‘Culturally relevant’ liturgy

I recently had occasion to view the parish profile of a parish seeking a new rector. Among the usual sorts of statistics and self-descriptions, the document states the parish’s desire for ‘spiritual connection and growth through worship and liturgy that is rich, nourishing[,] and culturally relevant’. While on the surface this seems a list of laudable goals (no one, I hope, would claim to crave liturgy that is shallow and unwholesome, or to seek spiritual disconnection or decay), and while it would nevertheless be possible to criticize this statement on various grounds (connection to whom or what? by and to whom is the liturgy given and received, and to what end?), I want to consider the last descriptor in particular, and to ask whether it is actually consistent with the rest of the statement. A passage from an interview with Oxford’s Regius Professor of Divinity, Graham Ward, quoted by catholicity & covenant, helps to articulate the matter.

Prof. Ward was being interviewed by the website Theos about his new book, Unbelievable, concerning belief – what it is, and how ‘belief ’ and ‘faith’ relate. As I understand it from the interview (not having read the book), he would define ‘belief ’ as something like the complex of ways, mostly unconscious and unexamined, in which we understand and relate to our selves and the world around us. ‘Faith’, on the other hand, is the acknowledgement of the fact of belief (i.e., that there is no such thing as ‘unbelief ’) and the search to understand and articulate what and why we believe.

It then follows, I would add, that if ‘belief ’ is, as Ward says, the ‘pre-reflective, pre-cognitive’ set of assumptions under which we operate, then

· ‘culture’ is the communal living-out of belief, and
· ‘ritual’ is a concentrated, formalized, stylized instance of enacted belief.

Analogously,

· ‘tradition’ or ‘rite’* is the living-out of faith, and
· ‘liturgy’ is a concentrated, formalized, stylized instance of enacted faith;

and if

· faith is ‘articulated belief ’, then
· tradition is ‘articulated culture’ and
· liturgy is ‘articulated ritual’.

This can be summarized in tabular form:

	Unexamined/ pre-reflective/ [purely oral?]	Examined/ Articulated/ [partly literate?]
World-view	Belief	Faith
Lived out communally	Culture	Tradition/Rite
Encoded verbally	Myth	Scripture
Concentrated/ formalized/ rehearsed ceremonially	Ritual	Liturgy

Thus, though the earthly Church exists within time, space, matter, and human society, just as Our Lord did during His earthly ministry, it does not properly celebrate or live out ‘culture’, but rather ‘culture’ illuminated, articulated, and transformed by encounter with the living Christ – which constitutes the Church’s ‘tradition’ or ‘rite’. It is this tradition, not culture at large, that is then concentrated and rehearsed in the liturgy.

The Church’s negotiation of the relationship between the world and itself has always been a highly imaginative, iterative, dialectical process. Growing out of the soil of Judaism, the Church has adopted many aspects of the cultures into which it has been transplanted: philosophical terms and concepts; governmental structures; long established holy places; festivals and other customs based in the cycles of human and agricultural/natural life; styles and techniques of art, architecture, and music. At its best the Church has successfully adapted these cultural ways, the products of human creativity and ingenuity, to its own theological and practical purposes, with beautiful and fruitful results. At its worst the Church has been complicit in oppressive and rapacious systems and has destroyed much good of both divine and human making.

Standing at the beginning of this new millennium, then, looking at the wreckage wrought upon the world by modern Western economic, political, and military activity, we must ask what of the culture of twenty-first-century America (or the subset of it represented in the parish in question, which I suspect is white, suburban, middle-to-upper-middle-class) is appropriate to adapt into its tradition and then to distill into liturgical practice. Can the Church really have any use for the banality, passivity, obsolescence, polarization, isolation, individualism, consumerism, materialism, appropriationism, racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, and other hallmarks of our society, or for any of the ‘cultural’ endeavors that partake of them? Any ritual that smacks of these qualities cannot be called liturgy.

We should instead desire to be delivered from all of this; if modern Western culture is not yet a physical hell for those of us who benefit from it in the short term, it has certainly created such for many millions of our sisters and brothers and threatens, via ecological and economic disaster, to engulf all of us. It is certainly a spiritual wasteland. We need instead a like-minded community with whom to seek salvation; and the Church’s authentic tradition, her liturgical and ascetical rhythms and practices, her theological and artistic imagination, are the most effective means by which ‘not [to] be conformed to this world, but [to] be transformed by the renewing of [our] minds, so that [we] may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect’ [Rm 12.2]. I suggest that it is by these means, and not by uncritically adopting the assumptions, arts, and other aspects of the surrounding culture, that we may find ‘spiritual connection and growth through worship and liturgy that is rich, [and] nourishing.’

*   Rite involves creeds and prayers and worship, but it is not any one of these things, nor all of these things together, and it orchestrates more than these things. Rite can be called a whole style of Christian living found in the myriad particularities of worship, of laws called ‘canonical’, of ascetical and monastic structures, of evangelical and catechetical endeavors, and in particular ways of doing secondary theological reflection. A liturgical act concretizes all these and in doing so makes them accessible to the community assembled in a given time and place before the living God for the life of the world.
     Fr Aidan Kavanagh

Our Christian identity should be shaped by living the liturgical rite, by the rhythm of the Church year, by the procession to the altar every eighth day, by seeing moral questions about human beings in light of their being an image of God, by the intellectual grasp of the content of faith and the bodily enactment of that same content, by fasting and feasting, by obedience to canonical authority, by stepping under the priestly hand of absolution, by catechetical witness that is sometimes uncomfortable in prophetic circumstances, by actualizing the domestic Church within the family, and by the hundred other concretized instances of liturgical life.
     David W. Fagerberg