Worship-Shaped Life: Liturgical Formation and the People of God, Canterbury Studies in Anglicanism

by Ruth A. Meyers (Editor), Paul Gibson (Editor)

Overview

Worship is not something that the church does, it is an encounter through which Christians are equipped to bring transformation to the world. This second volume in an important new series on worldwide Anglicanism draws on global contributions and examples to address the subject of liturgical formation: how liturgy forms Christians for participation in God’s work in the world, as well as the formation of Christians for worship and of those who lead worship.

Voices from the UK, Africa, the US, Canada, and the Philippines consider key aspects of liturgical formation in this essential new volume:

• connecting the liturgy with local contexts
• learning about God and ourselves through worship
• applying the liturgy to doing justice
• developing the role of music in liturgical formation
• training those who lead liturgical celebration…and more

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819227324
Publisher:	Morehouse Publishing
Publication date:	09/01/2010
Series:	Canterbury Studies in Anglicanism
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	138
File size:	827 KB

About the Author

Ruth A. Meyers is Dean of Academic Affairs and Hodges-Haynes Professor of Liturgics at Church Divinity School of the Pacific. She served as chair of The Episcopal Churchs Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music through the conclusion of the 2012–2015 triennium and teaches throughout the Anglican Communion. She lives outside Berkeley CA.

Paul Gibson served as Liturgical Officer of the Anglican Church of Canada and as Coordinator for Liturgy for the Anglican Consultative Council and is now retired.

Read an Excerpt

Worship-Shaped Life

Liturgical Formation and the People of God

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By Ruth Meyers, Paul Gibson

Church Publishing Incorporated

Copyright © 2010 The Contributors
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-2732-4

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CHAPTER 1

WORSHIP, FORMING AND DEFORMIN

Juan M. C. Oliver

I am much honoured to be asked to share with you some thoughts on liturgical formation and how we may engage it today. I will first look at the term liturgical formation and its development, exploring how worship is much more than a vehicle for theological ideas. I will then describe how worship itself forms – and sometimes deforms – Christians, and the importance of personal reflection upon our experience of worship. Finally, I will share some thoughts on intellectual ideas and their role in the liturgical formation of laity and clergy alike.

Liturgical formation

When I was growing up as a Roman Catholic boy in Puerto Rico in the 1950s, I would from time to time hear about 'the formation of seminarians'. This was meant to imply that seminarians had to be 'shaped' – developed into priests in the seminary hothouse through a process of study, work, and guided spiritual development. The term used to convey much more than the secular term 'education', and it denoted a complex process through which the seminarian's sense of self, his skills, and his spiritual life were all in a process of development and growth.

Imagine my surprise when in 1987, during a meeting on the development of the catechumenate in the Episcopal Church, several people began to talk about 'Christian formation' as something different in kind from 'Christian education'. We wanted to drive home the message that what goes on in most Christian education programmes does not take into consideration the development of the whole person. This came in part as a reaction to some Christian educators who insisted that the preparation of Christians for baptism should have a syllabus, lesson plans, even tests, when others insisted that persons exploring the meaning of the Christian experience needed a more holistic process characterized by reflection upon one's life experience in the light of Scripture and the sacraments.

Thus, by employing the term 'Christian formation' we wanted to denote much more than education, pointing to the development of the whole person: head and heart, intellect, will, imagination and emotions; actions as well as thoughts. This led us to the connection between Christian formation and ethics, and therefore to the recovery of the idea of conversion as a process of changing patterns in behaviour and not only a change in ideas.

At the same time, we were finding that abstract explanations of our creeds and teachings did not satisfy the serious seeker; people wanted deeply to be accompanied along this path of changing behavior, this gradual turning to God and a new way of living, and it seemed to us that pastoral skills such as empathetic listening were more conducive to conversion than lectures on Henry VIII's divorce.

Thus Christian formation as a process distinct from Christian education was born of our concern with the process by which a person is made into a Christian by the Holy Spirit. With Tertullian, we acknowledged that in our post-Christian age, Christians are not born, but made by God in the context of a supportive worshipping assembly. We therefore thought it important to dedicate time, energy, and funds to finding out more about how God makes Christians.

'Christians are made, not born.' Tertullian's statement of course comes as no surprise to theologians. And I dare say that most of us would accurately say that from the point of view of liturgical theology, a Christian is made by taking a holy bath and eating at a holy table with other Christians. I believe this to be profoundly true.

The developmental question, however, still remains: granted that Christians are made through the combined liturgical rites of baptism and Eucharist, how do Christians grow and develop before and after these? And that brings us to the central question of this presentation: What is the relationship between worship and the growth and development of persons into mature Christians?

To be sure, worship alone is not enough to make a mature Christian. When engaged by itself worship can end up being a pharisaical enterprise, art for art's sake, an exquisite idolatry worshipping liturgy instead of God. This is particularly true when worship is divorced from reflection upon Scripture, personal prayer, and the needs of the world. But even if we assume a living worship connected to individual and communal reflection on Scripture, personal prayer, and witness in the world on behalf of the poor and oppressed, the question remains: How does worship support us and form us as we grow into our full maturity in Christ?

Worship expresses and gives rise to theological ideas

Most people today, even most liturgical theologians, I dare say, approach worship as a vehicle or container that expresses, conveys, or makes present preexisting theological meanings. In this view, liturgy is the form; theology is its content. At its best, this view understands worship as a rhetorical means for the communication of religious insights. At worst, this view considers liturgy as rhetorical frosting on the theological cake. In the view of Catherine Bell, a contemporary student of ritual, this view, proposed by the Cambridge School of anthropologists a century ago, did a great disservice to our understanding of ritual, for it disguised how ritual in fact does much more than communicate ideas. Instead, Bell and others suggest that ritual can in fact give rise to ideas. The traffic moves in both directions. This becomes more evident as we consider what ritual does to our participating bodies and not only our minds.

By abstracting the act [of ritual] from its ... situation and reducing its convoluted strategies to a set of reversible structures, theoretical analysis misses the real dynamics of practice.

If ritual does not merely present pre-existing ideas, what is it that ritual does? What are its dynamics of practice? I have suggested elsewhere that ritual forms us by engaging us in a semblance or rehearsal of life as lived in a world different from our everyday world. For Christian worship, whether we call it common prayer, corporate worship, or liturgy, this 'other world' consists of life as it would be lived in the presence of God. Our shorthand for this other world varies; in the Gospels, it is called 'the Kingdom'; in the Syrian tradition, 'the New World'; today we often refer to it in English as 'the Reign of God'.

Whatever we call it, that world is different from our everyday life in that it is lived before and with God. We expect it to arrive one day here among us, as we pray in the Lord's Prayer – a time, we trust, when God will be revealed as all in all. This is a world characterized by justice, love, compassion, righteousness, and joy.

Worship engages us in a semblance of this New World and rehearses us in living this life again and again by practising the postures, thoughts, attitudes, and feelings of this New World, learning to live in it so we can welcome its arrival. Thus the liturgical action engages the whole person – not only our thoughts but our bodies, and our attitudes and feelings as well. Before we go on to explore the characteristics of Christian ritual, however, we need to ask further, How does worship do this?

I suggest that, briefly put, worship forms the whole person through a mimetic process of behaving 'as if'. An example might be helpful. If we attend a performance of Euripides' play Medea, and if the actors are even minimally able to act, we will soon forget that they are actors and begin to see and hear Medea, Creon, and the other members of that very dysfunctional family. Thanks to our willing suspension of disbelief – our willingness to 'bracket' our awareness that these are simply actors acting – we can enter into Medea's world and psyche, raging with her in her jealousy, bitterly bringing revenge upon her husband Jason and his paramour Creusa, and horribly killing her sons to spite Jason. We are there, even though, of course, we are not there at all, but in a darkened room in the West End.

In sum, in the liturgical re-presentation of the Reign of God, we enter into that 'as if' experience through the suspension of disbelief. As we participate in the semblance of the Reign, the experience rehearses our bodies, imaginations, wills, feelings, and minds in new ways of being an individual and communal body characterized by compassion, justice, and joy – as long as we willingly give ourselves over to the experience. If you wish, you can read this as a contemporary re-statement of the ancient belief that our worship is an exemplar of the eternal liturgy in heaven. As the author of Hebrews puts it:

For you have not come to the mountain that may be touched and that burned with fire, and to blackness and darkness and tempest, and the sound of a trumpet and the voice of words, so that those who heard it begged that the word should not be spoken to them anymore ... But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are registered in heaven, to God the Judge of all, to the spirits of just men made perfect, to Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaks better things than that of Abel.

Of course, we are not on Mount Zion at all, but, let's say, in London or New York.

In order to articulate further how ritual accomplishes this, Catherine Bell availed herself of the work of the French critic Pierre Bourdieu, who had examined earlier how human beings develop patterns of attitude – both thinking and feeling – out of practising a particular behaviour in an embodied way. Bell applies to ritual Bourdieu's four characteristics of attitude development or habitus, 'the principle by which individual and collective practices are produced and the matrix in which objective structures are realized within the (subjective) dispositions that produce practices'. Bourdieu suggested that the body must be studied as the place where the habitus makes meaning. His conception of the body is much broader than what we would find in anatomy or physiology; it includes 'the socially informed body with its tastes and distastes, its compulsions and revulsions, with, in a word, all its senses', including, as Bell points out, the sense of ritual.

First, following Bell, ritual practice is situational. It cannot be grasped theoretically outside the situation and place where it takes place. So, for example, the history of liturgical practice cannot be studied properly by examining only texts, without reference to the history of church architecture and ceremonial. When abstracted from them as the history of the development of ideas or meanings about or communicated through liturgy, we are no longer talking about the history of the liturgical practice but about the history of ideas about it.

Second, ritual practice is strategic, manipulative, and expedient. The practice of ritual in a given place remains always close to the implicit and rudimentary, 'a ceaseless play of situationally effective schemes, tactics, and strategies'. It takes place in a given place, not by application of theories but in an ad hoc manner, improvisationally, regardless of how regulated the improvisation is. Worship therefore needs to be studied with an eye to how it facilitates or impedes its strategies, manipulations, and expediencies, all of which point to some sort of desired outcome: the creation of a semblance of the Reign of God.

Third, worship is embedded in a ' "misrecognition" of what it is doing ... of its limits and constraints, and of the relationship between its ends and its means'. Thus worship is usually blind to the ways in which it actively creates what it seems to be responding to:

[Ritualization] is a way of acting that sees itself as responding to a place, force, problem or tradition. It tends to see itself as the natural or appropriate thing to do in the circumstances. Ritualization does not see how it actively creates place, force, event and tradition; how it redefines or generates the circumstances to which it is responding. It does not see how its own actions reorder and reinterpret the circumstances so as to afford the sense of fit among the many spheres of experience – body, community, and cosmos.

Worship, therefore, presents itself as a response to God's initiative, even though it is something we have crafted 'as the natural or appropriate thing to do in the circumstances' without calling attention to how it is created or 'how it redefines or generates the circumstances to which it is responding'. It does not explain in practice how it reorders and reinterprets circumstances in order to bring together coherently the body, community, and cosmos.

Finally, a fourth characteristic of worship is the production of a strategic vision of the order of power in the world. Bell names this vision of power 'redemptive hegemony', that is, 'saving power'. It denotes

the way in which reality is experienced as a natural weave of constraint and possibility, the fabric of day-to-day dispositions and decisions experienced as a field for social action. Rather than embracing an ideological vision of the whole, it conveys a biased, nuanced rendering of the ordering of power so as to facilitate the visioning of personal empowerment through activity in the perceived system.

Thus worship is crafted in such a way that it forms in the participating bodies a disposition towards a particular ordering of saving power. By engaging in the practice of worship, the participating bodies rehearse this ordering of saving power, in turn shedding light upon their experience of the rest of reality. Worship does not do this by presenting an ideological vision, but by 'rendering the ordering of power' so that participants may experience personal empowerment and their place in what I have called a 'geography of sacred power'.

These four characteristics of ritual practice, when applied to worship, sharpen our need to understand it as much more than a backdrop for the enactment of myths or the conveyance of ideas. In sum, worship forms the whole person, attitudinally and not only intellectually, by rehearsing our selves, our souls, our bodies through verbal and nonverbal means, engaging us in a semblance of the Reign of God. This takes place without worship telling us what it is doing, nor how, but rather presenting these behaviors as 'the way things ought to be'.

The tools of worship

Let us go one level deeper: What elements are at the disposal of worship in order to present this semblance of the Reign, teaching us new habits of thought and feeling? What are the ritual 'tools' at its disposal? By ritual tools I mean the aspects or elements out of which worship is crafted. For worship is not a natural thing, growing on trees, but a specific type of human artifact.

'What do we need in order to make eucharist?' is a question often found on the lips of Christian educators. The most essential element in worship, after God, is not the priest but the Christian People. I say this at the outset because one of the great temptations of clergy is to take the People of God for granted. But without the people, there is no priest, nor steeple!

The next most essential elements of worship are not the font, ambo, and altar, nor the water, Bible, or bread and wine, but the symbolic actions of the People of God responding ritually to God's summons to gather with the divine presence. In the celebration of the Holy Eucharist, for example, these can be listed as

1 Gathering in response to God's call.

2 Listening to God.

3 Responding to what God has to say.

4 Asking God to do something in light of what has been said.

5 Thanking God and asking for the Spirit.

6 Eating together.

7 Being sent out by God to serve the world and heal it.

These seven actions of the eucharistic liturgy are our ritual means for forming Christians in and through the liturgy. Of course, these actions may involve specific items of furniture – font, ambo, altar – and specific objects such as water, books, and food. However, these do not have meaning in themselves, but as they are employed in the context of the assembly's symbolic actions rehearsing the Reign of God.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Worship-Shaped Life by Ruth Meyers, Paul Gibson. Copyright © 2010 The Contributors. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword to the Series by the Archbishop of Canterbury          

About the Contributors          

Introduction Ruth A. Meyers and Paul Gibson          

1 Worship, Forming and Deforming Juan M. C. Oliver          

2 Liturgical Education and Formation from an African Perspective Solomon
Amusan          

3 Liturgical Formation and Education of the People of God Mark Earey          

4 The Role of Music in Liturgical Formation Carol Doran          

5 Liturgical Education, Training, and Formation for Ordinands Tomas S.
Maddela          

6 'When will you make an end?' An Agenda for Continuing Liturgical
Education Richard Geoffrey Leggett          

7 The Liturgical Formation of Children, Teens, and Young Adults Ruth A.
Meyers          

Appendix: Short History of the International Anglican Liturgical
Consultation Cynthia Botha          

For Further Reading          

Index