Christian Liturgy: The Gift of Devotional Digressions

Appreciation

I first want to express my thanks to you, the members of Societas Liturgica, for going where no conference has gone before with an online event. Kim Belcher and our hosts including Hansol Goo at Notre Dame have outdone themselves in organizing an unprecedented meeting. I am grateful as well to my colleagues on the Council of Societas Liturgica for ensuring the blossoming of our time together even upon such rocky terrain, and especially to President Bridget Nichols for inviting me to respond to Prof. David Brown's contribution and for the very kind introduction.

Introduction

I share with Prof. Brown a passion for liturgical openness and his reservations for changes and debates that flip-flop with regard to what is and is not appropriate for Christian worship. My response concentrates upon two preoccupations in his paper. One centers around language as found in eucharistic scriptural source material and prayers, and hymn lyrics. It is a polemic against liturgical reforms that he sees as erasing or dulling the richness of imagery and metaphors in what he calls “existing liturgies.” The other zooms in on architecture. It argues for reconsideration and wider liturgical appreciation for historical facets of the liturgically built environment, with particular focus upon stained glass as an exemplary liturgical art where the right kind of teaching, knowledge, and engagement can facilitate a more profound sense of divine encounter in worship. A preservationist stance toward worship construction and practice braids both lines of his argumentation together.

Concurrence

Again, Prof. Brown is correct that some liturgical revisions and objections risk ahistorical and uncritical understanding of liturgical language. He argues convincingly that some well-intended judgments regarding what is and is not liturgically appropriate for contemporary times can nevertheless end up stunting imagination for how antique liturgical arts like stained glass can still evoke divine presence today. For example, building upon the tenor of Prof. Brown's quip about Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and his other remarks about questionable revisions of hymnody, the ethical impulses behind the New Century Hymnal project are commendable, especially with regard to developing singable, inclusive, and affirming hymn lyrics. Yet I often winced inwardly when we used it in my first full-time teaching post as a fellow teaching worship and directing services at Wilson Chapel on the closed and sold campus of Andover Newton Theological School in Newton Centre, Massachusetts. “Be Now My Vision” may have more oomph. But it just does not have the same ring or “poetry”—to reference Prof. Brown—as “Be Thou My Vision.” As another example, pastel stained-glass panels (mostly colorful glass squares, if you will) by the Lazenby and Company of Bradford, England adorn the Beeston Methodist Church in Chilwell, England (formerly called Chilwell Road Methodist Church). Their design is only geometric without any figurative element. They could easily be waved away as “liturgical wallpaper.” Yet the soft and subtle hues of light cast by the politely colored glass panes still filled me with awe for God whenever I preached there as a British Methodist circuit minister more than a decade ago. To put it more succinctly, classic liturgical language and design provide a profound witness to the love of Christ and the call of our faithfulness to it.

Historiography

The memories mentioned here do not reach the historical depth to which Prof. Brown appeals in his paper. For example, his insistence upon the goods of the eucharistic inclusion of the full variation of the centurion's refusal in Matthew 8:8, Thomas Cranmer's Prayer of Humble Access, and the Agnus Dei moves us from the first century and its connection to newly adapted prayer language of the sixteenth century, and to an eschatological vision rooted in a seventh-century innovation credited to Pope Sergius I. I agree with the reasoning driving his sweeping observations that “inadequacies” regarding metaphors and imagery within eucharistic liturgies should be left untouched so that communicants are not prevented from wrestling with what might be perplexing or challenging sacramental imagery and metaphor. Even failed and flawed liturgical language is pierced through with theological and cultural complexities worth contemplating, and even divine realities. Yet his assertions seem to contain a hint of inertia and nostalgia. There is a hint of inertia because his line of argumentation treats liturgical history as fixed rather than involved in a continuous history of revision and dialogue. Liturgical history has been plural in theory and practice since the earliest forms of its expression and remains so going forward. There is a hint of nostalgia because Prof. Brown appears to romanticize liturgical precedents, artifacts, and tradition generally conceived.

Interpretation

Everything we Christians do at table worship is a construction and a matter of interpretation. The gospel of Matthew which serves as the basis for the Domine non sum dignus of the Roman rite and Cranmer's Prayer of Humble Access referenced in Prof. Brown's paper was not written until seventy years after the incarnation, many scholars believe, and only shreds of the originating papyri upon which our version of Matthew is based exist. The attribution to Matthew for the writing was a second-century development nearly 100 years after the gospel was completed. ¹ Reaching a consensus date for the incarnation itself was, according to Alden A. Mosshammer, largely the computational work of a sixth-century monk, Dionysius Exiguus or Denys the Little. Mosshammer believes that Alexandrian church calendaring largely influenced the calculations of Dyonisius Exiguus. But the source material remains undiscovered. The origin remains a mystery. The Scriptures are not only works of art, but also mysterious ones at that. The story of the Centurion from Capernaum's faith likely came from a source Q that biblical scholars still have yet to find. ² Luke's version of the story is also a permutation of Q. The Roman Catholic changing of pais or child from the Greek from the Centurion's reply, and rendered as “servant” in the English New Revised Standard version of the Bible to “soul,” demonstrates how sacramental practice and understanding arise out of consultation and decree over time. Sacramental practice and understanding also vary with respect to institutional liturgical need and agenda.

When Cranmer's Prayer of Humble Access first appeared in print and was presumably first used on Whitsunday in 1549, there was congregational upheaval in Devonshire and in a month's time a “religious revolt in the west [of England], as well as agrarian insurrection in Norfolk and riots against enclosures throughout southeastern England.” ³ In other words, the reception of Cranmer's poetic prayer was mixed at best from its introduction. The history of liturgical contention mentioned here does not disempower using the prayer normatively in celebrations of communion. But it does show that the acceptance of established liturgies such as Cranmer's prayer never happened without friction. On the contrary, instituting liturgies such as his involved a fervent of dialogue, consultation, debate, dissent, and invention. As another example, the Agnus Dei appeared in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer as a communion anthem. Yet it receded from view in the 1552 revision. Now it surfaces in various revised eucharistic rites “either as a confractorium or as a communion anthem.” ⁴ Robust invention and robust contention are at the core of institutionalized liturgical practice.

Mystery

Paul F. Bradshaw's Reconstructing Early Christian Worship and Valeriy A. Alikin's The Earliest History of the Christian Gathering ⁵ provide far more historical nuance, detail, and rigor than my initial remarks about the multilinear roots of table worship and Christian liturgy more broadly conceived. Liturgical history is creative and fraught. When we consider liturgical constraints and openness in divine address, the movement is less an oscillation between what Prof. Brown calls “tight regulation of what is said and done and more liberal regimes,” and more a quantum interaction. It involves sharing, and even physical and violent battling, as well as consultative and controlled arranging, rearranging, and syncretism of ever-changing ritual practices that are digressing from an origin point that is forever out of our reach. The origin point itself is furthermore celebrated according to innovated dating—the incarnation—and heading toward a future of which only God knows—the eschaton.

As Michel de Certeau writes in his last public address, “How is Christianity Thinkable Today,” which was delivered in English at St. Louis University, the “initial event” of the incarnation functions like an “interlocution,” something “said-between,” “implied by all the Christian languages but given by none of them.” ⁶ He further clarifies, “[n]ot that it is untouchable and taboo. But the founder disappears; he is impossible to grasp and ‘hold,’ to the extent that he is incorporated and takes on meaning in a ‘plurality’ of Christian experiences, operations, discoveries, and inventions.” ⁷ De Certeau's language also provides a helpful frame of reference for assessing the risks of Christian praxis that continuously evolves even as it transmits and establishes traditions. He writes:

The Christian movement is always the recognizing of a particular situation and the necessity of a new step forward. There is always a necessary risk in being different. It requires simultaneously a place and a “further,” a “now,” and an “afterwards,” a “here” and an “elsewhere.” ⁸

Or, to put it more succinctly by again using the words of de Certeau, “[b]oundaries are the place of the Christian work, and their displacements are the result of this work.” ⁹ The works of Christian liturgies set and move boundaries with controlled continuity and coherence as well as unpredictable and serendipitous upheaval and mystery.

Leitourgia

As Giorgio Agamben helpfully reminds his readers, even the Christian use of the term liturgy is a work of linguistic boundary breaking and displacement. Leitourgia translates the Hebrew word, “sheret,” or “to serve” in the Septuagint, a third-century composition and arguably the first Bible. Previously, leitourgia strictly described public service in the polis and encompassed games, parades, choruses, and even the collection of refuse, all civic works funded by the monied class in Hellenistic culture, all of which except for the latter Aristotle saw as frivolous in his Politics (1309a17). ¹⁰ Taking the evolution of leitourgia's civic definition to cultic meaning seriously, our ecclesial celebrations always carry within them an originary connection to the political realm. They resonate with theological rhetorical ingenuity and expansion taking place in an enduring dialogue between secular and sacred. Sometimes that is good, such as Cranmer's adaptation of Matthew 8:8. Sometimes, it is mundane, such as the rendering of sheret as leitourgia. At other times, it amounts to evil.

Transgression

Consider the 500 years when both text and action made crusading a sacramental act as it did when European Christians sought to annihilate Muslims (and some Jews) of the Levant from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries with violence-fueled sacramental piety and by eschatological aspirations. In Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin shows how warped and deadly liturgy can become in her examinations of the Eucharistic service (the Mass), the Divine Office (the opus dei), and a host of other public rites, including processions, blessings, and other formal prayers performed during the Middle Ages (mostly) in Latin. She also provides a working Timeline of Nonliturgical Evidence for Liturgical Supplications, or a list of “evidence” from “churches, letters, and other sources [excluding liturgical manuscripts]” requesting or prescribing “liturgical services to be said for crusades or crusaders.” ¹¹ The scope of liturgy from past, present, and into the future in works like Gaposchkin's continuously bears witness to the inescapable reality that “the world is in the church, and the church is in the world.”

The ongoing reality of liturgical sin of course does not mean that suspicion or skepticism should be our de facto approach to liturgical rites. That grave liturgical transgressions persist may in fact strengthen Prof. Brown's argument for norms based upon liturgies that have stood the test of time, or at least continual wrestling with them. My response here is in a way practicing precisely the kind of wrestling he recommends. Yet again, while facets of Prof. Brown's argument are persuasive for why some historical liturgical practices should continue and why some modern ones should recede to help cultivate appreciation for the poetry of liturgical language and in order to show the benefits of confronting the difficulties classical language might present, what is wanting in his claims is an association of liturgy more with comprehension rather than caritas, and a selective and decontextualized view of liturgical history separated from the vast cultural turn, movements, and quirks in which its array develops.

There is, has been, and always will be a place for the kind of liturgical poetry he recommends as well as the reevaluation of liturgical changes that he raises. Yet scholarly attention to liturgical practices must also stretch beyond current and historical debates about what honors and undermines faithful, ethical, intelligible, believable, responsible, and hospitable worship of God. Attention must also be given to extant liturgies from underrepresented communities of faith in liturgical discourse such as African American congregations. They have historically seen communion as “ordinance,” for example. Consider also packed celebrations around the world where stream-of-consciousness prayer frames a faint pattern of worship that includes communion peppered with repeating choruses of praise music. In such celebrations, the fraction is reduced to leaving the elements upon bar tables for the sake of accessibility and style. Even if we disagree with how such celebrations take place, rather than dismiss them because they do not fit our liturgical rationales, is there a way to think more deeply about their place in Christian worship and what we can learn from them even if the learning happens by way of contrast?

Connoisseurship

Liturgical connoisseurship informs the arguments of Prof. Brown. Yet in lived liturgy not everyone with ears is able to hear in the register that he recommends. This may be due, for example, to the inability to hear at all or differences in auditory abilities or differences in capacity or interest to engage liturgical expression intellectually. To put it another way, wrestling in worship is not always desirable or fruitful for the assembly. Rather, some forms of wrestling are more worthwhile than others, especially given the decline of historically Western liturgical worship and the rise of charismatic, evangelical, and post-evangelical forms of Christian worship and irreligiosity around the world. In The Disabled Church: Human Difference and the Art of Communal Worship, Rebecca F. Spurrier develops an ecclesiology that works through the aesthetics of human difference, interdependence, time and work, healing and claiming, and belonging in order to work out how a broader sense of God's created beauty can inspire worship for everyone, especially differently abled populations largely overlooked or neglected within Christian assemblies. ¹² Prof. Brown also admits as much in his discussion of the Presbyterian minister George Matheson. Zooming outside of sanctuaries and shifting to the general religious landscape of a nation—in the US, for example—membership in houses of worship has dropped below 50% (47% to be exact) for the first time since the Gallup poll began recording the statistic in 1937. ¹³ With the exception of Poland, European church attendance is at or below 25% of the general population. ¹⁴ The largest church building in Africa is Roman Catholic: Basilique Notre-Dame de la Paix de Yamoussoukro or Basilica of our Lady of Peace in Botswana. It can accommodate 18,000 worshippers. The most populated church, however, is Deeper Christian Life Ministry in Lagos, Nigeria, with a pre-pandemic weekly attendance over triple the capacity of the basilica at 65,000 people. Pope Francis is Argentinean. Yet the population of Catholics in the country, once as high as 90%, is now 63%. They are being outpaced by a growth in evangelical Protestants and religious nones. ¹⁵ In Korea, Catholicism has grown 50% from 3.9 million in 1999 to 5.8 million in 2018, making up almost 11% of the total population. Mainline and evangelical forms of Protestantism have also blossomed there, bringing the total proportion of Christians to 30% of the South Korean population. Yet younger generations are less and less Christian and less and less religious in general. The majority of people in South Korea have no religious affiliation.

Professor Brown's wariness regarding the dilution of liturgical language and practices does not touch upon the statistics mentioned here. They concern a liturgical profundity or intelligence outside questions regarding the public embrace of Christian worship today. Yet questions of relevance and inculturation are also sorely underexamined in liturgical scholarship and to our detriment as a guild. To put it another way, Prof. Brown's claims resemble advice for the appreciation of classical music or even avant-garde art in response to a listener or viewer who perhaps may only be familiar with popular forms of the day. “If you just understood it more or were willing to wrestle with it more, you would come to see the beauty and poetry of it.” That may be generally true. It certainly has been for my own musical and theological education. Yet I also see a need to rethink and place our preferences into wider conversation, and to redirect frustrations with liturgical changes toward more imagination and engagement with the myriad of everyday liturgical expressions that clearly resemble the arts of Christian worship, even if they do not match our taste or standards for what constitutes what the worshipful or liturgical should be.

Transfiguration

Professor Brown demonstrates how to widen a liturgical lens when he points to stained glass and its ability to participate in divine encounter. He even launches his remarks about stained glass beginning with a Hindu reality, darshan—beholding a deity. Stained-glass windows, even modern ones from Louis Comfort Tiffany (1844–1933) of the United States, Harry Clarke (1889–1931) of Ireland, and Douglas Strachan (1875–1950) of Scotland whose work has received criticism for promoting what Prof. Brown calls “a sort of Presbyterian nationalism,” participate in a transfiguration where divine communication is perceived through a purely “human artefact.” For Prof. Brown, the encounter is not natural theology but akin to how “the sermon as divine address reminds us that even texts that move quite far from the original bible story can be viewed as God using human creativity to communicate something more of the divine will and purposes.” According to him, there is no “divine take-over of the human, as it were.” Similar to the poetry of liturgical language that is even fraught, for Prof. Brown, “it is a matter of allowing an area that is already imbued with divine intention to communicate anew, thanks to the inherent openness of symbols in word and image that by their very nature strive to push beyond any constraints humans unwisely attempt to impose on them.” The freedom of interpretation with a sacred art like stained glass and the efficaciousness of it in opening new vistas of where God reaches out to us that Prof. Brown suggests has empirical support.

In his landmark study, Congregations in America, sociologist of religion Mark Chaves found that churches in the US undertake primarily three activities in no particular order: (1) transmit religious knowledge, (2) enact worship, and (3) celebrate the arts. ¹⁶

It is important to note that Chaves does not distinguish between high and low art, or fine art and pop art. Rather, by “the arts,” he means that if one attends a congregation, they will experience music there more than from a concert hall, visual art more than from a museum or gallery, drama more than a theater, poetry more than a public reading, and so forth. Moreover, Chaves finds that congregations spend the most time and money on the arts as they pertain to catechesis and liturgy. Chaves positions his research as a correction to presumptions that congregations significantly contribute to social service or the political realm. He writes, “three overlapping aspects of congregational culture—the worship events they produce, the religious knowledge they transmit, and the artistic activity they facilitate—occupy more congregations, engage more people, use more resources, and contribute more significantly to communities than either congregations’ social service or political activities.” ¹⁷ While he locates his research in the US, similar trends exist around the world. The findings of Chaves offer tremendous promise to see the material content of worship as the arts and to inspire our practices of worship accordingly.

Doing so may entail retrieving the value of establishment and controversial stained glass as Prof. Brown suggests. It might also mean seeing Arthur Jafa's videographic work, The White Album, that explored the unusual nature of race relations between blacks and whites in America, as illuminating the desires of God. Jafa won the Venice Biennale Golden Lion Award for Best Artist in 2019. It could also entail looking to lesser known artists like the Latinx high schoolers who held a photo exhibition at Artworks in Trenton, New Jersey where professional photographers volunteered their time to help underprivileged youth learn the craft of artistic photography. Their photographs were hung in a reception and sold for $50 each. Mentors, board members, and community residents ensured that every student sold a photograph. Trenton is the capital city of New Jersey, the third poorest in the state. Nearly 30% of the residents live in poverty. It is also one of the most dangerous. A gang-related mass shooting took place at Art All Night in 2018, the largest arts festival in the state of New Jersey and also hosted by Artworks Trenton. How might that kind of artistic engagement inform our current arts of liturgy?

More direct contact with artwork not typically considered sacred, undercelebrated artists, and under-resourced cities and locales would ground and expand our sense of how God reaches out to us in the aesthetic. Perhaps divine encounter in the aforementioned modalities entails more demand from God to widen Christian welcome and practice of Christian justice, love, and mercy.

Serendipity

The auspiciousness of Hindu darshan often depends upon the authority of gurus to identify it for adherents. Yet remembering the mysterious historical milieu that shapes our Christian worship practices such as the civic roots of leitourgia, and the current data indicating that the arts give shape to worship and receive the most resources from congregations, may lead us to perceive liturgical poesis as taking place in all kinds of vernaculars and to recognize transfigurations of divine encounter panoramically that fall within and beyond our liturgical comprehension. The wide listening and seeing I am recommending does not suggest that multilinear praxes of liturgy will be flawless or even without sin. But it will mean that perhaps there is still something about God and the people of God to learn from Presbyterian nationalist stained glass, even if it has more to do with the need for divine wrath and judgment than grace and redemption. What we cast out may still bless us through faithful dialogue and the persistence of grace. To put it another way, artist Titus Kaphar in response to a question about razing racist sculptural monuments during a lecture at Princeton University on November 16, 2017, put forth the idea of “reverse monumentalism.” ¹⁸ Instead of destroying sinful art produced by “third-tier” artists, why not hire top-notch professional artists to amend those historic works, to build around them and to create a deeper sense of memorial regarding how the offending work first came to be and what it means to move forward from it toward better horizons. Think of what Kaphar suggests as a different way of approaching liturgical counterpoint and contrast, such as preaching a sermon about responding to poverty in a cathedral. I also see his recommendation as complementary with the paradox Prof. Brown notes between the array of God's creation, our architectural celebration of it, and the divine realities that appear within it whether by darshan or transfiguration or serendipity. In order to continue the tradition of deeply reflective liturgical praxis that invites us into the realities of God, leaders and participants of liturgy will need to keep deepening our sense of anamnesis, remembering both good and evil of the past and how they came to be, as well as undertaking liturgical remembering as an art form unafraid of believing in and building better and new futures of praising God. Here also we have focused upon liturgical fluency in English. What are the long traditions, robust current trends, and hopeful futures that majority liturgical languages and practices stand to show us about restraint and welcome?