Worship as catechesis: Knowledge, desire, and Christian formation

Theology Today, Oct 2001 by Murphy, Debra Dean

This means that the knowledge that comes through the worship of the triune God is ultimately a kind of counterknowledge to the ways in which the real and the good are instantiated in the wider culture, thus affording the possibility of resistance to what Christians might take to be false and harmful construals of what is real and what is good. This "practical knowledge" reconfigures, reimagines a vision of the order of power in the world such that normalized power relations are called into question and the order of power (and desire) is brought under the scrutiny of "the community itself becoming the truth." The imagined world of the liturgy that is called into being by our acts and speech to, for, and about God is not only an alternative reality or a counterculture (that is, it is not alternative in the sense of consumer choice); rather, this vision of the real proclaims dissatisfaction with the existing order, with "the way things are." The language of the liturgy (verbal and bodily) signifies differently, creating a new set of possibilities for human existence; it puts the world under judgment--not condemnation, but judgment. To partake of the eucharist is to enact judgment against a world at war with itself; it is to recognize the subversive nature of this act of communing at Christ's table. To come to the Lord's table is to be shaped by a story of forgiveness, reconciliation, and communion; it is to refuse to participate in the forces of destruction (however subtle they may be) that deny that all of creation is God's good gift. It is, in other words, strategic disaffiliation: Within the context of other ways of knowing and acting, Christians bear witness to the fact that the body of Christ gathered together in eucharistic fellowship is not the way of the world; it is a sign of the inbreaking reign of God. But here the sign and that which it signifies cannot be separated; the eucharist not only points to the gospel story, but is itself its incarnated proclamation. To know this gospel story, to learn it, to be shaped by it, is to embody it.

KNOWLEDGE AND DESIRE

For Augustine, the only sure knowledge is that of desire: the natural, human longing that, when rightly ordered, finds its fulfillment, its telos, in the sociality of God's being, the community of Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. "I am clasped in a union from which no satiety can tear me away. This is what I love, when I love my God."35 Knowledge is now desire shaped toward its true end-such that one might say that "false" knowledge is simply the "short-fall of an inadequate desire."36 Knowledge is now participation, not mere contemplation; it is ontos, not simply episteme. As participation, it is enacted in and through the corporate life of the church, initiated by baptism and sustained through time by the sharing of Christ's body and blood in the fellowship of believers in Christian community. Knowledge as/in communion is never a knowledge outside the embodied practices of eucharistic fellowship, a fellowship that is the very life of God.