The Sound of the Liturgy

How Words Work In Worship

Cally Hammond

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780281069552
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

Cally Hammond looks at how words function as carriers of semantic content (communicating facts and doctrines; telling stories; articulating emotions and spiritual perceptions) and then contrasts this with words as they function as physical entities striking the ear, so as to evoke emotions, memories and spiritual perceptions. This basic antithesis between words as carriers of meaning and words as evokers of feeling, emotion, and memory leads to four chapters that explore in fascinating detail the four main aspects of liturgical speech: posture, repetition, rhythm and punctuation.

1

Posture

The lineaments of the body do disclose the disposition and inclination of the mind in general.¹

On not denying the body

The question addressed here is a simple one: ‘Does posture matter in prayer?’ The answer may differ from person to person – their age or state of health, whether they are in church or at home; or it may depend upon their personality and preferred worship style, their doctrinal allegiance, upbringing or education. The ideas explored here are not arguments for imposing a prescriptive homogeneous praxis. They are based on a conviction that, to put it in biblical terms, the deuteronomic movement may have over-achieved its laudable spiritual objectives. At the heart of that deuteronomic movement, alongside a strong emphasis on the centralization of sacrality, was a new way of regarding God–humankind relations. It observed the human person in relationship to God through the lens of a bodily metaphor: the ‘outward person’ was represented by the physical self, the ‘flesh’; and the ‘inner person’ was a way of thinking of an individual’s spiritual and emotional self. This metaphor assisted in the development of a theology that privileged inner disposition over outward action; a theology that was repeatedly upheld by Jesus in the Gospels.²

A religion that is only about the body is empty of meaning; but then a religion that despises the body and privileges the soul is in danger of gnostic heresy. Human beings are acutely, variously, and often subconsciously aware of the unspoken language of the physical between individuals, or individuals and groups, or in solitude.³ Social science has begun to communicate the idea that visual and physical clues form a powerful part of the language of human communication in daily life – so it is not unreasonable to inquire whether this non-verbal language has anything in it to elucidate the practices of Christian prayer. Many Christians find prayer difficult or even mystifying; and one reason why they cannot grasp it or make it stick is often that they are trying to do it inside their heads, rather than discovering how to use their entire created selves – which is to say the body: the physical, the flesh, which Christ accepted in becoming human, and which must, therefore, according to an incarnational theology, be accepted as a proper and necessary part of human conversations with God.

But there is a problem with this attractive plan. The history and conventions of the Church privilege the verbal language of the written word. Sometimes they even confuse the written word with the living Word, who is Jesus Christ. These documents and texts which form the basis of Christian history – the Scriptures, the Creeds, the records of the ecumenical councils in the early Church, the writings of Christian thinkers – together form a picture of how, in the early centuries, groups of Christians fell out most strongly over matters of doctrine and order. Who had the valid sacraments? How did the man Jesus relate to the Logos, the Son, the Word? Only in the fourth century did this thirst for uniformity, and desire to establish correct practice in matters of doctrine and orthodoxy (‘right-thinking’), begin to leak out from the doctrinal sphere into the management of the Church’s liturgies, that is, what people actually did when they worshipped God together.

It can be difficult to analyse the movements and actions of a worshipping congregation from within, where ‘valued-added’ or ‘encoded’ actions may appear natural rather than having any humanly imposed significance. In an alien or unfamiliar setting, on the other hand, it is easier for an attentive observer to pick out the physical actions that are more than just actions. In surveying these non-verbal communications within liturgical praxis, it is helpful to keep in mind that gestures are bodily movements which can be culturally conditioned or taught,⁴ or universal and instinctive.⁵

Conflict of customs

These encoded actions (that is, value-added actions, actions that carry other meanings beyond the purely functional) may include such conventional gestures as turning east to say the Creed at the Eucharist; or sitting for the first reading(s) but then standing for the Gospel.⁶ Wherever Christians worship together without intermingling with other groups, or encountering other traditions, the use of encoded actions is unproblematic. Long usage and repetition render them meaningful within the group. But as soon as contact with other groups of worshippers takes place, it prompts people to detect differences, whether of doctrine (‘What does this mean?’), order (‘Who says it should be thus?’) or liturgy (‘Why do we have to do it thus?’), and find them significant. The principle of valuing Christian unity (‘that they may be one’: John 17.11, 21–23) shades into a less positive practice of imposing uniformity. This may provoke dispute, and even conflict.

There is a good example of this kind of conflict of customs preserved in Augustine’s Confessions:

On one occasion [after she joined me in Italy] my mother Monnica brought stew and bread and wine to the chapels of the saints as she used to do in Africa, and the gatekeeper stopped her: when she learned that it was Bishop Ambrose who had forbidden such offerings, she acquiesced with such obedient devotion that I myself was astounded at how easily she became critical of her own custom rather than disagreeing with his ban (6.2.2).⁷

Happily, that conflict was easily resolved because of the trust of one person in the authority and goodness of another; but it did require of the former a letting-go of encoded liturgical actions to which she had previously attributed a positive spiritual value.

At the Council of Nicaea, a far more significant clash of this type had occurred. It was a difference of praxis between those who celebrated Easter according to the Johannine chronology, on the fourteenth day of the first moon of spring (the paschal moon), the same day as the Jewish Passover (this group was called the Quartodecimans, from the Latin word for ‘fourteen’); and those Christians who eventually prevailed, who celebrated it on the following Sunday. Though it is much less prominent in the modern scholarly literature on the Council of Nicaea, which is dominated instead by doctrinal disputation, the Quartodeciman controversy was a principal reason for the Council’s coming together. It is relevant to this argument because it was a clash of fundamental importance for the development of the Church’s liturgical praxis. For the first time in the Church’s history, a powerful central authority is shown determining and imposing a form of liturgical praxis as normative.

If ever a reminder were needed, in addition to the archetypal crisis of the Reformation, of how the drive for uniformity in worship and belief can create discord and division, this would be it. The way the decision was reached turns the usual usage of lex orandi lex credendi on its head: instead of meaning something like, ‘What people pray comes to be what they believe’, it has to be something more like, ‘The law on what to pray effects the law on what to believe.’⁸ In reality, the application of this statement to posture in worship is more complicated. But lex orandi lex credendi is a slogan. It originates in a fuller statement which uses the verb statuo instead of supplying the verb ‘to be’, esse. Prosper of Aquitaine’s original proposition was ‘ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi’, for which the only proper translation should be: ‘the law of supplication⁹ [or, in a later version, ‘the law of praying’] establishes the law of believing’. In this fixed form, the statement is open to abuse, of course. Aidan Kavanagh¹⁰ states that ‘the lex credendi is thus subordinated to the lex supplicandi because both standards exist and function only within the worshipping assembly’s own subordination of itself to its ever-present Judge, Savior, and unifying Spirit’. Kavanagh emphasizes the specificity of lex supplicandi: ‘it is a law of supplicatory prayer – not prayer or worship in general’. The point he is making is that so-called lex orandi, really lex supplicandi, is specifically intercessory: ‘the way Christians believe is, somehow, constituted and supported by how Christians petition God for their human needs in worship’.

Kneeling in public prayer

The commonest customary options for prayer in Anglican worship are sitting, standing and kneeling. Prostration is very rare (at ordinations; on Good Friday; for veneration at the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament). The true crouch position (on which more later) is never seen in public worship. C. G. Finney (1792–1875) wrote advice on promoting revivals in which he suggested that what works at the time is more important than strict adherence to biblical models:

Kneeling in Prayer. This has made a great disturbance in many parts of the country. The time has been in the Congregational churches in New England, when a man or woman would be ashamed to be seen kneeling at a prayer meeting, for fear of being taken for a Methodist. I have prayed in families where I was the only person that would kneel. The others all stood, lest they should imitate the Methodists, I suppose.¹¹

Kneeling is a controversial posture because in the past it has been almost a badge of allegiance, marking out the worshipper’s denomination almost as clearly as making the sign of the cross. And it has been controversial in the more distant past as well. The Canons of Nicaea (that is, the official rulings produced and agreed at the Council) are mostly concerned with church order, but their preoccupation with uniformity also extends, as has been shown, towards fixing norms for liturgical praxis. Canon 1...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• About the author
• Gestures of the hand
• Title page
• Imprint
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Posture
• 2. Repetition
• 3. Rhythm
• 4. Punctuation
• Conclusions
• Appendix: the rhythms of the Coverdale Psalter
• Bibliography
• Search items