THE HIGH SCHOOL RELIGION TEACHER AS MYSTAGOGUE
Let me say first that I wish to ponder good teaching in the high school religion classroom.
Since good teaching has as its goal both the teacher's transmission of ideas and the students'
integration of ideas, we need to be very clear in the first instance about the nature of those ideas.
For the religion teacher in the Catholic high school, the foundational idea is this: we live in the
Kingdom of God as heralded by Jesus Christ, and the Catholic Church is an effective structure
toward living in this reality. This idea is both simple enough and complex enough on its own,
but when teachers begin the business of enabling the students to understand and embrace it, they
find themselves in the middle of another puzzlement. I use the word "puzzlement" because it is
not as straightforward as "problem" is. Most high school teachers first discover it in the tangle
of department meetings, textbook introductions, the goals and objectives of their particular
courses, the rules and regulations of the larger institution, the classroom itself, and most
intensely in the faculty room.
For it is in the faculty room that we find the two strands that get twisted into the
particular knot of the high school religion teacher's puzzlement. The strands lead in two
methodological directions, but they begin (however confusedly) with the particular teacher's
attitude toward the experience of the God whose Kingdom has come and is coming. The strand
that heads off toward the left is best described as the "experiential" methodology. Teachers with
this thrust begin with highly personal descriptions of their own experience of God. They
believe that the students must first experience or enter into the presence of God before they can
learn about religion in any "structural" fashion. This often amounts to idiosyncratic descriptions
and stories that the teacher relates in the hope that the "spirit" will do the rest. The teachers of
1
the left drive those on the right crazy because the latter ones locate God straightforwardly in
specific moments of the history of the church and in the development of doctrines that carefully
articulate who the God is who rules the Kingdom and how such ruling occurs. This "doctrinal"
methodology is not interested in (or indeed even comfortable with) any discussion of the
"personal" experience of God. It sees such a method as inconsistent and fraught with the danger
of describing God in inappropriate ways. In the wish to protect the integrity of tradition,
teachers on the right reify the very experiences of God in history that they wish to honor. As
teachers from these two points of view converse, it is possible for undecided ones to remain
outside the tangle only if they recognize what the extremes apparently fail to: the coming of the
Kingdom and the God who rules that Kingdom are mysteries. Neither extreme encourages or
facilitates the student's own development as a human person who lives in the context of these
mysteries.
This essay shall ponder an ecclesiological way out of the tangle. When a new teacher
finds herself in the middle of the conflict, the talk is usually either broadly theological or
pedagogical. I do not think that either of these is the primary knot. Since the context is one of
teaching in a Catholic school, we are talking about two structures: the classroom itself and the
larger Catholic church that supports and provides the classroom. To begin with questions of
"who God is" or "what God can mean to sixteen year olds" does not do anything other than
tighten the knot. In order to deal critically with the problem, I believe that the teacher must
begin with a clear vision of the classroom as an "ecclesiastical" structure. Having done so, she
can then take some important lessons from ecclesiology. The intention of this essay is to
discuss how the classroom must function deliberately and explicitly as an arm of the church. I
am convinced that the first deliberate understanding the teacher must have is of her own
2
ecclesiastical role. That role should be that of a mystagogue as articulated in James J. Bacik’s
Apologetics and the Eclipse of Mystery. Further, the mystagogue must be located in a deliberate
ecclesiological structure that is appropriate to the classroom. I will illustrate why I think that
Avery Dulles' sacramental model of the church, dynamically oriented toward the community of
disciples model, is the most effective way to think about the church in the classroom.
I shall begin by describing how it was that I came to the particular knot of this
puzzlement. I shall then show how I was able to unravel it with the help of ecclesiology. The
puzzlement came in the midst of my first seven years of teaching high school religion. During
that time I also taught English. English department meetings occasionally became heated, but
the conflict was over whether or not we should require all teachers to study Emerson's "Self
Reliance" with their students. That is, conflict here was purely a matter of professional
autonomy and not of either content or method. Things were far different at religion department
meetings, where there was constant conflict. In my early years I listened rather than spoke, and
I discovered two main themes to the conflict: differences as to the character of God (was God a
judge or was God a compassionate creator?) and as to the character of the Catholic Church (was
the Church a legalistic and juridical structure or was it a body of individual believers?). In those
early days I was too under the gun to worry about anyone else's classroom, so I moved with the
intention of trying to find the appropriate resolution that would help my classroom. I found it in
two places: in the three theological foci of Catholicism (sacramentality, mediation, and
communion1), which provided me with an ecclesiological structure almost before I realized it,
and in the five-movement methodology of Thomas Groome, which was the pedagogical structure
around which I built my lessons. By grounding my classroom statements in this tripartite
1Richard
P. McBrien, Catholicism (Minneapolis: Winston, 1981), pp. 1180ff.
3
ecclesiological structure, and in Groome's solid pedagogy, I was fairly successful and effective.
The puzzlement would have ended there had not circumstances changed.
After my second year I was asked to initiate the new religion teachers, and for the next
three years I acted as a cooperating teacher for students from Seattle University. I also
substituted frequently for my colleagues. These three new experiences put me in the midst of
the actual teaching methods of other teachers. I was bewildered to discover that a methodology
as good as Groome's could fail, and that Catholicism on a teacher’s book shelf did not
automatically guarantee a proper use of its theology. Because I, and a few of my colleagues had
found Catholicism so helpful, the department required it as a resource text for teachers. As I
moved through observations with the student teachers and orientations with the new ones, I
found that the people who could be categorized as "experiential" in focus rarely used anything in
the book other than Chapter XII ("The Christ of the New Testament"), where they were able to
discuss their own very personal experiences of Jesus with the help of the gospels, and Chapter
XV ("Special Questions in Christology"), which triggered heated discussions about Jesus for the
sole purpose of "shaking up the students." Conversely, the teachers from the doctrinal school
drew most of their lessons from Chapters XIII ("The Christ of the Fathers, the Councils, and
Medieval Theology"), XVII ("The Church in History"), XXI ("The Sacraments of Initiation:
Baptism, Confirmation and Eucharist"), and XXII ("The Sacraments of Healing, Vocation and
Commitment"). These chapters provided good, solid content, and did not require the teacher to
talk much about the personal experience of God because they had "too much material to cover."
When I asked all of these teachers why they did not use the introductory sections on "Faith,
Theology and Belief," "Human Existence," and "God," their answers reflected the two schools.
From the left I heard "I take care of that with faith sharing," and from the right, "they will return
4
to those sections on their own when they experience tragedy in their lives." In no case did they
make use of Catholicism in the way that I had found most helpful: for a structural understanding
of Catholicism.
In addition, their use of Groome's five-movement methodology did not succeed because
they were not grounding themselves in the principles and therefore explicitly dealing with the
mystery of God's love and the Kingdom. It usually fell apart by movement 5, whose intention
Groome describes thus:
Movement 5 provides the participants with an explicit opportunity of decision
making for the response of lived Christian faith. Since we describe the truth and
faith life to which we are called wholistically, the response here, depending on the
theme, can be on cognitive, affective and behavioral levels. On any level, however,
the discussion must move the participants, by God's grace, toward a practical faith,
a faith that makes a historical difference in the quality of one's own and other's
lives.
The convergence of McBrien's principles and one small phrase from Groome helped me to move
out of the growing puzzle. In the small moment when Groome says that the method is effective
"by God's grace," he addresses the mystery dimension of the classroom experience. In doing so,
he makes illegitimate the claim of the left that "the Spirit would intervene" and the claim of the
right that "affective or behavioral responses were none of their business." He conjures the old
language of "channels of grace" and intimates the reality of the sacramental character of those
things connected to the Church. In doing so he locates us in the middle of an ecclesiastical
structure. This helped me to make better use of the three principles of Catholicism and to see
that I had to be more deliberate and explicit in articulating them in discussions with other
teachers.
It was at this point that McBrien's theology was of further help. Once I explicitly
viewed the teacher ecclesiologically, McBrien's understanding of catechesis helped me to make
5
large strides in my thinking. "Catechesis is systematic in intent and method (whether it employs
the question and answer format or not)…. Catechesis seeks to echo the Christian message in
away that provides the new or potential member of the Church with a sense of the
interrelatedness of Christian mysteries or doctrines and of their relative centrality and
importance."2 Groome's method was systematic enough but unless it was grounded in a
systematic intention that had as its goal our earlier stated notion of the loving God and the reality
of that God's kingdom it would fall short. In this way, McBrien helped me to find my way to
the places where the left and the right began to get tangled up. I did this by looking at their
methods from the stance of their implied intention about mystery. I did so using the definition
of mystery as a "reality imbued with the hidden presence of God."3 It was in the midst of this
process that I discovered Bacik, who provided me with a systematic articulation of how one
initiates students into the mystery dimension. Before moving to Bacik, however, it is worth
looking at the ways that the left and the right fail to property confront mystery.
The left reduces the mysterious character of the individual's encounter with God to the
idiosyncratic. Because the teacher's own experience of God is the one undergoing constant
inspection, it tends toward emotionalism and easily becomes ultra-personal. Teachers on the
left
spend most of their time in movement 3 of Groome's methodology: "Making Present the
Christian Story and Vision." They make use of their own experience or that of others that
resonates with theirs, which is fair enough. But if this step is divorced from the other four in the
classroom, it too easily elicits personal experience of God from any structure. The left often
2
Ibid., p. 30.
3
Ibid., p. 1250.
6
scorns doctrine for being "too removed from experience." Those on the left neglect the wealth
of history and the story found in the institution of the Church because neither of these can be
easily reduced and disclosed in an individual's story. The teacher on the left is rarely a
researcher and so fails to recognize the continuity between the long history of the Church, the
development of doctrine and the individual's own lived story of belief. The left can feel antiintellectual and non-academic.
The second problem with the left is that it violates the "personal" reality of the loving
God by insinuating that a particular kind of experience or image of God (the teacher's) is the
paradigm. If the presence of God is a mystery, and if this God is present to us as a relational
God as articulated in the Trinitarian doctrine, then mystery must be disclosed in ways that allow
God's self-communication to occur in the integrity of the individual's experience. Bombarding
them with one person's relationship with the Jesus of the New Testament does not encourage the
student's own personal relationship with God. It further obstructs the teacher's own wish that
"the Spirit move" by paying no theological attention to the Spirit.4 Confining God's presence to
Jesus truncates the mystery of the ways in which God comes to us and tends toward an
individualism that does not need the Church.
The third problem with the left is that it violates the mediation principle in that it pays
little attention to the reality of the classroom. The teacher who uses a large percentage of
cognitive time for prayer (the teacher on the left rarely prays for less than five minutes and often
much longer) and pays only lip-service to grades and evaluations (the left often bases grades
upon "effort and attitude") that are a natural and time-proven part of the academic process does
not honor the worth of that process. By trying to transform the academic into the liturgical
4
Theological here refers to McBrien's definition: "critical reflection upon faith." Faith is the personal
experience of God.
7
(prayer and/or preaching), they reject the intrinsic value of the academic and do not allow for the
possibility of God's mysterious presence moving in such a context. They further do not allow
for that same context to actually be what the Church claims: one location of the Kingdom of
God. This in turn leads to an unprofessionalism in that the left claims theology is not responsible
in ways that other disciplines are responsible; had I spent English class time telling long stories
of my love of Emily Dickinson or Mark Twain at the expense of reading their texts, I would have
lost my job.
Finally, this way is proselytizing rather than disclosive. It reflects an intention to
convert
rather than to do appropriate revelation. The left fails to account for all three principles:
sacramentality, by truncating the character of the God we seek to encounter: mediation, by
neglecting the concrete reality of the classroom structure; and communion, by insinuating that an
encounter with God is highly and ultimately individualistic.
The right, on the other hand, also prescribes a distorted view of God. God's presence is
located in specific moments in the history of the Church and in the development of doctrine.
These are the content of our faith. In locating God here, these moments are reified and the
mystery is all but lost. By focusing initially on doctrine, we disengage those articulations from
human experience and encourage a legalistic view of God's character and the structure of the
Church. Groome's comment about the primary texts of the Christian story points to this:
As those primary texts arose from God's self-disclosure in history, so if we are to
appropriate their revelatory possibility for our own time, they must not be treated
as reified revelations from outside of time. We must come instead to appropriate
them as reflections or mirrors of the truth already present in our present reality.5
5Thomas
Groome, "Theology on Our Feet: A Revisionist Pedagogy for healing the Gap between the
Academia and the Ecclesia," oral presentation at the University of Notre Dame, Sprint 1987, p. 13.
8
God is here limited to what Bacik calls "categorical mystery,"6 and the Church that exists to
offer access to God becomes primarily institutional and therefore impersonal. By studying only
the "content" of theology divorced from personal experience, the right denies the very process in
which it claims to be involved. If theology is "faith brought to the level of selfconsciousness,"7then we must address that content in ways that honor the classroom as a
classroom in the same way that in the Eucharist we honor the bread as bread while also seeing in
it a greater reality.
Further, this method discloses a skewed understanding of the character of God by
confining God to certain categories and denying that being in God's presence is an appropriate
wish in the classroom. These problems violate the principles of both sacramentality and
mediation. Finally, this methodological stance does not reflect an appropriate ecclesiological
model because it is not open to a communitarian experience, and instead implies a hierarchical
model. The communion principle affirms that "There is no relationship with God, however
intense, profound and unique that dispenses entirely with the communal context of every human
relationship with God."8 All of the content that has been distilled into doctrinal articulations
began as an experience of God and therefore can claim to continue to speak as such to each and
every individual. It is particularly at a time such as the present when there is some movement
back toward a hierarchical model of the church that this method is just plain bad. In no way
does it tend toward what Groome takes as theology's task: "If Christian theology is to be for us
6James
J. Bacik, Apologetics and the Eclipse of Mystery (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1980), p. 12.
7McBrien,
8Ibid.,
Catholicism, p. 27.
p. 1181.
9
the way God is for us, it must help to make and keep life human."9 Giving priority to content
divorced from the context of the human condition does not accomplish the goal of
the Christian classroom.
The most important discovery that resulted from McBrien and Groome's theology is that
both methodological strands violate the student's own religious potential. This is where Bacik's
systematic discussion of mystagogy proved helpful. He notes that "our very nature already
involves us in a relation to God."10
The teacher's intention must be informed by this reality.
Because "experience and doctrine grow out of a common graced matrix,"11 the way to deal with
the experiential and doctrinal methods is to locate ourselves on a plane with that matrix. And
this is an ecclesiological matter because it is a matter of location. The teacher must begin by
defining her or his territory. Once that is done, then she or he can become located as an
apologist who attempts to put the students in touch with the mystery dimension in their lives.
The intention of the mystagogue is one of "initiation into mystery."12 Bacik discusses several
important elements to the apologetic mystagogue's task, all of which are compatible with a
sacramental model of the church in the classroom. He says that the disclosure of mystery is a
"maieutic task" that brings the latent into "explicit consciousness."13 The left violates this by
assuming that mystery comes in "from the outside'' only through the Spirit, and the right does the
same by assuming that tragic or dramatic events are its main vehicle. Bacik further describes
mystagogy as "spiritual depth psychology." The left violates this by psychologizing without
9Groome,
10Bacik,
Notre Dame presentation, p.14.
Apologetics, p. 50.
11Ibid.,
p. 13.
12Ibid.,
p. 17.
13Ibid.,
p. 2.
10
building a foundation on the mystery dimension in the students' lives, since the primary
psychology explored is the teacher's own. The right rejects the whole arena of "spiritual depth
psychology" to begin with by having a vision of the classroom that is formally unconcerned with
the student's inner life.
Bacik states that mystagogy is "not indoctrination of external truths but the discovery of
internal truths."14 The left is in conflict with this vision because it does not see truth as
cognitive, and the right is at odds with it as well because it denies the internal character of truth.
The mystagogue tries to locate "the infinite in the finite." Both left and right obstruct this by so
limiting the character and person of God. Finally, Bacik warns that teaching is not just an
echoing of "superficial questions" and that failure to understand mystagogy yields the danger of
"excessive introspection." I n order to avoid these dangers the teacher must provide an explicit
context that provides a system which will anchor the student correctly.
If the intention of the teacher is informed by mystagogy's wish to give students access to
the mystery dimension in their lives, the most effective way to teach is to structure the classroom
around Dulles' sacramental model of the church. Even the best articulations of doctrine will not
be successful unless they are grounded in a mystagogy that points to the church. Students will
become (or in some cases, remain) scornful unless the teacher finds away to locate them in the
Kingdom of the loving God as people who experience the ultimate questions of salvation in the
context of today. If we want them to experience the Kingdom of God as revealed in the
Catholic Church, we must begin with the intention that the class itself be a sacramental event.
Because a sacrament is a "visible sign of an invisible reality,"15 all the structures, from the lesson
14Ibid.,
p. 32.
15McBrien,
Catholicism, p. 255.
11
plan to the relationship between teacher and student, can and should, become sacramental
structures. Since the classroom is not primarily liturgical (indeed, the left's greatest failure is to
forget this) but is instead cognitive, the intent of the teacher should be to create a context where
the students can encounter the God of the Christian tradition. Groome's "shared praxis" outlines
an excellent method for doing this but even that will fail unless the teacher sees herself or
himself in a sacramental space as a sacramental leader.
There are several reasons why the sacramental model is the best place to start. First, it is
theologically solid; it is built upon and "borrowed from the ritual activity of the church."16 It
suggests that the community can make "[Christ] present anew."17 In doing so, it leaves room for
Groome's "by God's grace" and for the mystery of God present in the world. If the teacher
intends the classroom to be a place where God comes in our midst, she implicitly structures a
sacramental event. The more deliberately she does so, the better she does so. The rubrics of
the classroom take on a new meaning. Every action he takes and every scene he creates,
whether it is the outline of the christological controversies made with chalk, or the bulletin
boards and posters that he puts up, becomes a sacramental that helps to disclose the presence of
God and to encourage the student's growth in understanding the Kingdom of the loving God as
the ultimate and true reality.
Another aspect that makes the sacramental model reasonable is that the students will have
some sacramental history. The teacher can draw upon this knowledge and experience. If her
intention is deliberately and explicitly sacramental, she can draw upon the student's knowledge
and experience of the other sacraments. Even students who do not come from a religious
16Avery
17Ibid.,
Dulles, S.J., A Church to Believe In (New York: Crossroad, 1987), p. 16.
p. 17.
12
tradition can be invited to see the sacramentality of all kinds of events in their own lives because
even the most complex ritual has its roots in the central moments in human life. As Aquinas
and others note, human experience is the source of all Sacraments.
The third reason for beginning with the sacramental model is that it gives the most
workable access to an appropriate christology, and therefore is most compatible with Groome's
personalistic methodology. The whole of sacramental theology hinges upon the experience of
God in Jesus. Since our mystagogy is done with and for people who are located on Karl
Rahner's horizon of the infinite questioner,18 the classroom's sacramental encounter should seek
to begin as a personal encounter. How God comes to the students in the very structure of their
lives as students is the best place to begin. It is made more effective if that life is revealed to be
a life in the church. By creating a parallel between the student's experience of the ritual of the
Church and the Church as revealed in the operation of their school day, we encourage an
ecclesiology into which the student can more easily enter.
As I indicated in the opening section of the paper, it is not appropriate to stop at this
model. The sacramental model needs to be dynamically pointed toward what Dulles calls the
community of disciples model. Why is this? If we remember that the tangle is first caused by a
confusion or failure of intention and that that intention is ultimately that our students experience
the Kingdom of the loving God through life in the Church, our intention must include access to
the larger community of the Church. The teacher must not structure the classroom as simply
another sacrament with a beginning, middle and end, which sadly characterizes many teenager's
experience of sacrament. The ecclesiological model that they encounter must encourage
movement beyond the classroom. Secondly, a movement toward the community of disciples
18Bacik,
Apologetics, pp. 75-84.
13
model recognizes the developmental nature of the classroom. The classroom seeks to impart
knowledge for the student's own integration. Like a good sacramental experience, a good
classroom encourages further growth in knowledge outside and after the events of
the classroom. Thirdly, it is Groome's wish that the final movement of shared praxis "provides
the participants with an explicit opportunity of decision, making for the response of lived
Christian faith."19 In the religion classroom we are far less concerned with how the students do
on the SAT than we are about the development of their ability to read the depth dimension in
their lives and respond accordingly. The community of disciples model gives them access to
ways of responding.
In addition to this, most students are unconverted. Because of this the teachers must
stand towards them not just as a presiders who mediate God's coming, but as servants to the
wider Church. "The mission of the Church is not to grow and multiply but to be a minority in
the service of the majority."20 The students must perceive the teacher's intention to be one of
service in enabling them to cognitively deal with depth experience. If the teacher does so, the
students see a model of sacrament and of Church that is ongoing and easily able to be integrated
into their lives.
Another reason for the two-model dynamic is that it sets up a dialogue. This dynamism
helps to break open the deadlock between the two extremes of the left and right by echoing the
voice of each. The community of disciples model embraces the personal character of
membership in the Church, and the sacramental model will satisfy any doctrinally focused
teacher by providing an appropriate context for intellectual discussion about matters of faith.
19Groome,
Notre Dame presentation, p. 4.
20McBrien,
Catholicism, p. 662.
14
Because sacraments have an inherent structure and at the same time take place in and with the
community of disciples, both strands can begin to move toward the middle; both viewpoints can
make use of these models without feeling that they have relinquished the heart of their position.
The dynamic relationship of the models seeks (and, I believe, succeeds) in resolving the
puzzlement by changing the terrain of the conflict. It does not change the basic furniture, but
instead puts it into another room where it fits better.
The community of disciples model is also valuable in and of itself, in addition to its
dynamic relationship with the sacramental model. Dulles himself found the sacramental model
inadequate because of the potential "impersonality, ritualism and untarnished holiness associated
with the term."21 The classroom should propel students into a wider life in the Church. The
sacramental model can get stuck exclusively in the experience of Jesus, thus truncating the
Trinitarian character of Catholic faith. By pointing students toward the world in the Spirit, we
open up the possibility of experiencing the personal, relational God in the community. And
since the classroom is fertile ground for this because it is potentially communitarian, it should be
our wish to encounter the Spirit. In doing this we shift the emphasis from the sacramental
moment to the sacramental life, i. e., the student's own vocation in the Church. If our intention
is perceived as being present and in service to a community of valuable persons, all of whom are
beloved of God and relentlessly pursued by God, then we create the possibility for the student's
own discovery of this evaluation of all groups of people. This intention takes advantage of the
most obvious raw materials of the classroom: time and space. Most classrooms have 20- 35
persons in them for 50 minutes every day. If we use the time and space sacramentally and view
the persons as a community of disciples, we go a long way toward Groome's goal.
21Dulles,
A Church, p. 16.
15
When I initially began to confront the puzzlement that I have tried to describe and begin
to resolve, I took the action that most neophytes take: I asked the veterans. Their answers were
of two types. Type one was that "teachers fail because they don't have any talent," and type two
was that "teachers fail because they don't know theology." Even then I was suspicious of these
evaluations. The first reduced the hard work of methodology to luck or circumstance and
implied a quality judgment about certain articulations of the experience of God. The second
was not rooted in fact. Some of the worst teachers had the greatest cognitive knowledge of
theology. The veterans encouraged the deepening of my puzzlement by failing to reckon with the
intention of the classroom. They failed to recognize what Groome beautifully articulates: "We
need to recognize the fact that people have a natural tendency and capacity to speak their own
'word about God' (theologia) and stop seeing it as something very difficult that only specialists
can do."22 The two intentional classroom models allow for and encourage the "word" of the
sacramental life of the church as well as the "word" of the community life of the church.
22Groome,
Notre Dame presentation, p. 9.
16