The Strength of Ritual

Episcopal Life has excerpted a column from the Rev. Patrick Malloy's book Celebrating the Eucharist: A Practical Ceremonial Guide for Clergy and Other Liturgical Ministers (Church Publishing, 2008). Malloy is the rector of Grace Church, Allentown, Pennsylvania, and has served on The Episcopal Church's Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music. The essay says in part,

Nothing is more important to the life of a community than what happens during that one hour on Sunday. At the most pragmatic level, the Sunday liturgy is the only time in the regular life of a community when everyone gathers.

From Sunday to Sunday, individual members of the community and subgroups within the community live out their particular vocations within the baptismal vocation. On Sunday, however, the body of Christ experiences itself in its totality. The Sunday Eucharist is a pivotal moment, both in the church's expression of what it is and in being formed into what it is.

If the Sunday liturgy is largely a clerical affair done by the priest for the people, so that the people are mere responders or observers rather than key actors, the chances that the parish will grow into a group of integrated, self-starting, empowered ministers is greatly decreased.

The liturgy will have expressed a worldview and simultaneously instilled a belief that "Father knows best" or "the priest has all the power" or "we lay people know how to take care of the nuts and bolts of this operation, but when it comes to God, that's better left to the professionals."

The liturgy is precisely common prayer, expressing and creating a common life. For the majority of the worshipping community, the liturgy's message is not easily resisted.

There always will be those in any Sunday assembly who are not members of the church, but seekers who have come hoping to find something that will give their lives meaning and direction. They are true participants, but they usually keep a safe distance, often literally, from the group. The Sunday Eucharist paints a picture for them of what the church is – or, more truly, what the church aspires to be.

It is not the only place they could explore the church. They could visit the parish soup kitchen and see the church as a force for social change and compassion. They could sit in on a midweek reading group and experience the church as a community of learning and exploration. They could observe the children's Sunday school and see the church as an agency that cares for the vulnerable and includes everyone, regardless of age.

At the Sunday Eucharist, though, all of what the seeker might see in any of those venues is on display at one moment. The Sunday assembly of the church is the most important moment in the church's relationship with itself and in its relationship with the world. Done well, ministering at the Sunday Eucharist facilitates the church's seeing and experiencing itself as the body it is growing into and, at the same time, showing the world an image of how human beings live when God's kingdom comes on earth as in heaven.

Ultimately, all of this depends on God. But, as the catechism says, the sacraments are means of grace, of an encounter with the Divine. They change people, and so they change the world, even on those normal days when hearts are not moved to conversion and worlds do not seem to be blowing up.

The full text of the Episcopal Life column, which also makes a thoughtful comparison to underground nuclear bomb testing in North Korea, is online here: The Strength of Ritual

Individualists are incapable of worship

The awesomely corporate act of public worship assumes, requires, demands a celebrating assembly of believing persons who have not lost the sense of being part of humanity, the sense of relation to, interdependence with, even identification with every other human being—as consequences of the love of God. People who approach that act, who gather on Sunday as self-contained unites, individuals for whom all others are merely competitors or makes, are simply incapable of it. Any sensitive pastoral minister has long since observed that the Sunday assembly's liturgical problems (participation, engagement, understanding, experience) cannot be solved by liturgical reforms alone.

Of course the church needs continuing liturgical reform. The bed of a living tradition has to be dredged constantly, as a maxim has it. One of the glories of this confusing and promising century is the resumption of that invaluable service in so many parts of the faith communities of Judaism and Christianity. No question about it. Pressing those issues is a most important contribution to the life of faith.

But it is insufficient in itself. the cancer of Western and American individualism infects that Sunday assembly and produces as church that is barely capable of celebrating the eucharist or any other liturgical rite. We cannot blame the liturgy for the fact that we who celebrate it, the faith community, are so mesmerized by the idol of rugged individualism that it is dreamy to call us a "community" at all. It is quite impossible to see in our corporate life a community of biblical faith committed to witnessing in the world the advent of God's reign of justice and peace.

—The Rev. Robert Hovda, Worship, January 1991

There is no going back

Henry Breul was a leader of liturgical renewal in The Episcopal Church for forty years, and served as a longtime editor of its publication, Open. In 1991, he and his wife, Sally, retired to a small community in Maryland where the parish church was not reformed in its worship. But he felt strongly that one attends one's parish church and so they remained. Here is a reflection he wrote for the Fall 1991 issue of Open on going back to an earlier piety:

I think it is difficult for those of us immersed in the liturgical reforms of the past twenty years to understand the profound changes that have taken place. We have become used to many things that have, as a result, disappeared from our consciousness and become part of the furniture, as it were. When one of these young people moves into a "time warp" there is culture shock lurking in the pews. Imagine, if you will, a lovely, riverside community with colonial houses and a slow living pace. A place where all the store clerks are genuinely helpful and where people stop to "chin" on the streets. A place where blacks avert their eyes from white gaze and the supermarkets are filled with farm folk on weekends, folk who speak a special patois related to the watermen and the colonial past. Put all this together and then place yourself at the 8 a.m. eucharist in the parish church—liturgically it is 1938. The priest faces that wall, he wears brocaded Barclay Street vestments, he reads all the lessons, moving from lectern to pulpit, he says all the "Amens," and nobody passes the peace.

Now what? Does one simply leave? Look for another church in the next county? Surreptitiously read Rite Two as he reads Rite One? Or hunker down and let it all flow over one? There are more options, but let's not get into Rome or Presbyterianism. If one stays and participates it is necessary to rediscover the piety that served well in seminary. In other words, if you accept the time warp of the streets and the market place, the concomitant liturgical time warp is part of the deal, and it is surprising how easy it is to slip back and worship in a past mode, even secretly rejoicing in the forgotten richness of an outmoded piety.

All this triggers questions. Is it possible that the ethos of the 1930s remains in worship because it still speaks to a cultural backwater? Do people who meet almost daily in a small town find the Peace a very exciting option? People who have a strong sense of community are hard to persuade that the eucharist is community building. It is for them, rather the celebration of individualism with everybody, including the priest, doing their own thing.

The late medieval problems of Rite One become clear when one returns to it after a long absence. Indeed, Cranmer's doctrines of the atonement become offensive to the alert theological ear. The one thing that comes back loudly in all this is that there is no going back. Even a backward, charming community deserves better of its worship that Rite One offers. Cable TV has arrived, drugs have appeared, four people were shot in the public park last Friday, and the signs of the late twentieth century are everywhere. It is time for the local parish to move toward reform.

Those battles that many of us fought years ago are about to break out here in the midst of elms, formal gardens, and boutiques. Retirement seems to be getting more interesting.

The Shape of Mission

In the most recent issue of the APLM online magazine, Open, the Rt. Rev. Joe Morris Doss writes The Shape of Liturgy is the Shape of Mission. He asks in that article:

I will offer two statements of faith. Consider which is the most important statement for you personally?

• We are called to embrace this life, as it is, as a gift, and to make gratitude for this gift the basic attitude of our life (especially through belonging to a people of thanksgiving), becoming at home in the world and achieving the fullness of our humanity as lovers – finally, lovers of all that is, of the entire created order.
• We are to make this a better world. This world is not the final reality or our true destiny. We are to resist evil, identify where there is wrong and name it, support the weak, the oppressed, and the deprived; we must strive for that justice, compassion, and righteousness which reflects the inner life of God and which finally will be established when the prayer is realized that God’s will be done on earth as in heaven.

The retired Bishop of New Jersey goes on to show how the statements are not only mutually compatible but that they are in fact both essential. He shows this through the liturgy of Justin Martyr. The full text of the article is here: The Shape of Liturgy is the Shape of Mission.