God Who Hearkens Inside Me
The issue of Liturgy entitled “Future Renewals: Looking Toward the Next Fifty Years of Worship Scholarship and Practice,” was co-edited by Andrew Wymer, vice-president of the Liturgical Conference board and professor of worship at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, and me.
We solicited essays from a range of members of the North American Academy of Liturgy (NAAL) looking at what has changed in liturgical scholarship and liturgical practice in the years since NAAL was founded in response to the Second Vatican Council.
Here is an excerpt from David Turnbloom’s essay focusing on teaching the mysteries of faith to undergraduate students rather than attempting to feed young people ideas to memorize. –– Melinda Quivik
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A mystagogy of the unauthorized, then, aims to be a grace-filled (even if not very graceful) process that fosters hospitable encounters with the unauthorized religious experiences of others. Instructors who embrace this mystagogy must set out clear expectations for patience and mutual respect. While possibly arduous and disorienting, when undertaken with the right predisposition, these encounters can lead to a deeper self-understanding and a deeper appreciation for religious diversity. Paul Crowley has argued that mystagogy draws people beyond the boundaries of their own faith community and into a prayerful, interfaith journey.
Discipleship, then, can be understood as a mystagogy of believing that reaches beyond oneself toward strangers, draws them into dialogue, and moves along the road with them…. Yet more than discoursing about beliefs per se, or proselytizing, this mystagogy into mission is a moving along the road of life, breaking bread with the other and, as a church, transcending our limited selves, meeting the other where cor ad cor loquitur, “heart speaks to heart.”
In the end, this form of mystagogy is no less prayerful than mystagogical catechesis of the Church Fathers. In early Christianity, mystagogy was intended to draw people into the prayerful life of Christ. Mystagogy of the unauthorized is a process of sacred encounter that transforms the lives of all who participate. Mystagogy of the unauthorized insists that undergraduate classrooms can be sacred spaces of revelation where divinity encounters divinity.
As I said above, I believe the future of liturgical studies needs to move beyond seminaries and graduate schools and into the undergraduate classroom. However, these classrooms cannot simply be places where we depart our expert knowledge of liturgical rubrics, their historical contexts, and their theology. Rather, liturgical studies should engage undergraduate students as a frontier of revelation where divinity is encountered anew. If we cannot make our field speak (and, more importantly, listen) to the religious other, then the field of liturgical studies will continue to shrink. By practicing a mystagogy of the unauthorized, we are better equipped to convince students that they are agents in their own education and in their own faith journey. In turn, instructors learn to see themselves as fellow pilgrims walking with their students.
To close this essay, I will quote the Jewish mystic and Holocaust victim, Etty Hillesum. In her journals, Hillesum wrote extensively about the importance of listening intently to one’s self and to others. My vision for a mystagogy of the unauthorized finds its primary inspiration in Hillesum’s prayerful search for meaning and divinity that she carried out by seeking God in the vulnerable moments of everyday life: “Truly, my life is one long hearkening unto myself and unto others, unto God. And if I say that I hearken, it is really God who hearkens inside me. The most essential and the deepest in me hearkening unto the most essential and deepest in the other. God to God.”
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The full essay including references is available now in the digital and print editions of Liturgy. All of the essays in Liturgy 38, no. 1 are available by personal subscription and through many libraries.
David Farina Turnbloom is an associate professor of theology at the University of Portland in Portland, OR. He is the author of Speaking with Aquinas: A Conversation about Grace, Virtues, and the Eucharist. He is also the founder of and faculty advisor for the Collaborative Humanities Investigating Religion and Power (CHIRP-Lab.com).
David Farina Turnbloom, “Mystagogy of the Unauthorized,” Liturgy 38, no. 1 (2023): 18–23.