Robert W.

Hovda

The Amen Corner

THE RELEVANCE OF THE LITURGY

It is natural, too natural, in any movement of reform and renewal

after a long period of stagnation, that repair efforts should make
some mistakes. Some of the paths we follow in our attempt to get
back on the pilgrim trail turn out to be blind alleys. The many
who do nothing, because they are tired or because they do not see
the problems, make the biggest mistake of all.
But we should not ignore mistakes-in-progress in our own
camp, even when their advocates are motivated by the same desire that moves us: to make the Sunday assembly's liturgical
celebration fully participatory, alive and relevant as "the primary
and indispensable source of the true Christian spirit." The desire
alone is not enough. Liturgy is a tradition, not a concoction, and
its relevance is on a deeper, more universal, more effective level
than the action-interpretations of any individual or group bound
by inevitable limits of time, place, knowledge and experience. Our
best efforts at incarnating the reign of God's liberating/reconciling
will at this moment must be modest, humble, open to the further
steps (political, economic, cultural) which we do not yet see.
The mistake-in-progress I am concerned with here is hard to
identify in abstract terms but unmistakable when one experiences
it in celebration. When a single "theme" or action-issue dominates
the entire rite and one's attention is drawn to the planners and
leaders rather than to the biblical God, participants are deprived
of the reign-of-God breadth for the sake of an agenda, deprived of
the stimulus to use all of our gifts in the work of interpretation for
the sake of ready-made and only momentarily cogent "answers."
When any oppressed group turns in upon itself, forgets that its
experience should make it the advocate for all, indulges "liturgically" in self-promotion and self-pity, the relevance of liturgy is irretrievably lost. Single-issue zealots are sad enough in the political
and economic spheres. They are a total disaster as liturgy planners. The Tightness of their cause is not in question. The nature of
liturgy is.
Robert W. Hovda
446

As readers of this column know, I never tire of quoting theologian Joseph Sittler's remarks about imposing "themes" on the
liturgy, which conclude: "We must not . . . declare a premature
calm over the boiling sea of the biblical witness. That body of
water is a tumult of oppositions, a disclosure of tensions, a
mighty music instinct with the thudding of matters that cannot be
made completely harmonious." We have no right to avoid, by
forcing the community's liturgy into a mold that seems momentarily apt to the planners, the human responsibility for activating all
our faculties (especially imagination) in a continuing work of practical interpretation in every new day and situation. The liturgy
stimulates that work but never substitutes for it. The work is ours,
with the rest of the human family, and therefore is always tentative and modest and open to correction.
Perhaps it should not be necessary, but I think it is, to preface
these remarks with the statement that the writer's conviction
about the church's task today, our mission, is to make the little,
time-bound steps toward justice/peace which a consensus of our
current perceptions of appropriate action suggests. That's part of
our service to the rest of humanity: to speak and act on concrete
issues. The liturgy, however, cannot be bent to replace our human
and fallible activity or to lend it the aura of God's word without
surrendering its character and power.
We are a people of biblical tradition. Our faith is a common
faith, the faith of the community. Individually and in our subgroups we are different in countless ways, which differences
(when they are valued rather than feared) are part of our glory.
They enable us to learn from each other, as persons and as
groups, and to transcend the dreadful limits of every person's and
every group's current perceptions and interpretations. And we are
pilgrims in history needing the big aim, the big picture which
stimulates and invites creative imagination, and much more than
we need dictation about the next, immediate step, a liturgy reduced
to the narrow dimensions of one group's current perceptions.
This may be a hard saying, but it is so fundamental to the
meaning and spirit and power of liturgical celebration that it
makes one want to scream quite as desperately in some "progressive" liturgical celebrations as in all pro forma, rote and clerical
ones. It illustrates our cultural difficulty with symbol and with the
inefficiency, playfulness and contemplation symbol requires. It exThe Amen Corner
447

acerbates that basic problem. It encourages the illusion that liturgy's verbal texts are meant to supply the "answers" to the
immediate problems of daily life, whereas the entire liturgy
(whose nonverbal elements are at least as important as the verbal
ones) is concerned with our life's orientation to the reign of God.
Liturgy is thus catholic, unifying, comprehensive, seminal,
productive of growth and development beyond our present condition. It forms us and stimulates our imaginations to deal with today's issues without offering blueprints, or a specific agenda. It
trusts us to develop these and to keep on revising them.
It is such a liturgy that has kept faith alive through millennia of
Jewish and Christian history: millennia during which both biblical
groups have been idolaters in one way or another most of the
time, preferring a god in our image who will provide a list of do's
and don't's for every occasion, afraid of the mystery and ambiguity of the vision of God's reign (the end which stimulates our
continued seeking and which refuses to permit us to be satisfied
with today's "cutting edge"). A culture insensitive to symbol and
disinclined to accept political and economic responsibility is severly tempted to measures of "crowd control," "party lines," the
imposition of one interpretation upon all. Inspiration and stimulus
be damned, we say, we want an agenda. But actions imposed
prove to be neither liberating nor reconciling, and those two
aspects of the biblical God's love are indissoluble (a word we like
only when we apply it to our doing). Like so much else in our
culture that is throwaway, what Harvey Cox calls "idiosyncratic"
treatment will make the liturgy throwaway as well.
Liturgy's classic character on the whole enables it to offer moments such as the homily and the intercessions when the assembly's here-and-now interpretations should be expressed, when
such expression is legitimate and appropriate and necessary. We
need these moments of relative spontaneity, when the present
stage of the assembly's pilgrim journey is the focus. Students of
the berakah, model of our eucharistie prayer, tell us that traditionally it was not only a thanksgiving for God's deeds but one
framed in the precise time in Jewish history when it was offered.
All this, however, without sacrificing the liturgy's classic character.
So in our tradition the biblical readings enjoy a clear primacy
over the homily, and the local assemblies are asked to include certain broad categories in the general intercessions. Isn't that suborRobert W. Hovda
448

dination of interpretation in the rites also the reason why homilies

are not the last word of interpretation but rather the first, the
priming of the pump, encouraging all of us to continue that work
with our own consciences, in our thoughts and words and deeds?
All of us except the most supine are aware that the rich and the
powerful in each succeeding age have claimed ownership of the
liturgy, as well as of the church in general. But for the liturgy's
ambiguously classic, "far-off" vision of God's design for utter justice, perfect peace, their claim might at some point have seemed
cogent. Since they are as innocent of the power of God's word in
symbolic communication as the rest of us, they have satisfied
themselves with their influence upon the way we preach and the
intercessions we make. They always impress the crowd, for we
are obviously more awed by wealth and power than by divinity
. . . most of the time. But, whatever the general temper of the
churches, it is our liturgical sources (far more than any other aspect of church life) which raise our eyes above the rich and
powerful and enable singular, prophetic voices. In the long run
the rich and powerful are defeated by the very liturgy they claim
to own.
One of the most obvious examples in American history is the
defeat of slave-owners, who mistakenly thought that exposure to
their church traditions would induce a more passive and docile
mood among the African workers, whose bondage was making
the "owners" rich. Instead of fulfilling the wishes of the
"masters," however, the biblical stories and songs (the language
of the liturgy) to which the slaves were introduced became the
language of a revolution that is still going on. In other words, it is
not the liturgy which blesses the status quo . . . now, or at any
point in the evolution of human institutions. It is our satisfaction
with the way things are for us that renders us almost incapable of
understanding the liturgy we celebrate. Hence we resort to the superficial and self-defeating measures under discussion (the idiosyncratic domination of public worship by ideologies, by our limited
vision, by our self-consciousness, self-pity, self-promotion) to supply
what we fail to perceive the traditional rites are already supplying.
Our rites supply not the answers, not the concrete socioeconomic steps today toward justice/peace, but rather the sanction, inspiration, orientation, and dynamic to move believers to
join with other people and groups who want to make the world a
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449

better home for all. Our rites do not excuse us from work, they
impel us to work, to create the local, "intermediate" (in Bellah's
terminology) institutions without which democracy perishes and
economic socialization goes the way of the imposed communism
of Eastern Europe. God's word does not supply what we have the
brains and the imaginations to create. Liturgy moves us to use our
brains and activate our imaginations, if we work at it with love
and with dissatisfaction; if we adapt the language of the readings,
songs and prayers to be not only inclusive but incisive and compelling; and if we open up the symbolic action until the gestures
and the acts have no need of "explanation."
People who know they are oppressed and divided as long as
any of their sisters and brothers are oppressed and divided perceive what satisfied and socially dominant types fail to recognize.
The rich and powerful may call the shots for many preachers,
teachers and ecclesiastical officials (whose occasional or frequent
lapses into sycophancy are legend). But the traditional, classic,
slowly-evolving-through-countless-generations-of-believers liturgy
keeps undermining their foundations, keeps washing away the
sand on which their castles are built. Unlike fads and fancies
sometimes imposed upon the liturgy by good-willed, superficial,
impatient planners, liturgical tradition respects every member in
every assembly engaged in doing the rites far too much to indulge
in manipulation of brain-washing.
C. S. Lewis wrote in The Chronicles ofNarnia ("The Horse and
the Boy," Book 5): " . . . i n Calormen, story-telling (whether the
stories are true or made-up) is a thing you's taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that
people want to hear stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who
wanted to read the essays."
And W. H. Auden said it another way: "You cannot tell people
what to do, you can only tell them parables; that is what art really
is, particular stories of particular people and experiences (M. K.
Spears, The Poetry of W. H. Auden, p. 13). (Thanks to Don Wardlaw
for the two references above.)
Stories are the Bible's and Jesus' and the liturgy's way.

Robert W. Hovda
450

^ s
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