Starting a Bit of Post-Easter Mystagogia for the Next Month

In the Catholic tradition, the instruction in the Faith leading up to Baptism is called Catechumenate.

After you are baptized, what often happens is that people are just left to flop around on the shore of the great Catholic Ocean. What is supposed to happen is entry into a lifelong habit of learning about and experiencing the mysteries of the Faith ever more deeply. In the early Church, post-baptismal instruction in the mysteries of the Faith was called Mystagogia.

The curious thing about the term “mystery” in the early Church is that it did not so much mean “a weird thing we can’t figure out” as “a thing long hidden that has now been revealed” or, alternatively, “a thing we have been looking at all our lives that has now taken on a shocking, new, and deeper meaning we never saw until the life, teachings, passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus threw it all into a dramatic new light.”

If you want to get the hang of how it felt to the early Church in a very minor key, think of that strange experience of when an optical illusion where the cubes all facing one way suddenly reveal to you cubes that all face the other way. Or to vary the metaphor, think of a story with a twist ending like THE SIXTH SENSE, where you have been given all the data you need to reach the conclusion, yet find that you were blind and only now do you see.

Mystagogia is about the process of learning to see God, other people, ourselves, and all the rest of the cosmos, not only in light of Christ, but with the eyes of Christ. It begins after Baptism. It only ends, for a healthy Christian disciple, in eternity with God. It’s about learning to see everything new again.

So I thought that for the next month or so (with the exception of Saturdays and Memorial Day), I would do a little bit of mystagogia by talking about the gifts of the Holy Spirit given in Confirmation.

Confirmation has sometimes been called a sacrament in search of a theology. What is striking about it in the New Testament is that the apostles are shown practicing it and alluding to it, but we never get a treatise on what it is or why we do it. So, for instance, we get records like this:

Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent to them Peter and John, who came down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit; for the Spirit had not yet fallen on any of them, but they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then they laid their hands on them and they received the Holy Spirit. (Ac 8:14–17)

This peculiar scene is one of several in which Baptism, while conferring the Holy Spirit, is seen as somehow to be supplemented by a further rite in which apostles or their ordained delegates are empowered to lay hands on the baptized and confer on them some kind of deepening experience of the Spirit. As is often the case, the early Church starts by Doing the Thing (whatever the Thing is) and only later do Christians pause to ask themselves “Why are we Doing this Thing?”

My favorite analogy for such experiences is that of falling in love. Revelation is like falling in love, not like deriving the answer to a math problem. Nobody pencils into their calendar that, today at 3 PM, they will encounter the face, mind, and heart that will forever change them and show them light, power, glory, and joy they could never have imagined existing but for that encounter. You fall in love first. Then you spend your life figuring out what happened.

In the same way, the apostles’ encounter with Jesus calls forth a bunch of responses to their utterly unexpected experience, mediated to them in the terms they understood–their Jewish culture and in the practices and commands of Jesus himself–and they respond in those terms. Ritual washings become Baptism, ritual anointings become Confirmation and the Sacrament of the Sick. Marriage takes on a radical new meaning in light of Christ the Bridegroom and his Bride the Church. Passover and table fellowship are transformed by the command of Christ into the encounter with him in its fullness, and so on.

But it takes a long time for the Church to start working out the why of these different encounters with grace. Not all the sacraments get pulled apart and examined at the same time or in the same way. (Indeed, the process of asking, “What was that?” continues throughout the Church’s entire history till the Last Day.) 

In many ways, Confirmation remains deeply mysterious to most Catholics. It’s this thing we do. It helps us be better disciples of Jesus–somehow. But many if not most Catholics are pretty fuzzy on how.

In a certain sense, I’m fine with that. As C.S. Lewis pointed out concerning the Eucharist, the command was “Take, eat”, not “Take, understand”. Most of the human race eats dinner with no understanding at all of what vitamins, carbs, proteins, and lipids are or what they do or how they do it, and they feel better after eating. Some people make nutrition an object of study and learn many valuable things about its benefits and the dangers of bad nutrition, just as others study sacraments of like Confirmation and learn many valuable things about the sacrament and its benefits and the dangers of bad theology. So a person can be innocent of expertise in nutrition (or theology) and receive the benefits of food or the sacraments. The only thing they shouldn’t do (and often do in the era of social media) is buy into nutritional (or theological) crankery that leads them to consume bad food (or bad spirituality). And the warnings against bad nutritional science and bad theology are given for the same reason: because good theology, like good nutritional science, is descriptive before it is prescriptive. It describes the Way Things Work and all its recommendations and warnings exist, not to push us around, but to help us live physically (and spiritually) healthy lives based on the best information we have.

When it comes to Confirmation, the Church has worked out that the sacrament exists so that friends and disciples of Jesus Christ can be equipped to function as adults in a challenging world and not just survive, but thrive.

The Tradition has teased apart two sorts of gifts the Spirit bestows: sanctifying and charismatic.

The charismatic gifts are the gifts you give away. They are not for you: they are for the building up of others and for the renewal of the face of the earth. They illustrate one of the cardinal truth of the way the Kingdom of God works: namely, that the Chosen are chosen for the sake of the Unchosen. Your artistic, or musical, or administrative, or financial gifts are given you, not for you but for the people around you who need them. Such gifts are typically linked to our vocation in life: that specific work of love to which God has called us. Yet though exercising our charisms faithfully can certainly contribute to our becoming more Christlike, the mere presence of a charism is not a guarantee that we are conformed to the image and likeness of Christ. As both the play Amadeus and the career of Caravaggio demonstrate, you can be an extraordinarily gifted artist, for instance, and still be a jerk.

Conversely, you can live a life of quiet, unassuming love for God and neighbor, unmarked by miraculous special effects, and be a towering giant in the Kingdom of God. For God sees the heart that human beings do not see.

That is why Paul situates his powerful discussion of love–the greatest fruit of the sanctifying gifts–in the very heart of his instruction on charismatic gifts:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Co 13:1–13)

It is for the transformation of the heart (and therefore the entire person) that God gives the other sort of gifts in Confirmation: the sanctifying gifts. These are the gifts you keep, the ones that make us more and more like Christ.

It is these gifts–Wisdom, Knowledge, Understanding, Right Judgment, Fortitude, Piety, and the Fear of the Lord–that I want to do a deep dive into during the next month.

Of which more on Monday.