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The
Synodal experience of the Churches in Europe saw the first crowning of
its works in the post-synod Apostolic Exhortation Ecclesia in Europe
[= EiE] that John Paul II signed on 28th June, 2003.
Important
because of the peculiar perspective within which it moves, the document
is centred “on Jesus Christ, living in His Church as a source of hope
for Europe, as the title well indicates. We find within it two
underpinnings, which can offer the outline for every pastoral year (in
which the religious, too, are involved): to re-discover the Liturgy
and to celebrate the sacraments. These two aspects are not new in
themselves: the spirit animating the whole document may be new, a spirit
that finds again an exquisite source of action and life just in the
liturgical action. It is in this optic that we can welcome the pressing
invitation, «Celebrate the salvation of Christ: welcome it as a gift
that makes of you his sacrament; that makes of your life the true
spiritual cult pleasing to God» (EiE 69). The consequent exhortation
flows down from here, «The revival of an authentic liturgical sense in
the Church is urgent. Liturgy (….) is an instrument of sanctification;
it celebrates the faith of the Church; it is an instrument for the
transmission of faith» (EiE 70).
The
actuation of this programme, also in the context of religious life,
implies a «true renewal, which (…) consists in developing always better
the conscience of the sense of the mystery» (EiE 72); therefore, «a
great effort of formation is required» (EiE 73). This is the challenge,
which opens again with an attentive preparation and an opportune
planning at the beginning of every liturgical year, every year being the
space within which the religious modulates and realises the progressive
identifying oneself with the mystery of Christ. The commitment to
formation aims at giving shape to the given challenge so that the
religious man/woman may become what he/she celebrates.
How to
promote all this? This pamphlet offers some precious contributions for
an education to such a prayer as it may lead the soul to a totalising
experience –though in constant progress- of the mystery. The
present study offers the horizon of an ecclesial reference (1), to
concentrate on the Sunday (II) and on the celebrative modalities of the
Eucharist (III); The common platform is assured by the education to
prayer (IV) as a guarantee to live the liturgy in its fullness (V), not
as the actuation of a rite, but as a daily occasion to recuperate one’s
own identity as consecrated being (VI).
In the
on-going journey of the Church
Nobody
ignores the gesture made by John Paul II when, at the end of the
Eucharistic liturgy for the 2001 Epiphany –at the conclusion of the
great Jubilee- he signed, on the altar, the Apostolic Letter Novo
millennio ineunte [= NMI]. That signature, on purpose in a
“liturgical” context, sealed the conclusion of a journey, as well as the
intention of opening new future perspectives. It is a journey constantly
characterised by a “liturgical” line, just as it had been proposed by
the apostolic Letter Tertio millennio adveniente [= TMA], signed
by John Paul II on 10th November, 1994.
In fact,
the lay out in preparation of the Jubilee through the re-discovery and
deepening of elements rotating essentially around the liturgy was the
winning card. The three years preparation made the ecclesial community
to assume the commitment to re-discover the presence and the role of the
Trinity within the liturgical year. The lesson flowing from this was an
invitation to value the pedagogy –besides the content- enclosed in every
liturgical year, so that every year might be the year Of Jesus Christ,
of God the Father, of the Eucharist and of the Most holy Mary.
We could
not help taking again and re-launching this jubilee line, above all to
the end of turning each liturgical year into an authentic “jubilee
year”, on the pattern of the commitments and reaching-posts brought to
evidence in the TMA. In this perspective, it is important not to forget
the NMI. Out of the numerous evidenced aspects, we remember here one
that concerns the nuclei of the ecclesial commitment: the celebration of
the Eucharist on the Day of the Lord, but on some conditions!
Sunday a
“special day of faith”
On 31st
May 1998, John Paul II, through his apostolic Letter Dies Domini,
re-launched to the entire ecclesial community an articled commitment
about the sanctification of Sundays: it was a strategic document that
will go on enlightening the journey of education for that symbolic day
–the day of the Lord- in which the believer is called to find himself
and others again in the sacramental encounter with the God of life.
The
essential elements have been recuperated by NMI. In particular, two
paragraphs, which the NMI dedicates to the Sunday Eucharist: nos. 35 e
36. The underlining is in the context of the third part, when the Church
is urged to “start afresh from Christ”. The beginning of the third
millennium has welcomed the invitation to “a renewed enthusiasm in our
Christian life”, not by seeking a “magic formula”, or by inventing “a
new programme” that might satisfy the “challenges of our time”, but by
appreciating “such a programme as does not change with the changing
times and cultures, though considering times and cultures for the sake
of a true dialogue and an efficient communication» (NMI 29).
Here is
the planning reminder in which religious life remains deeply involved,
«The most important and binding horizon of the ordinary pastoral
activity» in the achieving of holiness to point at as a true “urgency of
the pastoral work” (NMI 30), indeed, as «foundation of the pastoral
planning» (NMI 31).
It is very
much meaningful to see that such a strategic document, while reminding
the complex attention to be paid to the pastoral projects, it pinpoints
the true objective of all this commitment and it underlines that “the
pedagogy of holiness” needs “personal…journeys” capable “of adapting
oneself to the rhythm of the single persons” (ibidem); as well as the
rooting of all this “in contemplation and prayer”(NMI 15); indeed, in
“education to prayer” – “in the art of prayer” (NMI 32) – introduced as
“a qualifying point of every pastoral planning” (NMI 34).
The NMI
puts the Eucharist at the summit and the heart of this journey. The
precise definition of this sacrament was not prospected to speak of it
amply, but only to re-launch some elements to the attention of the
entire ecclesial community; they are elements that can, rather must
contribute to an ever fuller participation in the memorial celebration
of the Risen Lord.
In this
line, the evidencing of some aspects herewith made, considers also other
contents concerning the listening to and the proclamation of the Word
(See: NMI 39-40) because they are strictly linked with the Sunday
Eucharist (let us think of chapter III of Dies Domini dedicated
to the “Eucharistic Assembly, heart of every Sunday” and of Nos. 75 and
81-82 of EiE).
The «way
of celebrating»: challenge and guarantee
Having
seen realised that the Christian Community “has grown a lot (….) in the
way of celebrating the Sacraments, above all the Eucharist”, (NMI 35)
the Letter calls the attention on the role of Sunday. In fact, in this
symbolic and free space, «the Church will go on indicating to every
generation what constitutes the bearing axis of history» (NMI 35).
Therefore,
to draw back the attention of the formative and projects strategies to
“this day” means to lead the object of attention of the faithful and the
pastoral workers to the very heart of the problem and at the basis of an
animation line, which requires some attentions. We say this so that the
participation in the Eucharist “may be truly, for each baptised person,
the heart of every Sunday: an inalienable commitment to be lived not
only to the end of observing a precept, but mainly as need of a truly
coherent and aware Christian life. (NMI 36).
The
apostolic Letter Dies Domini has already amply illustrated the
lines of education to understand the Sunday as a day of the Trinity, of
the assembly, of the person; as the primordial feast that reveals the
sense of time. The recuperation of those elements supply us with a
precious material to go deep into the sense of a weekly appointment
that, in the passing of “millenniums”, remains as memorial and symbol.
However,
when the NMI introduces the talk on the Sunday Eucharist, it introduces
a statement which admits a datus of fact on one side, and on the other
side it constitutes a challenge together with a guarantee, “Therefore,
the utmost commitment is to be directed to the liturgy”, particularly to
“the way of celebrating the sacraments, above all the Eucharist” (NMI
35). Accompanied by the classical council quotation, culmen et fons
(See: SC 10) constitutes a challenge and a guarantee.
The
challenge is posed by the fact that, if the liturgical action is the
symbolic space that allows to join the reality and daily choices with
the God of Life, then we need to continue a strategic commitment to see
that the complex typically symbolic language of liturgy may be
understood and treasured up. This implies very binding consequences at
action level, such as they may not be unexpected, otherwise there is the
risk that the very Day of the Lord may be depleted of its meaning and
sense.
As a
reflection, the guarantee of a Christian life (particularly of the
religious life) enlightened by the Word of Life, is offered and
supported by the participation in those specific holy signs of the
Eucharist. The living and real encounter with the God of Life –in his
mysteries- guarantees to the journeying faithful the support he stands
in need of to face the most different challenges. On this line,
therefore, it is necessary to pose the interrogative: what to do so
that the Sunday Eucharist “may guarantee” the answer to these
expectations?
Educating
oneself to the end of educating to prayer
Beyond the
many definitions of prayer mirroring an equal amount of forms by which
the person relates with the supernatural, even in the milieu of
religious life, prayer assumes different connotations, according to the
spiritual attitudes of the faithful, his motivations, the relation
between prayer and life, between personal and communitarian prayer.
A
reference picture. The journey of education to prayer is to be
seen in an ample context that may keep in view the phases, which start
with the Noviciate, to continue with ever increasing commitment during
the successive years. This requires the attitude of continued projects
of the educative and formative proposal. The continuity has its sense
when it is within a picture or project of reference in which it
converges and from which the specific education journey takes its sense:
the evangelisation and the sacraments. The first is the basis for the
initial experiences of prayer (educating to attitudes of praise,
thanksgiving, blessing, supplication; eloquent examples can be found in
the Psalms). The second is a more refined and binding experience of
Christian prayer, in as much as the sacrament, the liturgical year, the
Liturgy of Hours (without forgetting the many forms of devotion and
popular piety) constitute privileged areas of prayer, realizing a more
or less deep contact with the God of the Covenant.
The Christian
prayer
After the
first experiences, the religious perceives always better that Christian
prayer is: listening to God who speaks; contemplation of
the signs of His presence in the brothers and sisters, as well as in
diverse realities; dialogue with the one who has been first to
come towards us; progressive communion with the absolutely Other
already present in the intimacy of every person. Five interrogatives
accompany the precise definition of the essence of Christian prayer: Who
prays? The religious who has realised a minimum knowledge of God in
Jesus Christ. How to pray? The modalities are diversified; history
enriches the today with a plurality of forms, which respond to the vast
tonality of spiritual expectations of the individual person according to
the numberless charisma that the Holy Spirit arouses in history. Where
to pray? The most adapted places can be in relation with personal
situations or communitarian and official situations. When to pray? The
official Christian prayer has its rhythms, time-tables, but the
religious prays always whenever he turns the ordinary choices of his
life into a sincere and total answer to the God of the covenant. Why to
pray? Understanding the dimensions of Christian prayer (listening,
contemplation, dialogue, communion) offers the most convincing answer:
in prayer the religious welcomes the voice of God, transfigures
the daily realities, giving to them the most genuine meaning, weaves
a relation with God and the created realities, thus contributing to
realise the communion that salvation history expresses and
declines around the category of the covenant.
Some firm
points
In the
Christian world, the summit and together the font of prayer is
the Eucharist, because it is there that the divine proposal and the
human answer find their meeting point. That’s why the Eucharistic
prayer, enclosing all the themes of Christian prayer, has always been
called the prayer par excellence (prex.). Second, the nourishment of
prayer is given mainly by the divine Word both for the exemplar
experience –also of prayer- that it offers, and because it helps to read
the situations of life by taking them back into the perspective of the
original project given by God and expressed in the covenant conditions.
Third, the role of silence must be brought to evidence, as condition of
encounter, space of listening, occasion of dialogue and motive of
deepening. In all this dynamism, we cannot neglect the help offered by
the body, the space, the “things” around us, the times and the
rhythms of life. No theoretical lesson, anyhow, will ever be able to
exhaust the whole problematic, the expectations, the fears, the
defeats, which one meets in this itinerary. The most diversified
experiences will lead us to a personal synthesis of relating the most
diverse dimensions and situations of one’s existence in the “logic” of
God the Trinity, who became history so that man might realise a journey
of divinisation
Living
the liturgy in its fullness
The term
liturgy is found for the first time in the classic Greek language,
where leitourgía indicated a public activity, carried on
freely at the service of the citizens. With the passing of time,
liturgy indicated any service rendered to the collective people or
to the divinity. In the Greek Bible of the LXX, liturgy indicates
always a “religious service” rendered to YAHWEH, while the New Testament
adopts other terms to indicate the reality of the new cult “in spirit
and truth” (John 4,24) inaugurated by Jesus Christ. At the end of an
ample bible-theological page (See. SC 5-6; but also DV and LG), Vatican
II presents the liturgy as «the exercise of the priesthood of
Jesus Christ” l (SC 7). The rite, with the typical language of signs and
symbols, is the place of proclamation and realisation of the saving work
of the Father, through Christ, in the Spirit; therefore, the term
liturgy is not equivalent only to rite, but it indicates a reality to
which the rite itself sends us back. The liturgical reform in the church
of Roman rite has been actuated to highlight this reality better, with
a renewal of pastoral action and catechesis The rich liturgical
documentation, as well as the variegated pastoral and catechetical
production, which have characterised the local churches from Vatican II
onward, prove how urgent it is to go on in the commitment to the
understanding of the liturgy so as to educate us to it by valuing
the most different areas of life, according to the rhythm of time, the
ultimate reaching-post, which gives sense to each cultural expression
and is constituted by the liturgy of life , namely by that
“spiritual cult” which Paul brings to evidence in Romans 12,1-2.
To
understand the liturgy.
From the
moment the command of Christ resounded; “Do this in memory of me” (1
Corinth: 11,24) the Church celebrates the memorial of the Easter of the
Lord every time, everywhere and in every culture, without repeating
rites as ends to themselves, but elevating the spiritual cult to the
Father in one’s own language: by celebrating the cult in the different
segments of daily life, through a symbolic-ritual language it is
the only cult that, in a context of faith, allows a real divine-human
communication and vice-versa. The priestly mediation of Christ
continues, in history and in the religious life, to actuate the
communion-communication fulfilled once for all times on the Cross, so
that every man who opens himself to the announcement of the Gospel may
realise the deepest interiori liberation through a real and
efficacious encounter with the God of life in the sacramental
celebration. Therefore, the sacraments realise this encounter on
the condition that they may really be symbols of the will to
encounter the brother, and the desire of liberation from every
form of evil, to be actuated in the daily tissue imbued with Gospel.
An
itinerary in the time
The
experience of God Trinity can never be reduced to a punctual moment; it
is realised and prolonged in time according to the rhythms that the
liturgical pedagogy has condensed in the progressive structuring of the
liturgical year. Its articulation –which does not follow the
running of months and seasons- is finalised to let the religious live in
time the mysterious experience of the Easter of Jesus Christ. The
alternating of “Strong times”, (Christmas season and Easter season), and
of the “ordinary time”, of solemnities, feasts and memories, constitutes
the occasion for an ever fuller and totalising conformation with Christ,
new and perfect Man. For this reason, what gives meaning to the time
dimension is not the succession of days and seasons, but the
certainty of living the work of salvation within a natural cycle, in
which the elements “sun” and “light” are assumed as signs of Christ “Sun
of justice” and “light that knows no sunset”. Since the experience of
the mystery passes through the rite, the liturgical year also (in
harmony with the daily rhythms of the Liturgy of the Hours) constitutes
and educative experience that allows the religious to realise his/her
own itinerary of faith and life. To educate to the dynamisms of the
liturgical rites means to catch the contents and the methodologies of
one out of the Languages called to express and to realise all that it
encloses of the mystery of the time that runs from the Incarnation up to
fulfilment in the Parusia.
Educating
to the liturgy of life
The title
sends us back to the educative role, which is to be actuated for a
liturgical formation. From the moment Christ sent his disciples with the
task of evangelising and celebrating, Word and Sacrament were always
accompanied by the commitment to the ecclesial community in educating
to the living and vivifying experience of the Easter of the Lord. As the
announcement of Easter is realised in different forms, similarly the
celebration of the Sacrament requires the support of formation, of
catechesis and animation. In this way Word and Sacrament can realise
the liturgy of life or the spiritual cult, which identifies with
the free acceptance of the divine proposal, in waiting for an answer
that the rite is capable of expressing in truth when this has already
been ritualised in life. In the same perspective, it is a duty to
remember that the liturgy has the inborn capacity of educating to
itself. In fact, while the Church celebrates, the celebrating assembly
is educated to turn one’s life into a cult. In the light of the revealed
Word announced in the liturgy, the ecological texts become a binding
and perspective memory for those who participate in the liturgical
action, according to the type of the celebration, the situations and the
liturgical times. Verbal and non verbal language, together with the
ministry reality, at the faith level of the celebrating assembly,
contribute not only to the experiential perception of the mystery, but
also to its specific identification, so that the celebrated and lived
mystery may turn into a true and specific mystics. In this sense, the
catechetical-pastoral dimension must never be missing in an educative
itinerary towards the vertex of the Christian religious experience as
actuated in the sacrament.
Recuperation of “one’s own identity”
The
constant confrontation with “a deep entwining of cultures and religions”
binds the religious to the maintenance or the recuperation of “one’s
identity” (NMI 36). This underling can be read as an invitation to value
all that can contribute to the achievement of similar identity.
But the
reflexes of all this call to cause above all “a spirituality of
communion, making it to emerge as an educative principle wherever man
and the Christian are moulded, wherever we educate the ministers of the
altar, the consecrated persons, the pastoral workers: where families and
communities are built up. Communion spirituality means a glance of the
heart on the mistery of the Trinity living in us, and whose light is to
be caught also from the countenance of our brothers and sisters who are
at our side” (NMI 43). In this line, the liturgical spirituality is not
like something that is super-imposed on other spiritualities specific of
the charisma; on the contrary, it is the source of every type of
spirituality, because it is only in the liturgical action that every
religious has the unique occasion of experiencing the presence and
action of the Spirit, who acts through the sacramental epiclesis. The
talk on spirituality –consequently on the mystics (as announced,
celebrated and lived mystery)- becomes strictly connatural with the
liturgical action.
This
panoramic allows us to notice how hard is the journey to be realised,
and how many are the implied elements and challenges; however, it
reminds us also that the “new evangelisation” will be able to reach its
objectives, if it is constantly linked with “a new (or renewed)
celebration” that, if well realised, can have a determining role in the
growth of the Christian personality towards the full maturity in Christ.
“The scope of the liturgy of the Church is not that of lessening the
desires or the fears of man, but in listening to and welcoming the
living Jesus, who honours and praises the Father, so that we may praise
and honour Father with Him (EiE 71). A wonderful programme for every
choice of religious life! «Today’s time is a time of constant movement
reaching agitation, with the easy risk of doing just for the sake of
doing”. We must resist against such a temptation, trying “to be” before
we start “doing”. (NMI 15). The dialectic between “to be” and “to do”
finds its harmonic and immediate re-composition there, where the journey
of life starts again in continuation of the mystery that, starting from
the Incarnation –beating heart of the time (NMI 5) – goes on realising
itself with the time through the signs of a new and definitive Covenant:
there, where we do not just meet a “formula” that can save, “but a
Person” (NMI 29). It is in the living and vivifying encounter with Jesus
Christ that the religious, in the Church, open to “a future of hope” (NMI
59), prolongs the mysterium lunae (NMI 54), if he continues to be
“the light of the world” (Mt 5,14).
Manlio Sodi
Docente all’Università Pontificia Salesiana
Piazza dell’Ateneo
Salesiano, 1 – 00139 Roma
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