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.
Through a little book of liturgical essays published in 2010, Paul Philibert, OP offered the English-speaking world a special gift.[1] The essays, containing valuable insights into liturgy by the famed ecclesiologist Yves Congar, OP, were never before translated into English from the original French.[2] The initial essay in the collection, “‘Real’ Liturgy, ‘Real’ Preaching” (pp. 1-12) lays the foundation for Congar’s pursuit in his day of a liturgy that was truly intelligible to the ordinary Catholic. It necessarily discusses the integral role of preaching in that pursuit. For reasons very different from those Congar identified, writing in the 1940’s, today’s preachers stand to gain meaningful insights from his timeless observations.
The primary concern of the essay is that the liturgy must avoid becoming meaningless by succumbing to the mere performance of ritual. Such ritualism is where the liturgy becomes the reason for the worship, because it is otherwise unintelligible. Instead, Congar draws a parallel between the grace that the sacraments re-present in liturgical form, and the transformative effect those sacraments are intended to have on the interior lives of worshippers.
Liturgy, Congar insists, is not mere ritual for ritual’s sake. It effects what it signifies in both the individual believer and in the believing community. The grace that the sacraments re-present is an encounter with the presence of God in the lives of believers. This encounter is always transformative. Liturgical preaching is integral to this transformative aspect of liturgy.
What makes preaching transformative? For adult worshippers at least, transformation is a fraught endeavor for all the reasons that conversion is not an everyday occurrence. Transformation, like conversion, is a paschal event in the lives of believers, a dying to a current, familiar self, and a rising in some form of a new self. The motivation is straightforward: fuller life, if not yet life in its fullness. If life is a pilgrimage to communion with God, then each step of transformation is one step farther along The Way.
[1] My reflections in this three-part series are informed by Jack Mezirow’s transformative learning theory of adult education, which he describes in Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning (Jossey-Bass Publishers, Hoboken, NJ, 2009).
[2] Philibert, Paul OP [Translator and editor], At the Heart of Christian Worship: Liturgical Essays of Yves Congar (Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN, 2010).
This post is part one of a three-part series.
Wayne A. Cavalier, O.P., Ph.D. is an ordained Dominican friar of the Southern Province. Ordained a priest in 1993, Cavalier accepted the position of Promoter for Community Life and Permanent Formation on the Dominican Provincial Leadership Team for five years before pursuing doctoral studies in theology and education at Boston College. In 2005, he founded the Congar Institute for Ministry Development, a ministry of the Southern Dominican Province, which fosters collaboration among providers of ministry formation to help make excellent lay ecclesial ministry formation resources available in under-served dioceses. Through his work with the Congar Institute, Wayne has developed various resources in English and Spanish.
Since 2012, Wayne also serves part-time as Associate Professor and Director of the Doctor of Ministry program in practical theology at Oblate School of Theology, San Antonio, TX.
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