This post continues the Obsculta Preaching Series, sponsored by the Obsculta Preaching Initiative at Saint John’s School of Theology and Seminary. In these posts, our authors engage a variety of ways in which scripture, preaching, and liturgical worship interact with the life of the faithful.
During my time in the Master of Divinity program at Notre Dame, I served as an assistant rector in one of the undergraduate women’s residence halls on campus. A hallmark of ND’s residential program is that each dorm has its own chapel which serves as a kind of parish for that community. Many dorms have a priest in residence who presides at dorm liturgies; however, some dorms do not have a resident priest and instead invite visiting presiders to celebrate liturgies. My dorm fell into this category of a “parish” with rotating presiders. This meant that presiders often did not know the community well and might have a more difficult time preaching to an unfamiliar assembly.
To remedy this problem and to deepen my residents’ experience of Sunday Mass, I chose to implement a pastoral initiative similar to that described by the USCCB in their 1982 document, Fulfilled in Your Hearing: The Homily in the Sunday Assembly. The bishops advocate for homily preparation groups as “an effective way for preachers to be sure that they are addressing some of the real concerns of the congregation.”[1] They suggest that the preacher and about five members of the congregation come together for about an hour to read and pray with the lectionary readings. They recommend seven steps: read the passages, share the words (lectio divina), exegete the texts, share the good news, share the challenge these words offer us, explore the consequences, and give thanks and praise.[2]
In implementing the bishops’ vision, I made a few intentional modifications. First, I avoided calling it a “homily preparation group” and instead described it as communal mystagogical reflection or a CMR group. Names are important and CMR more accurately describes the goal of these faith-sharing sessions grounded in the readings of the liturgical year. While I certainly hoped to improve the quality of homilies, the mission of my CMR group was broader than that. I wanted to empower all the baptized to live into their call to preach the Gospel. CMR groups capacitate both the ordained and the lay faithful to come together and interpret our lives through scripture. Rather than concentrating our attention on a single product (the homily) that prioritizes the responsibility of an individual (the ordained presider), CMR emphasizes a shared responsibility to proclaim the good news.
Second, while the bishops suggest that groups begin with the Gospel, I instead chose to begin with the psalm. I almost never hear homilists preach on the psalm (or even mention the psalm!). And yet the psalm often acts as a thematic hinge that reveals connections among the lectionary readings of the day. The psalms are also a very accessible entry point for bringing the stuff of our lives to prayer because they embody the full spectrum of human emotions and teach us to pray through both praise and lament, contrition and thanksgiving.[3] The women were invited to bring all of this to our CMR group and also to the liturgy on Sunday.
Our communal conversation always implicitly impacted the liturgical preaching event, but occasionally homilists would explicitly mention the CMR group. One homilist began, “I had the chance to join a Bible study here in the hall to reflect on the readings. One of the themes that came out of that conversation was the reality of fear.” He went on to recognize specific fears he knew to be relevant to this community because he had listened to residents: first-years were anxious about choosing the right major or getting along with a new roommate while graduating seniors faced fears about finding a job and relocating to a new home. His homily revealed how the readings spoke into those fears and drew out a relationship between fear and love that we had discovered together in our CMR group. The lay voices of the congregation were thus lifted up, and the CMR group had an impact on the entire congregation—not just the five to ten women who participated in the group that week.
During the first few meetings of our CMR group, I noticed that my residents were at first reluctant to share their thoughts on scripture. They often assumed that the magisterium had a definitive stance on each and every verse and admitted that they were afraid of saying something wrong. Instead, they would often ask the priest in the room for the correct answers. I have noticed a similar trend in other ministry experiences. Many Catholics simply do not know how to reflect on their experience through scripture and feel unqualified to comment on biblical texts or speak about their faith. However, relegating the proclamation of the word to the ordained or to experts distorts the ecclesiology of our church and stunts our mission. As Pope Francis declares, “All the baptized, whatever their position in the church or their level of instruction in the faith, are agents of evangelization, and it would be insufficient to envisage a plan of evangelization to be carried out by professionals while the rest of the faithful would simply be passive recipients.”[4] Being equipped to draw connections between scripture and daily life is an essential part of being an agent of evangelization. Francis likewise reminds us that “the study of the sacred Scriptures must be a door opened to every believer.”[5]
As time went on, the participants in our CMR group gradually grew more confident in their ability to make connections between the Bible and their daily life. This experience not only deepened their experience of the liturgy of the word but it also empowered them to go forth from the liturgy and share their faith with others. In my experience, CMR groups exceed the goals set by the bishops. They not only improve homilies—which is itself a worthy goal and should be a priority! —but they also capacitate all of the baptized together to “Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord.”[6]
[1] United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Fulfilled in Your Hearing: The Homily in the Sunday Assembly, p. 36.
[2] For the full explanation of these seven steps, see p. 36-39 of Fulfilled in Your Hearing.
[3] For an excellent pastoral resource here, see Irene Nowell’s Pleading, Cursing, Praising: Conversing with God through the Psalms.
[4] Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, no. 120.
[5] Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, no.175.
[6] The Roman Missal, no. 144
Megan Effron is a doctoral candidate in systematic theology at the University of Notre Dame. Her dissertation draws on the writings of French Dominican Yves Congar as a foundation from which to construct a theology of preaching, with a particular focus on lay preaching. She lives in La Porte, Indiana with her husband and son..
Previous posts in this series: Co-Responsibility for Proclaiming the Gospel: Part I
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