The misplaced symbol and liturgical practice

I in said "I it use a word tone what a scornful, when Humpty just less choose means neither more nor Dumpty"

That does not make much sense does it.You might just realise that it is the quote from Alice through the looking glass

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone,"it means just what I choose it to mean --- neither more nor less."

but it hardly says that because the words are deliberately put in the wrong order. You see Humpty Dumpty is wrong, words are symbols and symbols get their meaning through use and relationship. That is how people use words and the various connections, rules and associations that we apply to the use of the word. Syntax and grammar are just two of these relationships.

If words are taken out of their relationship their meanings change:

A-'s a giggle now
bit on it Osiris, Ra.
An अ an er.. a cough
once spoking your valleys with light.
On it St Pancras station,
the Indian and African railways.
That's why you learn it today.
...
Get back to your language

According to Homi Bhabha this is taken from Adil Jussawalla's poem Missing Person. What Bhabha points out is the use of "अ" which is the first letter of the Hindi alphabet and takes the sound "er". It 'misplacement' make the monoglot English speaker, such as me, stumble as we do not have the skills for interpreting the symbol. Yet oddly in that stumbling might make the intended sound, showing his poetic skill. The symbol used where it is not expected causes a tension within the poem. It carries meaning but takes it at the cost of being unintelligible.

If you have travelled with me so far, you may at least be persuaded that symbols at least in part take their meaning from their use and relationships, if they are placed elsewhere they change their meaning but that change comes at a price and that price can well be incomprehension.

Let me now turn to liturgical practice. It is accepted that all acts of worship include the handling of symbols. At the most basic level because all human culture involves the handling of symbols. That meanst that within the worship setting there is a system developed of handling symbols and in doing this the symbols gain specific meanings. Quite often the meanings are left unspoken or explained and it is assumed an initiate can read them.

Now in the current ecumenical age it is often assumed that symbols may be lifted from one rite and placed into another without altered meaning or even with an alternative meaning.

It should be clear from what I have written above that actually such behaviour is an act of colonialism. That is the persons so doing it, are trying to appropriate that which belongs to a symbolic system not their own and to incorporate it into their own. To a certain extent this has always gone on and the CofE as the most powerful colonizer in the UK is a past master at it. However just because the URC is a bit player does not excuse it when it does similar. I am not going to say never but the use of a symbol from another symbolic tradition needs to be done with care. There are dangers.

Firstly the transplants tend to act rather as the अ above. That is they take on a similtude of their intension rather than the actuality. Sometimes they can even mislead. My colleague at work, someone who as far as I know is a thorough going secularist and most of the time is not bothered by religion, for a few weeks in his late twenties took to wearing a cross. He wore it upside down. I decided this could not go uncommented on so I asked him what his devotion to St Peter was.  So you need to be careful about the relationship between what the symbol means in its original symbolic system and what you intend it to mean.

Secondly the introduction of a new symbol into an already existent system has knock on effects. That is they have a tendency to smuggle in more than the smuggler intends. The result is a rearrangement in the meanings associated with the other symbols within the original system. The liturgical year is only brought into non-Conformist worship at the expense of the careful exegetical preaching through entire books that formed one of the planks that made us whole Bible people. That was not the intention of the innovators, they wanted to get away from preaching on a passage of your choice but now huge chunks of the Bible are rarely preached on.

Therefore I would suggest that care was taken when you move a symbol from one symbolic system to another. The movement should not be in such a way that it denigrates the integrity of the original symbolic system; the movement should be careful that the symbol works in an effective way within the system into which it is placed.

 We are humans, we live within a culture and are bounded by that culture. Humpty Dumpty is wrong, because our use of symbols can never solely be what we intend them to be, they will always Janus like look back towards the previous uses and on towards the future uses. The meaning never fully resolved within the instance they are performed.

A reason why the episcopal churches aren't getting the liturgy they would like!

This is part two of my pieces from this conference. It also in part answers why Liturgical Studies has not addressed issues of power. I offer this in the sense of ecumenicity and partly because I am in non-episcopal tradition, I can say things people in those traditions can't.

Lets get the definition out of the way, by episcopal, I mean ruled by Bishops. So Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism are both forms of Episcopal churches. It is technically possible to have Bishops but not be Episcopal. There are situations where the Bishop is the chairperson of a council that rules rather than the individual through whom power moves.

What I gathered from the process was that basically what they were doing was gathering together a number of people who had studied liturgy, asking them to work on the new edition of the liturgy, then taking it to the Bishops who if they did not like it, chucked it out and re-did the work themselves. What is more if someone higher than a Bishop did not like that, then they chucked it out and re-did it once again.

Three things are wrong with this process:

Poor consultative technique

In my home church, we have an eldership which at times requests a group of members, normally a mix of elders and non-elders, to carry out a piece of work on behalf of the eldership. The assumption when the piece of work is done is that it will be accepted. If it isn't accepted the first line is not for the elders to do it again, but to refer the task back with a directive request from the elders. Quite often a committee will suggest several routes forward and the elders will select which or ask for more information. To reject it out right given that the elders requested the work in the first place is seen as bad form and only to be done as a last resort. Now if a local church can think that far why cannot a Bishop's council.

The wrong make up of the committee

You would not set a group solely made up of English Literature students to write a piece of poetry to be performed, or a group made up solely of Historians to stage a pageant, would you. However that is basically what the committees are being drawn from. This creates problem as the concerns of tradition and doctrine are pushed to exclude such things as drama, and performance. Safety becomes the dominant thoughts of those carrying out the task. What is more it is the interpretation of the critique and not that of the lay person participating that is dominant. The fact that there is solely an authorised liturgy to use is also problematic. People just cannot get the experience. I a lay non-worship leading individual has probably written more liturgy than most of the Liturgist in episcopal Churches. I simply have written stuff for weekly services when required and for personal devotions. I started doing that about 9 or 10 years of age; normally I work as part of a group, so I learnt from the senior people.

Power is totally Centripetal

Everything works towards being conservative and going with the dominant power. This has become a highly controlled process,where the central discourse is the only one that matters. Now I am not in favour of a total centrifugal process, that is chaotic, but a centripetal one is conservative, dry and rigid. It really does not have the vitality to survive the changing society around the Church. The effect of keeping thing under this sort of control is not to stop change but to make change huge when it does happen. The fact that any difference from the centre is over-ruled may make for a uniformity but does not make for a healthy tradition. It is alienating those who would support a more tolerant centre and in so doing it is creating a smaller group of people who have power, and a larger group of people who feel marginalised. To be healthy a tradition needs ways of including the insights of those on the periphery.

If the episcopal churches want to produce better modern liturgy, or even create people capable of doing it, they need to:

• have better self discipline when asking people to write it;
• widen their committees to include non-liturgists such as poets
• and develop more open consultative methods so as to incorporate the insights of the laos, the entire people of God.

At present I suspect that this is being handled differently at present within the two traditions. In Anglicanism it is leading to the increased use of non-authorised liturgies, whether it is through the use of evangelical style praise services or through the use of Roman Catholic or historical liturgies. Within Roman Catholicism I would expect a growth in folk devotion and a decrease in the attendance and centrality of Mass.

Why so few free church liturgists attend SLS conference

Right this is the first of two short pieces in spired by attending this conference. I was the only URC person there, although there were a couple of Methodists, a solitary Pentecostalist and an American Reformed Pastor. Apart from that everyone was either high church Anglican or Roman Catholic. At one point someone said that they wished that more "Free Church liturgical theologians would come as those that do are interesting." Well here is my reason why such people don't come.

Firstly the discourse of the conference is totally against them coming. They define themselves as "liturgical" and free churches as "non-liturgical". Now why would someone defined by a liturgical conference as "non-liturgical" come to it? They are wanting Non-liturgical liturgical theologians to attend. Sorry that is like asking for hot cold water or is oxymoronic. If they want free church liturgists and liturgical theologians they need to make a space for them.

Secondly our liturgists and liturgical theologians are very different from theirs. The prime task of them is to write the liturgy and they do it week in and week out. They are not primarily critics of liturgy and by that I mean those who bring their mental faculties to the task of analysing how liturgy is produced. They are primarily artisans producing liturgy week in week out. It would never occur to them that you might invite in later a poet, or musician to the creation of liturgy as if there is some secondary function they could add. The skills they bring are part and parcel of the task of creating liturgy.

Let me outline what skill a great liturgists needs in free church tradition:

• The poets sense of words
  
• The dramatists sense of flow and drama, and the liturgy as something performed
  
• The musicians sense of the role of music
  
• The theologians knowledge of doctrine
  
• A religious sense of the pattern and shape of prayer through life
  
• A sating in the Biblical text, sometimes seen with elderly Presbyterians with the Psalms where not only can they summon verses to memory at will, but their language is shaped by it.
  
• A biblical scholars sensitivity to the meaning and interpretations of the text.
  
• A Sociologists awareness of how people participate and comprehend the liturgy and the role it plays in religious formation.
  
• A critques understanding of the tradition of liturgy
  

At the moment only about four of these functions are acknowledged in the conference. Where were the workshops where people brought examples of their own work and worked on improving it? Where were the discussions on what people understood of the liturgy and took with them? Where was the collection of folk liturgy, the prayers of the everyday people? If the Society for Liturical Studies, wants to include those from the Free churches in England it is going to have to make a space and begin to understand that valuable though the historical and critical study of Liturgy is, it is not the sole concern of an active working liturgist, at least not when there is Sundays Worship to prepare and you cannot just pick up the book and read it.