Читать книгу The Liturgy Explained - James W. Farwell - Страница 6
ОглавлениеThe Eucharist is the entrance of the Church
into the joy of its Lord.
And to enter into that joy, so as to be a witness
to it in the world, is
indeed the very calling of the Church,
its essential leitourgia, the sacrament by which it “becomes what it is.”
ALEXANDER SCHMEMANN1
story is told of a young man, an unsavory type, who falls in love with a saintly young woman. Knowing that she will not so much as look in his direction, he slips into the vault of the town cathedral, dons one of the masks of the saints used in the annual town festival, takes on the demeanor and behavior of a saint, and begins to woo her. Surely enough, over time, she begins to fall in love with him. As the relationship flowers and deepens, the young man’s scoundrel friends finally become envious of his success with the saintly young woman and, one day, out of sheer spite, challenge him in the center of the town square, in the presence of his beloved, to take off the mask and reveal his true identity. Dejected, knowing that all is lost, he slowly removes the mask… only to reveal that his face has become the face of the saint.
The origin of this story is uncertain, the present author no longer recalling where he first heard it. Its inspiration, however, is clearly medieval dramas, eighteenth-century stories of the masque, and even St. Augustine’s theological account of desire in our search for God. Whatever its source, it is an apt metaphor for the function of liturgy in the best possible case.
The Liturgy is the shorthand term we use for the service of worship called, by various families of Christian faith and practice, The Holy Eucharist, the Mass, the Divine Liturgy, Qurbana, Communion, or the Lord’s Supper. In due course we will explore the meaning of the liturgy, consider the use of liturgy as a term for the Eucharist, and reflect on its structure and the practices. But first, our story.
In the liturgy, the people who call themselves followers of God don a mask, as it were. In the liturgy, they enact in ritualized ways the actions and attitudes befitting those who are followers of the God of Jesus of Nazareth. In the liturgy, they praise the source of beauty and truth, listen to the proclamation of love and the laws of human flourishing in the kingdom of God, lament that which is broken in the world, focus their energy on help for those broken, acknowledge their failings and commit to begin again to seek God and the good, make peace with one another, and welcome one another to a shared table. Like the young man in the story, they seek the one they love, or try to love, or want to love more deeply, and they do so by behaving—again, in “ritual shorthand”—in ways that are congruent with the nature of the One they love. They bring their desires for God and for Life—sometimes focused and afire, though often enough halting, partial, and unfocused—and they direct their actions of worship, praise, lament, and prayer toward the object of their desire, the One from whom all good, mercy, and truth flow out into a broken but glorious creation of which they are a part. Ideally, over time, as they wear that mask of desire for God, ritually enacting peacemaking, welcome, intercession, and sociality, they become like that for which they long. They become more like the persons they aspire to be for the sake of the One they love.
There is deep wisdom to this story. As old as Aristotle’s ethics and as new as modern moral and psychological theories is the understanding that we become the persons we want to be by first acting like the persons we want to be, even before we fully feel ourselves to be such persons. Too, the wisdom is there in the mask story that we become like what we desire, and so we do well to take care with our desire and place it, above all, in that which is most deeply worthy of being desired. Being clear about our highest, ultimate desire brings clarity and order to the many other desires we have.
Of course, like all stories and metaphors, the mask story has its limits. Liturgical action, at its best, is indeed like the actions of the young man who seeks to be in a loving relationship with the one he desires and who becomes more like her over time, winning her over in the end. But unlike the young man in the story, in the case of the liturgy, Christians are always already taking the second step in an unfolding narrative of love’s emergence: it is, as St. Paul and St. John wrote, God who first loves, who IS love, and we whose love is first awakened and focused by the love we have received. Like Michelangelo’s painting, God’s hand reaches for Adam—for humanity, both women and men—and Adam reaches back, even if haltingly, responding to the divine initiative. Liturgy, as Robert Taft puts it, happens in the gap between the two hands reaching for one another: one in action, one in response.2
If the ultimate purpose of liturgy is an action in which human beings “practice” who they are, or desire to be, in response to the One who loves them first, then perhaps we can understand who Christians are meant to be by exploring the meaning of the term liturgy, looking at the structure of the liturgy, and reflecting on the practices that make up the structure. That is the purpose of this book: to explain the liturgy and, in the course of doing so, to linger over Christian identity itself.
What we will discover in our study is that being Christian—contrary to an unfortunate, and widespread, misunderstanding—is not really about holding certain beliefs about God and the world, but about becoming a certain kind of person before God and in the world. Being Christian turns out to have a great deal to do with being a person who is fundamentally grateful to God for life, committed to living in communion with others, and acting compassionately toward other beings, just as Jesus Christ has done. And liturgy has a great deal to do with becoming Christian.
To understand this, and before explaining the liturgy of the Eucharist, we might best begin by reflecting on the term liturgy in relation to several other terms to which it is related. After all, if the service of Holy Eucharist is called the liturgy, where does this term come from and what does it mean?
Ritual
Let us begin by considering a generic term to which our question is related: that term is ritual. All religious traditions involve rituals. Indeed, ritualizing is something all human beings do, whether they consider themselves “religious” in the narrow sense or not. We relate to the world, convey what we think is most important, and make our way through the passages of life through various rituals. Some rituals are religious (depending on how one defines “religious”); many are civic, or social, or communal. Rituals are seen as a dimension of activities as diverse as American Thanksgiving meals, football games, weddings both within and beyond faith communities, New Year’s celebrations, and family gatherings of various kinds. Some rituals are loosely organized, like a Thanksgiving meal in which many of the same people will be involved from year to year; traditional foods are often (though not always) served; some (though not all) of the same family jokes and stories will be told; and the sequence of the day will be fairly predictable, though not rigid, involving, perhaps, elements of gathering and greeting; watching or playing of games; eating the foods associated with the ritual; and so on. Some rituals are more tightly organized and scripted, with specific words and actions, organized in a sequence that is invested with importance so that it does not change. Religious rituals are often of this more highly organized kind.
Our tendency to ritualize may at first be puzzling, or we may be tempted to dismiss the importance of rituals. In part this is because we have been taught since the sixteenth century or so to think of our identities as being centered in the thinking and willing part of ourselves—our souls or our minds. But we have bodies; in fact, we don’t just have bodies, we are bodies. We are embodied beings, whether one understands that to mean that we are souls in bodies as some of our Greek intellectual ancestors tended to do, or ensouled bodies, as religious traditions like Judaism tend to do, or bodies with consciousness, as contemporary neurobiology and neuropsychology do. However we understand ourselves as embodied, our embodiment means that we signal our important values and beliefs, and navigate our most significant life passages, by the whole-body activity of ritual. Thus, rituals involve not simply words and intellectual reflection but ceremony and gesture, movement and song, sound and smell.
Sometimes we use the term “ritual” to mean anything we do on a regular basis, like brushing our teeth in the morning. But rituals are not merely things we do repetitively. We may brush our teeth in roughly the same way every morning, but we could do so differently, so long as our teeth get clean. Brushing our teeth has a utilitarian purpose. Rituals in the full sense of the term are done with a certain amount of repetition because they are scripted, figuratively or literally. They have a normative structure that is considered significant to the values or realities that they are aimed toward, and those values or realities are themselves considered significant in an ultimate way. Rituals are not simply utilitarian; they don’t simply get something accomplished but situate the practitioners within a higher value or set of values that give life meaning. Ritualizing is centered on the beliefs or values that a particular person, group, or culture considers in some way central to their identity and flourishing. It is centered on them in the mode of practice, not simply by way of ideas.
Furthermore, rituals are not simply dramatic expressions of those central things we believe anyway or that happen to us elsewhere. While there are some exceptions, often enough rituals actually enact what we believe, bring to pass certain states of being. Everyone is familiar with a wedding or blessing of a lifelong relationship, and this is a good example of the way in which rituals enact reality. When a couple participates in a marriage or blessing ritual, they are not simply dramatizing a covenantal relationship that has already occurred, though certainly it has begun to take shape in the life of the couple. They are not just announcing something to the public in a particularly festive way. The couple cannot “believe themselves” into being married. Rather, in the course of the ceremony, the marriage itself is actually brought to pass. When the ritual begins, the couple has a relationship and an intention to make it covenantal and faithful and compassionate, but they are not married, no matter how much they wish or intend to be. Through the marriage rite, they become married; the ritual points to their relationship and their intentions for lifelong commitment, but it also brings to pass that to which it points.
Really, most rituals work in this way, and not just in Christianity, but there is a special term Christians use for rituals that bring to pass what they point to: sacraments. The line between rituals in general and sacraments in particular is not really absolute, but a sacrament is a core ritual and is used to refer to the materiality, the physical objects or signs through which ritualizing enacts identity. Sacramental materials are usually of an elemental nature: food, water, oil, for example. In some religious traditions, such as Hinduism, fire or other natural elements could be said to function sacramentally. In Christianity, in the ritual of Eucharist that concerns us in this book, the sacramental material is bread and wine. These are foods that, when used in the ritual of the Eucharist—handled, prayed over, and eaten in highly scripted ways—are taken not simply to remind people of Jesus, or even point to the risen Christ who gave his life as divine love for the world, but to make the risen Christ truly present in the lives of those who worship. The bread and wine are not divine; they are not Christ in a literal way; yet they are called the Body and Blood of Christ because in eating bread and drinking wine in this way, the Christ to whom the sacramental foods point is also made really present to the members of the Eucharistic community through the eating of those foods. Christians have had many ways over the years of explaining how the bread and wine convey the real presence of Christ. Here we will content ourselves with the observation that, ritually consumed, they bring to pass that to which they point: the continuing presence of the divine among the human community that desires God and seeks to live, like the young man in our story, in a way befitting the One we love—the One who first loved us.
Christians believe the sacrament of the Eucharist makes God present through Christ in this way we have described, not because the ritual itself contains some special power to do so, but because Jesus told his disciples, at the last meal eaten with them before his death, to eat bread and wine in this way in memory of him. The Jewish form of memory from which Jesus worked is one in which the past is not simply recalled but made present. So in the Eucharist, a ritual of thanksgiving to God (“thanksgiving” is roughly what the term Eucharist means), Christians offer praise to God, hear their sacred Scriptures read, make various responses to those scriptural words, and then eat bread and drink wine through which (by God’s grace) the Lord of the community is made present to them again. Eucharist, then, is a sacramental ritual in which something—God’s presence through Christ—is not simply recalled as past, or pointed to as important, but enacted, made real in the community.
Liturgy
But we still haven’t defined liturgy. Why do we call the sacramental food ritual of the Eucharist a liturgy? And how is the presence of Christ in that food ritual related to the way we ourselves become Christian?
Among Christian rituals, the Eucharist (or communion, or the Mass, etc.) has a pride of place. While it has been practiced in a variety of ways in different times and places, we have good evidence that this ritual of the Eucharist became very early the principal way in which Christians marked their gatherings weekly—perhaps even daily, in addition to other prayers—in which they understood themselves to be connected again to their Lord, who was risen and ascended but still present to them and empowering them to go out to others with the good news of God’s radical forgiveness and unconditional love for the world. Over time, the term liturgy came to be used as shorthand for this food ritual. When the term is used broadly, it can refer to any number of rituals that Christians do: burials, daily prayer, ministry to the sick, and so forth. All these liturgies, or rituals, bring to pass the connection to God and related features of Christian identity that they point to. But when the reference is to THE liturgy, in most contexts the reference is specifically to the Eucharist. Why?
In the world in which Christianity emerged—a Greek speaking, Roman and later Byzantine political and cultural environment—a liturgy (leitourgia) was an act done by a benefactor for the sake of the people’s common life. It was also closely related to religious rituals performed in the temples that benefactors might support. Two senses of the term, then—a (religious) work of the people and a work done for the good of the public came together in Christian usage. That usage suggests the instinct of Christians that in the Eucharist, two things happen: God is thanked and praised, and the church joins in God’s own activity to do something on behalf of the world. God, the one true benefactor of the world, has done a work for the world in Jesus Christ, loving it, saving it, and calling it to communion with God. As Robert Taft has put it, in the deepest sense, the one true liturgy is God’s work of salvation in Jesus Christ. In the Eucharist, the Christian community joins in that work made present to it again and participates in God’s love enacted, made real in the world. The church, in fact, both commits to working together in the great benefaction of God’s gift of love through Christ, and is empowered to be part of it. In this way, Christian faith is renewed again and again in the Eucharist, not simply as a set of ideas to be held, but a form of life to be lived.
We can see, then, how the terms ritual, sacrament, and liturgy finally converge on a basic idea for Christians: that through its Eucharistic thanksgiving to God, rendered through the hearing of Scripture and the eating of sacred food, something is not just recalled, but enacted; not just talked about appreciatively but brought to pass again. We don’t just express beliefs in a dramatic way in the Eucharist, but we become, like our young man who acted a certain way until he became who he acted, a people of God who are ourselves a continuing part of what God is doing in the world out of love.
Of course, Christians do not do this perfectly, or immediately, or easily, and there are moments in the liturgy when we acknowledge our own failure to enter fully into participation in the one liturgy of God who is Jesus Christ. We will turn to that element, and all the other elements of the liturgy of the Eucharist soon enough. For the moment, it is worth making sure that we have grasped this central point: that the Eucharist is a ritualization, through the eating of sacred food, of an identity into which we ourselves are called by the grace and invitation of the One who has made us and is the deepest end of our desire.
St. Augustine, a great theologian of the Western church, was once reflecting with the newly baptized on the idea in Christian Scriptures that the church is “the Body of Christ.” Augustine pointed to the bread and wine on the altar and said to the newly baptized:
If it’s you that are the body of Christ and its members, it’s the mystery meaning you that has been placed on the Lord’s table.… It is to what you are that you reply Amen, and by so replying you express your assent.… So be a member of the body of Christ, in order to make that Amen true.… Be what you can see, and receive what you are.3
A very similar sentiment is expressed in more contemporary terms by Robert Taft, an Eastern rite Catholic scholar of liturgy. Taft said:
If the Bible is the Word of God in the words of [human beings], the liturgy is the deeds of God in the actions of those men and women who would live in [God].… The purpose of baptism is to make us cleansing waters and healing and strengthening oil; the purpose of Eucharist is not to change bread and wine, but to change you and me: through baptism and eucharist it is we who are to become Christ for one another, and a sign to the world that is yet to hear his name. That is what Christian liturgy is all about, because that is what Christianity is all about.4
With all this in mind, we turn now to the environment, structure, and texture of the Eucharistic liturgy itself, for the way in which we enact in liturgy both thanksgiving for the love of God and embodiment of the love of God is through the specific prayers, gestures, words, and actions of the rite. In this book, we will focus our reflections about the sacramental liturgy of the Eucharist on the rite—the specific ritual form—that it takes in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, the authorized liturgical text of the Episcopal Church, and on volume 1 of Enriching Our Worship, one of the supplemental liturgical resources that are also authorized for use in the Episcopal Church. The understanding that we seek of the liturgy is aimed, in the end, not at being informed about the liturgy, but being ready to be formed by it, to embody the love of the One who first loved us.
