Liturgy and justice: live your discipleship
Liturgy and justice really can heal a broken and hungry world
Photo from Photos.comLast June, a casual passerby would have seen an unusual sight outside San José City Hall. Streams of people processing behind banners of Our Lady of Guadalupe and other parish banners converged before a monstrance on an altar sheltered by a cloth baldocchino. The worshipers, from different lands and cultures, sang with one voice, “Somos un Cuerpo de Cristo, We are the Body of Christ,” as they processed on to St. Joseph Cathedral. It was a celebration of the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ. It was also a witness by and for immigrants cosponsored by the Diocese of San José and Catholic Charities, proclaiming that the church welcomed them as members of one body and stood publicly in solidarity with them in their desire for comprehensive immigration reform.
The link between liturgy and justice
While this celebration was an explicit linking of liturgy and justice, most of us experience the two realms as completely separate types of actions. On the one hand, we engage in the sacred time and space of liturgy as a unique experience of prayer, immersing our senses in the richness of music and incense, the rhythms of ritual language, gestures, and symbols, and the powerful experience of unity in celebrating word and the sacrament of the Eucharist.
On the other hand, action for justice engages our intellect and passion in a rough and tumble, give and take of building relationships, planning, negotiating, confronting, deciding, and acting communally to change conditions of injustice in order to benefit the common good and care for the least among us.
Both the prayerful celebration of the liturgy and compassionate action for justice are necessary for true discipleship. True liturgy is not just a ritual that is led by the priest for an hour while people passively wait to be filled with the words of Scripture and the bread of heaven. Rather it is “the work of the people.”
And justice is not simply the work of lay people to right wrongs. Justice is based in the Hebrew concept of zedekah, righteousness based on right relationship with God. This right relationship is founded on divine love, God’s love for us which inspires us to love one another, especially the least of these, the anawim.
As Pope Benedict XVI noted in Deus Caritas Est, “The direct duty to work for a just ordering of society…is proper to the lay faithful.” Moreover, charity animates their political activity, i.e., their work for justice (29). Or as Pope John Paul II put it, charity is the soul of justice (“Address to the UNIV Conference,” Vatican City, March 31, 1999, p. 14).
The sacrament of the poor
So for the disciple, both liturgy and justice are work, but works of love. And for the disciple both are a form of prayer, of an encounter with the divine that transforms our daily bread and our daily struggles into a communion of love. John Kavanaugh, SJ, talks about “the sacrament of the poor,” which both reveals and conceals God’s presence. In our work for justice, we experience the sacrament of the poor and through that encounter we have the graced possibility of encountering God.
Yet our daily struggles for justice in our communities and the world are nothing if they are not infused with love and they can become merely frantic, ego-driven activities if we do not renew ourselves in the kairos of God’s time through communal liturgy and individual contemplation. At the same time, our immersion in liturgy and prayer can become simply an escape or ritualistic superstition if we do not also bring to the feast the reality of the brokenness of our world, the violence, the poverty, the despair of our brothers and sisters.
On that Sunday in June, as I knelt in the hot sun on the hard concrete during the litanies of prayers at the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, I was at first distracted by the pain in my knees. And then I thought, I am kneeling in the midst of people who have worked hard all week in the fields picking produce, doing back-breaking construction work, or cleaning toilets. And they are hurting too, because of prejudice, poor wages, separation from family members, and a denial of mercy and justice. Yet here we are together, truly one body in Christ, one people of God, one family of humanity.
Afterward I talked with one of the women in her broken English and my worse Spanish. What touched me most was that she was so thankful that others in the community joined them, that the bishop blessed them and publicly recognized them, and that they did not have to struggle alone. In receiving her thanks I received the sacrament of the poor.
To be a disciple one must not just hear the word of God but act on it. With God’s grace we will then have the strength to engage in both the work of liturgy and the work of justice to bring true charity to our broken and hungry world. TP
Resources on justice and liturgy
Catholic Charities USA
www.catholiccharitiesusa.org
See their Campaign to Reduce Poverty’s Prayer Resources.
Federation of Diocesan LiturgicalCommissions
www.fdlc.org
See Liturgy and Social Justice under Liturgy Resources.
Notre Dame Center for Liturgy
www.liturgy.nd.edu/bibliography/justice.shtml
See their bibliography of liturgy and justice.
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
www.usccb.org
See the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (www.cchdc.org).
See Communities of Salt and Light: Reflections on the Social Ministry of the Parish.
*This article appeared in the November/December 2007 issue of Today’s Parish.
Gregory R. Kepferle is CEO of Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County, in San José, California. Greg received his MDiv from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley. He and his wife, Jean Blomquist, live in Morgan Hill, California.
