When we look for a house or a car, most of us will look at several before we buy. In fact, a psychological assessment called the Personal Orientation Inventory (POI) suggests that the average person looks at about 8.5 of anything they need to commit to, such as houses and cars, before they make a decision. The range of look-before-we-buy-or-decide is three to nineteen. That is, we can predict that different people will consider 3 to 19 options before they buy or decide.
However, what a person eventually chooses is shaped and determined by their attitudes. To modify people’s behavior, we need to start with the attitudes that underlie their choices. Thus, we begin to define who we are or what we are going by looking to our attitudes. Further, the starting point for sorting through our choices is by rejecting attitudes that lead us to choices we may have come to regret.
We can apply the same sort of process within mystagogy with viewing mystagogy can as a forum for working through our attitudes. Since mystagogy is part of the catechetical process of becoming Catholic, our tools are the Bible, the catechism, and the use of the other symbols of faith mentioned in the RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults).
Be forewarned, changing people’s attitudes is not a small task because people’s attitudes often shape their whole lives. But we are called by God to “work on our attitudes.” For example, the Bible does not say, “Be holy, if you get around to it.” Rather, the Bible’s approach for each of us is that we are directed to become lovingly holy with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, “because I (God) am holy” (Leviticus 21:8; Exodus 19:6, 1 Peter 1:16). So, mystagogy directs us to put all our efforts into living the great commandment and getting started now, not later.
I’ll also talk about mystagogy as competency-based as we go along, however, you might note here that the first competency is to “adjust our attitudes.” Much more on that as we go along, I promise!
It seems to me that the opposite of the attitude-formation implicit to mystagogy is something like voluntarism. That’s an attitude of relying on our own decisions as the most important or main factor in getting to heaven or deciding on our values. I’ll admit that that’s my paraphrase of Oxford Languages Online Dictionary definition of voluntarism. So, my Mystagogy Tames the Wandering Demon (2024) is a more in-depth study of the implications of abandoning the practice of our faith. Background for Faith-Sharing Small Groups (FSSG) is in my Mystagogy Leader Guide: Explorations in the Purgative Period.
Mystagogy offers a Vatican II inspired and catechumenate-structured path back to active faith for those who have opposed, defied, abandoned, or neglected active participation in Catholic life. From PEW Research data we can reasonably infer that there are tens of millions of baptized Catholics who are angry, defiant, argumentative, hurt, and vengeful toward the Church. But, regardless of all those reactions, the Church is not helpless in reaching out to them.
I have confidence that if developed as a catechetical ministry mystagogy can be a forum for leading those folk back. The first step in that process is to work through a whole range of human attitudes and replace them, instead, with the be-attitudes of Jesus (Matthew 5:2-12), but more on the beatitudes in some later blog, but for now, remember, “How do you eat an elephant? One small bite at a time.”
Deacon Ray Biersbach
January 16, 2025
