TESTIMONIES ABOUT MYSTAGOGY

Most of the students in my Roman Catholic theology classes are baptized Christians, with the majority engaging at least some faith practices. Amidst a Roman Catholic majority, a smattering of non-Catholics dot the room here and there, along with two or three non-Christians admitting little previous exposure to Christian thought and practice. Last week, I asked these students to perform a reflective description of the most significant events, persons, occurrences, and classes contributing to either their religious/spiritual growth and change or personal transformation they were also asked to describe. Carefully written, the brief papers attentively disclosed meaningful aspects of students’ experiences. The findings of this unofficial survey proved illumining, catalyzing my own increasing inquiry into the substance and nature of spiritual formation and development.

Student replies suggested three general themes: students stated they had been most affected by 1) a specific event in their lives, such as a sports injury (interestingly, number one in the male responses) or a difficult illness in their families; 2) a youth group or gathering of friends, usually related to a particular event such as a concert, retreat or outing; and 3) church-sponsored CCD confirmation classes or Sunday school during their school-age years. Throughout the reflections, Catholic students most often mentioned varied types of catechesis they had attended in the context of relationships with friends and family. For example, one student commented her fondest spiritual memory was walking to after-school CCD with a group of friends every Wednesday afternoon, another mentioned taking her younger siblings to classes with her. Almost universally, students’ exploration of spiritual and religious transformation related interpersonal engagement with people in the past, with no mention whatsoever of doctrine or theological ideas. God, Jesus, the sacraments, liturgy, or scripture was rarely if ever mentioned, and students discussed past events, youth gatherings, and church classes as primary focus of their religious experience itself.

There was, however, a striking exception to this trend. The few non-Christian students all very transparently described their experience of God as very meaningful, especially as they were given the course’s many reflective opportunities. Sharing they had never really thought about “thinking about God,” “reflecting on the meaning of things,” or “looking more deeply into myself,” these students articulated details of their immediate transformations in a very different tenor than their baptized classmates. They spoke in present tense!

Throughout the ponderings elicited through my informal student survey, I have gained no specific “action steps” toward a more mystagogical enactment of Christian baptism. Most deeply, authentic mystagogy is encounter with Mystery, taught beyond teaching, known beyond knowledge. Perhaps this is why my catechized students recalled not doctrine but friends, family, and the interpersonal moments of simply being together. Catechesis becomes transforming mystagogy when, in pointing to word, sign, and symbol, it apprehends these externals toward a transforming union of each human person with the divine Mystery.

Neville Ann Kelly <nevkel@gmail.com>
Mount Marty College

5. An example of baptisms that are increasingly common

I was asked to be a stand-in for a godmother of a 4 year-old several weeks ago at a parish I had not visited in 30+ years. The divorced mother of the child attends a protestant church and I was not sure if she was reverting to the faith or needed her child's baptismal certificate to qualify him to attend pre-school. The grandparents sometimes attend Mass at a "liberal" parish elsewhere as they are divorced and remarried - the grandfather came from a very devout Catholic family of 9.

The parish has no pastor now. The priest was "rented." There were three children to be baptized, but nobody knew each other. The baptisms were held after Mass rather than during, which is what I have been used to. The priest spent much of the very lovely ceremony explaining in detail what things meant. He sang an African American spiritual without music that nobody knew. He seemed filled with the Spirit.

Overall, the parents reminded me of a Star Trek episode where the crew found a group of adults on a planet who had been stranded since childhood and had developed a cultural system based on fragments of things from the past they did not understand - like fractured words from childhood songs.

One goes through the motions because this is what one does, sometimes. Rituals outside community – yet community is what gives any them meaning.

Clare McGrath-Merkle cmm4@verizon.net
Universität Augsburg

B- ON ORIGINAL SIN

1. Exorcism and original sin

Just a comment on an element in the rite itself of baptism which is apparently still official and widespread: the exorcism.

At recent baptisms of babies during Mass at our parish, different priests, reading from the Ritual, first announced and gave an "exorcism" to the baby being baptized. Is this done also for adults?

In any case, the rationale seems to be to cleanse the person of original sin. Is this appropriate or necessary today? True, the new Catechism of the Catholic Church seems to be inconsistent in respect to Original Sin (see Gabriel Daly, "Creation and Original Sin," in Commentary on the Catechism of the Catholic Church, ed. Michael J. Walsh, 82-111; London: G. Chapman, 1994). But the idea that sin brought death to the human race makes no sense, once one realizes that like all other living things in the process of evolution, human beings are naturally subject to dying.

Jack Mahoney SJ, in his book, Christianity in Evolution: An Exploration, Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2010, shows how the full range of Christian doctrine can be better understood without Original Sin. He also indicates why the idea came up and how it became so seemingly crucial in Western (not Eastern!) Christianity, given a lack of knowledge about the evolution of humanity.

An exorcism seems to be out of place, then, in baptismal preparation and the baptismal rite.

Paul Misner <paul.misner@marquette.edu>
Marquette University

2. Initiation and cleansing of sin are a two-fold reality

I'm just a lowly biblical scholar, so typically I only lurk on these conversations, but it strikes me that the present conversation might benefit from Paul's understanding of "original sin."

For Paul, this comprises a social-metaphysical reality (not a personal/individual one) otherwise known as "the present evil age". Baptism liberates from the influence of this "evil age" precisely because it integrates the neophyte into the body of Christ. In other words, incorporation into Christ effects liberation from sin. Initiation and "cleansing" of sin are not two different effects of baptism, but rather one two-fold reality. Those who live "in Christ" no longer live "in sin/this age of evil." Augustine's reading of Paul – or, at least, the dominant understanding of Augustine's reading – suffers from an individualism alien to Paul, which shipwrecks both the doctrine of original sin and also the understanding of Baptism as the act of divine re-creation- by-means- of- incorporation into the community of those who live in Christ Jesus.

Paul's theology avoids the difficulties raised by Prof. Miller and integrates the two sides of the traditional coin of Baptism's effects on the recipient. However, it also demands a baptismal community that consistently witnesses, in word and deed, to that reality of life in Christ – a tall order left unfilled by many local churches. There's the rub, indeed, and the place where IMHO baptismal mystagogia can make a real difference today.

Sheila E. McGinn <smcginn@jcu.edu>
University Heights, OH 44118

3.Love and faith, and naming the "empty works and promises"

In our Diocese (Harrisburg, PA), newly baptized and/or confirmed adults are ‘promoted’ from RCIA to adult education such as the ‘Breaking Open the Word’ Bible study, are invited to speak to future RCIA classes on selected themes and are contacted by representatives of parish sodalities and other organizations inviting them to consider joining in the work of those groups. They are also initiated into the liturgical ministries of lector and extraordinary ministry of Holy Communion. In some parishes, such as the Cathedral Parish of Saint Patrick, the neophytes are encouraged to attend and sit together at the same Mass together through Ascension Thursday, wearing the albs with which they were clothed in the Easter Vigil. Obviously, all of these introductions to ongoing study and leadership in the parish family are intended to sustain the spiritual forward momentum of the preceding year to eighteen months of preparation for active life within the Body of Christ. What a hope!

Sheila McGinn puts her exegetical finger on the neuralgic point of the Latin Catholic and more broadly ecumenical problem in the post-baptismal life of Christians, though with the slight anachronism that Paul the Apostle never actually dealt with the problem of ‘original sin’ as Saint Augustine had not yet invented it. Saint Paul expresses in the dynamic Greek that is patrimony of the Greek Church the dynamic and powerful (dunamis = power) energy (energia) of the baptizand’s participation in the Body of Christ. Paul’s language about love and faith in Christ, especially in Galatians and 1 Corinthians, is charged with these explosive twin verbal nouns linked to everything Paul teaches about grace, summed up with the formula “faith-working-through-love” (Gal. 5:6; I Cor. 7:9).

Is there not still an important place for the renunciations and exorcism within the baptismal rite, and act through which the whole Church stands in solidarity with the new Christian being born through the Sacrament? Perhaps the rite is in need of some imagination at the local level to name those Satanic ‘empty works and promises’ the Church calls us to name. In baptismal preparation, perhaps the RCIA class, or the parents and godparents of the infant baptizand(s) could be asked to name those 'empty promises and works' against which they intend to energetically struggle in Christ. If dated and trite 'namings' of evil can be avoided, the possibilities are legion.

Guy C. Carter <drguychrcarter@comcast.net>
Retired from Saint Peter's University, Jersey City, NJ