In This Issue: "More than Meets the Eye: Formative Liturgical Participation" (Part 2)

The issue of Liturgy entitled “Worship and Formation,” guest-edited by E. Byron Anderson, explores how the liturgy “schools” the assembly through language, ritual, music, shaping of time, and distortion of its intention. This excerpt from Lizette Larson-Miller explains the importance of faith formation for children by their presence worship. Key to that formation is that faith is not a mere cognitive apprehension but rests in communal experience centered in Christ through symbol and sacrament. –– Melinda Quivik

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We are already partakers of Christ through our baptism—we are grafted onto Christ the root stock, and the fruit we bear is no longer simply of our own stock and contributions—it is shared. But participation is a slippery word when it comes to liturgy. Unlike many contemporary popular assumptions about participation in liturgy, often limited to encouraging everyone to speak all the parts, sing all the verses of every piece of music, and make sure everyone sees everything, participation in the liturgy is multilayered and ongoing. In his classic three levels of liturgical participation, Mark Searle mentions this outward participation (the performance of singing, speaking, watching attentiveness) as the path to be drawn deeper into the liturgy. Because liturgy functions symbolically, through this outward participation we become “engaged in the divine, invisible life of the world-to-come.” 

Here the ritual participation is formative as it leads to Searle’s second level of liturgical engagement, participation in the liturgy as the work of Christ. What he means by this is that the work of Christ the high priest in the liturgy (here, particularly the eucharistic liturgy) is what we are joining our prayers to—the whole of the body of Christ being swept up into the prayer and offering of Christ, “the endless self-giving of Christ into the hands of God from whom he receives back his life.” This participation in the high priestly ministry of Christ brings participants into the third level, participation in the life of God. . .

How can this possibly work, that what we speak with our mouth leads us into the divine life, aligns us with the priestly ministry of Christ, and leads to our participation in the ongoing life of God in this world and the next? This participation on multiple levels is possible because God invites us into God’s presence, and because we are holistic people, complicated, multilayered whole beings. Recalling our brief foray into ministry for and with the sick we know that to be spiritually unwell can affect the physical, to be socially unwell can affect the emotional, and so on. So here in this ritual setting to be physically participating in ritual is forming us, shaping us, to be church together, to be the people of God and to act as the people of God, which directly affects the spiritual (and the emotional, and the mental) circling us into the priestly ministry of Christ and into the work of God in the world through the power of the Holy Spirit.

. . . Starting with the ontology, the actual state of our being, brought about through baptism, our baptized selves are forever part of a community crossing all space and time, part of the body of Christ. As part of this community we need, if not consciously to always be receiving the Trinity into ourselves at least not to be rejecting what God has done.

In this quarterly journal’s focus on worship and spiritual formation, this particular essay is interested in participation itself as formative, not only in rituals forming habitus in all of us, but also in the power of sacramental formation that shapes us as we often give shape to the outward structure of our liturgical lives. What might be some of the essential elements of sacramental formation?

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Lizette Larson-Miller, professor of liturgy and sacramental theology at Bexley Seabury Seminary in Chicago, as well as the canon precentor for the Diocese of Huron (Anglican Church of Canada), is the author of four books and numerous articles, including Sacramentality Renewed (Liturgical Press, 2016).

Larson-Miller, L. “More than Meets the Eye: Formative Liturgical Participation,” Liturgy 40, no. 2 (2025): 60–67.