Can
today’s young people come to experience the power of liturgy? Father Michael
Mason draws on his years of involvement in youth retreats as well as his
research on the topic of religious experience to offer some reflections
about liturgy and today’s youth.
To
my astonishment, when I read the evaluation sheets that the students had
filled in at the end of the camps, the Saturday evening Mass was the
activity most students chose as the one they “got the most out of” – not
just on one occasion, but after nearly every weekend, during the ten years
or so that I was involved in “Stranger Camps”. Occasionally
they would write something like: “At the Mass, I
felt close to God”, or “I’ve been attending Catholic schools for twelve
years, but this was the first time I felt involved in the Mass.”
This
was very touching, but extremely puzzling.
They
were Year 12 students, boys and girls from a mix of Catholic schools (never
from just one school), but we knew that very few were regular attenders at
Sunday Mass. Some others had been, back in primary school, but not since.
The retreats were voluntary, and the advertising made it clear that the
weekend was a religious retreat, but it would not surprise me if most of the
boys came to meet girls and vice-versa. Nonetheless, our style of invitation
attracted young people, some of whom were clearly believers; and the rest,
with few exceptions, were at least
open to the possibility.
What
was there about the Mass that provoked such a response? The way Mass was
celebrated on these weekends was nothing spectacular. Of course we involved
them as much as possible in preparing the room, the altar, the readings and
prayers, and the music, but they must have experienced that dozens of times
in well-conducted school liturgies. Nor was the atmosphere particularly
“intense”; we were at pains to avoid the artificially hyped emotionalism
that had characterised some kinds of youth retreats in the past.
The
only way I can think of to describe those celebrations is that they were
simple and serious.
Simple
in the
sense that there were no add-ons or distractions which changed the shape of
the Mass. My idea throughout was to
“get out of the way and let the symbols work” – the powerful liturgical
symbols of the Mass itself.
Serious.
I do not know if that is the best word; it risks being misunderstood as
ponderous or glum. I mean the approach was not light-hearted or chatty; we
used the somewhat “formal” language of the Mass, not “adapting” it to some
imagined teenage style. I think it had some solemnity without being heavy.
We tried to convey: “We’re doing something important here. This is special,
different; we’re touching into a deeper level of life where God is.” The aim
was to allow a sense of the sacred to permeate everything. It is not much
good trying to talk about the sacred, or sacredness, directly; it is a kind
of “tone”: people intuit it through the symbols of the setting and style.
But
again, all that seems to me pretty ordinary, and part of any well-done
liturgy, which they surely would have experienced elsewhere. Why was the
effect apparently so different, so much more powerful?
Looking
at the retreat/camp weekend experience as a whole, I came to see that there
were some significant preceding events which served as “remote preparation”
for that evening celebration of Eucharist. Only a small group was present
from each school, and those from the same school were not in the same small
group. So they could leave aside their peer-imposed roles and try being
someone more like the person they wanted to be.
Earlier
the same day, they had done an activity in which they shared something of
their life story. For many this would have been the first time they had
reflected on it, and they were listened to with respect and gentleness, but
without any rush of inauthentic emotional response, or haste to “band-aid”
their wounds, some of which were deep and painful. It was not uncommon even
for boys to feel safe enough in this setting to show some feeling, even to
shed a tear, when talking about, say, the death of a parent, brother, sister
or loved grandparent.
This
seems relevant to the later celebration of the Eucharist in the sense that
it was a celebration within a community – however temporary and fragile – a
group among whom they felt they belonged and were valued. Eucharist, of its
nature, is meant to be celebrated in a community of faith – whether of this
temporary and passing kind, or something more permanent.
But
I think something more was also at work in those young folk.
The
surprising impact of those celebrations of Eucharist on the teenage
participants set me off on some years of exploration of the topic of
religious experience. I began to include questions about religious
experience in interviews and in a large-scale Australian survey of
Catholics; in radio talk-back sessions I also invited people to send in
letters describing their experiences. What interested me was to focus, not
on the dramatic forms of religious experience we read of in the lives of the
great mystics, but on the much more common forms that most people experience
in everyday life, almost without noticing.
I
became convinced, on the basis of others’ research findings and my own, that
religious experience is far more widespread than is generally acknowledged.
However, for the most part, the sense of the presence of God arising in
these experiences is what people in the Middle Ages called “dark” knowledge;
you know, but cannot explain.
I
call this fundamental level of awareness of God “primordial” religious
experience, and see it as virtually universal in human beings. It is a
primitive level of grasping of God; it is not yet faith, acceptance of
Christ or of the Church; but it is the precursor to religious faith. And if
faith later develops, it builds on and retains this basic level of knowing
as its human foundation.
Religious
symbols, especially the great sacramental mysteries, are the gateways to
powerful experiences of God. They are like bridges we cross to enter another
world of consciousness, in which we can know even realities which transcend
the familiar world of everyday life. But the gateways can only be found and
entered by those who have grown to a certain level of faith.
I
think this is the most fundamental reason why the liturgies on those retreat
weekends seemed to touch many of the participants so deeply. They had
sufficient faith to walk through that door and, for some at least, the
liturgy was like the striking of a great gong, which reverberated through
them and awakened answering vibrations in areas of their experience that had
until then been out on the periphery of consciousness, like stars lurking at
the edge of the universe – intuitions of God hitherto shrouded in “dark
consciousness”, dim and unrealised, arising from unprocessed experiences in
which God is present but unrecognised, such as the death of a loved one, the
birth of a child, the beauty of nature, the entrancing power of music, the
sense of an answer to prayer, the rebirth of hope, fleeting moments of
inexplicable joy or peace of soul. (These are the things people most often
mention in interviews and surveys as opening them to awareness of the
Presence or Power which some call God.)
I
cling to the conviction, based on what I consider sound evidence from
research, that even among those young people who show little or no interest
in religion, the still small voice of primordial religious experience is
present, even if only as a deeply-buried intuition, waiting for the midwife
who will help it to be born into consciousness.
Michael
Mason CSsR
© 2008, Redemptorists
ABN 23 152 266 720, All rights reserved. Last updated: July 5, 2008
