Liturgical renewal - twenty years later
Collins, Patrick W.
HAVE WE LEARNED THAT LITURGY IS A FORM OF ART? II I PATRICK W. COLLINS Liturgical renewal, twenty years later R OMAN CATHOLICS CELEBRATED an important anniversary in 1983. The Constitution...
...We must stop speaking about liturgy and the arts as if the arts were some sort of a drcor dropped upon some text called liturgy...
...How do we retrieve the Mystery without losing participation, comprehension, and communication...
...If this is true, then liturgy is a form of art...
...It has tensions and resolutions...
...What is still needed is a team effort by persons of several disciplines and skills, persons who are experienced in doing liturgy's most appropriate languages: image, symbol, story, and ritual action...
...One will be transformed because one has created...
...Liturgy does not use the arts...
...You are trying to pray...
...Can parishioners understand an aesthetic approach to liturgy...
...Nothing is happening...
...This was to have been the decade for white-collar organizing...
...I say: try it, they'll like it...
...The imagination is addressed and engaged in worship through the recurring use of images, symbols, stories, and ritual action...
...The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of Vatican iI was twenty years old...
...The Otherness is absent...
...It is aesthetic ritual expressions which can create the conditions of possibility for evoking the experience of Mystery present in the assembly, and in the world...
...Examine the art of ritual, for example...
...With the priest facing the assembly and the people celebrating in their own language, liturgy seems to many persons-inthe-pews tel have become an experience not much different from ordinary life...
...Something in a novel by James Carroll expresses this well...
...You do not want to be an actor...
...The scene is Washington, D.C...
...More members.of the assembly have been called to serve as liturgical ministers...
...I t is the sense of Mystery -- the awe, the holiness and wonder which had been the liturgical experience of Catholics prior to Vatican II...
...Third, ministerial formation should include aesthetic dimensions...
...The eighties will be for organizing clerical workers what the thirties were for industrial workers," proclaimed Karen Nussbaum of Working Women, a national group organizing white-collar workers, in 1980...
...We need an artist person to create this work...
...With so much speaking and direct understanding of texts, something of the transcendence of the incomprehensible and ineffable Mystery of God has disappeared...
...Frankly, I don't think Catholicism as it now is will engage her imagination sufficiently to survive into adulthood with her.' " 'I think I do understand what you mean,' Father Tierney said, 'And in a small way, I do have a d a u g h t e r . . , yours...
...All of those forms must be swallowed up in a new artistic commanding form of ritual...
...It is rather a change of mental mode, according to Coleridge, in which reality dissolves, diffuses, and is recreated...
...1. The first stage is the artist's encounter with the world...
...Very much like music and poetry...
...Music's virtual image, according to the philosopher Susanne Langer, is an experience of time...
...The Steelworkers will pursue white collar organizing with a vengeance," promised Leon Lynch, a vice-president of the United Steelworkers of America, two years later...
...In liturgy, perception is linked with performance, because the performance is not those "on the stage" acting for those "out there" in the entire assembly...
...The art of ritual must resemble music in its organizing and rhythming of sounds...
...Some people look at it, and other people see it...
...Liturgy is an art...
...Sound going somewhere involves rhythm...
...It is the artist who takes matter, infuses it with spiritual insight, born in his or her creative imagination...
...It is in the performance that the perception takes place...
...All of this movement toward grasping the aesthetic nature of ritual action finds support in the comments of the great American scholar and educator, John Dewey...
...Ritual must be an integral aesthetic expression itself...
...Very much like dance...
...The illusion or virtual image created by ritual art is the Mystery of Christ present in the church...
...It is a performing audience...
...It becomes symbolic action that moves with rhythm...
...It falls...
...Look," said the priest with restrained anger, "I'm not going to be an actor...
...Matthew's Cathedral who is preparing the daughter of the British ambassador for her first communion, and the ambassador is saying to the priest, " 'Perhaps Father, you'd understand what I'm saying, perhaps you'd understand what I mean if you had a daughter, too...
...Such persons are called artists...
...But the question of how to create and celebrate the liturgical experience for assemblies could not have been answered by liturgical scholars alone...
...The music swallows the words...
...The imagination surrenders to this encounter so that we see, we perceive, and we participate in the mystery with feeling...
...Wait a minute, Father...
...It is the artist who best understands how to activate the sacramental principle, viz., that the spiritual becomes present in and through the material...
...The repetition, the alienation, are no less than what workers in dead-end factory jobs often find...
...An example: I attended a national meeting which involved a beautifully choreographed ritual...
...From that knowledge of truth with feeling, the artist creates symbolic expression...
...It is an art of time which needs to be created and composed and choreographed in a rhythmed expression...
...No person or single group of persons has all the answers to the problems and questions of the liturgical experience...
...It rises...
...Could it be that in modo sacramenti means in modo artis...
...But, despite all the rhetoric, union elections among clerical and technical workers are still few and far between...
...This is called aesthetic, abstraction...
...The creative artist of worship is not supposed to be expressing how he/she feels about faith at any given moment...
...It is not the sitting, the duration...
...Out of an art's primary abstraction, an illusion is created, a virtual image...
...Divine presence in but not of the world...
...Other people perceive and participate in what they experience...
...One can create the most marvelous art work ritual in the word on the page but it can fail in performance...
...That is what happens in the aesthetic encounter...
...Nothing holds that kind of time together...
...The company' s executives never venture into the third-floor room...
...IfI believe that liturgy is an art, I will stop talking about liturgy planning and start speaking about liturgical creating, composing, and choreographing...
...Surely it is such artists who can help assemblies in the decades ahead to move beyond the mere repetition of stale formulas toward nuanced and lifecompelling rituals...
...All of them face the assembly as "sanctuaries" have been turned around...
...Time experienced is what is created by the art of music...
...With their printers working steadily away beneath sound-dampening plastic shields, the women listen to one tape after another, turning their recorders off and on with foot pedals as they transcribe...
...In experienced time, there is a beginning, a development, and an end...
...You should be looking at the people...
...Art is an expression of the ideas of human meaningfulness and feelingfulness which are present for perception and participation...
...It is sound...
...How can the texts throw light on the times...
...The book is Madonna Red...
...It is an action that points to and makes present a reality beyond itself without being identical to that reality...
...In doing this we will discover again that faith begins and grows not primarily through word and concept but through image and symbol...
...Time experienced is not just the tick-tock of the clock...
...It goes somewhere with one energy leading to the next action...
...A story may help to make this point more clear...
...They are subsumed into a new form, much in the way that the words of a psalm stop being just words when sung...
...Our own language is now used...
...For sound to become music, it must pass through the imagination of the artist who puts those sounding forms in ordered motion so that they go somewhere...
...During the first two decades of renewal, professional liturFATHER PATRICK W. COLLINS i8 director of the Office of Christian Worship and Muaic of the Diocese of Peoria, Illinois...
...All the arts have in common a medium of expression...
...The energy of the acclamation went nowhere...
...The primary abstraction of ritual is action accompanied by words...
...Isn't that exactly what sacramental theology, incarnational theology is all about...
...What is the primary abstraction of music...
...The artist participates in that reality rather than merely looks at it or labels it...
...The priest is there with the book on one side of the "altar," simulating a Mass to let Bill see how he does it...
...It is the locus of conversion...
...It is ministers interacting, picking up energy from one another...
...I suspect that I may have only planned a ritual if it did not change me...
...This is putting into action an art work that must not stay on the page...
...The office workers are far less likely to be represented by a union...
...2. The second stage is the creation of the artwork which expresses the insight which has been born in the intense engagement with reality...
...Rhythm is the link between the downbeats...
...The church, Dewey points out, has always, at its best, connected its faith with the arts...
...They do want to know and feel the presence of God...
...So the priest looked straight ahead and said with neither facial expression nor verbal inflection, "The Lord be with you," etc...
...There is a danger, of course, in creating these aesthetic ritual objects for mere ti~il|ation or pleasure...
...How do the times, in turn, help us interpret the texts...
...A reciprocal dialogue between the artist and the art work is, involved in this process...
...In liturgy, there must not be a dance, then a song, then a play, and then a story...
...It is the artist's imaginative knowing of what it is like to be inside that tree...
...People do not need great explanations about the history, the theology, the aesthetics of liturgy...
...When I speak about liturgy involving feelings, I sense I am about to fall into a trap...
...But it is not reading recipes either...
...The changes yet to come in the liturgical renewal may be more profound than those of the past twenty years...
...except for lunch and coffee, the typists need never leave their scientifically designed chairs...
...I gists gave the church new and purified ritual texts and structures...
...There is an organization of energies in musical sounds which was not there when sound was just sound...
...It is the up in the air, the arsis rather than the thesis...
...The supervisor picks up the finished pages and distributes them throughout the building...
...The texts interact with the times in terms of liturgical creativity...
...It soared and peaked...
...What are our people going to say...
...Could you put some feeling into your face and sounds...
...Ritual is dramatic action...
...I think we do a great disservice to ourselves and to worship by continuing to talk about liturgy and the arts...
...Symbolic action is its created expression...
...The liturgy draws upon that movement which becomes dance, upon story that is drama and poetry, upon the sounding forms and motion that is music...
...repeated the artist...
...The arts are not something to be inserted between the layers of the cake to give it a little extra flavor...
...The artwork contains ideas about feelings, but it is the ideas about feelings that are expressed, not brute, bold, "touchy-feely" sensitivitysession feelings...
...It is this imagination which grasps the power to know the truth with a deeper comprehension than meets the eye...
...329...
...First, those who minister in liturgy need to develop their own aesthetic sensitivities...
...Only a relative handful of insurance workers are organized...
...His hands are up in the orans position...
...A middleaged priest in Washington, D.C...
...and also covered business and labor in the Southeast for Time...
...Gerard Manley Hopkins says there are two ways of taking in the world around us...
...The same thing needs to happen for ritual artists...
...Commonweal: 334...
...It is not waiting for the last thing to finish so that you can do your Commonweal: 332 thing and let the next person get on with her or his...
...This has been the observation not just of recalcitrant Tridentines and nostalgia-buffs but of ordinary Catholics and some liturgical experts as well...
...I I I MARC LEVlNSON has written regularly on labor matters for Daily Labor Report, a publication of The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc...
...It transforms them...
...There is a danger here...
...TECHNOLOGY STYMIES THE UNIONS On the white-collar assembly line i MARC LEVINSON I N THE Atlanta office of a major computer firm, a subdued silence reigns in the typing pool...
...It is action specified by words...
...There must be a similar sense of experienced time...
...It is passage...
...It is not enough to look at the text and the times...
...What is its created expression and its virtual image...
...The number of unionized banks can be counted on fingers and toes...
...Second, liturgical studies should include an aesthetic component as well as theological and historical components...
...They live in it...
...I sometimes wonder whether I have really created a liturgy if my vision has not changed down deep...
...The assembly performs its ritual...
...Now, I hope that you are as nervous about my use of the word "performance" in relationship to ritual as I am...
...It flows outward, forward...
...This use of imagination is neither fantasy nor escape...
...Our problem is that our liturgies so often stay on the page...
...instead, they call in their dictation by telephone at home or office.The tiny tapes from the automatic recorders drop into a metal tray, where a supervisor logs them in and assigns them to the next available typist...
...It is an art very much like drama...
...Well, I'm reading what"s prescribed here in the book - - 'The Lord be with y o u ' . . . 'Lift up your hearts,' "replied the priest...
...Ritual's virtual image is the experience of presence...
...But don't you realize," the dramatist said, "this is a dialogue...
...Only when wind becomes the breath of the Spirit, which moves the imagination of believers, will the Spirit merge and mesh with spirits to disclose the Gospel powerfully to this people and time...
...If we follow this approach, we can create and retrieve those conditions which make it possible for people to experience the sacred...
...In Art As Experience, Dewey wrote: The ordinances of r e l i g i o n . . , are efficacious as they are clothed with a pomp, a dignity, and majesty that are the work of imagination (p...
...The creative artist takes all that material - - the sounds, the movements, the words - - and swallows them into a unified art piece...
...T HERE ARE FOUR stages of creativity involved in the performing arts of drama, dance, music, poetry, and ritual...
...326...
...It has to be pulled out of where one normally sees it, hears it, and feels it, to tease it, bring it to a new kind of birth...
...If liturgy is ritual and if ritual is dramatic symbolic action, then is it not accurate to assert that liturgy is an art...
...Perhaps only when liturgy is an art will the church more effectively express and experience the mystery which is Christ in us...
...At the side of each machine, a counter silently registers each line as it is typed...
...As Cardinal Newman said, belief must first Commonweal: 330 become credible to the imagination before it can be credible to discursive reason...
...We read them at one another...
...Many have asked me, how do you know this works...
...Fourth, the parish must invest money in its ritual life...
...Imagination is the crossroads of all our human faculties where we best know ourselves and all our relationships: to self, others, and God...
...There is an intense surrender of the imagination to the encounter with reality...
...But doesn't this mean anything to you...
...The scholars, however, did not provide adequate tools to transform the new structures and texts into celebrative events of Mystery...
...While some theologians have said the sacred could be discovered in the secular, the sacred seems to have been replaced by the secular...
...Ritual is there to transform the community, to send it back to its ordinary experience to transform the world into the Kingdom...
...3. The third step is the performance...
...Because of this aesthetic strand, he asserts, " . . . religious teachings were the more readily conveyed and their effect was the more lasting...
...As one creates from his or her insight into the texts and the times, ritual will in turn create the artist...
...was trying to improve his style as a presider in the community of worship...
...The Gospel Acclamation was a lively Howard Hughes's Alleluia...
...This is aesthetic insight that is the seed of the expression and the experience of Mystery in ritual...
...During those twenty years of official liturgical renewal, most middle-life and older Catholics accepted "the changes" which flowed from that document...
...Active participation in word and song are evident...
...That is the creative process called composition...
...John Dewey said 1 June 1984:331 there are two ways in which people respond to the world...
...There is no longer just a poem but music, a song...
...i'his will require us to budget enough money to train local people or hire professional people to do this in our parishes...
...We don't enact them together...
...Here, their desks separated by color-coordinated partitions, a dozen women spend their days...
...Material things become organized to express insights into truth with feeling, and something more than meets the eye becomes present to the perceiver...
...Turning texts and structures into events which engage the imagination tO know the presence of Mystery in the assembly will be breathtaking and difficult...
...That creates the felt rhythm in the ritual...
...You want to be real...
...Comprehension of the liturgy and its communication have been guiding values in the two decades of the reform...
...It begins...
...He gets to the preface...
...Sounding forms are put in motion because the energies of sound are organized and rhythmed to go somewhere...
...Unfortunately, in decades past, we have tended more to address it with the wordy languages of the classroom or conversation rather than with imaginal forms of expression...
...Outside of government offices, the union presence remains almost nonexistent...
...Imagination, according to Kierkegaard, is what Providence uses to get us far enough out and deep enough down into reality so that we can discover what life is truly about...
...If we invite and allow artists of ritual to create, compose, and choreograph our liturgies in union With liturgical ministers and members of the assembly, the imaginations of believers are more likely to be inspired to know and experience the Mystery of Christ present in those assemblies...
...For it to be right, we must have people who know how to 1 June 1984:333 make rite, how to make text into event...
...One lives it...
...What, then, is the primary abstraction of the art of ritual...
...Despite evident progress, many worshipers' sense something is missing...
...From that encounter, an insight into the truth about life is formed, and that insight is feelingful...
...By the art in them, they were changed from doctrines into living experiences" (p...
...But there is one important difference between the white-collar production workers and their blue-collar counterparts...
...What are you doing...
...In the performance, imaginations are engaged to perceive the truth that is more than meets the eye: the Mystery of Christ present in the assembly...
...Some people merely observe the world...
...One does more than endure that kind of time...
...What are you doing...
...In the parish itself, the proof of the pudding is in the eating...
...Among law firms, unionization has gone nowhere...
...They have some thing with which they work, something natural of the earth...
...In this it most resembles drama...
...A work of art is not normally the product of a committee...
...Liturgy is an art not of space which you plan and shape and design...
...When an artist paints a picture, for example, it is not just a picture of a tree...
...These grew from historical and theological research...
...I These are the production workers of the 1980s, white-collar workers whose jobs have been transformed by technology into routine functions similar to those of the assembly line...
...It goes somewhere...
...It connects...
...He begins the preface dialogue, "The Lord be with you," etc., while leafing through the book, eyes searching the pages for the proper place...
...With frustration evident in his voice, he replied, "I'm looking at the people just the way you told me to...
...It must not be merely a hybrid of poetry, drama, dance, and music...
...The drama professor interrupted: "Wait a minute, Father...
...That "natural" has to be extracted from its ordinary situation...
...And the challenge of nurturing in her a religious, Catholic imagination leaves me winded.' " Perhaps it is only after being winded, having come off all the hot air and explanations, that a liturgy can be developed which explores Mystery...
...It is, after all, the imagination that primarily should be addressed in worship...
...The artist looks at reality and it dissolves and diffuses and is recreated...
...However, ritual must not merely use the art of music...
...Such persons surrender to the dual worlds of the ritual texts and the present times...
...They simply label and recognize things...
...Liturgy is surely not On Golden Pond...
...This can change vision, values, and behavior...
...The Mystery may not be so missing from Mass...
...The dramatist shot back, "Well, Father, if you don't want to be an actor, take off the costume...
...That is not art...
...Liturgy is like the core of all these occurrent or performing arts...
...Younger Catholics, of course, have not experienced the "change" at all...
...The virtual image of music is this kind of unified experience of time...
...Ritual is primarily action, not words...
...The composer makes music out of that art's primary abstraction, sound...
...The Kingdom has become not only in but also of this world...
...In this way liturgy can become what the Constitution on the Liturgy says it is: an expression and an experience of the Mystery of Christ and the nature of the church...
...4. The fourth and final step in this process is called perception...
...What is this aesthetic insight...
...Most of the changes experienced in Catholic worship have been up-front, around the altar and lectern...
...Bill is a friend and told me the story...
...If liturgy is to become the kind of expressive form it is by nature, namely, an aesthetic form, then four changes are called for...
...He asked Bill Graham, the Director of the Drama Department at Catholic University, to help him...
...Imagination is the mind's capacity to know Mystery...
...Filter the ordinariness of human movement, music, and words through the imagination of a believing ritual maker and symbolic action is created...
...He begins to recite the preface of the Eucharistic Prayer, only to discover that he is not on the right page of the Sacramentary...
...It is an art...
...What is it we deal with in that art...
...If all that is created is " ~ elite art or even folk art that fails to send forth the assembly with the strength to draw the spirit out of the world, then the boat has been missed...
...Then the deacon said, in a fiat, nasal tone, "The Lord be with y o u . . . " It all fell flat...
...Now the priest became annoyed...
...There is a priest at St...
Vol. 111 • June 1984 • No. 11
