The Presence of Christ in the Gathered Assembly

Judith M. Kubicki

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780826419019
• eBook ISBN: 9781441178923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The Dogmatic Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of Vatican II reiterates the church's traditional teaching on the manifold presence of Christ in his church, especially in liturgical celebrations: in the priest, the consecrated bread and wine, the sacraments, and when the gathered church prays and sings. Nevertheless, there continues to exist in both scholarly writing and popular piety an almost exclusive focus on the presence of Christ in the eucharistic species. The purpose of this book is to examine the most elusive mode of the manifold presence of Christ mentioned above, that is, as it is symbolized within the assembly that gathers for worship. Using the resources of several contemporary philosophical aproaches, including semiotics, phenomenology, personalism, and existentialism, the book draws attention to the forgotten or or less understood aspects of the belief in the presence of Christ in the gathered assembly and explores the implications of this belief for participating in the liturgy and living the Christian life. While the book is scholarly in tone, it has extremelypractical ramifications for the ways in which the mass should be celebrated in millions of Catholic parishes around the world.

Chapter One

PERCEPTION, PRESENCE,
AND SACRAMENTALITY
IN A POSTMODERN CONTEXT

Introduction

In a crowded subway deep in the belly of Manhattan, harried straphangers¹ huddle together. Jerky stops and starts of the train force contact between total strangers — in many cases people who don’t even understand each other’s language. In the corner, a young man listens to tunes on his iPod, totally oblivious of the people or activity around him. As the train emerges above ground, several people reach for their cell phones to make or receive a call. When the doors open, passengers jockey for a position that allows for quick exit. How was presence to other human beings perceived or experienced in this setting? How do daily experiences of life in the twenty-first century influence our ability to speak about — let alone understand — the meaning of presence in a human or religious sense?

Doing theology does not have an option when it comes to paying attention to context. Rather, doing Christian theology is, by its very nature, a process of ongoing dialogue with context. In other words, theology requires dialogue with each place where faith would be alive and active so that the received tradition might flourish in communities of diverse time, place, and culture. This chapter offers a modest contribution to that dialogue by exploring how the unfolding of Christ’s presence in the gathered assembly can be expressed and perceived in a postmodern world. Several frameworks from phenomenology will be engaged as critical conversation partners in this process. This chapter will address three questions: (1) What are the characteristics of postmodernism that might directly impact this religious belief and experience? (2) What role does sacramentality play in the contemporary Catholic imagination? and (3) How can “presence” be understood and “perceived” in a postmodern world.

The bishops of the Second Vatican Council eloquently expressed the contextual nature of theology in article four of Gaudium et Spes (1965), the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World:

[I]n every age, the church carries the responsibility of reading the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel, if it is to carry out its task. In language intelligible to every generation, it should be able to answer the ever recurring questions which people ask about the meaning of this present life and of the life to come, and how one is related to the other. We must be aware of and understand the aspirations, the yearnings, and the often dramatic features of the world in which we live.²

The work of the Second Vatican Council was a monumental effort to put theology in dialogue with culture. However, even as the documents were being promulgated, the world from which and to which it was speaking was already evolving from what is usually termed a “modern” perspective to one that today is generally designated “postmodern.”³ The theological investigations, the biblical research, and the pastoral reflections that constituted the work of the council were the fruits of a modern world. The challenge of the present time — a brief forty years later — is to bring the theology and pastoral insights of Vatican II into dialogue with the postmodern context.

Liturgical Renewal

In many ways, the response to Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963), Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy,⁴ can be described as both positive and negative. On the one hand, the worship life of many has been reinvigorated with new life and energy. Most Roman Catholics are at home worshiping in the vernacular and have welcomed the reformed rites. On the other hand, some are bitterly disappointed. They rue what they see as the loss of a sense of awe and mystery in the liturgy. In addition, local churches are dealing with the reception of new directives in recent documents published by Rome and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops regarding particular aspects of celebrating Mass and devotion to the Eucharist outside Mass. Many directives contained in these documents have re-ignited public debate on the role of the laity in the liturgy and placement of the reserved eucharistic species. Some view these developments as attempts to reverse the reforms initiated by the Council. Others regard them as a response to grass roots appeals to rescue Catholic worship from laxity or wrongheaded or irreverent innovation.

A potentially fruitful starting point for interpreting the current tensions and gaining insights for promoting authentic worship is to take another look at the guiding principles of the liturgical reform from the perspective of postmodernity. This chapter makes a small step in that direction by exploring how a postmodern experience of both human perception and presence might affect an appropriation of belief in the presence of Christ. Article seven of Sacrosanctum Concilium states:

To accomplish so great a work Christ is always present in his church, especially in liturgical celebrations. He is present in the sacrifice of the Mass both in the person of his minister, “the same now offering, through the ministry of priests, who formerly offered himself on the cross,” and most of all in the eucharistic species. By his power he is present in the sacraments so that when anybody baptizes it is really Christ himself who baptizes. He is present in his word since it is he himself who speaks when the holy scriptures are read in church. Lastly, he is present when the church prays and sings, for he has promised “where two or three are gathered together in my name there am I in the midst of them” (Mt 18:20).

The observations that follow are offered as introductory considerations. (A more detailed analysis of this article will be taken up in the next chapter.) Within the celebration of the Eucharist, four modes of Christ’s presence are identified by article seven: in the word (sacred scripture), the presider (priest as leader of prayer), the gathered assembly, and the bread and wine. A fifth mode refers to other sacramental celebrations. Such an enumeration of modes may be news to the average believer. For the last several centuries, the focus of the average worshiper has been on the presence of Christ in the sacred species. Since Vatican II published Sacrosanctum Concilium, there has been an increased awareness and appreciation for the presence of Christ in the word and, to a lesser extent, the presider. Scholarly work on the presence of Christ in the eucharistic elements (bread and wine) continues to be significant and extensive. Developing a theology that promotes an understanding of Christ’s presence in the assembly gathered for worship is receiving some increased attention. However, much more work is required to provide a theological framework for understanding this belief and articulating it effectively. But before the theological implications of this teaching on the manifold presence of Christ are examined, we need to ask how “presence” is actually understood in a postmodern context. Let us begin by exploring what is meant by the designation “postmodern.”

Characteristics of Postmodernity

Scholars generally agree that the label “postmodern” originated in the 1930s to designate certain developments in the arts. Its usage gained more widespread attention when it was applied to certain forms of architecture in the 1970s.⁵ Postmodernism rejects the modern mind-set that views the human person as an autonomous rational subject. This attitude originated with the Enlightenment and culminated in the twentieth-century view that human existence could be brought under rational management through technology.⁶ Modernity believed that knowledge is certain, objective, and good. As a result, reality in many of its varied aspects was put under the regular scrutiny of reason. In addition to elevating the importance of reason, modernity likewise elevated the importance of the freedom of the individual, understood to be an autonomous self existing outside the constraints of any tradition or community.⁷

Postmodernism also rejects modernity’s sanguine assessment of human knowing. Instead, the postmodern perspective challenges the assumption that knowledge is inherently good. It likewise rejects the notion of the dispassionate autonomous knower and belief in the inevitability of progress. The events of September 11, 2001, have affirmed these postmodern convictions in undeniable ways.

Mounting threats of terrorism, despite the escalation of strategies for war and homeland defense, highlight the fragility of security, peace, and freedom. Rational management of the planet appears to be a colossal failure. Even spending billions of dollars has failed to bring order and certainty to a time of chaos and unspeakable human suffering. On the positive side, however, the failure of the intellect to serve as sole determiner of belief has resulted in the reemergence of appreciation for the emotions and intuition as valid avenues for arriving at truth. Integration is favored over analysis and the universe is viewed, not as mechanistic and dualistic, but as historical, relational, and personal. Reality is thus characterized as relative, indeterminate, and participatory.⁸

Deconstructionists operating from within a postmodern perspective propose that meaning occurs when the interpreter enters into dialogue with a given text. However, because each interpreter reads reality differently, the possibility of arriving at a universal worldview significantly diminishes. In other words, all is difference.⁹ Pluralism becomes the hallmark of postmodern culture;contradictory styles are juxtaposed as in a collage.¹⁰ This is readily evident in such venues as art, fashion, and entertainment. Even so, the postmodern perspective is sensitive to the social dimension of reality and keenly conscious of the significance of the local community for providing interpretations of it. In fact, it is within the framework of particular communities that postmodernism allows for the possibility of truth claims. But since meaning can occur only when the interpreter enters into dialogue with a given text, interpretation replaces knowledge.

Another characteristic of postmodernism is the frequent blurring of reality and fiction, presence and absence. Technology, particularly in the form of the screen — movie, television, computer, or cell phone — has contributed to this phenomenon. In the first place, the television screen provides a collage of images that juxtapose the irreconcilable, e.g., atrocities of war reported in news bites interrupted by commercials for luxury automobiles. Secondly, technology eliminates spatial and temporal distinctions, merges past and present, the distant and the local. This blurring of boundaries is only heightened by the experience of surfing the web on the personal computer.

The traditional contrast between the subjective self and the objective world recedes as the screen becomes an extension of us and we an extension of it.¹¹ Another form of technology to incorporate the screen is the cell phone. In many ways similar to the television and computer (but in some ways more insidious because its picture-taking capability easily violates privacy), the cell phone serves to overcome spatial and temporal distinctions and merge the distant with the local. However, even without the screen, the cell phone disrupts the ordinary experience of personal presence and absence. Persons can be available twenty-four/seven to those who are absent. Conversations with those who are absent intrude in public spaces.

Finally, the postmodern age can be identified as the period that has witnessed the demise of the meta-narrative. Criticized for displaying absolute, universal, and cognitive pretensions, master narratives have been abandoned and exchanged for the radical particularity and contextuality of individual or local narratives.¹² In such an intellectual climate, it becomes difficult, perhaps even impossible, to appeal to a central legitimating myth. In fact, not only have all reigning master narratives lost their credibility, but even the idea of a grand narrative is no longer considered tenable. This contemporary awareness of the hegemonic assumptions of the master narrative seems to expose the arrogance of the Western perspective. It might actually be more accurate to say that the postmodern age has witnessed, not the demise of the meta-narrative, but the demise of the belief that there was or is one universal grand narrative.

What are the implications of these developments for the Christian narrative? The fundamental plurality of the postmodern situation highlights the particular and contingent nature of all discourses and narratives, including “founding” narratives. Does this lack of universal perspective signal the end of narratives that negotiate both individual and collective identity? The Belgian theologian Lieven Boeve, in his work on sacramental presence in a postmodern context, argues that it does not. Rather, he suggests that it requires an acknowledgment that plausibility now must mean contextual plausibility.¹³ This need not mean the demise of the Christian narrative as such. A shift in context may imply a loss of plausibility, but as Boeve observes, it also “represents a challenge to renew the effort of recontextualisation, to look for a new relation between the received tradition and the changed context.”¹⁴ Such an insight has serious ramifications for the Church’s task of inculturation, especially in regard to the celebration of the liturgical rites. In a postmodern world, the decision to ignore issues of context may actually render the Christian narrative unintelligible or incomprehensible to a world far removed from the influence of the originating culture of Western Christendom.

Acknowledging that the context has changed requires a reexamination of old assumptions. If the contemporary context exhibits postmodern characteristics that reject the superiority of reason, the possibility of a universal worldview, and the intelligibility and legitimacy of master narratives, we need to reflect on how this perspective might open up new avenues for exploring the intuitive and the relational dimensions of the sacramental imagination. Further, if postmodern technology has helped to create the blurring of distinctions between reality and fiction, presence and absence, the subjective self and the objective world, we need to reflect on how such a lack of boundaries specifically influences our understanding of the local and participatory dimensions of Christian faith and rituals. Might some of these developments be welcomed opportunities for promoting authentic worship?

Since the integration favored in the postmodern approach promotes a worldview that is relational, personal, and participatory, worship may once again be acknowledged as an important locus for religious insight and the expression of religious belief. The type of knowing that occurs within worship can be described as neither rational nor scientific. Rather, because it is symbolic activity, it is primarily non-discursive and exhibitive. That is, meaning is not asserted by means of propositional content in worship, but exhibited or manifested in the interplay of symbolic activity.¹⁵ By means of such simple elements of creation as water, fire, oil, bread, and wine, human beings are drawn into ritual behaviors that enable then to engage in “sacred commerce” with God. It is this fundamental belief that God can be experienced in this way that provides the foundation for the notion of sacramentality.

The Notion of Sacramentality

Simply stated, sacramentality can be described as having one’s eyes and ears attuned to the intimations of a benevolent God inviting us into a transforming relationship. It requires an openness of the imagination to being surprised by the presence of God in the mundane. In this way, ordinary created realities serve as symbols or windows...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One Perception, Presence, and Sacramentality in a Postmodern Context
• Chapter Two The Sacramentality of The Gathered Assembly
• Chapter Four The Sacramentality of Time
• Chapter Five Gathered up into The One Cosmic Dance
• Notes
• Index