Forming Hearts and Minds of Students for Worship

To understand the place of the Eucharist in Catholic education, we must first understand worship. Here are four elements of worship that Catholic educators should contemplate: worth, training, method, and culmination.

Worship requires worth

Each morning, Catholics and Jews greet the new day with the words of the 95th Psalm of David:

Come, let us sing to the Lord. Shout for joy to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before Him with praise and Thanksgiving…O come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!

Psalm 95 forms an integral part of Jewish morning prayers and, as Catholics, we received this inheritance and incorporated it into Lauds (Morning Prayer) of the Roman Rite Liturgy of the Hours. With our Jewish brothers and sisters, we share a fundamental conviction that the first impulse of the day should be worship.

The very word worship reveals the nature of the act. Worship at its most fundamental is to recognize something as having ultimate worth. Another way to put it is to say: to worship is to “make a big deal” of something. In worshipping we acknowledge that we have found something so precious and full of worth that we have to name it. The American novelist David Foster Wallace famously remarked to a group of 2005 graduates of Kenyon College that worship is in no way optional:

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship. Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

The task of all education, then, is the task of proposing to students what ought to be worshipped, what is worthy. To propose divine worship to students, the highest calling of Catholic education, is to invite them to behold the eternal significance and beauty of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, the worth of this Lord Jesus is not self-evident to students inhabiting a world saturated with Tik-Tok stars, influencers, and billionaire entrepreneurs. Despite its challenges, it is the joyful obligation of each generation committed to Catholic education to unmask all that is truly worthless and to propose anew the One who is worthy of ultimate value and supreme worship.

Worship requires training

While worship is the most natural thing in the world to us, it can also seem thoroughly alien. To focus on another… to forget myself for a moment… to not ask, “How long will this take?” or “How much will this cost?” or “What will I get out of it?”… to restrain these impulses will very often feel completely unnatural. The truth, though, is that each of our students was made for this worship and made to find all their joy and fulfillment in discovering this Worth. Yet, just because we were made for worship doesn’t mean learning to worship will be easy. We were made to speak, to walk, and to use our hands, and when these are learned they bring untold joy and fulfillment but learning to do each of these required awkward beginnings and hours of frustrating practice. After those hours, we found ourselves capable not simply of speaking and walking but even of singing and running. Worship, like all these others, while ordained to us, is not automatic to us. Training and practice are necessary to cultivate a real habit of worship. It must be explained, prepared for, done, reflected upon, and done all over again. It cannot simply be taught; it must be caught.

As Catholic schools seek to prepare the ground for Eucharistic revival, we must prepare the hearts and minds of students for worship. Taking time at the beginning of a new school year to explain our rites, practice our responses, and rehearse our music are all seemingly mundane but essential steps in helping us move from merely standing to running in worship. The Church, in her wisdom, has given us liturgies and devotions to be used over and over and over again, so that the music and prayers and responses can be practiced and properly learned, moving from our lips to deep down in our innermost being. In this way, we are slowly being trained, so that one day when we have a moment when we don’t know how or what to pray, words will be given.

Worship requires a method

To train ourselves to acknowledge ultimate worth requires some kind of method. Since man first sought to draw closer to this Power behind all things, what one scholar called the mysterium tremendens et fascinans, the method has been sacrifice. While sacrifice has certainly looked different through the ages, the essential quality remains the same: to sacrifice is to waste something on your God. At the height of Israel’s sacrificial economy, one Passover might see the blood of 250,000 lambs shed. Whether the ancient sacrificial offering was flesh, grain, or oil, the essential meaning of the gift was the same. These things I am offering are precious to me, yet this rare and precious thing is not worth more to me than my God. He is source of all that I have, so He is more precious. He is worth more.

Now, these things are easily accessible to us. They are not fitting sacrifices, because they are too easy. For sacrificial worship to have its proper place in our schools, other sacrifices must be made. For school leadership, it will be the sacrifice of time, something which is so precious, because we have such a limited amount of it. To propose worship to students is to ask Catholic schools to sacrifice time and resources. It is to carve out time from instruction, from organizations, from sports, and from all the other demands of a school day and to “waste it” on Our Lord. It is to “waste” resources (that’s the polite word for money) on music and art and a space that is fitting for a God of goodness, truth, and beauty. If our school liturgies require no waste, then we must ask to what degree they are training for worship.

Putting the blade to instructional time and every other urgent need in a school schedule is no easy ask for Catholic school leadership. What is asked of our students in this sacrificial worship is to offer up something that will seem to many of them even more precious: their sense of dignity, their sense of “not caring,” of aloof “coolness” and social status. For so many of our students, these are precious offerings, but these too must be invited to be placed on the altar. None of these sacrifices will be easy, and if they were, they would not be worthy of divine worship, but by the gift of sheer divine grace, schools and students can be trained.

Worship requires culmination

It should be obvious to all concerned that the habit of worship we’ve described, in all its beauty and profundity, is incredibly difficult. Not just for the obvious reasons we have spoken of, that training is required and that we are easily distracted and easily turned back in on ourselves. More tragically, though, these lips that speak God’s praises also soon take up gossip and slander. The hearts that we lift up to the Trinity in adoration are often deceitful. And it is for these reasons that the culmination of our worship is nothing we offer. The climax of our school worship cannot simply be preaching, no matter how engaging, or singing, no matter how robust, or prayer, no matter how earnest. These are our acts of devotion, but the crown of Christian worship, the end of Christian worship is not our offering, but His: the Eucharist. Our worship finds its source and summit in the Mass because there, and only there, is found the perfect act of worship and obedience to the Father.

For centuries the children of Israel called themselves to worship, longing for the day when a perfect temple, with holy priests, would offer perfect praise to the Father. Now, in our Eucharistic worship, we encounter the one who in His death declared the worth and beauty of the Heavenly Father. In the eternal Son’s offering of Himself, He gathers up our scattered voices, imperfect singing, and distracted praying, and, united with Him, makes of our worship something glorious and truly worthy.

The journey towards this culmination of our worship is no small labor. We take up this adventure of worship with all the sacrifice and training required, not simply because it is “right and just,” though to be sure it is. We propose right worship to our students because worship is not simply our duty, it is our destiny. It is the future for which every student in our schools was made. One day, when this veil of tears is lifted and we know Him, even as we are fully known, sacraments will cease, but worship, the Revelation of St. John promises, will not. One day it is all we will do, and of it, we will never tire.