Liturgy of the Word
It is not hard for us to imagine a place where we can find everything that our human need requires: information, instruction, emotional satiation, humor, tragedy, at the touch of a moment; a place where worded, yet voiceless thoughts connect all people to one another with ease, where distance is quickly overcome between two people; a place where descriptions of our day and our activities, our wants and concerns, our life context, can be shared in an entangled web of human interaction; a place of messages given and received. What is this place?

Mystery
Let us encounter a mystery: that two people, encountering the same message, will derive two entirely different warrants from it. This response many be “conclusive proof” of some faith (OED “warrant,” n.1, def. 5b); it may be an affirmation of the foundation, the “under clay” of belief (“warrant,” n.2); it may be a license to action; it may be a point of conflict, to hold over oneself or another (“warrant,” a.); or the response may be no response at all, a lost moment, a mis-connection. What is the difference entre the former reactions and the latter one? Why is that all may hear, but not all hearken?
Meaning: Catechesis of the Post-Modern Liturgy
A recent study showed that young Catholics differed significantly from the older generations in their attitude towards the Church and the liturgy: “younger Catholics are more individualistic, more tolerant of religious diversity and far less committed to the practices of their faith than older Catholics” (Hefferin). Catholic University Professor and study coordinator William D’Antonio states: "The general sense of what is sinful appears to have changed over these generations….For the pre-Vatican II group, personal sins--missing Mass on Sunday, premarital sex, masturbation, lying--were serious failings, while the Millennial Catholics see social sins--bigotry, failing to give women equal rights, lack of respect for diversity, neglect of the poor--as major ills they need to confront" (quoted in Hefferin).
For the current generation of young Catholics, the Church and liturgy no longer have meaning. This meaning is not a dictionary definition, a one-to-one sign—a reason—it is a multivalent context connecting the multitude of signs and symbols together. Heidegger states: “meaning is the ‘upon-which’ [the context] of a projection [the future aims] in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something; it gets its structure from a fore-having [something we have in advance], a fore-sight [something we see in advance], and a fore-conception [something we grasp in advance]” (193, 191). Without this context, people live in a state of dis-connection, something that can be perceived as an ignorance, a mistaking, a misunderstanding, a disregarding (OED “ignore”). Speaking specifically of the religious catechesis of the young, John Cavadini writes: “This vast ignorance is not just a question of missing bits of information, retinal holes marring an otherwise excellent field of vision. It is something more like a retinal detachment, a whole field of vision pulling inexorably away towards blindness. Not only are the words gone, the bits of information, but the system in which the words made sense is fading” (12). Where has this “pulling away,” this disconnection, taking place?
In Liturgy Made Simple, Mark Searle writes: “Instead of thinking of itself as the only gateway to God, [the Church] has come increasingly to see itself as a sign established by God among the nations of the earth: a sign set up in history to show what God has done and is doing for the whole human race, whether he does it visibly or hiddenly” (18). However, there is a difference in this self-understanding from how the world popularly sees the Church. The shrinking world now has many such pictures, for many in the younger generation can rank it next to Mecca, or the Bodhi Tree, as symbols toward holiness–it is simply another religion among many; sadly, it has, according to the aforementioned study, become a symbol for all that is perceived as wrong with religion (prohibition of the body, restriction of women’s rights, etc.)—without any positive re-emphasis on the inherent notions of its constructive, healing purposes. It fails, as all things, in the meeting of God and man, body and word; with popular over-emphasis on the juridical understanding of salvation, it has become a tool wielded instead of a context-given. It speaks, but the world no longer. But it is in this same place, the meeting of God and man, body and word, where it also triumphs. How can “this place” give context for the re-meeting of individual and society, acts of conscience and acts of consciousness, word and warrant?

Dabar: Sema and Soma
Scientist and author Chet Raymo writes: "There was a time when words were thought to possess a literal power over things. Ali Baba opened doors with incantatory syllables. ‘Hoc est’ evoked a transubstantiation, turned bread and wine into flesh and blood. We have lost magic in the tongue. With a sophistication befitting the inventors of the telegraph, we have reduced hoc est to hocus-pocus and abracadabra to dots and dashes" (Raymo 58). The problem, then, is a problem of language—and not merely the words, but the entire system in which we proclaim them. We must first re-raise the wonder of words. Let us look at the theological words for word itself. "In the Hebrew language of the Old Testament, the term used for ‘word’ (dabar) could also mean an event, especially and important or significant or meaningful event: an event that said something" (Searle 39). What is the quality of this speaking? What is the connection between the word well-spoken, and the word-made-event? The necessity of hearing. Where do we first hear? In the body, in the ear, in the mind and spirit. And to hear requires an openness-towards, a hearkening. To hearken is “to have regard to, heed…to learn by hearing;” it is a “going-to” in order “to seek to hear…to inquire after,” constitutive of a “lie in wait” (OED “hearken”). It requires a waiting-to-hear, a listening. Listening is an engagement, which is not only intellectual, but is first and foremost bodily. Our hearkening and hearing requires an in-carnated response. "This reflects that way in which the term ‘Word of God’ or ‘Word of the Lord’ is best understood. God communicates through his people, not by putting thoughts into their heads or whispering into their ears, but by doing significant things in human lives" (Searle 39-40). It is heeding-to an event which first requires a waiting awareness of giving-heed; it is a circle, paradox, and mystery—a revelation and an opening. It is primary grace, the flip side to the circle of ensnaring sin. It is a change of our being. "Similarly, in Christian tradition we speak of Jesus as a dabar: he not only speaks God’s name, but he is the Word of God made flesh...His very person...a significant or meaningful event" (Searle 40). And so too for us as little Christs, humbly comprehending this, truly heeding-to this warrant, requires furthering the eventus in others. The Scripture warrants that we “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says:” fulfill the eventuality, eventuate the word (James 1:22). The word-heard in truth is an eventus: a coming out–of the church, out of the self (Webster "event"), of the sending-forth of the Mass (misse), positioning us to hear more in the whole, holy way of grace—in the daily events to which we give-heed. Therefore we strive to embody and incarnate Christ, individually and together towards the Kingdom proclaimed by Him in word and deed. In this way we reflect the manifestation of Logos, Christ’s wisdom, reason, and Word: in wor(l)d-flesh. Our wonder, then, is in the mystery of the meeting ‘twixt dabar, the word-event, and logos-, word-wisdom-made-flesh, in-the-body (in-carnate), the meeting of sema, word-signs, and soma, body, a soma-sema which is not the Gnostic tomb, but whole personhood, mind-body-spirit, under Christ; the mystery of hearkening searched for in the difference of an o from an e. The liturgy includes “a non-verbal language system [which complements] a verbal [system] with gestures that interpret the verbal (e.g., sign language) or with gestures and actions that emphasize the verbal (e.g., striking the breast in the Confiteor,” or which move beyond the signs of language to the emotional and spiritual dispositions amidst persons and between a human and God (Vereecke 503). The liturgy, then, is the primary word-event that draws the sema (words of our faith) into contact with our soma, our body; it is the word-event that reveals the Logos made Body, Jesus Christ, to us more clearly; to us, the corporate Body gathered in the Temple, and the sole-soul gathered in the Temple of our individual bodies. The liturgy gives us the open space, the liminal and luminal threshold in which to find ourselves and be shaped. How it all inter-relates, the mystery of the perichoretic and hypostatic universe, the place where the cascading light finds an open space in which to shine, and in which the bright white reveals the recess and womb of potential growth. This is the same space where a word can fall onto waiting soil, penetrate, gestate, grow, change, then transform, making it fertile for another season. How does the fallow first become fertile? Another mystery, a strand of the tapestry. What we concern ourselves with is the mystery of how some people are spoken to in the framework of the word event, and some are not. And we still have no answer—merely wonder of grace. But liturgy, as a “rehearsal of attitudes,” can help sow a seed, a seed as simple as showing up (Clay 10).

Current Cultural Need: Connection
What is missing is the teaching of symbolic interpretation and learning–the study of dabar: myth and parable in such a way that connects to bodily, psychological, and spiritual reality, instead of the pure objective learning from the Modern age in which “the direction of life was linear...[so that] individualism, fragmentation, specialization, differentiation, and a loss of the sense of the [comprehensive] whole of reality” yielded the “dislodging” of religion from personal growth, “because [religion’s] focus is on the meaning of the whole of life at its deepest level” (Seasoltz 23). In this, the “[the context] of [the future aims] in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something” is fragmented. Lost is the fore-having [something we have in advance], of theological understanding amidst the deprivations of the laity by Church history, the deprivation of catechesis or “pedestrian” over-verbiage to the first generations post-Vatican II, and the current push and pull of working out the reforms of that Council (Pecklers 113). “The fore-sight [something we see in advance],” then, has also been lost—what are the goals, now, for the Church, now that their age as sign has come and passed? And the “fore-conception [something we grasp in advance]” of how the Church is applicable to “my” individual life, confused. Amidst un-intelligibility, either apathy or a striving can be chosen, lost-ness or seeking, or, worst, clinging of the “old certainties”.
Strangely, then, this current generation is living a future vision, a fore--sight of social awareness, but without the undergirding of context to support it; without the Church, in many ways it carries on the Church’s goals, but in a state of survival. But there are still mis-connections, missed and mistaken, amiss (OED “mis-“).
We need to reclaim the sense that the liturgy is a connecting point to the very ancient: our humanity, with our individuals hurts, needs, hopes, and fears; and to the Divine, who guides us and helps us navigate our way through our humanity–self and community formed and forming together. If we can plug ourselves into the liturgy, we will be able to clear away much of the detritus of the past, to speak the old words anew, finding new ways to allow the Mass to speak of us and to us. Similarly, the Church will have to offer a primary language of healing and engagement, away from rubric and juridicial understanding; it will have to speak the people: "They talk about God instead of letting God speak to us" (Searle 39).
Spiritual hunger and social consciousness are present in the aforementioned article–and so the need for connection found in the virtual reality of storytelling through blogs, e-mails, and Facebook. Nick Wagner points out that “telling our story is a process of reconciling. Once I know your story–in the biblical sense–I am your story” (11). But he also points out that this connecting is something beyond the search for self in the bigger picture–the connecting “calls us to a ‘reality’ in which there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female” (11). It is a story telling amidst a bigger cultural story. In his book, A Sense of the Sacred, Kevin Seasoltz states: “This culture, developing above all among young people, is in some ways a return to primal culture, to nature, to the images of good and evil, and to symbols, myths, and rituals that are thought to enable people not only to deal responsibly with the mystery of iniquity in human life but to triumph over that evil” (30). And if the people are beginning to live universally, why cannot the Church and its voice?
The challenge, then, is moving this positive aspect of our generation into society and into our Church. This requires a spiritual coming-together: it requires a speaking out in the world, a word-event, not as individuals, but in communion. What is required is a renewed interest in liturgy, not as an empty, ritualistic practice, but something which does indeed have the same force of spiritual knowledge as the latest Harry Potter book (the new, post-modern myth and parable that teaches us the difficult spiritual lessons of life, even tragedy, in a constructed, fairy-tale world).
Liturgy is the aforementioned place written about, where the constructed global community symbolized in the Internet is drawn together in true intimacy–it is where we communicate our deepest needs, hopes, and desires–and our worst failures and sins, the Facebook wall made flesh. It is the healing reconciliation of religion, now replaced by the fabricated, electronic world. It is also the gathering place where we derive energy from the Body of Christ–one another and in the Eucharist–the viaticum, the “food for the journey” that we need lest we burnout our-selves as individuals with the incomplete understandings that we are alone in this world, that we can be self-made, and that, being self-made, we are failures if we do not succeed. It fosters our true and full self-identity in community, knowing and known, “In the paschal mystery story, the good guys seem to get defeated” (Wagner 10). Going to Mass, then, is bringing oneself into a context in which the absurdity of the world is seen with an angle to reality: suffering and pain; death of man and of justice; but also the hope of resurrection; of love’s power and joy’s fulfillment; of a strengthened community of believers once downtrodden, then empowered; of serving the downtrodden in the world in order to bring about the Kingdom of God. It is the story of the light that shines in and through darkness. It is the place where our story, our witness finds its meaning. It reveals the Church’s authority, its auctoritas: the author who promotes us, helps us to grow (OED “authority”, “author”). The Church, then, as authority, will have to speak the new generation even if requires new words, for the context is symbiotic and symbolic, not definition or sign.
The liturgy never demands, but always warrants, a response: “a reply, in words” or an “answer by some responsive act…in response to some influence” (OED “response”). It is a forum for connection. It is the shaping force of the seed sown, the cultivation of the wheat and chaff, the healing renewal of the field so that more seed may bear fruit, fertilize itself, then become pregnable again. "The liturgy keeps bringing us back to old words until we begin to understand them, and to old signs [symbols] until we begin to see what they mean. Our care should be to let the words be heard, to let the images shimmer, to let the gestures be done so clearly that they speak for themselves" (Searle 30). This bringing back is the circle of context. It is our, the integrated bodies/Body of the Church of Christ, warrant: “authoritative witness” (“warrant, n.1” def. 5a). What kind of response will it have for us? What kind of response will we have for it?
How can we bring ourselves back to it? How will it return to us?

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