Last week, my class got into a discussion about how we worship God at Mass, and did it by going through each of our senses and then kept going…
These are some of the things we came up with:
Listening–especially to the Gospel and other readings from Scripture, but also to every prayer.
–to sing is to pray twice. We should always remember the songs are prayers to God.
Seeing–the liturgical colors, the flowers from nature, the gestures the priest uses, all of these are meant to turn our attention to worshipping God. We even worship with what time of year it is!
Tasting–we also worship in how we consume the Eucharist! God really leaves no stone unturned. We aren’t just thoughts, but real bodies. There is no part of us that doesn’t belong to God. Jesus died and rose again so that our physical bodies could also be resurrected and live forever, too.
Touch–the sign of peace is meant to be a way of recognizing Christ in the other person. It isn’t a social hour, but really is part of our worship and God’s action in us…wow! It isn’t the physical touch that is most important, but the reverence in how we recognize that we are one before God.
Smell–Catholics even bring smell into our worship, when we use incense. We worship God with our whole selves.
The movement of our bodies: kneeling, standing, folding our hands, bowing, genuflecting.
In other words, every single thing we do at Mass is one big act of worship, one huge shared prayer, and there isn’t a part of our being human that we don’t use as Catholics. This is easy to forget, but very important to remember.
All of this stuff we do with our bodies is meant to grab the attention of our hearts and minds…and if we use self-control on our bodies, it will be that much easier to turn over our hearts and minds to God, too. We’re both body and soul. What we do with our bodies when we pray really does matter.
That is why Jesus is willing to take the appearance of bread and wine. He didn’t want to be just present in spirit, but really physically present. None of us can even be present to each other as much as Jesus is present to us in the Eucharist! Wow! Say that again, kids…WOW! So of course we don’t forget that when we are in Jesus’ Real Presence in church, either. Can I say that again? WOW!!! What a gift we have been given! We are SO BLESSED!!
Then I went into how our whole selves were handed over to be hidden in Christ’s death and resurrection when we were baptized! Wow! We couldn’t offer ourselves, as sinful as we are, except that Christ covers us in his death and resurrection. So can we have our lives hidden in Christ and offered to God at Mass, can we really take God himself as nourishment, and then go off for the rest of the week and forget that? Let’s hope not!!
I think it was useful for the kids to talk about reverence and solemnity in a joyful manner. The Mass is such a great gift! The reading where Elijah waited to hear from God and didn’t hear him until the quiet whispering sound is a great introduction to this idea. Moses taking his shoes off for the burning bush is another. We need to know how to act when we are on holy ground.
We don’t go to Mass with long faces, but we also don’t act like we are in a gym or a school assembly. If the kids were going through a forest, wouldn’t they expect to be told to be quiet, so they could hear the birds, so they could take in the peacefulness? Quiet and reverence are what are needed to experience the holy, too. This is why a lot of people experience God when they’re out alone in nature: God’s creation grabs the attention of their whole selves, body, heart, and mind. But even there, one has to learn how to be quiet, inside and out.
God gave us the whole world and the whole rest of the week to run and play and talk to each other. These are really, really good things. But we set aside the building of the parish church as a special place of quiet and listening and prayer, so that in the church, what is not prayer is a attentive listening quiet. There are going to be babies crying or making noise at Mass, just as there are going to be birds in the forest, but Mass deserves reverence from those of us who are old enough to choose.
The idea was not to hand over a lot of facts, but to get them to look at Mass and how and why we behave a certain way when we worship differently than they had in the past.
“Rome” is not built in a day. The first step is to get the workers an idea of what the project is, so they want to really sign on for the effort required.
I would suggest you make your presentation interactive. If you can start with a song that has movements, so much the better–even if you don’t like them for Mass, this is a time where they’re appropriate–and then go for the Socratic questioning method. It keeps their attention much better than a strict lecture style.
