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2007 Lent/ Easter
The Sign of the Cross
In the years since the Second Vatican Council
Leading Children to the Sundays of Lent, Easter and Pentecost
WWJWMTD? A Personal Easter Cycle Question

David A. Stosur

A true story: In a parish I belonged to several cities and some years ago, I was asked to take part as a foot-washer at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday evening. The custom was to have the pastor wash the feet of several people in front of the altar, but also to have a number of other men and women wash someone else’s feet at various places throughout the assembly, so that all could, at least visually, take part without straining to see. There was a rehearsal for this a few nights earlier, but the man whose feet I was to wash was unable to attend, so we would have to do this without having practiced it, and without even having been introduced to each other.

During the liturgy, when the time came for the foot washing, we were cued to begin when the cantor started leading the assembly in Richard Gillard’s, “The Servant Song”, “Will you let me be your servant, let me be as Christ to you? Pray that I may have the grace to let you be my servant, too.” Feeling a little uncertain and a bit uncomfortable, I walked over to my appointed station. The man had already begun removing his shoes and socks, and an acolyte was ready with a large white ceramic bowl, a matching pitcher with warm water and a soft white towel. The well-amplified choir and enthusiastic congregational singing made any conversation impossible, so I simply but deliberately poured the water over his feet and, trying not to rush through my discomfort, carefully dried them. Spontaneously, I decided that I needed to say something to this man whom I had never met before but whose bare feet I had just held in my hands. I looked up to him, caught his eye, and said as loudly as seemed appropriate over the music, “Peace!” He looked back at me and replied at a matching volume, “You’re welcome!” I was so surprised by his response, all I could do was smile and nod.

Invitation and Effectiveness
I learned a lot through this experience about God’s unexpected grace, and about how necessary that grace was to breaking through my self-preoccupation and uneasiness in order to relate more authentically to God, through a relationship to this man who was a stranger to me. Even if his unanticipated response was simply due to a miscommunication, he at least could see (perhaps because he, too, was suffering some discomfort) that I should be grateful for this opportunity to wash his feet, and that I could well have said, “Thanks!” His reply, consciously or not, presumed what it shocked me into seeing: that God had answered the prayer “that I might have the grace to let [him] be my servant, too.” In writing or telling the story, I hope, of course, to pass something of the experience along to you, the reader or listener. In reading or listening to the story, you perhaps can dwell where I dwelt (and even I can now only dwell there in memory and imagination), can feel something of what I felt, can learn something of what I learned. But you, with your own history, will dwell and feel and learn differently than I did—maybe even more effectively than I did.

The power and effectiveness of a good story comes as no surprise to parents, catechists and homilists. When a story is told well to children (and adults alike), it invites them to “inhabit” it, to use their imaginations as they envision what is happening and see themselves as one or more of the characters, feeling what they might feel, reacting as they might react. The art of good story-telling entails selecting enough information to allow the listeners to live vicariously in the story, but not so much that the action—the “plot”—gets overwhelmed by details, or explained so thoroughly that its meaning is severely reduced. Jesus’ parables fit this description wonderfully. The Master is also the master storyteller, whose surprise endings catch us off guard and reveal something new about our own shortsightedness by offering an alternative vision of “something more,” “But some seed fell on rich soil, and produced fruit, a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold” (Matthew 13:8). Indeed, he lived his life and died his death in just such a parabolic way, so that in his resurrection we are all called to something far more than we can imagine—a truer story was never told, a truer life has never before been lived.

This depiction of story in general, and of the Christian story in particular, teaches us something interesting about liturgy and liturgical catechesis. It is just as important that a story contains “gaps,” as that it offers information and details. Because of the silent places in the story, we are invited thoughtfully to enter it and creatively to “fill in the blanks.” That is part of what makes the dynamic of a good story so engaging. What Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) said of symbols applies as well to stories: they have “a surplus of meaning,” and that surplus is what lends them a more or less universal openness that bids us welcome and calls us to walk around in them. And it is precisely in doing so that we “appropriate” them, that we make them our own.

The story I offered above is a story about a liturgical ritual, which is one way of understanding how liturgy and story are related. Let us consider a couple of other ways for their catechetical possibilities.

Stories In the Liturgical Ritual
The liturgy is replete with stories. In this age of Catholics’ revitalized appreciation for the Bible and for lectionary-based catechesis, we think primarily of the stories from sacred Scripture that are told in the Liturgy of the Word. Learning about the stories of the creation, covenant and redemption: from the Hebrew Scriptures, the fall and the flood; the patriarchs and matriarchs; the exodus from Egypt and the pilgrimage through the desert; the kings and the prophets; and from the New Testament, the Good News of the one whose Paschal Mystery fulfills all of God’s promises and more—the “Greatest Story Ever Told.” This story, coming to us through the Scriptures, provides the irreplaceable articulation in words of the very Word of God: Jesus Christ, in whom we find “the Alpha and the Omega” of the faith we share and hand on to our children.

What we often fail to recognize, though, is the way in which the story of this Word is “really present” in so many other ways throughout the liturgy, not only in the proclamation of the Scriptures. The eucharistic prayers and their many prefaces offer a paradigm of the abbreviated retelling of God’s promises and their fulfillment in the life, death and resurrection of Christ, so that the eucharistic celebration itself becomes the response to Jesus’ request “on the night before he died.” The list of ritual prayers and recitations that tell this Story again is almost endless: from nuptial blessing to prayers at ordination, from litanies of saints to the consecration of chrism or blessing of oil of the sick, and from lengthy invocations to brief collect prayers. The blessing of fire, the preparation of the Paschal candle, the singing of the Exultet, and the blessing of water are among the prayers and proclamations that, along with the readings from Scripture, recount this story at the Easter Vigil, the culmination of three days of story-telling at the very heart of the Christian life and, for the newly initiated, at the deepest interior of their new identity.

“Recount,” of course, is something of an exaggeration here. The entire story is not, in fact, told again in these short prayers (even the longest of these is extremely short by comparison to their corresponding Scripture episode!). The liturgical rites presume our knowledge of the story’s entirety as it draws on this wealth of biblical symbols, images and incidents. These serve as shorthand reminders of this story, enabling us easily to connect our present liturgical and sacramental moment with the “history of salvation”—God’s actions in the past and God’s promises for the future. The gaps in these brief liturgical recountings are surely key indicators of where catechesis for children can fruitfully be focused. Guided by the continuing cycle of scriptural proclamation within the liturgy itself, parents, pastors, homilists and catechists gradually undertake the never-ending process of “filling in” those foundational stories, so that children who hear the prayers can progressively catch more of the biblical references and allusions within these liturgical prayers, can relive the stories anew and appropriate them ever more deeply.

The Liturgical Ritual As Story
Another oft-overlooked aspect of the relationship between liturgy and story is one that also can provide some guidance for liturgical catechesis. When we think of helping our children to learn about full, conscious and active participation (which is, of course, their right and duty by virtue of their baptism; cf. Sacrosanctum Concilium 14), we tend to think in terms of helping them to learn “the parts of the Mass” and their parts within it, that is, “the people’s parts.” This is a necessary and indispensable enterprise for anyone who would actively participate in the liturgy. If it remains, however, at the level of “After Father says x, we say y,” it will never allow us to penetrate more deeply to what the liturgy intends. The liturgical rites are, in some ways, comparable to the scripts of a play, in that the various actors take on certain roles and must remember their “parts.” Occasionally, even stage productions will call for “audience participation.” But the assembly gathered in Christ for worship is not analogous to an audience; the assembly and the ministers share a supporting role with Christ, who always has the leading role and top billing. The whole world is the audience for this production, for as the Second Vatican Council stated, “the liturgy...is supremely effective in enabling the faithful to express in their lives and portray to others the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true Church” (SC 2). For a production so significant to be effective, the plot or storyline must be clear to all who take their role seriously.

So, for example, the assembly’s “Amen” to cues like “through Christ our Lord,” or “who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever,” or “all glory and honor is yours, almighty Father, for ever and ever,” is indeed a small “line” to learn. Yet this exchange of dialogue between presiding minister and assembly indicates a mutuality of action in directing prayer to God, through Christ, and in the Holy Spirit—the Triune God is indeed the hero of the story. When we recognize that our prayers, which address and glorify God in recalling the divine saving activity in the past, also petition God to continue to save us now and in the future, we become aware that the whole storyline of salvation is summed up in these brief prayers. Similarly, when we not only hear the recited narrative of what Jesus did “on the night before he died,” but also do ourselves take bread and wine, bless them, break and pour them, and share them with each other, we do not merely mimic what Jesus and his disciples did as if we were enacting a play. We become ourselves the body of Christ for a hungry world; we appropriate the plot of this mystery story as the pattern of our own personal and communal lives.

Liturgy: Living the Story of Humanity’s Sanctification and God’s Glorification
Without having entered at least a little into this mystery story, my story about the foot-washing could have ended in my walking away thinking, “I should have spoken louder,” or “That man must have been hard of hearing.” Because God is gracious and merciful, it was otherwise, and I was in some manner transformed. At some level, hearing this man’s “You’re welcome” tapped into a pattern of thanksgiving (“Eucharist”) that I have encountered over and over. Throughout my lifetime I have heard words like: “... ever-living God, we do well always and everywhere to give you thanks. You have no need of our praise, yet our desire to thank you is itself your gift. Our prayer of thanksgiving adds nothing to your greatness, but makes us grow in your grace, through Jesus Christ our Lord” (preface IV for weekdays). It turns out, then, that the liturgy is less like the production of a play than a rehearsal for life—we keep doing it so that we can get the stories of our lives right, recognizing our stories in the story, and the story as our own:

“Do this in ______ of me ...”—“Amen!”
“The Body of ______.”—“Amen!”
“Go in peace to ______ and ______ the Lord!”—“______ be to God!”
Can you fill in the blanks?

David Stosur, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Liturgy at St. Bernard’s School of Theology and Ministry, Rochester, New York. His current research and writing focuses on the narrative elements of liturgy and liturgical theology.