As a graduate student at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, I had to write a synthesis of Catholic faith through a lens of my own choosing.  The lens that I chose was that of liturgy or worship. Following is a constructive way I believe of thinking about our Christian faith in light of the way we come together to worship the living God.

INTRODUCTION

"When [Jesus] was at table with them, he took break, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, 'Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?'. . . Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread." (Luke 24.28-35)

The ancient church had a saying, "lex orandi, lex credendi," which loosely translates as "the law of praying is the law of believing." We express our belief in our worship. In worship, the Church ritualizes in words and actions what it believes deeply in its heart. As the Luke passage states, Jesus Christ is recognized when the gathered assembly breaks open Scripture and in the breaking of the bread.

Worship is God's turn to humanity in grace and blessing making God accessible to humanity and the ritualized response of humanity to that revelatory grace. It has the character of encounter between person with God. The Church gathered in worship is the meeting point of theology and praxis. The Second Vatican Council stated, "It is through the liturgy, especially, that the faithful are enabled to express in their lives and manifest to others the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true Church." (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 2) In worship the Church receives the revelation that is God's word, responds to that revealed truth, expresses what she believes and is inspired by the Spirit to go forth in mission. In an essay titled The Church as Sacrament, Peter Fink, S.J. wrote, "The Church in assembly expresses its identity and carries out its mission as the sacrament of Christ whenever it baptizes, confirms, does Eucharist, anoints the sick, reconciles the sinner, consecrates ordained ministers or blesses married love."

The worship of the Church community offers a reviving moment of contact with God . Worship is a dialogue between worshiper, community and a transcendent God. Fink outlines four basic elements in all the church's sacraments - word, offertory, consecration and communion. These elements articulate the relational quality of worship. Doctrine mirrors these elements beginning with a revelation, some statement or understanding of God (word), our response to what has been revealed (offertory), a connection with sanctification, being made holy (consecration), and ultimately unity with God (communion). What better lens through which to look at the basic doctrines of the church in order to make them intelligible to questioning Catholics than through the paradigm of worship?

Worship participates in Revelation. Revelation is the self-communication of God initiated by God and responded to by people through our capacity to be open to God's presence and action in history. Out of love for creation, God is disclosed to humanity in a specific way - in historical events, through individuals (prophets, Apostles, etc.), through special communities (i.e. the Church), and ultimately through Jesus Christ (God revealing and revealed). In worship, we receive and respond to this graced Revelation. Scripture is our principal record of Revelation. Worship is intrinsically connected to this Revelation as the Scriptures record the story of a people chosen by God and the story of Jesus of Nazareth. We are incorporated into that story and it becomes our story.

Worship is Christological. The summit of revelation is Jesus Christ who is both revealer and revealed. If worship is revelatory it is also Christological. The Second Vatican Council stated, "The most intimate truth which this revelation gives us about God and the salvation of man shines forth in Christ, who is himself both the mediator and the sum total of Revelation." (Dei Verbum, 2) Jesus is the incarnation of God's word among us - he is the fulfillment of God's desire to be with us. Our historical reception of revelation requires of us special attention to the signs, the symbols - the way God has been mediated - that are the expression of God's disclosure within our community of faith. That revelation of God has come to us through the people of Israel and made complete in the person of Jesus Christ.

For Catholics, Christ represents the "completed and perfected Revelation" of God. Worship is a meeting point between the Scriptural witness and the experience by the believer of the Risen Christ. In Christ we find the perfect model for humanity and for relationship with God. In his earthly existence, Jesus offered worship and praise to God his Father and so we too do the same. The experience of responding to Jesus goes on today. It did not end when the New Testament canon was settled. We continue to discover ways that the experience of Jesus is mediated to and by our culture.

In worship we continue to encounter this Risen Christ in the Spirit. Edward Schillebeeckx wrote, "The present with its contemporary empirical models . . . has to be the place where we, as Christians, must make our Christological response . . . it is clearly in full accord with the gospel for us, with a like experience of salvation, to give new names to Jesus," and additionally to adopt and re-interpret old titles of prior ages. This highlights the relational character of worship in its experience of Jesus Christ. Through worship we come to know the Jesus Christ proclaimed in Scripture and experienced in faith through the Spirit.

Christians have always sought to understand more clearly who this Jesus is and was. Conciliar and patristic Christology find their way into worship, most obviously through the understandings gleamed by earlier generations of Christians as they experienced the Risen Christ in word and sacrament. The Church fathers at Nicea taught that the Word incarnate in Jesus is not less in being than the Father. Chalcedon gave further explanation that Jesus Christ is one person with two natures, divine and human, not mixed and not a third thing. While not ecstatic proclamations of faith like we find in Scripture, these Christological doctrines help us to form an understanding of Jesus Christ. They support New Testament kerygma as a "dictionary of faith." Like today, the Church then was trying to make sense of this Jesus that they'd experienced in faith. Their definitions remain valid today and give contour to the understanding and implications of Jesus' personhood from Scripture. This second-order, philosophical language works to serve our central authority - Scripture, which is always decisively normative.

God is always offering God's self in history, always communicating through the mediation of history. But the Christ-event is more than a one-among-many occurrence of this communication. It is a definitive event in which God's self-communication is mediated in a unique and extraordinary way, a way that is salvific. Our salvation is effected through Jesus by opening up dimensions of true humanity for us.

In the life, death and resurrection of Jesus we have present and modeled a unique relationship with God, one that unites humanity and the God who has been revealing Himself throughout history in an ultimate way. Jon Sobrino writes of the Christ-event in the terms of Jesus' ultimacy in relation to the reign of God. He writes, "If the one who has been raised is one who ended as a victim of the anti-Reign, then the resurrection can very well be understood systematically as the confirmation of the mediator, the confirmation of his (objectively) theological daring, and the confirmation of the fullness of the human occurring in his person. Then the qualitative leap of faith can be made, and the christological concept formulated of Jesus of Nazareth as the mediator of the Reign of God." Jesus' life, death and resurrection are salvific for all people. The Christ event was the definitive occurrence in history of God's saving self-communication. In worship we enter into this Christ-event again through word and sacrament (particularly in the sacraments of baptism, confirmation and eucharist).

Jesus is the fullness of God's self-communication. Again from Vatican II: 3"The most intimate truth which this revelation gives us about God and the salvation of men and women shines forth in Christ, who is himself both the mediator and the sum total of Revelation." (DV, 2)

Worship is Trinitarian. Worship's structure engages the economic Trinity as the assembly prays through the Son to the Father in the Spirit. We relate to God through what God has done for us in creation, redemption and reconciliation. Worship relates directly to this economy of the Trinity as it recalls the measurable activities of God in the world of our experience. God creates all that is, sends his Son to redeem his creation and continues the work of redemption and reconciliation through the Spirit. The immanent Trinity, also speaks to us about our Christian call and worship. The unity of the Triune God in God's inner life teaches Christians again about the relational aspects of God - God is intrinsically relational. In word we recall the history of God's plan of salvation for humanity, we unite with that story and worship through the Son and in the Holy Spirit.

In the divine economy there is an order of relationships that we reflect upon in worship. The Divine economy speaks of a triune love that pours over into creation and that we too participate in. Through the action of the Holy Spirit we become by grace what Jesus was by nature. Through this Trinitarian action, the world is being gathered to God and God is being communicated to the world.

Worship is faith-filled. The community worships God in faith. Faith is personal knowledge of God. It is fundamentally our response to God's self-communication in Revelation. Revelation is the content of faith. Faith is a response of the whole person to Revelation. An experience of the Risen Christ in word, worship or through some other medium leads an individual to faith and to worship - to the desire to express that faith ritually within the context of a believing community. Faith begins the relationship between the individual and God in and through a community of believers.

Worship is sacramental. "Each sacrament in its own way expresses and manifests 'the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true Church' (SC, 2)," Fink states. Most significant in those formal sacramental moments of worship is baptism and eucharist. Baptism welcomes the Christian into unique relationship with God. The doctrine of Original Sin points to the Christian need to be in unique salvific relation to God through Jesus. Trying to understand this doctrine so it can say something today while maintaining doctrinal and scriptural fidelity, it helps to focus the positive elements of the doctrine. Baptism seeks to place us in unique relationship with God through Jesus in an outpouring of grace ultimately placing us in relationship to salvation. We find ourselves after baptism in a unique relationship with God that we were not in before. We find ourselves initiated into the community of believers where we will join in worship and be led forth to mission. The sacrament begins the relationship between person, God and community in a formal, ritualized way and has a character of welcoming the person into this new relationship.

This I take to be the essence of the traditional doctrine, that prior to our relationship with Christ, we are not as uniquely oriented towards God. Through baptism we are placed in transcendent relationship, saving relationship, with our Redeemer. Jesus is the Savior of all people, and all people need salvation. This is what the doctrine states positively: we are in need of salvation and it is available in Christ. The element of relationship is crucial to this doctrine. Scripture gives the dual picture of life in Adam in opposition to life in Christ. Through Adam we are in sin, through Christ we live in grace. Once we have been touched by grace, we become more radically aware of the ways that we were not turned towards God before, this I believe to be the essence of original sin.

The Eucharist is the highest point of the Church's worship. According to the Second Vatican Council the Eucharist "involves the presentation of man's sanctification under the guise of signs perceptible by the senses and its accomplishment in ways appropriate to each of these signs. In it full public worship is performed by the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, that is, by the Head and its members…No other action of the Church can equal its efficacy by the same title and to the same degree." (SC, 7) Eucharist does not exhaust the activity of the Church but it finds supreme expression of the Church's story and sends forth its members to preach that story to the world. "The liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; it is also the fount from which all her power flows." (SC, 10)

Worship responds to God's creative work. Our creatureliness is a constant reminder of our fundamental relationship with God who is Creator. As the psalmist wrote, "Know that he, the Lord, is God. He made us, we belong to him, we are his people, the sheep of his flock" (Psalm 100). The psalmist reminds creatures that their fundamental stance is one of relationship to the One who created.

An acceptance of this relational characteristic between Creator and created inherently leads one to issue of soteriology. The beginning of things leads to questions of the goal or telos of the created world.

Fundamental to the understanding of Creation is Genesis 1.31: "God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good." This statement as part of the beginning of Scripture, our narrative of creation/salvation, begins with this profound statement of our Divine origin and our fundamental goodness. As creatures, we are fundamentally, intrinsically even, created good. Through Creation, God's desire is to be close with his creation. Through worship, we recall that movement of God towards us and we respond in praise.

Worship is Eschatological. Creation theology leads to soteriology and eschatology. A focus on the beginning leads to the question of the end. God has created, God has communicated God's self, and God ultimately desires to be united with Creation. Perhaps the churches of the East embody this best in their worship where an active principle in the liturgy is the raising of the congregation to the heavenly altar where all worship God together with the angels and the communion of saints - the end time, the Kingdom of God, is foreseen in this act of worship. The Council stated, "In the earthly liturgy we take part in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the Holy City of Jerusalem." (SC, 8) From the beginning of time, God has intended for creation to be reconciled to Him. In worship we recognize the "already but not yet" quality of the eschaton. We do not know how the history of salvation will ultimately play itself out, but we have a taste of it in the resurrection of Christ. In worship we realize that the eschaton is a present and future dimension.

Worship is the action of the Church. The Church is the People of God witnessing, as a community in history, to the Gospel of Jesus Christ through proclamation, worship and action in and through history inspired by the Holy Spirit. Dulles pointed out that there needs to be proclamation and discipleship - time for worship, contemplation and even patient suffering. Awareness of all of these crucial aspects must be held in balance - history, community, action, prayer, Spirit.

The mission is to be Kingdom people, to continue the mission that Jesus Christ himself began and worked for - bringing about the Kingdom of God. Paul Knitter affirms this, "If the mission of Jesus Christ was the Kingdom of God, it cannot be otherwise for the mission of the Church." (p. 108) The Church is an active reality that is supported, strengthened and nurtured through worship and prayer to continue the mission set forth by Christ as witnessed to in Scripture and tradition.

The Church, the Body of Christ, is uniquely related to Christ, its inspiration. Jesus Christ is the founder of the mission and the mission developed into a church. While not instituting the structures and offices of the Church, Jesus Christ is the origin and inspiration in the foundation of the Christian church. It is descended from the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Church has evolved from and responded to the needs of the community through history and must continually evaluate and respond.

Authority is exercised in the Church as dynamic relationship within the milieu of the Holy Spirit. This relationship of believer to authority is one of hope that authority supports and sustains the life of the community. The authority of the Church most often characterized by its institutional structures seek to continue the survival of the Church and preserve its identity across the generations. The Church's worship is part of an historic response to the Christ-event. This function of authority effects the Church's worship as well. This authority is Spirit centered and is precisely not authoritarian in nature effectively killing the inner life of the community. Authority is authentically exercised it when rooted in the work of the Holy Spirit and exercised by one who is competent.

Conclusion. It has been my intent to begin to look at various doctrines of the Church through the lens of worship. But, I also express a caveat in the fact that this is a construct and as such will be limited and flawed, but nonetheless helpful in trying to understand some basic tenets of the faith and their intelligibility to an average, questioning, intelligent Catholic. In these doctrines I think we can see an overarching motif of God as relational to creation with a desire to embrace that creation in love, a desire expressed in worship and responded to in worship and mission. Lex orandi, lex credendi - as the church prays, so she believes.