Provisional Explanations: the Purpose and Effects of Liturgy

The thread below has turned to the purpose of worship and especially frequent reception of the Eucharist—what’s it all for anyways?

To push the discussion along, I thought I’d post something that I’m doing elsewhere that connects to part of this question. That is, it fusses with worship and liturgy, but not necessarily the Sacraments. Yet. So, critique away…

The Purpose of Liturgy

Worship grounds our experience of the life hid with Christ in God.

Q. What is corporate worship?
A. In corporate worship, we unite ourselves with others to acknowledge the holiness of God, to hear God’s Word, to offer prayer, and to celebrate the sacraments.
BCP, p. 857

Dearly beloved, we have come together in the presence of Almighty God our heavenly Father,

    to render thanks for the great benefits we have received at his hands,
    to set forth his most worthy praise,
    to hear his holy Word,
    and to ask, for ourselves and on behalf of others, those things that are necessary for our life and our salvation.

BCP, Morning Prayer: Rite I, p. 41

Our Life and Salvation

Salvation and the embrace of the kingdom of God is at the heart of the Christian life and experience. But how do we define “salvation”? All too often, it seems, our culture tends to equate Christian salvation with “going to heaven”. While this answer is not completely wrong, neither is it right and in choosing to answer this way, perhaps the most important facets of Christian salvation are lost.

What does it mean to be saved?

In the New Testament, one of the words most commonly used to discuss the Christian end/goal is the word “abide”. The Gospel and Letters of John in particular use it, but it is found throughout the rest of the New Testament too. To abide, we in him and he in us.

The way St Paul phrases it in Colossians has especially captured my mind and heart. Speaking of Baptism, he writes, “For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” (Col 3:4).

This is what it means to be “saved”—to be hid with Christ in God. To be invited, through Baptism, to participate in the very life of God, to abide in and with the mystery of love who abides at the heart of creation, who loves each of us individual, who cares enough to take on our frail flesh, live and give his very life for each one of us. The abiding happens once we shuffle off this mortal coil—and in that sense I’ll agree that salvation is connected to “heaven”, the abode (hey, there’s that word ‘abide’ again…”) of God “after we die”. But more important is the invitation into God’s own life.

It doesn’t start once we’re dead.

It starts here. Now. We get to live it. Here. Now. Waiting ’til you’re dead means missing God’s party here and now.

Worship

Christian worship—Christian liturgy—is one of the ways that we open ourselves to the mystery of what this abiding/hiding means.

You see, I can’t really explain what it means to be “hid with Christ in God”. Words fail me. And that’s ok. Christian worship—when done well and with full, intentional engagement—is one of our great clues to teach us, to show us, to connect us to what it means to be hid with Christ in God.

Worship gives us the experiences, the sounds, smells, and tastes that we use to recognize, to remember, and to enact our on-going relationship with God when we’re outside of worship as well. It’s like an answer key that gets tattooed into our movements and feelings as well as our thoughts that help us decode the crazy world we find ourselves in—and to find even in the midst of it all the compassion, the love, of the God who created it all, who loves it all, and who waits for us to embrace our life in him.

The Effects of the Liturgy

Worship is habit-forming: it directs our affections and creates an ethos.

Worship is habit-forming…

Note, first, the choice of the verb: is. I’m not saying that it can be, that it may be, or that it should be habit-forming. It is habit-forming. Whether we like it or not, whether we want it or not, it simply is the case. Whether it’s sublime, inspiring, energizing, mediocre or down-right poor, the worship we experience will shape how we understand and experience the Christian faith. And let’s face it: there’s a lot of mediocrity out there. I can’t help but think that it has an effect on our churches and on our lives.

So if worship is going to form and shape us, we as active Christians need to 1) be informed about what the liturgy is, 2) where it came from and 3) be aware of how it shapes us. From a big pictureperspective, I’m going to identify the how under two major concepts: Affections and Ethos.

The Religious Affections

“Affections” isn’t a word we hear a lot, especially in the sense in which I’m using it. Thus, it requires a bit of explanation.

Religious language is often feeling language. We use emotional language to talk about our relationship with God and one another. Even our main virtues like “love” and “hope” have a feeling nature to them. And yet, emotions tend to be both spontaneous and transitory things. Love wells up, hope springs new—but then they go away again. Or, anger springs up in us, often unbidden.

Using the term “affections” is a way to talk about attitudes, orientations, ways of being in the world that relate to emotion or emotional states but are broader and deeper than the transitory surface feelings that we might have. Affections are complex constellations of feelings and thoughts that seek to pattern our lives and train us in certain actions.

Thus when Christians use words like “faith”, “hope”, “love”, “joy”, “expectation”, “penitence” we’re not just talking about emotions that may come or not come—we’re talking about affections. About ways of being undergirded by rational thought that shape how we act.

When affections and emotions get confused,we can start haviung problems. Worship can be seen as a means of manipulating emotions—whether through inculcating fear or else passing off a false fleeting joy as “real” Christian emotion. Both of these emotional extremes distort the message of love, hope, and joy in the Gospel and cause more harm than good.

The historic liturgy of the Church seeks to pattern people into the affections. This occurs preeminently through the seasons of the Church Year. I’ll say more about this later when I discuss the Church Year, but the major seasons show us the shapes and boundaries of the affections and help us try them on, make them part of our habits of living.

Instilling an Ethos

Where we participate in corporate worship has a major effect on our experience of the Christian life with God and thus shapes our theology and spirituality.

The ethos or “character” of a place is a combination of factors. It seems to me that a classic description of the English Anglo-Catholic stronghold, All Saints Margaret Street is one attempt to define a community’s ethos:

Music by Mozart, Decor by Comper; Choreography by Fortescue; but, my dear boy, libretto by Cranmer.

It’s fair to say that an ethos is a combination of:

  • Architecture
  • Music
  • Ceremonial
  • Liturgy
  • Decoration
  • Attitude and Execution of the Liturgy by the Clergy
  • Attitude and Execution of the Liturgy by the Congregation

The last two cannot be overlooked. Reverent, pompous, attentive, energetic, bored, sloppy: it’s remarkable how one community can project a completely different ethos from another even when many of the other elements are the same.

After hearing and participating in “worship wars” for well over a decade, I’ve come to the conclusion that most conflict is about ethos. Such discussions often fail by being too narrowly focused. That is, people argue over music, liturgy, and ceremonial. But more often I think what they really intend is the over-all package and the elements don’t—and can’t—create the whole ethos.

SpirituaLinxx

Today when I dashed into the gym for a lunch-hour session with the weights, the login kiosk greeted me with a virtual banner and balloons for reaching a certain number of points for the month.

One of the things that M and I like about our local Y is that the machines in the workout room are hooked into the FitLinxx system that tracks how long, how far, how heavy, etc. Furthermore, when you’re at home you can log in and add other activities. So, when I run outside, I can go and put it in manually.

In recent days, I’ve been working on really embracing this system, and being dutiful about logging my out-of-gym workouts. I find that doing so actually helps me to be more diligent about getting up and doing my tai chi in the morning. The more intentional I am about logging, the more intentional I am about doing, therefore the sooner I accumulate points and, voila, virtual banner and balloons…

So, I found myself thinking tongue-in-cheek, why not a SpirituaLixx? You know, you log your Morning and Evening Offices, your mid-day rosaries and mass attendence. It in, return, keeps you abreast of which collects to use, what Holy Days of Expectation are coming, and—when you acheive your target goals—presents you with suitably ironic icons, medals, statues, and plenary indulgences…

Church Attendance and Christian Formation

Vicki+ left this comment below and it really is begging for its own post…:

So much of your commentary on this blog is about Christian formation. But one thing that has not been raised is the frequency of attendance at Sunday worship, and the role of that in formation. One of the measurements for congregational vitality is Average Sunday Attendance (ASA), reported on parochial reports and other analyses. (Yes, I know that CS Lewis once commented that Jesus said ‘Feed my sheep’, not ‘Count my sheep’; nevertheless….) But more and more the pattern of Sunday worship attendance among people who consider themselves faithful, committed Christians engaged fully in the life of their parish has changed. That standard used to be 3 out of 4 Sundays a month. Now it is more like once a month or even once every six weeks. This is not just my own observation, nor just about the Episcopal Church. I’m hearing it from many different quarters (of course there are always local exceptions).

So, the question becomes: how does Christian formation work in such a climate where the chance for repeated exposure becomes far less? At what point do we lose the corporate sense of the Body coming together to be fed and formed and sent out in mission? What as Christians is our duty and responsibility, not only to God and to ourselves, but also to each other as part of each others’ formation? The phrase from the BOS bidding prayer for Advent Lessons and Carols keeps ringing in my ears: “Let it be our duty and delight…”

Anyway, do you have any thoughts about this?

Oh, do I…

Especially after a meeting I attended this weekend. We were planning for next year and we had some suggestions that education classes not be held every Sunday because, can we really expect people to get to church that much? And then to stay for a whole two hours (for mass and Christian Ed)?

[ol’ codger tone] When I was growing up  going to church every Sunday is what was both expected and done. We did it, the families on our street did it, the families at our church did it. The only times we weren’t in church was on campouts for Scouts. Otherwise if you weren’t there, people assumed you were sick/indisposed. M said it was the same way for them. And we’re not talking the ’50’s here, these were the ’80’s. [/ol’ codger tone]

Also back then, there were very few sporting events and such held on Sunday morning (I can think of a few soccer leagues in our area that had games then—but not many). One of the reasons is because they simply could not get the kids because parents wouldn’t let them skip church to play on Sundays.

That’s definitely no longer the case, especially in M’s parish’s geographical region. All sorts of community and school athletic events are on Sundays/Sunday mornings and often parents choose those over church.

Somehow church is being viewed in greater numbers and across age-spans as an optional activity.

I’ll just open this topic up at this point… Do these anecdotal trends match with your observations? What do we do with this?

Recovering Liturgies: The Asperges

As I’ve said several times, we are the Christian Church, not the Christian Historical Society. We don’t do what we do because it’s old, we do it because it proclaims the Gospel.

That having been said, like Matthew’s scribes training for the Kingdom of Heaven, we should periodically assess our treasures old and new and consider which of them best proclaim the Gospel in our time and place. There’s one treasure I’ve been looking at quite a bit recently…the Asperges (“Sprinkling”).

There’s no question that one of the great theological centers of the ’79 BCP is Baptism; the Baptismal Service and Covenant holds a prominent place in current Episcopal thinking (or, at least people give it lip-service despite actions to the contrary [ahem–CWOB!]). Indeed, one of the major complications for the acceptance of the bishop-elect of N. Michigan is his “edits” to the Baptismal liturgy.

However, despite the centrality of this Sacrament, nothing in our regular weekly services point to directly it. Why not? My suggestion would be to recover the Asperges, a liturgical action that a) is thoroughly within the historic Western liturgy, and b) clearly relates Baptism to the forgiveness of sins and the life of the Church.

As written in the current Roman Rite, the Asperges is parallel to the Penitential Rite that opens Mass. We’ve got a Penitential Rite (however rarely used) and an Asperges rite would be a perfect counterpoint to it. Here’s the rite as it stands in the Roman Missal:

[This would, for Sunday Masses,  follow the normal Beginning Dialogue with its seasonal variations]

Invitation to prayer:

Dear friends, this water will be used to remind us of our baptism. Let us ask God to bless it and to keep us faithful to the Spirit he has given us.

[Clear and direct without being overly didactic]

After a moment of silence, the priest says one of the following
prayers:

God our Father, your gift of water brings life and freshness to the earth; it washes away our sins and brings us eternal life. We ask you now to bless this water, and to give us your protection on this day which you have made your own. Renew the living spring of your life within us and protect us in spirit and body, that we may be free from sin and come into your presence to receive your gift of salvation. We ask this through Christ our Lord.
R. Amen.

Or:

Lord God almighty, creator of all life, of body and soul, we ask you to bless this water: as we use it in faith forgive our sins and save us from all illness and the power of evil. Lord, in your mercy give us living water, always springing up as a fountain of salvation: free us, body and soul, from every danger, and admit us to your presence in purity of heart. Grant this through Christ our Lord.
R. Amen.

During the Easter Season:

Lord God almighty, hear the prayers of your people: we celebrate our creation and redemption. Hear our prayers and bless this water which gives fruitfulness to the fields, and refreshment and cleansing to man. You chose water to show your goodness when you led your people to freedom through the Red Sea and satisfied their thirst in the desert with water from the rock. Water was the symbol used by
the prophets to foretell your new covenant with man. You made the water of baptism holy by Christ’s baptism in the Jordan: by it you give us a new birth and renew us in holiness. May this water remind us of our baptism, and let us share the joy of all who have been baptized at Easter. We ask this through Christ our Lord.
R. Amen.

[So, all of these 1) mention Baptism as the forgiveness of sin, 2) mention salvation in connection with Baptism, and 3) make some solid biblical connections.]

If salt is to be added to the holy water, the priest says:

Almighty God, we ask you to bless this salt as once you blessed the salt scattered over the water by the prophet Elisha. Wherever this salt and water are sprinkled, drive away the power of evil, and protect us always by the presence of your Holy Spirit. Grant this through Christ our Lord.
R. Amen.

[Because of salt’s sterilizing properties it was used as a symbol/creature/means of exorcism and played a role in the Baptismal Rite. Our rite no longer has the salt bit, rendering this optional though, as Elliott points out, it does help keep the water cleaner if used in holy water stoups and such during the week…]

The priest then pours the salt into the water.
He then goes through the church sprinkling the assembly, while one of the following antiphons is sung:

You will sprinkle me with hyssop, 0 Lord, and I shall be cleansed; you will wash me and I shall be made whiter than snow.

During the Easter season:

I saw water issuing forth from the Temple, on the right side, alleluia; and all those to whom this water came obtained salvation and they exclaimed: “Alleluia, alleluia”.

[Music available upon demand in English or Latin as is your preference. And—oh look, some nice biblical passages that connect the sprinkiling to purification of sins and our new life in Christ within the Church!]

When he returns to his place the priest says:

May Almighty God cleanse us of our sins, and through the eucharist we celebrate make us worthy to sit at table in his heavenly kingdom.
R. Amen

My thought is that instead of/in addition to this prayer we could go back to the good ol’ Collect for Purity which also fits here just fine and flow back into the rest of the service…

IIRC, Smokey Mary’s uses the Asperges on Sundays and Feast Days. I should check my back bulletin file and see exactly how they do it.

Anglican Gradual & Sacramentary Revisited

Prompted by some of my thinking on the place of the Lesser Propers in Anglican worship and due to a thread on the Ship, I took another look today at the Anglican Gradual & Sacramentary,

I come away with three convictions on the matter:

  1. The author put an awful lot of hard work into it.
  2. It is (as the author/editor states) an idiosyncratic work. Were I to have done it I would have made some different choices and would have followed them through in a different manner. Nothing necessarily against the work there—I’d just do it different.
  3. The one overt critique I will make is, the format chosen is a serious issue. While I recognize the desired output, a set of Word/PDF docs is simply not the technology to use for this kind of project.

Brief Reading List for Anglican Laity

There was Discussion below on a reading list for clergy. I thought that it would be fitting to begin where it’s most proper—a brief recommended reading list for laity.

Bible, BCP, and Hymnal go without saying…

Then:

1. Augustine, Enchiridion

2. Luther’s Large & Small Catechisms

3. Athanasius, On the Incarnation

4. The Rule of St. Benedict

5. Michael Ramsey, The Anglican Spirit

6. Luke Johnson, The Creed

7. Martin Thorton, Christian Proficiency

8. Luke Johnson, Living Jesus

9. Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline

Most of these are pretty self-explanatory. Of the modern works, the Ramsey and the Thorton give the primary introductions to Anglican thought and Spirituality; the Johnson books are the best I know at laying out biblical Christology and the creedal core of the catholic faith that fall neither into scepticism (a la Borg and Crossan) or fundamentalism. The Foster has a tendency to get protestant, but is a good introduction to the basic Christian disciplines.

Early Medieval Monastic Libraries

In filling out a footnote in the diss, I ran across a new and fascinating study by one of the current Great Masters of Anglo-Saxon Studies, Michael Lapidge’s The Anglo-Saxon Library. Here’s his conclusion on page 127 of the content of monastic libraries:

Evidence of various kinds indicates that Anglo-Saxon libraries were not large, at least in comparison with ninth-century Continental libraries, as we know these from surviving inventories, or with later medieval cathedral and monastic libraries in England, as we know these from the catalogues printed in CBMLC. . . . The typical Anglo-Saxon monastic library probably owned fewer than fifty volumes, all of which could be housed in a simple book-chest.

To judge from the combined evidence of inventories, surviving manuscripts, and citations, as set out in the Catalogue below, the typical Anglo-Saxon library housed a small core of staple patristic texts, scarcely exceeding twenty titles:

  • Gregory, Dialogi [Dialogues—book 2 being the life of Benedict], Hom. .xl. in Euangelia [The 40 Gospel Homilies], Moralia in Iob, and Regula pastoralis [Pastoral Care];
  • Isidore, De ecclesiasticis officiis, De natura rerum, Entymologiae [His 20 volume encyclopedia], and Synonyma;
  • Jerome, Epistulae [Letters] and possibly the Comm. in Euangelium Matthaei; and
  • Augustine, De civitate Dei [City of God], De trinitate, Enarrationes in Psalmos, Enchiridion, and the Epistulae and Sermones in selections.

To these works of the four major patristic authors (at least as suggested by the Anglo-Saxon evidence), one may add several individual works: Cassian, Conlationes [Conferences] and Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica, as translated by Rufinuis . . .

[Needless to say, the patristic material would also be filled out by the homiliaries which are essentially patristic anthologies.]

His discussion continues from here, but this is the section that particularly caught my eye. I find this list fascinating because, when I ponder what books and what ecclesiastical learning is most needful, this list isn’t too different from what I’d pick—certainly as the core of a patristics section. The one major change would be the Isidore block. Isidore was the major encyclopedist of the early medieval world and the items included here would be more properly replaced by modern rather than medieval reference works: Hatchett, the Anchor Bible Dictionary, etc.

Rule Resource

Don’t miss today’s reading from Speaking to the Soul at the Episcopal Cafe. It’s from Margaret Guenther who, IIRC, was a professor of spirituality and spiritual direction at General. The topic is on the proper form of a rule of life. From the snippet, it looks like it’d be a good resource.

Confirmation and Catechesis

There have been discussions recently—here on the site, at home, around the diocese—concerning Confirmation, especially as found within the ’79 BCP.

I’d summarize the standard Western view as “confirmation completes Baptism.”

M’s response, and that of others, is that in the ’79 BCP Baptism doesn’t need completing; it’s already a complete act in and of itself. If this is the case, then it completely changes many of the assumptions that we’ve held about the nature and timing of Confirmation.

  • Reception of the Eucharist is not dependent upon Confirmation: I note that this seems to me to be a bit of Eastern influence, especially as they commune after Baptism as well (I’m thinking particularly small children here). Is there an Eastern corollary to Confirmation? I’m ignorant…
  • Esp. if Reception is not an issues, what about age?: M and I emphatically agree that Confirmation is not a rite of passage based on age. Yes, bar/bat mitzvahs are and they did evolve out of catholic Confirmation practices—but that doesn’t mean that Confirmation is or should be a rite of passage. We also agree that Confirmation is about a “mature public affirmation” of faith. Mature is not 10. Or even 15. We’re thinking that 20’s and 30’s is when “mature” really starts to hit.
  • Catechesis: What’s appropriate and proper? This is where I see the ideal of a 3 year catechumenate making some connection with our context. Not three years, but a decent enough amount of time to give a person a suitable grounding in the faith
  • Sacramental Status: If Baptism is completed in Baptism—which appears to be a clear departure from the current Roman Catholic catechism (“the reception of the sacrament of Confirmation is necessary for the completion of baptismal grace”) does Confirmation remain a Sacrament or sacramental rite? Is there an indelible spiritual mark (section 1304) impressed at Confirmation? Despite the place and authority of the current Roman Catechism, it seems to me there’s quite a bit of waffling going on in this text itself due to both the issues raised by the Liturgical Renewal and the inclusion of non-Latin Rite Christians within the papal fold…

What do you think?

Home Again, Home Again…

  • I’m back from K’zoo. The presentation went quite well, I thought. As I was only on site 1 day, I didn’t get to see nearly the folks I had hoped including Michelle, theSwain and the reclusive H.E. On the other hand, I presented in the same session as B. Hawk and ran into Dr. Nokes in the book room.
  • The book room was quite nice—not as grand as the one at the combined AAR/SBL (shall we see its like again?)—but nice. I picked up volumes 1 and 2 of de Lubac’s classic Medieval Exegesis and started reading it one the drive home. I’ve dipped into it from time to time but have never actually sat down and read it cover to cover as it deserves. Such an amazing work.
  • I’ve become enamoured of XML. All of the major text encoding projects in the Humanities use it. I guess it’s finally time to look a little deeper. I am fascinated by its ability to manipulate a text while still keeping it in a textual format (unlike other databasing options).
  • While I was gone the Cafe ran a piece of mine on salvation.  I’m becoming increasingly frustrated in the ways that we both do and don’t teach the faith. As I note in this one, we tend to cede important framings of the debate to others and therefore either lose or make ourselves irrelevant apparently by choice.
  • We need to rethink catechetics. More on this later.
  • bls has located another great text, this one a discussion of the Sarum Gradual’s procession from the Roman Gradual by Blessed Frere.
  • The bishop-elect of N. Michigan has put out an explanation which I’ve not read but has been measured and found wanting by several colleagues. I feel no need to comment further…
  • Fr. Reid of St Clement’s has a great post on lessons learned in his London parish which should be read by all who belong to or have an interested in city churches.  Smokey Mary already does something like this but this model has great potential for churches in non-residential areas whose numbers and vitality have ebbed in recent years. (And of course gutting the place is never a help…)
  • I finally got off my butt and called a wonderful priest in the area (Fr. Former Priest for those who know) whom I’m hoping will become my spiritual director. I was pleasantly surprised that he remembered me  and we’re looking forward to getting together and talking.