Our Communion, Our Peace, Our Promise

Our Communion, Our Peace, Our Promise: Pastoral Letter on the Liturgy

On Sunday, How Do We Gather?

Everything that happens before the first scripture reading is meant to help us assemble. That means gathering together many individuals as one community at prayer, but it also means recollecting ourselves personally-not by leaving behind the cares and distractions of home and work, but by bringing them into the gospel's light.

So we gather, one by one, household by household, passing through the doors of this parish church of ours, greeting one another, taking our places. This building called a "church" is a kind of living room of the family of God-it is our room when we assemble as the Church. Here we are at home.

What matters most is that the room allows us all to gather closely, see one another's faces, be truly present to one another. The common focus is the holy table...and the stand where the scriptures are read. But liturgy is not a performance, and we are no audience. Liturgy is an activity...

As members of the assembly, we should be there-we should be assembled-before the liturgy begins. Coming late or at the last minute...says we are only spectators dropping in to see a performance. But the liturgy is ours. To come late or leave early breaks the very spirit of the assembly. Come early instead, to greet others, to pray quietly, to center your thoughts on the Lord to whose table who have been invited...bring the concerns and problems that occupy you, all the people you carry in your heart.

How we begin the liturgy will vary somewhat from season to season...Always we make the sign of the cross, respond to the greeting of the one who presides...and join in the opening prayer of the Mass. Usually we sing either an opening hymn or the "Lord have mercy" or the Gloria. The familiar and lovely routine leads us into community prayer.

The sign of the cross should be made with reverence and attention. By this simple gesture we identify ourselves as Christians. This sign marked us even before baptism and will mark us even after death.

We respond to the presider's greeting and give him our full attention. When he extends the invitation, "Let us pray," we welcome the silent time to gather ourselves in stillness, so that we can enter fully into the opening prayer, unique to each Sunday, which places us in communion with the Church throughout the world.

Singing within the entrance rite is a wonderful way for us to realize that we are a community at prayer. Cantors and those who play musical instruments select and gradually teach people those compositions which will draw forth their song. Here, and throughout the liturgy, music is not a decoration but part of the central action itself. What we do in liturgy is too vast and too deep to be left to our speaking voices. We need music so that we can fully express what we are about.

As the one who presides over the assembly, the priest has an important service to render in these introductory moments. Standing by his chair, he gives us his full attention as he leads us in the sign of the cross, greets us, and invites us to join in the opening prayer. Additional words, if any, should be very few, so that the cross, the greeting, and the prayer stand out and are not rushed.

If we gather as we ought-singing together, being silent together, responding together-we will be a community praying, and know that we are such.

How Do We Listen to the Word?

From the first reading through the prayers of intercession we are engaged in the liturgy of the word. Most of our "doing" at this part of the Mass is listening. On Sundays we listen to three readings from the scriptures and the homily.

This kind of listening is not passive-it is something we do. At these moments in the Mass the liturgical action is not just reading and preaching, it is listening. Readers and homilist are servants to the listening assembly.

In the liturgy we are schooled in the art of listening. What we do here, we are to do with our lives-be good listeners to one another, to the Lord, to the world with all its needs.

We usually have a reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, one from the writings of the New Testament, and one from the gospels. Every three years the Church reads through most of the four gospels, much of the New Testament, and scattered selections from the Old Testament.

The Council used the image of a pilgrimage in speaking of the Church. We are on a journey, not only as individuals but as a Church living out corporate life down through the centuries. On this journey we carry a book, our scriptures. Each week we gather, and in our midst the book is opened and read. Its words are heard over and over again. They have come down to us through dozens and even hundreds of generations. We in turn read them to another generation and so entrust the book to our children. In these stories, visions, poems, letters-all sorts of writing-we Christians find again and again the meaning of our own journey, the Lord who is our way and truth and life.

Our listening, then, is not like the listening to a lecture, not like listening to a play. It is listening with the whole self, mind and heart and soul. We do not expect to be entertained or to learn new facts, but to hear God's word proclaimed simply and with power: the word of God spoken again to the Church.

What helps us listen? Several things are important.

First: Lectors, deacons, and priests must read as the storytellers of the community...Story and storyteller become one...The lives of all who read publicly should embody the words they proclaim.

The second element for good listening is this: Unless you have difficulty in hearing, I suggest you give full attention to the reader and not rely on a booklet or hymnal containing the scripture texts. A reader lacks inducement to read as well as possible if others are following their own texts, for then the bond of communication is broken. We should fix our eyes on the reader and give full attention to the living word.

Third: It would be well if all of us who listen to the scriptures on Sunday prepared by reading scripture at home during the week-especially by studying and reflecting on the texts we will hear on the following Sunday.

Fourth and last: At the liturgy, the readings are to be surrounded with reverence, with honor. This means many things: reverent use of a beautiful lectionary, a period of silence after the first and second readings, a sung acclamation of the gospel.

The psalm is especially important. As we chant its refrain, we are learning the Church's most basic prayerbook.

We all recognize how important the homily is. You want good homilies; you need good homilies; you deserve good homilies.

The homily is the assembly's conversation with the day's scripture readings. Only by respecting both scripture and the community can the homilist speak for and to the assembly, bringing it together in this time and place with this Sunday's scriptures.

The reforms which followed Vatican II reintroduced the prayer of the faithful (the general intercessions) into the Roman liturgy. This prayer is a litany: One after another the needs of the world and the Church are brought before the assembly, and to each we respond with prayer.

How Do We Give Praise and Thanks?

Now for the first time in the liturgy, our attention is focused on the altar. We bring bread and wine to be placed there...The unleavened bread is obviously not our usual bread but a simple bread, a bread of the poor. In this bread we cast our lot with the poor, knowing ourselves-however materially affluent-to be poor people, needy, hungry. Unless we acknowledge our hunger, we have no place at this table. How else can God feed us?

We also bring forward wine. Like bread, it is "Fruit of the earth and work of human hands," something simple, something from our tables, a drink of ordinary delight.

When the table has been prepared, we stand and are invited to lift up our hearts to the Lord and give Him thanks and praise. Thus begins the Eucharistic prayer in which we do indeed give thanks to God our Creator for all the work of salvation, but especially for the paschal mystery.

So this Eucharistic prayer, too, is the work of the assembly.

In every Eucharistic prayer the whole assembly joins the proclamation of praise led by the priest. By singing the "Holy, holy," the memorial acclamation, and the "Amen," we claim the prayer as our own. These acclamations are so important that even if we sing nothing else at the Mass, we sing these affirmations of faith.

These Eucharistic prayers express in words the action we perform...Renewed by the Holy Spirit, we lift up all the elements of life in praise and offer ourselves to be spent in sacrifice.

We are called to the Lord's table less for solace than for strength, not so much for comfort as for service. This prayer, then, is prayed not only over the bread and wine, so that they become Christ's body and blood for us to share; it is prayed over the entire assembly so that we may become the dying and risen Christ for the world. Participation in this great prayer of praise, as meal and sacrifice, transforms us. By grace, we more and more become what we pray.

Not a homily or a drama or a talk given to the assembly, it embraces remembrance of God's saving deeds, invocation of the Holy Spirit, the narrative of the Last Supper, remembrance of the Church universal and of the dead, and climaxes "through Him, with Him, in Him..."

For all our devotion to the body and blood of Christ present on our altars, we Catholics have hardly begun to make this Eucharistic prayer the heart of the liturgy...How are we to make our own this prayer which is the summit and center of the Church's whole life? How are we to see that this prayer is the model of Christian life and daily prayer? Does this prayer of thanks and praise gather up the way we pray by ourselves every day? When we assemble on Sunday, we help one another learn over and over again how to praise and thank God through and with and in Christ, in good and bad times....

Are we a thanks-giving people? So we give God praise by morning and thanks by night? Do we pause over every table before eating, as we do over this altar table, to bless God and ourselves and our food? The habit of thanksgiving, of praise, of Eucharist, must be acquired day by day, not just at Sunday Mass. In fact, it is at Mass that our habits of daily life come to full expression in Christ.

What Is Our Communion?

The communion rite begins with the Lord's Prayer and the peace greeting, continues through the "Lamb of God" as the consecrated bread is broken, moves into the communion procession, and concludes with silent and spoken prayer. Here it is clear that the assembly performs the liturgy; all of us pray the Lord's Prayer, exchange the sign of peace, and join in the litany "Lamb of God," and all are invited to partake of communion.

This sign of peace is also a visible sign of our commitment to work for peace as a Christian community.

After our peace greeting has signified how we stand with those around us and with all the Church, we attend to the priest as he lifts up the large host and breaks it.

Following the invitation to the table and the response...the communion procession begins.

At this table we put aside every worldly separation based on culture, class, or other differences. Baptized, we no longer admit to distinctions based on age or sex or race or wealth. This communion is why all prejudice, all racism, all sexism, all deference to wealth and power must be banished from our parishes, our homes, our lives. This communion is why we will not call enemies those who are human beings like ourselves. This communion is why we will not commit the world's resources to an escalating arms race while the poor die. We cannot. Not when we have feasted here on the "body broken" and "blood poured out" for the life of the world.

This is "food for the journey" that we began at baptism. We may eat of it when we are tired, when we are discouraged, even when we have failed. But not when we have forgotten the Church, forgotten the way we began at the font; not when we have abandoned our struggle against evil and remain unrepentant for having done so. Let us examine our lives honestly each time before approaching the Eucharist...Christ, resent in the Eucharist and in us, calls us to be a holy communion, to grow in love and holiness for one another's sake.

When the priest is seated and the vessels have been quietly put aside, then stillness and peace are ours. Only after the meaning of the life we share has entered deeply into our souls does the presider rise to speak a final prayer.

What Does Our Dismissal Mean?

The concluding part of our Roman liturgy is very brief: the blessing and the sending forth...Whatever is done in these final moments, including any announcements that have to be made, should help us pass from the  moments of community ritual to less formal time together and then back to our own lives and daily prayers.

We are sent from the Eucharistic table as a holy people always in mission. (The word "Mass"-in Latin Missa-means "sending" or "mission.") The spirit which fills us in the liturgy inspires us to re-create the world...

There is nothing narrow, selfish or blind in our Sunday worship. We give thanks not so much for personal favors from the Lord as for the earth itself, for the goodness of creation and the wonder of our senses, for the prophets and the saints and for our sisters and brothers throughout the earth, for God's saving deeds recorded in our scriptures and visible in our world. Only in such thanksgiving can we look on this world, embrace its sorrows and troubles, and confront the mystery of evil and suffering.

The dismissal of the assembly is like the breaking of the bread. We have become "the bread of life" and "the cup of blessing" for the world. Now we are scattered, broken, poured out to be life for the world. What happens at home, at work, at meals? What do we make of our time, our worlds, our deeds, our resources of all kinds? That is what matters.

Our Progress in Liturgy

Now we need to make this liturgy ours, to be at home with it, to know it deeply, to let it shape our everyday lives. Further changes in rubrics and wording may indeed come, but our present task is to make beautiful and make our own the tradition we have received.

Conclusion

You know by now that I love the liturgy and find my own identity there, as well as yours and that of the whole Church...But good liturgy cannot be created out of a bishop's letters or rules. I can only call you to be what Christ has already called you to be. I can only invite you to serve God and one another in the beauty and depth of Sunday Mass.

Above all else, you must know, as I do, that we learn to pray by praying. Can we take the treasure of prayer that is ours and begin-alone or together-to pray as the Church each morning and night? Can we keep Sunday holy? Can we take the Sunday scriptures and other passages of scripture into each week and even each day? Can we heed the bishops' call in our letter on peace-the call for prayer and fasting and abstinence on Fridays? Can we keep the great seasons of Advent and Christmas, Lent and Eastertime, not only in our churches but in our homes? Only in these ways will we gradually become active members of a Sunday assembly of the baptized who know how to gather, how to listen to the word, how to give thanks and praise, how to share in holy communion, how to take leave of one another for the week-long and life-long work of building the kingdom of kindness, justice, and peace.

Joseph Cardinal Bernardin
Archbishop of Chicago
© 1984, Archdiocese of Chicago. Used with permission.