goal far beyond the capacity of any human cult. As David Fagerberg notes, “ What cult cannot contain is contained in liturgical cult, just as what heaven and earth could not contain was contained in the womb of the Theotokos . . . . We celebrate supercultic reality in cultic form . . . . Everything we use in Christian liturgy has passed through the hypostatic union” (Fagerberg, Theologia Prima, pp. 13-14). Therefore, liturgy is more than ritual in its enacting function, and more than mythic in its conceiving function: “Liturgy is not an expression of how people see things; rather it proposes, instead, how God sees all people” (Paul Holmer, “About Liturgy and Its Logic,” Worship 50: 18-28). Our cultic ritual expresses how we see God, but the supercultic, mystical reality that we experience is the transubstantiated presence of Christ. Our cultic myth communicates our understanding of God; but it is God’s word that communicates the Myth or the cosmological Reality to us through the liturgy. Put succinctly by Father Alexander Schmemann, “It is in the liturgy that the sources of faith—the Bible and tradition—become a living reality” (“Theology and Liturgical Tradition,” in Massey Shepherd, ed. Worship in Scripture and Tradition, p. 166). In fact, liturgy enacts Revelation in such a way that those who “do” liturgy also “do” theology (and Christology, pneumatology, theological anthropology, and ecclesiology). Litugry traditions (tradere: to hand on) the Tradition. In other words, if today’s young people are looking for meaning, liturgy is indeed the place to find it. It is where we live the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Again, David Fagerberg: Liturgy is itself theological for reason of being a meaningful understanding of such questions as why God created, the destiny of anthropos, how spirit and matter interpenetrate, the cosmological presuppositions of the kingdom of God in our midst and its eschatological consequences. Granted, because of its subject matter (theos) this stab at meaning is unlike any other that the human being makes. The subject matter of theology is God, humanity, and creation, and the vortex in which these three entangle is liturgy. (Theologia Prima, p. 42) In other words, everything we believe as Catholics is contained in the liturgy, and our participation in this “vortex,” this encounter with the God of the universe, changes us and give us a theology, event if we cannot articulate it. Therefore, our participation in liturgy is an experience of the heart of Catholic Christianity, providing the underlying grammar that guides our entire worldview and manner of existing in the world. In sum, we are taught all of Catholic culture—the way of being and living, speaking and acting, as a Catholic Christian—through the experience of God and the work of the Holy Spirit active with in us in the liturgy. Postmodern adolescents must come into contact with God and need to be taught our beliefs and practices, our culture. Participation in the liturgy provides both. Transformation or conversion is our number one goal in youth ministry. Therefore, it is the role of youth ministers to facilitate this process by aiding youth to delve into the deeper meaning and function of the liturgy and, as a result, to view, comprehend, and experience the liturgy and all of life in light of the Paschal Mystery. Conversion is lifelong process, and liturgy facilitates that conversion. Liturgical asceticism is the process by which baptized persons, through regular participation in liturgy, receive the necessary formation to habitually order their lives such that they come to know and experience God in their lives. It is the discipline required for our theosis (deification). In a word, liturgical asceticism is metanoia (conversion). It is a live of conversion that takes place with and through the Body of Christ, and through which baptized persons experience the Paschal Mystery and are transformed by it so as to be strengthened to love their neighbor as themselves. It is entering into the divine pericholresis (mutual participation) and coming out again in the image and likeness of the Trinity. In sum, liturgical asceticism is the Christian life, lived through, in, and with Christ and his Body, the Church. As noted above, liturgy communicates the Christian grammar, a grammar that is not sociological but theological: its content is the Trinity. This theological grammar is neither about the precision of academic jargon nor a commitment to the rote memorization of one’s catechism. Rather, through our participatory engagement with Christ, Head and Body (totus Christus), we learn that the Christian grammar is not so much about speaking, as it is about living. Metanoia is about the total reversal of the thrust of one’s life, not merely a cognitive change in belief. The ascetic life is about learning to live the theological virtues: living virtuously makes one more disposed to prayer, and prayer culminates in the experience of God. Traditionally, asceticism is the name for the daily process of becoming like Christ. Unfortunately, a common misconception about asceticism is that it pertains only to those few radical persons who choose a life of sacrifice. Yes, in general, asceticism is about self-denial or self-sacrifice: it is costly. However, it is intended to be the practice of all Christians. Put simply, asceticism is about imitating Christ. In A Century on Liturgical Asceticism, David Fagerberg explains, “If liturgy means sharing the life of Christ (being washed in his resurrection, eating his body), and askesis means discipline (in the sense of forming), then liturgical asceticism is the discipline required to become an icon of Christ and make his image visible in our faces” (Diakonia, 1998). This process of acquiring the Christian grammar and learning to live as disciples makes us more like God. In fact, it is the process of becoming another Christ, an alter Christus. In receiving the Body of Christ in the Eucharist, we become the Body of Christ for the world. Quite literally, we become what we eat. Understood this way, liturgical asceticism is the hinge between the rites and daily life. Although this process is slow, it is very real and ingrained on the deep level of our souls. Aidan Kavanagh suggests that liturgy slowly transforms us, saying that “what results in the first instance from [the liturgical experience] is deep change in the very lives of those who participate in the liturgical act. And deep change will affect their next liturgical act, however slightly” (On Liturgical Theology, pp. 73-74). Put another way, the National Directory for Catechesis says, “Through the Eucharist, the People of God come to know the Paschal Mystery ever more intimately and experientially. They come not simply to the knowledge of God—they come to know the living God”(p. 111). Further, the continual, cyclical, and repetitive nature of liturgy corresponds to the natural processes of creation—birth, life, and death—and the lifelong conversion of Christian discipleship. We are empowered to live as disciple in the world by a primarily subconscious (yet increasingly conscious and active) Christian grammar at work within us. We are perfected over time by the work of grace through contact with the Trinity in liturgy, and in this way the baptized are capacitated to live as Christian disciples. Millennials are highly receptive to liturgy when it is enacted well, and they are given a little catechesis. Their desire for authenticity, personally fulfilling mystical experiences, meaning, and a sense of ultimates all suggest their predisposition to ritual in general. It is the job of individual parishes to cultivate these desires, and facilitate their passing through the hypostatic union. If the ascetic life is the disposition or habitual life of the Christian, the liturgy is the place in which we learn how to be Christian ascetics: it is where we learn how to be Catholic Christians. For these reasons, I suggest that youth ministry cultivate liturgical asceticism among today’s young people.
Beginning to Apply the Liturgical Lens If liturgy provides an active experience of the living God and the means of our becoming the Body of Christ, and liturgical asceticism is the process by which we are given the grammar of God and/or Catholic culture, as will as the capacity to live into our baptismal calling, then youth ministry should comprehensively cultivate a liturgical world view through the continual conversion process of liturgical asceticism. Young people need to experience, name, and celebrate God, and liturgy is precisely the place for such activity. It was youth minister Tony Jones who, in quite different language, suggested to me such a view of youth ministry. In his book Postmodern Youth Ministy, Jones, himself an evangelical, suggest adapting Orthodox Vespers as the postmodern model for youth ministry meetings. He says that the traditional Protestant model (a couple of fun secular song, a couple of games or skits, a couple of slower and more explicitly Christian songs, and finally a brief Gospel talk) worked well for modern generations, but Millennials need something else. He finds that high school students are attracted to symbolically rich prayer that provides an existential experience of God. The more intense and engaging a prayer experience, the more youth will join in and experience it with those present. Therefore, he proposes utilizing the traditional structure of vespers, infusing it with passionate, contemporary music and meaningful preaching. Jones’s theory is an attempt at a liturgical approach to youth ministry, and it has created an excitement for liturgy amid an evangelical audience. I must point out, however, that, like Beaudoin, Joes’s framework stops at a predominately (albeit not wholly) sociological or human notion of cult, rather than the Catholic theological and liturgical notion as described above. He articulates that ability for ritual prayer to convey meaning through symbols, and rightly sees its ability to shape the lives of today’s young people in light of the Gospel. Yet Jones neither reaches the depth of Catholic liturgical theology nor comprehends the mystical reality or ascetic potential of liturgical prayer. He is concerned primarily with rearranging liturgical furniture and tinkering with the ritual in order to adapt it to his evangelical theology and make it more accessible to youth. Our approach must be rooted in a more robust understanding of Christian liturgy. A Catholic perspective would understand liturgy, like the Church, as an icon of Christ (who, in turn, is the icon of the Father). The West has traditionally understood icons as windows into the divine. It might be more accurate to describe them for the East as doorways: we don’t merely glimpse heaven, but experience it, and in the process we go to God. More importantly, God comes to us. This precisely the experience youth are looking for and that which liturgy provides. Because of their developmental stage, today’s adolescents need individual, participatory encounters with God; because of their culture, they have the ability and desire to enter into the depth of the liturgy. Further, Catholic young people have been capacitated by their Baptism to live as disciples of Jesus. The role of Catholic youth ministry, then, should be to help young people delve into the meaning of the liturgical icon, to find and experience the Trinitarian reality hidden under the symbols of our faith. In doing so, young people will come away different, ascetically transformed by their contact with God. This means that our role is not so much adapting liturgies as it is enacting our liturgies well, and aiding youth in understanding how to approach liturgy, what actually happens there and, more importantly, how to view all of life liturgically or sacramentally. Efforts have been made to engage young people in liturgy. The National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry published a document in 1997 entitled From Age to Age: The Challenge of Worship with Adolescents, laying out both principles and strategies for creating vibrant liturgies that are youth friendly, helping to incorporate youth into the liturgical life of the Church. Life Teen has been at the forefront of putting into place some the principles found in From Age to Age. Although I would argue that some individual Life Teen parishes have made adaptations that are theologically questionable (namely, one often finds the use of individualistic song lyrics, separation of youth from the rest of the community, and having Masses with a concert atmosphere), it certainly tries to provide meaningful and engaging liturgies for youth, and it has also given us some creative yet healthy adaptations of extra-Eucharistic liturgies. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg—Life Teen is only one expression of the vision of From Age to Age. There is much creative work yet to be done to foster liturgical spirituality among youth. Essentially, I am simply suggesting a method of inculturation, that is, of integrating youth into the culture of Catholic Christianity via the liturgy of the Church. I am recommending that youth ministry have what we could call a liturgical predagogy or a sacramental approach to ministry. Everything that we do in youth ministry must communicate how everything can be viewed through the liturgical lens, including charitable service, prayer, work for social change, the search for knowledge, or even a disciplinary measure. By this I do not mean to suggest that everything be related to Sunday Mass, or that our youth ministry meetings should consist of nothing but masses, or that we force young people to think about Eucharist all the time. Rather, everything we do and say with youth must be related to a liturgical or sacramental understanding of the world. This could mean that service projects be explicitly undertaken in light of our baptismal calling and our liturgical mission of becoming the Body of Christ for the world. This could mean that social gatherings, picnics, or dances would be planned around and explicitly understood as participation in feasts of the liturgical calendar. It could mean training all youth for leadership in liturgical ministries. It should mean that we provide catechesis for the liturgy (e.g. understanding of the liturgical symbols, teaching and reflection on the rites themselves) and catechesis from the liturgy (reflection on youth’s experience of the rites, education for community life, and communication of the Church’s mission of evangelization, service, and justice in the world). It most certainly means that liturgical rites in the parish must be executed well so that the symbols of the tradition are apparent and can be fully engaged. It also means that we must do very well the youth ministry component of prayer and worship, providing engaging music, good liturgical preaching, and refreshed ways to engage symbols of our faith. It also means not being afraid to encounter forms of liturgical prayer like the Liturgy of the Hours, Stations of ltheCross, or Benediction, and finding ways to highlight a post—Vatican II theology through such rituals. There is one immediate question or objection to my thesis. Someone might ask, “That all sounds good on paper, but most teens I know do not care at all about liturgy, and they are utterly bored at Mass. The reality is that young people come only when forced, or in crisis moments, and even then they do not begin to comprehend or engage the sacred mysteries.” I have two responses: first, relationships are the key to getting teens to do anything. Rule number one in youth ministry is always build relationships. Only when young people see the active and enlivened faith life of adults in the parish will they be willing to engage Christ. This is true of the whole parish, not just the youth minister. Second, and more importantly, consider the young person who has gone to Mass every Sunday of his or her life and, at this point, is bored to tears. This person, who paid little attention to what was being said or done, has in fact already ascetically incorporated or assumed the grammar of God or Catholic culture, albeit subconsciously and incompletely. It is my theory that such youth already possess a foundation on which to build. The role of youth ministry is to make the connections, helping teens unpack the sacramental realities that lay behind the symbols they have so often encountered, and thus recognize the active presence of God in their lives. There is in fact a biblical image of this process: Luke 24:13-35, the road to Emmaus. The U.S. Bishop’s first document on youth ministry, A Vision for Youth Ministry, utilized this image. Notice that it is an utterly relational story in which Jesus listens to, cares for, teaches, admonishes, and communes with two disciples on the way. Notice, too, that it is a thoroughly liturgical encounter in which Jesus gathers these people to himself (despite their weary and struggling faith) and reveals himself through word and sacrament. Further, when Jesus has gone from them, the disciples themselves become the Body of Christ, going to share the Good News with others. In liturgy, Jesus actively comes to us through word and sacrament, gathers us in with all our sinfulness and lack of faith and transforms us into new persons empowered for the life of discipleship. What better model for youth ministry? A liturgical or sacramental lens for comprehensive youth ministry will form teen disciples through the liturgical life of the Church.
(Artical published in “ASSEMBLY – A Journal of Liturgical Theology” booklet Notre Dame Center for Liturgy Volume 34, Number 3, May 2008) |
by
Michael N. Buckler, MDiv
Michael
Buckler is a graduate of the Notre Dame Master’s of Divinity Program and
currently Director of Youth and Young Adult Ministry at Prince of Peace
Catholic Church, Ormond Beach, Florida.