Chapter 1: Liturgy, Mission, and World in Relationality
1.5 Mission and Official Roman Catholic Documents on the Liturgy
1.5.3 Beyond Source and Summit
The phrase “source and summit” appears multiple times in the above liturgical documents.
Based on the discussion above, the role of the liturgy is paramount to mission. Even though acknowledgment is made of other sites of mission, namely the domestic church and EN’s notion of “ecclesial intention”, there remains an implicit construal of mission as liturgically centred. My exploration of the above documents showed various ways of construing mission.
AG, RM, and EE employ the older, church growth model of mission from the days of colonialism. GS, EN, and EG have a principal concern for humanisation, the newer form of mission. SC is devoted almost exclusively on participation in the Paschal Mystery in the liturgy to such an extent that humanisation and charity are virtually absent. The result is three different ways to privilege the site of mission: (1) the liturgy, (2) humanisation, (3) the domestic church. Which document should one take as the guiding choice for prioritising mission? Even more to the point of this Chapter is that, if read on its own, SC may potentially distort the fact that there are various sites of mission in addition to the liturgy. Because these liturgical documents employ “source” and “summit” language from SC, I turn to Peter C.
Phan’s critique of this language in order to serve my purpose of articulating a comprehensive notion of mission in the site of liturgy as well as in acts of humanisation.
Phan argues against SC’s use of “source and summit” since this image ”suggests a mountain or a pyramid and …underlies the one-way relation between the original source and the [mountain or] body of water that flows out of it”182 The implied result of this image “sets up
181 Ibid.
182 Peter C. Phan, “The Liturgy of Life as the ‘Summit and Source’ of the Eucharistic Liturgy:
Church Worship as Symbolization of the Liturgy of Life?,” in Incongruities: Who We Are and How We Pray, eds. Timothy Fitzgerald and David A. Lysik (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2000), 11- 12. Also published in Phan’s Being Religious Interreligiously: Asian Perspectives on Interfaith Dialogue in Postmodernity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004): 257-278.
a scale of values”183 between liturgy and all other activities whether ecclesial or not. Liturgy, therefore, is valued greater than other activities, like mission, that may flow from it. Moreover, this image also implies a one way relationship: “However small is the source and however large is the river flowing down from it, there is only one way in which the two are related to one another, and that is from the top to the bottom, and never from the bottom to the top.”184 This critique of SC’s language of “source and summit”, as employed significantly by the papal documents explored above (EE and DCE) then, makes apparent that liturgy itself is central to the life of the church, and from my own perspective, this language of “source and summit”
reinforces that the church’s mission is principally liturgical. Mission, therefore, is centred within liturgy.
The world, as Phan evocatively argues, remains “parched” until those nourished by the liturgy “flood it [the world] and makes it fertile.”185 Whilst Phan does not relate his critique explicitly to a mission theology, the implication of “source and summit” language retains an older, colonial notion of mission; mission as conversion of non-Christians, that is, those who have participated liturgically in God’s mission. This language, therefore, centralises the liturgy in the life of the church, but mission apart from liturgy (as humanisation) remains either marginal or of less value than the liturgy itself. This language may be why the liturgical documents (SC, DCE, and EE) have less to say on dehumanisation than the mission documents, especially GS and EN. The two contrasting modes of mission are present within these official Roman Catholic documents, but the liturgical documents employ the older notion of mission, due to the use of SC’s “source and summit” language, whilst GS, EN and parts of AG employ humanisation as the newer mode of mission. In the next Chapter, the language of source and summit has influenced Roman Catholic liturgical theologies of mission, and yet, as I will show, there is also a growing concern for the new mode of mission as humanisation.
183 Ibid., 11.
184 Ibid., 12.
185 Ibid., 13. Phan takes this argument further by suggesting that SC’s “source and summit”
language retains a dichotomy between the sacred (liturgy where grace is made available) and the secular (where grace appears when those nourished by the waters of the liturgy sprinkle the world with sacred actions. Picking up on this critique, Ricky Manalo, The Interrelationship of Sunday Eucharist and Everyday Worship Practices (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press/Pueblo, 2014), 83-94, employs Phan’s argument to argue for the value of prayer practices of disciples apart from the liturgy.
Whilst Phan and Manalo turn to Karl Rahner’s supernatural existential to argue that grace is always and everywhere present to human persons: According to Rahner, because “of the permeation of the [entire] world by God’s grace, Christians are called to be ‘mystics’ in the world, that is, to be attuned to the presence of God during everyday moments that would otherwise go unnoticed. Experiences of God are not rare but are available to everyone at all places and at all times. Where Rahner calls these mystical encounters with God ‘the liturgy of the world’…, Phan, for his part, encapsulates these terms in his own, ‘the liturgy of life’” (Manalo, 90-91). My thesis turns not to Rahner but to Rowan D. Williams and Delores S. Williams to delineate how mission is not only important to daily activities of disciples, but also to explore how disciples can perform mission daily.
Conclusion:
I have been arguing that, despite various emphases, the overall theology of mission from these official Roman Catholic documents on mission is holiness. Holiness, it was suggested, is rooted in Christological living, that is (1) a contemplative participation in Christ through prayer and liturgy, as well as (2) a mimesis of Christ Jesus’s earthly ministerial life. From the above, it is clear that mission as holiness is principally construed as participation in Divine Love, thus accentuating this aspect of mission as holiness over the mimesis of Christ’s ministerial live. What this means, then, is that there is an underdeveloped mimesis in the construal of mission. This will be developed in Chapter 5.
The ecclesial act of mission is construed as participation in Divine Love, but can this participation theology of mission be extended beyond liturgy and prayer to the daily ecclesial acts of mission in the world? In other words, rather than centring mission in participation with potential subsequent acts of justice, can mission be decentred so that ecclesial acts of mission as justice simultaneously participate, however minimally, in Divine Love? These Post-conciliar documents, especially those concerning the liturgy, allude to this through a spirituality of living in and out of Divine Love , but as the above evidence suggests, only after one has participated in Divine Love (in liturgy) may one then live this out in life. This suggests a bifurcation between participation and mimesis. In the second half of this thesis, I will construct a bridge between participation and mimesis through the language of sacramentality, and by developing further a Christological mimesis of Christ’s earthly ministerial life. As such, then, a liturgical theology of mission may be constructed based upon a theology of mission as holiness.
This initial understanding of the dynamics of adopting a missionary identity needs to be expanded and deepened. In the next Chapter, I turn to contemporary liturgical theologies of mission, in order to analyse them through the lens of mission as holiness.
Chapter 3