Millennials and Catechesis

The return of the discussion about millennials going liturgical and the debates such discussions engender (see here, here, and here) underscore some of the popular confusion about forms of Christianity.
It’s also a reminder of the ongoing challenge of proper catechesis. One gets the impression in some accounts that persons who want to move to another faith tradition
have failed to understand their own. Caricatures like watered-down Christianity
or ritualistic and lifeless religion become the basis for departing to greener
pastures. We should be equally worried, however, that they might not understand
the faith tradition that currently has caught their attention. It seems
catechesis must become an ecumenical enterprise.

Not too long ago I had a conversation with a former student
about some of her challenges as a pastor in a liturgical and sacramental form
of Protestantism. She noted that some parishioners wanted to go “Pentecostal”
without even realizing what that meant. They wanted to encounter God and
thought that maybe raising their hands in the air would help. In response I wondered, “Did you tell these people that if they want to
encounter God, they simply need to come forward to the Eucharist for God is
there?” No hands need be raised except to receive the elements.

Having been catechized in a liturgical and sacramental
tradition, these parishioners still did not seem to understand what it meant to
say that Christ meets them in the bread and wine. Nor did they seem to get the
fact that the liturgy itself is an embodied movement toward God requiring an
act of consecration and commitment. To be sure, raising hands is another kind
of embodied movement, but that’s it. There is no magic in it. The key, of
course, is the disposition of the worshipper, because even though in the act of
consecrating the elements the Spirit descends and Christ is objectively
present, the gift of grace must still be appropriated in faith on the part of
the believer. The richness of the liturgical life in its sacramental fullness
was somehow missed by my student’s parishioners.

At the same time, in their zeal the parishioners seemed to
equate Pentecostalism with bodily movements, which reinforces stereotypes of
superficiality and subjectivism in the same way that charges of ritualism feed
into stereotypes of lifeless performance and stale worship. These stereotypes
also make it difficult to find common ground.

A few years ago the late Jeff Gros, a De la Salle Christian
Brother who was deeply invested in ecumenism, suggested that he and I host a discussion
about healing as a sacrament (or the Sacrament of Anointing) partly because it
allowed us to leave aside temporarily the mode of divine presence in the
Eucharist so as to come at the nature of a sacrament from a different direction.
We discovered much agreement in the Catholic and Pentecostal views insofar as both
grounded their understanding of healing in James 5 and the work of Christ to
overcome bodily and spiritual infirmity, both saw the oil as transmitting the
grace of the Spirit, and both saw healing of the body and the forgiveness of
sins as being intertwined. We also noted how the Sacrament of Anointing stood
within a broader compass in which the prayers of the laity, pilgrimages to
sacred shrines, and special charisms of healing could also serve as conduits of grace to cure bodily infirmity. When one looks at it this way, the
charismatic life and the sacramental life do not seem so distant.

No one wins when stereotypes abound regardless of what faith
tradition is the object of such stereotypes. In fact, these interpretations of
various faith traditions become obstacles to understanding. Participating in
ecumenical enterprises has taught me the value of seeing every faith tradition
from a number of different angles. Overcoming such stereotypes will require
more than better catechesis about one’s own faith tradition. It will require a
richer understanding of the alternatives.