Sharing of Liturgical,Theological,and Ecumenical Gifts: A Quest for a Method *

1. Introduction

The 2023 Congress statement of Societas Liturgica brought together two important insights: “[t]he Pauline instruction to test everything and retain what is good,” and the recognition that, when it comes to liturgical practice, this very testing has involved a different manner of ecumenical openness than is reflected in the major agreements and common documents. Focusing primarily on participation rather than assent, it places the notion of a gift as central, as it seeks to inspire “gratefulness for God's gifts and a willingness to share these with others … [as] a requisite for full acceptance of these very gifts.” ¹ This article seeks to explore how current phenomenologically grounded ecumenical methodology can help liturgical communities to reflect more deeply on mutual sharing of the gifts, and to study obstacles that prevent the receiving of the gifts from each other.

To do so, this article will draw on a critique of the ideological constructions of “golden ages” in liturgy and of the opinion that we live in an “ecumenical winter,” in which the promising initiatives of the past sleep under the snow. ² While it is possible to say that after thirty years of dialogue, many old wounds and disagreements have been overcome, not enough changes have happened at the institutional and practical levels, such as would, for example, make shared eucharist more possible, and where believers in their daily lives could be encouraged by the dream of the full visible unity of all churches becoming more attainable. ³ But I need to add that perhaps such things have happened, just differently from how they were expected or planned, even if at the same time, steps back were taken on other fronts. ⁴

The phenomenological approach taken in this text offers alternative paths to that of the “golden ages.” Focusing on the economy of the gift and on the links among the gift, the giver, and the given, it engages in a detailed critique of proprietorial relations. Such relations, alien to the theological and liturgical contents of the gifts, bend the economy of the gift in ways informed by what we may call metanarratives of utility and entitlement.

Jean-François Lyotard identified metanarratives as assumed superior and universal explanations of how a society functions and should function. According to him such explanations claimed neutrality and objectivity, but in fact, supported particular power interests. ⁵ The life of liturgical communities, theological faculties, ecumenical initiatives, or even of families and individual people who practice religion, is marked by both external and internal conversations with the majority culture formed by dominant metanarratives, which demand an explanation of the benefits of the gifts that religious communities and people stand for, and how they can be in control of them. In this conversation it is necessary to have sufficiently strong antidotes grounding resilience practices that would prevent “pseudomorphosis” ⁶ of the liturgical and theological economy of the gift, and allow for deeper gratitude for and support of ecumenical unity where and how it has been taking place.

A living tradition with which we go forward to the roots rather than backward, as Georges Florovsky emphasized, will be studied here as a common and living heritage, as a task rather than as a legacy. ⁷ It will give additional support to moving beyond assumptions that specific ecclesial groups could “own,” for example, the Easter Triduum, icons, biblical consciousness, or the right and proper manners of conversion, and as their “property” share it with others. The manner of receiving of the gifts from each other, as will be argued, thus could be in accord with the notion of the gift, and as the 2023 Congress statement of Societas Liturgica emphasized, give deeper content to “a certain humility and a willingness to recognize the presence of the divine in other Churches,” ⁸ and also to the absence of the divine that needs to be recognized and shared as a common burden.

The authors studied in this article will help me to work with different notions of the absence that includes both an apophatic movement of making space for the coming of the Spirit, and the idolatrous filling of such space by something that is not God and that does not accord with the gifts of God, and help discriminate between the two. While focusing my ecumenical study primarily on participation rather than on the methods of assent, I shall not avoid epistemological questions underpinning the process of discernment. This will be related not to any external notion of objectivity but to the manners of sharing of gifts and enabling a common discourse of love towards God and neighbor, understanding, and transcending the contextual priorities and local interests.

In sum, in my methodological exploration, I shall first look at how the notion of the gift can be taken out of causal relations and utilitarian thinking. Secondly, I shall turn to the notion of non-possession with regard to our traditions, the riches of others or even, when these are put together, of the common heritage. ⁹ Third, I shall consider how we can also share the difficult “gifts,” the burdens that we bear. Fourth, I shall explore helpful ways of discernment. The final part will put these diverse insights together in a formulation of the basic principles of a method of non-synthetic dialectics. ¹⁰ In the conclusion I shall sketch how such a methodology can fit with the current context.

2. Gifts and the Manners of Their Sharing

Two thinkers who have rehabilitated the notion of the gift for current theology are Jean-Luc Marion and Louis-Marie Chauvet. Drawing on Husserlian phenomenological analysis and on Heideggerian hermeneutics, they developed types of economy of the gift that moved away from causal relations and utilitarian justifications. And as we explore how the sharing of liturgical, theological, and ecumenical gifts across traditions could be liberated from prescriptive idealizations of such processes, insights from Marion's and Chauvet's principles will prove helpful.

Marion's notion of a gift and its economy starts with a critique of conceptual idolatry and of the reduction of God into our categories of being, through which we tend to filter whom we see God as and how God acts. Striving towards God that is concretely lived, however, is constituted differently. ¹¹ It assumes a conversion from seeking to talk about God to allowing God to speak, to reveal God-self with all that belongs to the mode of revelation, including accepting such movement as a gift that is not caused by anything, and that resists being made smaller and more manageable within our structures of being; in other words, one that resists human mastery. Rather, it invites an adequate response to the giver, in charity and in holiness. ¹² On this ground Marion constructs the eucharistic role of theology. ¹³ Eucharist, according to him, “constitutes the first fragment of the new creation,” and “anticipates what we will be, will see, will love … facing the gift that we cannot yet welcome, so, in the strict sense, that we cannot yet figure,” and he concludes with a quotation from Proust: “In this way, ‘sometimes the future lives in us without our knowledge of it.’” ¹⁴ Thus, the first manner of understanding the gift is eschatological. The gift coming from God transforms those who receive it in their spatio-temporal existence and feeds all other relations with charity and holiness. Where God is not made smaller, reduced to human schemes and, thus, taken out of God's own reality, there is also a hope that the church, the body of Christ, constituted by that gift, will translate it at each moment into the very web of its existence. ¹⁵

In a similar way, Chauvet considers grace as an irreducible gift, outside of our value system. Grace comes first, it is “always preceding and necessitated by nothing.” ¹⁶ It is not justified, not reducible to any “value,” whether conceptual, physical, or moral. A way to grace is also a way towards a fundamental openness, “an attitude of listening and welcome toward something ungraspable by which we are already grasped; … a gracious attitude of ‘letting be’ and ‘allowing oneself to be spoken’ which requires us to renounce all ambition for mastery.” ¹⁷ The role of the church is, according to Chauvet, in mediating an open space for the otherness of God to come and break our enclosed circles. ¹⁸

Later, Marion expands the notion of the gift back towards the Husserlian given. ¹⁹ Two reasons for considering that shift are very relevant to our theme. First, it has to do with the way the gift implies a giver. In the case of God, which is the prime instance for Marion, there is a problem of visibility. ²⁰ Theologically it may seem to be without question that, for example, the gift of creation, of grace or the gifts of the Holy Spirit imply God who gives them. Scholastics believed so, and much of our theology is indebted to that heritage. Chauvet makes the Marion’s point even more explicit by saying that the scholastic explanations preferred the concept of causality for explaining the relation between God and the world, which strengthened the idea of knowledge at the expense of excluding the symbolic “non-knowledge.” ²¹ The visibility of knowledge was constructed in such a way that God was caught in the web of causal relations, subjected to them, even if as a prime cause or a prime mover. The gift, then, was instrumentalized as a way to guarantee such a prime place, and in this logic, a proper relationship to the giver. ²²

When we take a step further, and transpose such gift sharing to the liturgical, theological, and ecumenical gifts among Christians and churches, the problem will become still more apparent. The implication of another Christian tradition as a giver establishes an unhealthy mode of relationships. It assumes that specific ecclesial groups could “own,” for example, the Easter Triduum, icons, biblical consciousness, or the right and proper manners of conversion, and then give them to others, or more often, give some of their wealth to others while still safekeeping a privileged relationship to the “goods” and the privileged position of the giver. Such understanding of the sharing of the gifts as akin to holding stock in a company has its roots in the wrongly assumed visibility when it comes to seeing what comes from God. ²³

The second point regarding the shift from the gift to the given has to do with the selection of what is taken into consideration. Phenomenologically understood, all that appears in our consciousness needs to be counted, not only a pre-selection given by our ideas about reality, desires regarding how things should be, or fears concerning how they might be. ²⁴ The focus on the gift with some of the problems mentioned above is often a focus on the pre-selection. It happens in liturgical theology when we want to specify where and how God is present in ways that mark these as privileged places excluded from other places that are not so lucky. It happens in ecumenical relations when we want to measure success of ecumenical dialogues and specify what “goods” were delivered to the churches and received by them. Of course, I am not saying that reflections on what works and what does not work in ecumenical relations is wrong, or that liturgical theology should not study how to understand the manners of the divine presence mediated by the church. The problem rests elsewhere, namely in the “not-knowing” that needs to accompany the “knowing.” ²⁵ Only then will its iconicity be preserved. ²⁶

The spirit of humility of which the Congress Statement speaks thus includes not only a willingness to recognize the presence of the divine in other churches, but it also transforms our whole way of perceiving the gifts, the givers, and takers. Marion goes as far as saying that because of our inclinations to select and own, if not physically then mentally, it is better to focus on the given. I would consider the notion of the sharing of the gifts still helpful, provided we accept such criticism, and cultivate non-possessive relations regarding the gift. Chauvet offers an example of this when he speaks about the manner of sharing of gifts in the light of the possibility of a “common ‘world’ of meaning,” where “a new relation of places between subjects, a relationship of filial and brotherly and sisterly alliance” is cultivated, instituting or restoring faith with its basic attitudes of gratitude and generosity. ²⁷

3. Non-Possession of the Common Heritage

The non-possessive manner of relations, when it comes to liturgical, theological, and ecumenical life, does not mean that we give up who we have been and from where we have come, but rather it means to be more attentive to what that means and includes. If we seek to understand liturgical and sacramental life in its broadest sense, ²⁸ the initiating initiative of God, and the commonality of its expressions, already stand against a mentality of privileged access to such life and are much closer to the common living and varied heritage, including processes of growth and flourishing, as well as regression and disintegration.

Mother Maria Skobtsova, a Russian émigré nun in Paris, interprets the role of non-possession, emphasizing the need to prevent seeing normativity in the wrong place or in the wrong manner, as an obstacle to seeing that which emerges out of the given conditions of life. ²⁹ Creating such obstacles, according to her, leads to the fossilization of traditions. ³⁰ Tradition is always both what is inherited and what is emerging in response to the new conditions, even if at times we must pass through darkness, where both of these dimensions seem unavailable. ³¹ Tradition is not preserved by means of adapting ourselves to past times—not even to our images of eschatological fullness. Neither can ultimately be done. In living out Christian tradition we do not step into the past, but into the realm of the Spirit, where we are enlightened from the eschatological realm of the resurrection, where the saints, our fathers and mothers, are closer to Christ, the Source of Life, than we are. And yet, with Christ's and their help and advice we must act. We need “to accept the new, to comprehend it, to make out precisely what it demands of us,” according to Mother Maria. ³²

In this context she speaks about non-possession in a way that will be helpful to our understanding of the healthy manner of sharing gifts. Interpreting the beatitude, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matt 5:3), she states that the monastic vow of poverty understood as non-possession should be expanded to “spiritual non-possession.” ³³ This “non-possession” can also be applied to our attitude towards liturgical, theological, and ecumenical gifts. For Mother Maria the call to live this beatitude and the search for how to do it involves struggling with two vices, miserliness and greed. On the one hand we must face the loss of certainty regarding our convictions, which involves the challenge that salvation may not arrive for us in the way we wish. We cannot issue a limit to divine love, according to Mother Maria, not even the limitations of our self-preservation. On the other hand, we must struggle against greed for the spiritual riches of the other. Mother Maria states that both of these desires to possess are common in life outside the church and in distorted understandings of Christianity. ³⁴

4. Participating in Each Other's Burdens

Sharing of gifts in the ecumenical context is often reduced to the specified “nice things” we can give to each other or borrow from each other. I have already criticized this approach when I spoke about expansion towards the phenomenologically grounded given, or we could say also towards the Heideggerian Dasein, being thrown into the complexities of life that precede our choice and our reflection, and that form the context in which we live our lives. It is possible to reflect on the instances of shared ministry to those in need, whether in hospitals, prisons, among the poor, during pandemics, floods, earthquakes, wars; praying together, celebrating liturgy, at times including eucharist or the sacrament of reconciliation, partaking in each other's ordinations, teaching together theology, leading retreats, and feeling deep gratitude for the moments when it really is a common quest. It is, however, also needed to reflect on the instances of sexual abuse, and the often very unsatisfactory ways our churches are dealing with such abuses, as well as other instances of abuse of authority, making spiritual and theological claims justifying injustice and even manifest violence. What kind of sharing is involved in the recommendation: “Bear one another's burdens, and in this way, you will fulfill the law of Christ”? (Gal 6:2)

Here a sound theology of kenosis or of the limitation can help us. But especially when working with the dark sides of our participation with each other, we need to start with problems associated with kenosis. The beautiful hymn in Philippians 2:5–8 praising Christ for clinging to nothing and complete self-emptying for our sake, has supported various forms of spiritualizing sacrifices and justifying harm. ³⁵ In a sound theology of kenosis, human freedom remains a necessary ingredient if we do not wish to maintain a state of oppression or to authorize depravity, or even think that bearing each other's burdens means being blind to such features. Thus, a more helpful way to interpret a healthy kenotic attitude may be that of limitation rather than that of sacrifice.

When harm was done, the limitation allows for distance. It includes awareness that not all actions or attitudes are equal, that not everything goes. Things could have been different and better. And yet the judgment made is not made on the grounds of superiority. But even if a difference among the positions of victims and violators and oppressors is maintained, as well as the need for justice to the harmed, ³⁶ it does not construct a position of superiority. The sharing of burdens cannot be demanded from victims or even enforced on them, and it cannot be demanded or enforced on third parties either, but there are instances where it can be found. And such testimonies bear redemptive power. ³⁷ They unfurl the possibility of the impossible—or at least the experience of the desire for the impossible, as Jacques Derrida says. ³⁸

The principles of non-causal and non-utilitarian sharing of gifts taken from Marion and Chauvet, of non-possession taken from Mother Maria Skobtsova, and on the unconditional possibility of the impossible, as Derrida puts it, when it comes to sharing burdens with each other, all point to a kind of ascetic purificatory dimension of the manner in which sharing of gifts may remain healthy. They safeguard the iconicity of participation in God and in each other, and provide an irreplaceable critique of the conditioned ways in which we settle our relationships, be aware of our contexts and limitations, using different forms of compromise so as to bring at least some of the unconditional good into practice. ³⁹ Now, though, I turn my attention to the discernment that is needed if we are not going to resign to some kind of profiled, shared forms of ritual, belief and practice, and that is equally needed as we engage in the negotiation between the unconditional and the conditional regimes of sharing.

5. Discernment

The notion of discernment as searching for a right judgment, or making judgment in a proper way, is part of all religious traditions, grounding their spiritual life, development of ritual and doctrine. ⁴⁰ According to Franz Brentano, a predecessor of phenomenology, discernment plays a central and mediating role in how we experience the world, relations with other people and creatures, and the relationship with the holy and the transcendent. ⁴¹ As I shall argue, it is also central to ecumenical relations and to the sharing of gifts and burdens with each other. Drawing on previous experiences of what has and has not worked, it provides us with an open matrix of directives and insights for correlating the unconditional and the conditioned aspects of such sharing.

The biblical narratives teach us that right judgment is not learned in the abstract. They often use the symbolism of the journey, in which, for example, particular challenges teach Abraham how to discern what comes from God and what originates from his desires or fears before he becomes the father of a multitude of nations. Moses must discern between what leads to life and what leads to death, and only thus can he become the giver of the divine law, who knows God by name. But also, for example, Odysseus on his journey must learn how to discern between good and evil in all the different practical situations in which he finds himself, before he becomes an archetype of a person of wisdom, of moral and spiritual depth. It may be helpful to see our liturgical, theological, and ecumenical journey in that continuation.

The real choices between what is good and what is evil belong to this journey as well, and to use Marion's language, they include moving beyond “excessive visibility” ⁴² towards seeing a more complex web of forces and relations in which the characters and their communities are caught and from which they need to emerge with a new consciousness, with a deep knowledge of the difference between the surface and the very heart of human life. From that depth, what I call a profiled non-synthetic dialectics arises. It includes awareness of different, and sometimes irreconcilable rules in play, valid at the same time, as well as a profound awareness that there are paths that lead to death, while others that lead to life, physical, moral, intellectual, and spiritual. Learning discernment meant learning liberation, letting oneself be redirected from the land of the shadows to the light of the Spirit and to the realm of the divine Logos.

6. The Method of Non-Synthetic Dialectics

The method of non-synthetic dialectics that I shall present here is deeply linked to discernment and to the previous methods it criticizes. Here I am referring to the last century's multifaceted search for the permanent reference points for Christian tradition, so that it would not lose its creative depth, something I have been deeply nourished by and despite the critical remarks I am going to make, I still sympathize with some of its aims.

When in 1936, Georges Florovsky presented a program for renewing Orthodox theology, he argued that a new path of creative following of the Greek Fathers, not Neo-Scholasticism, needs to be pursued. ⁴³ For this way forward to the roots he constructed a scheme, the “(Neo-)patristic synthesis.” ⁴⁴ This scheme combined (or we might say “synthesized”) the reading and rediscovery of the patristic tradition with the rehabilitation of what he saw as a living and liberating tradition in his own time. Similar programs were undertaken by liturgical theologians Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff, differing in details concerning which period should be taken as foundational, ⁴⁵ and they all have had a significant effect on how the theological and the liturgical sharing of gifts happened or could not happen in initiatives of the WCC's Faith and Order Commission. ⁴⁶

The weakness of this approach lay in what Marion called the “excessive visibility” of what forms such a synthesis. Florovsky, Schmemann, and Meyendorff constructed privileged places and times formative for all, and even in those ignored or downplayed the plurality of voices, the conflicts, and disagreements. The desire for synthesis as a way of combining different patristic gifts into something new, some composition, combination, agreement, or treaty, dominated over other sensitivities.

An alternative methodological option, which does not involve such an essentialist understanding of tradition, is paradoxically found already in the sources so dear to the authors of the synthesis. We can learn from the distinct insights of the Fathers what this might mean, without formulating these into a synthesis. Thus, for example, Justin Martyr claimed that God gave people the power to contemplate, to think and discern, and to act justly, while offering a plurality of ways in which living in the realm of the divine Logos may occur. As the seed of Logos was, according to him, given to all nations and cultures, people who followed it in its different manifestations participated in Logos. And such participation was recognizable according to the fruits of their lives. The partial relationships to Logos were fulfilled but not overcome in the explicit knowledge of the full Logos, Christ. ⁴⁷

St. Maximus the Confessor worked with a different integrative approach, based in mediation, a model of which he found in the mystery of Christ's hypostatic union with the created world, which made it possible for people to participate in the divine nature, and to mediate this participation throughout creation. ⁴⁸ Mediation presupposed distinctions, five divisions as St. Maximus said. He did not seek to overcome them, but rather to see how they can communicate with each other and thus participate in the divine love. He said that love moves people to mediate between: (i) the female and the male; (ii) paradise and the inhabited world; (iii) the earth and the heaven (sky); (iv) the material and the spiritual world; (v) the creation and God, or the created–uncreated. ⁴⁹

The open, yet rooted and communicative, plurality of positions present already in these two examples can help ecumenical theology towards understanding a “non-synthetic dialectics.” ⁵⁰ It also could be expressed in terms of perichoresis, ⁵¹ coming from perichōreō—to encompass, to permeate, and thus meaning “interpenetration.” ⁵² The concept was, of course, first employed for speaking about the communion of the Holy Trinity, in which the full distinction of persons, their making space for each other and their radical unity, needed to be held together. The movement of giving and receiving does not presuppose arriving at a new entity or participating in a higher singular abstract essence.

Something similar was already implemented in Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae's notion of “open sobornicity,” ⁵³ based on belief in and experience of the Holy Spirit bestowing communion among the different members of the church (with their different confessional backgrounds) without taking away their distinct ways of living their Christian life, but by turning them to each other, making bonds among them and teaching them that “the gift of each exists for the sake of the others.” ⁵⁴ This may be a very helpful model, provided we combine it with a non-instrumental understanding of the gift, and with a non-elitist mentality. Stăniloae himself was not always free of this temptation and he struggled for coherency when it came to translating this unconditional principle to the conditioned ways of living in visible administrative structures. ⁵⁵

Non-synthetic dialectics remains related to the lived experiences where sharing of the gifts was and was not successful, as well as to insights from traditions of discernment that can teach us about how to measure such success. As in the previous parts of this article, I have used examples for the purpose of avoiding meta-constructs, even of a critical nature. The examples I have used, whether Justin Martyr, Maxim the Confessor, or Dumitru Stăniloae, offered schemes of interpretation that focused on communication, and worked with an awareness that human or ecclesial wholeness is not found in isolation.

7. Conclusion

To conclude, I return to recent challenges, especially Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine, which have forced us to re-evaluate the stability of our previous convictions, ⁵⁶ including those concerning the role of worship in what divides and unites Christians. Back in 1975 Jürgen Moltmann wrote: “It is no longer true that ‘doctrine divides but service unites’; now it is often the case that ‘doctrine unites but politics divide’.” ⁵⁷ Christians in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, or Africa, struggling with wars and poverty, were aware of this long before it came home to Europeans. Confronted with hate speech and practices, with revivals of apocalyptic imagery and the defense of war proclaimed as “holy,” ⁵⁸ something we thought was dead in Europe for a long time, we learn how politics embedded in religion divides not only confessions but also within confessions, and that unity at any cost is not a viable option. Moltmann qualified the unity that matters as “the unity of Christ and the Spirit that makes all things new in the midst of conflicts” and said that even “the unifying power of sacraments cannot be separated from the tasks and forces of social and political justice.” ⁵⁹ William Cavanaugh, reflecting at the end of the 1990s on church life during General Pinochet's dicta­torship in Chile, pointed out that when Christians actively engage in violent actions they participate in fact in an “anti-liturgy of fear, torture, and fragmentation of the physical, the ecclesial, and the social body.” ⁶⁰

Such challenges test the methodological approaches towards a reciprocal and uncalculated sharing of the gifts that I have offered in this article. They bring to the fore the relation between unconditional and conditioned economies of the gift. At the same time such extreme situations create their own “excessive visibility” that prevents people from seeing what is there to be seen. ⁶¹ Situations of massive suffering and abuse sometimes endanger, other times strengthen, “identities” that were built in a competitive manner. At the same time, they teach us about new ways that prevented the fossilization of traditions, ⁶² and in our case can take us out of what “2023 Congress Statement” called an “elite ecumenism.” ⁶³ Non-possession does not create elites, Mother Maria Skobtsova pointed out, provided the possession does not move to the realm of desires.

The current challenges also remind us how difficult it is to act upon the belief that broken relationships can be mended, how easy it is to accept the demonization of others, and how hard it is to discern between legitimate claims to justice and illegitimate hatred of the other. The impossible possibilities of also sharing the negative parts of our heritage, however, may be precisely where communities step into the realm of the Spirit, and seek what it means to be closer to Christ, the Source of Life. ⁶⁴ If the source of life is taken seriously, then living in the present is open to genuinely new possibilities of life, including those of communication and communion, both within and beyond visible administrative structures, whether denominational or ecumenical.