the liturgy 2

Instead of giving you an outline of the Instrumentum laboris I am giving a personal reflection on it because I don’t want to repeat what I presume you have already read.
First permit me to state the obvious in the instrumenta laboris of this second session: the Biblical Apostolate has 14 pages and has more or less 7 proposals, the Youth has 13 pages and has more or less 23 proposals, the Laity has 21 pages and has 11 proposals, the Family Life has 13 pages and 7 proposals, but topping them all, the Liturgy has 62 pages and 41 proposals. In effect we have just given our instrumentum laboris a new name – instrumentum laborious. The presumption therefore that you have read this comes from the belief that if you have not read it because of interest, you must have read it at least as an act of penance for the many sins we and others have committed on the sacred liturgy.


Why this long document? . . . that is why! - topics on the liturgy coming from the Rome since Vatican II. The Documents on the Liturgy or the DOL alone spanning from 1963 to 1979 consist of 1496 pages, in 4543 numbered paragraphs. Not included among these documents are queries, comments, complaints, including tsismis, huring-huring and outright panglibak spanning 5 long years of giving seminars to your parishioners and ministers, and a voluminous compilation of results from parish, vicarial and archdiocesan congresses starting 1986, to the parish and vicarial consultations on the synod ending just last month.
But before you give up on the document please give it a second glance. Liturgy as the compendium of our catholic faith can be treated from different angles. You can treat it from the point of view of sacramental theology or from the point of view of liturgy in the economy of salvation, or you can treat it from the point of view of doctrinal theology as it is a summary of every dogma, and every article of faith, involving both scripture and tradition. You can treat it from the point of ecclesiology or you can even treat it from the point of view of anthropology. But we choose to treat it from a simpler viewpoint that all of us can easily understand and something which we can consider pastorally doable. The message of this laborious document is simple and can be summarized in one sentence, which is – let us treat liturgy as “Our Prayer.”
The Liturgy is our prayer. It is prayer. It is not work, it is not the source of income, and surely it is not a commodity to be bought or exchanged. If there is money involved it is meant for the support of the church’s ministers and the apostolate and not for gain. It should not be taken as an obligation either, it is not just one of those church activities, it is not rules and regulations – it is prayer. When we do the liturgy we come to pray. Some may have the opinion that the liturgy as presented is too legalistic, too concerned about observing rules and regulations. These opinions had been noted and it is precisely because of this that the document changed its emphasis.
In the Acts of the Apostles, the Eleven on sensing that they were already overburdened by serving on tables, that is doing the ecclesial work of charity, established the office of the diaconate so that they can reserve to themselves the principal duty of praying and preaching. I am not in anyway saying that the works of charity should be relegated to the background. In fact the apostles established another structure, a ministry of orders, to make the works of charity an inherent part of the church’s mission. One who prays and one who preaches Christ cannot turn his back on this essential feature of the church’s mission. But it should be noted with equal emphasis that the principal duty of praying and preaching are not, should not become peripheral. These are called our principal pastoral duty – to pray and to preach. Now what can be more pastoral than doing our preaching, our homilies well? What can be more pastoral than making our Eucharist better? What can be more pastoral than making ourselves more available to the sick and the sinner unencumbered by so many concerns. Principal duty.
I have come a long way from the creativity and daring of my youth to the stability and the call for the search for meaning and purpose in my mid-life, and in all these I realize that there was only thing I wanted to do in the liturgy – I wanted to pray in a meaningful way. I want to pray a prayer which touches my intellect, my heart, my emotions, my senses, my whole being. A prayer that I can understand and a prayer which expresses what I want to express before my God and Father. I wanted a prayer that brings out the goodness in me and the goodness in people, that my encounter with God in prayer will make me more loving and less angry, more caring and less inattentive and insensitive, more priest than administrator.
In my years as one who is charged with the Liturgy in the archdiocese, I have to admit that I have grown weary of queries as to what is liturgically correct and what is liturgically incorrect. I don’t want to be made an arbiter anymore between what is right and what is wrong as if I am a walking encyclopedia as to everything that is in the heart of God. To all these incessant questions thrown at me, the only real answer I wanted to give was in the form of a question, “have you prayed? Did you pray? When you are doing this and that in the liturgy, can you truly say that you have prayed, can you truly say that you are guiding the people to pray, teaching your parishioners to pray?” Liturgy is prayer.
There is a story of a group of men and women who were gathered together after the mass and were sharing to each other how they were so touched by the celebration of the mass, how they prayed so intently, how they felt the living presence of God among them, how some of them were moved to tears and resolve. The sharing went on for some time until all of a sudden everything changed. Why did the conversation change? Well they were just joined by a liturgist. I do not want to be that anymore. In matters of liturgy I just want to go back to the pristine worship and prayer patterned after the early church community.
This instrumentum laborious is merely emphasizing what we most often miss when we discuss the liturgy – that it is prayer. In this document, priests are called the presiders of prayer and most especially they are referred to as the foremost teachers of prayer. The family is the first school of prayer, while the schools and lay movements are called schools of prayer. The rubrics and laws are called guides to prayer and the heavier regulations are called the discipline of prayer.
A charismatic once told me how she started her day with prayer. She would go through her morning ritual of brushing her teeth and washing her face, and combing her hair and dressing up before she could face her God – her Father and God. She has to prepare for her encounter with God. Simplistically said that is what the instrumentum laboris is all about. It may have 122 quotations for in reality it is a struggle to put into words the movement of the heart which cannot be easily articulated – a heart that yearns to do and be the best before its God, a heart that yearns to make the encounter well prepared and done well.
In my one year stint as a spiritual director of the college seminary I have always insisted to these beginners of prayer that the discipline of prayer is important from the way they carry their breviary to the angry look they receive when they slouch on the pews, or when they nod their heads during meditation, because while we await the gift of prayer, when prayer does not yet come out spontaneously, we need to show the willingness and the resolve to pray.
It is our desire then that we consider the 41 proposals from this perspective – that while we await the gift, when the time has not yet come for that spontaneous outpouring of interior impulse which could only come as a gift from God, we show through these proposals our willingness and our resolve to pray. The proposals, however you want to make them or word them, must show our willingness and resolve to pray.
But this prayer is not just my prayer, it is our prayer. Our prayer does not only mean us here in this hall. The pronoun is inclusive - it includes the whole church, the whole people of God, the church understood not just in its present arrangement but a church understood as a communion of the saints from the time it was just a germ in the promises uttered by the prophets, to its fulfillment at the time of Christ, to what it was right then at the age of the martyrs and how it is right now in our day and age.
The content of the homilies and the importance of the prayers of the faithful at every gathering were already described by St. Justin Martyr who died in the year 165. The Eucharistic prayer no. 2, so often prayed and already memorized by most priests is based on the Eucharistic Prayer found in the Apostolic Traditions probably with connection to what Hippolytus might have used in his mass. The Roman Canon was composed and remained substantially unchanged since the late 4th century used probably for the first time by Pope Damasus who made the shift from Greek to Latin; and the prayers we utter were mostly composed by the likes of Popes Innocent I, Leo the Great, Gelasius, Vigilius, Gregory the Great, the great classical teachers, Latinists of their era who represented whatever is noble in Rome – the classis. These are prayers composed and inspired by great theologians, the fathers of the church and the countless holy men and women through the ages. Liturgy is not just a prayer – this is our prayer and when we pray these we are not just merely praying a prayer, for when we do history is passing us by and we are reliving it, living once more in the shadow of these great men and women of our faith. We express and profess the faith, the same faith which these great men and women professed in their lifetime, echoing the same faith in our day and age so that the next generation that will build on the stones we have left behind may pray them with the same fervor and the same intensity and the same reverence as when it was first prayed. The message of the instrumentum laboris and its proposals is simply this, please take care of our prayer. This is not yours, it is not mine, it is ours. This is not just the possession of one man or one priest, this is owned by the communion of the saints. Take care of our prayer, by the way you celebrate them, where you celebrate them, when you celebrate them, in the way you do the gestures, the songs and responses, in the way you prepare for all these, whether in a humble chapel in an out of the way place, or in the majesty of a cathedral. Please take care of our prayer.
This prayer, so strong in tradition is not however static and frozen in time. It upholds tradition but it is at once open to progress responding to the different needs of the time and responsive to them for he or she who prays appropriates to oneself the sensitivity of the heart of God. Our prayer has always been a means to make us love God and to make us more loving toward each other. It is not an end in itself in the sense that since we have already a beautiful liturgy we will all go to heaven and be counted among the exemplary parishes. That is not enough. Consider a quote from the instrumentum laboris about a community who after rearranging the altar and the sanctuary, and after providing for an offertory procession, they realized in desperation that they still do not love one another. Indeed no matter how rubrically correct is our liturgy if it does not lead to conversion, if it does not deepen our love for God and neighbor, if it does not empower us to build real communities in our midst, something is terribly missing in our liturgies, something is terribly missing in our prayer. The instrumentum laboris is telling us to consider the intrinsic link between our prayer and the work of justice. One way or the other those who take seriously the liturgy cannot help but become social activist – probably in varying degrees but a social activist nevertheless. This is what the instrumentum laboris wishes to connect.
Take the concepts the church of the poor and the community of disciples of PCP II so pronounced in our vision-mission as an archdiocese. For so long we have paid lip service to these concepts, a priest has already composed a song deriding us for such neglect Kita simbahan sang kubos, sunod-sunod sa kay Jesus, pulopaambit, nga daw maalwan, kuno abi para sa tanan. The synod is probably the time when we can do something really concrete, to give the concepts church of the poor and community of disciples a perceivable face. Church of the poor – what is that – give it a face. And where else can we do something concrete that is really tangible and immediately perceivable if not in our prayer. In the gospel yesterday Peter was described as being out of his mind when he suggested that they remain there on the mountain with eyes transfixed and hypnotized in such glorious sight. But Jesus had to wake them up from their reverie thereby showing to men and women in all ages that the encounter with God necessarily leads us to come down the mountain, transfigured, strengthened, renewed.

. . . I think I covered everything. We have finished our duty, you are about to commence yours. A synod is always historic, something that future generations will refer back to. Leave your mark, share your idealism, be fired up by the thought that what you are discussing is something so familiar, for this is “our prayer”. As our first reading has said, It is already in your hearts and in your lips. It is very near you – you have only to carry it out.