Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in her novel, Aurora Leigh, this poem:
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,
And daub their natural faces unaware.
If “earth’s crammed with heaven,” then our liturgy is jam-packed with it! Yet too often we walk into our churches without seeing it, distracted by superficial things. We feel fragmented in our understanding of what the liturgy has to do with our daily lives. Or we become lost in what Pope Francis called an “abstract spiritualism which contradicts human nature itself, for a human person is an incarnate spirit and therefore as such capable of symbolic action and of symbolic understanding” (Desiderio desideravi 28).
The result is that we go through the motions of the liturgy but never “let ourselves be amazed at what happens in the celebration under our very eyes” (31). It’s not a generic kind of amazement that flattens the mystery into a vague piety or generalized sense of reverence that comes with being “in church.” Nor is it a kind of spiritual awe that recognizes the holy clearly present in the Eucharist but not in the more common things of communal prayer—water, oil, light, hands lifted, people greeted, words proclaimed, songs sung by ordinary voices to praise our extraordinary God.
Pope Francis called this the fundamental question: “How do we recover the capacity to live completely the liturgical action?” (27).
Why is this a serious challenge not only for long-time persons of faith but especially for our catechumens, candidates, and seekers? Because when we lose our capacity to engage with symbolic action, we miss seeing God deeply present in the ordinary human things of our daily lives.
Fortunately, ever since the church has baptized, it has also called the faithful to a deeper contemplation of the mysteries they celebrate and how they are to live those mysteries in their daily lives. That is what mystagogical reflection is.
In this video, Diana takes us through the three main parts of mystagogy and provides several mystagogical questions to help your catechumens and candidates see the wonder of God right in front of them wherever they are.
