Doesn't Fit in a Box

Someone just said to me, “I just tell them, people don’t get me.” She is wonderful, smart, passionate and multidimensional, or in other words, does not fit into anyone’s box. I think that is true of rituals and symbols. What they really are, really mean to us, cannot be completely contained and packaged neatly into an easily understood box.

            I find that true of Chapter 1 of Christian Symbol and Ritual.  The definition of rituals and symbols and how they function felt flat, especially during Sunday’s “ritual” of mass I looked at all the symbols around me, and even 2 dimensional representations in my church touch me with more depth. Take the Celtic crosses painted on the dome above the altar.  They are a cross, a circle of eternity, and a commonplace symbol in the Northern U.S., Irish-German Catholic culture where I grew up.

Adding in St. Thomas Aquinas and ‘sacramentum’ in chapter 2 helped Cooke and Macy’s discussion (37-39). For me this adds dimension, and includes what is alive in the Christian faith. Sacramentum extends the range of how we use our word sacrament. There are things and in “a human world which really can embody the divine in ordinary human actions” (38). The book is trying to capture and put into words, that symbols and rituals are more than what can be put on a page.

“A sacramentum…referred to any thing or action or person that medicates the presence of God to humans” (39). Along with symbols and rituals that vary in meaning and context over time, we are trying to communicate something that we believe is continuous, alive and life giving. It’s like still pictures. They catch and print a moment in our lives, but not the totality of that life.

This reminds me of my favorite dog. He loves to tear apart boxes. We can show him a big box, and can even coax him to sit in one. Yet nothing is going to contain this one year old. He is still too full of “puppy” for a box to withhold all that personality, energy and life.

Cooke, Bernard J., and Gary Macy. Christian Symbol and Ritual: An Introduction. Oxford:

              New York, 2005. Print.

photo: Max in a Box 3/14/15

One of the most challenging aspects of teaching high school religion in a relatively expensive private high school is that the students are often disconnected from the rituals of life in biblical times. Many students learn best by doing, so as often as possible, I will have the students reenact biblical scenes. In my first year of teaching, while learning about the last supper in my 10^th grade class, I though we should have a ritual washing of the feet. Right before class I filled up a large bowl with warm water and grabbed some small towels. I thought the girls would be excited about doing an interactive lesson. I could not be more wrong. I had to spend most of my energy convincing the students that it would be OK; there is nothing really that weird about washing someone else’s feet.

Bernard Cooke and Gary Macy note in their book, “Humans comprise such a diverse group that it is hard to state with certainty that all cultures share certain experiences” (25). This is certainly true when comparing typical 21^st century teenagers with the 1^st century apostles. While in the context of 1^st century Palestine Jesus washing the feet of the apostles was a sign of humility, to my students, it was just weird.

About a year later, some teachers (including myself) along with eight students took an immersion strip to Guyana, South America. We happened to be visiting a small Amerindian village with summer with some Ursuline sisters at the same time they were getting a visit from their Mother General. Much to my surprise, when the visitor came, the Ursuline sisters washed her feet.

After witnessing the washing of the feet in Guyana, I realized the culture of the Amerindians was much more similar to that of 1^st century Palestine. Amerindians never wear socks, some wear sandals while others wore no shoes at all. Nothing in the village is paved, so their feet are always dirty. They spend a great deal of time washing feet; it is not weird to them. Since we in the U.S. do not experience feet that are perpetually dirty, the washing of the feet ceremony has little significance to us. Now I am in search of a new way to convey to my students that the washing of the feet was a sign of humility and service that they will understand. Any ideas?

Cooke, Bernard J., and Gary Macy. Christian Symbol and Ritual: An Introduction. Oxford: New York, 2005. Print.

Church and Sacrament

March 18, 2015

The readings this week were interesting and challenging, bringing a deeper insight into the meaning of liturgy than I had had before.

There were several points I was interested in commenting on, but I will stay with the one which first caught my attention, the treatment of  “lex orandi, lex credendi” over the centuries.  Although Prosper of Aquitaine (Maxwell E. Johnson, ed., 50-51) may have been the first to bring this term into the theological vocabulary, the reasoning behind it goes back at least to St. Athanasius in the fourth century, who, in his argument against the Arian heresy,  referred to the divinity of Christ implied in the baptismal liturgy (44). 

            Pope Pius IX (58-60) referred to this principle in pronouncing the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854.  He said it was a truth “generally accepted and put into practice by the faithful” (59), although most of the passage spoke of its backing by bishops rather than by the laity.

            A century later, Alexander Schmemann also referred to lex orandi as the basis for the third task of liturgical theology: “to present the separate data of liturgical experience as a connected whole, as … the ‘rule of prayer’ dwelling within the Church and determining her ‘rule of faith’” (66).  He points out that “the early Church firmly confessed the principle lex orandi lex est credendi” (66).

Geoffrey Wainwright, a British Methodist (date?), seems to have been the first to open this phrase up to new developments, pointing out that, as structured, it can mean either that the rule of prayer is the rule for belief or vice versa (69).  He formulated the difference this way:

“Both Catholicism and Protestantism consider that there is properly a complementary and harmonious relation between worship and doctrine to express the Christian truth.  They tend to differ on the question of which of the two, doctrine or worship, should set the pace, and they differ profoundly on the question of whether either or both – the Church’s worship or its doctrine – may fall into error” (69).

            Edward Kilmartin, S.J. introduces a more nuanced contextual understanding of our subject.  He says that “the law of prayer is the law of belief and vice-versa” (73).  The law of prayer is specifically a “pre-reflective perception of the faith,” while the law of belief “requires the employment of theoretical discourse” (74).  He points out that however orthodox a prayer form might be, with time, changes in language and culture may give this form meanings which it did not originally have, so it would need to be changed, not because it was not correct when formulated, but in order to have it be correctly understood today (74). 

            David Fagerberg defines liturgical theology as “the theological work of the liturgical assembly, not the work done by an academic upon liturgical matter” (94).  Moreover, he says that liturgical theology is “normative for liturgical renewal because such efforts should arise out of the tradition of the Church and not our individual preferences” (84).  My first thought on reading this was that it was too bad that this principle was not applied to the most recent English translation of the Roman Missal, in which translators made the English be as close to the Latin construction and vocabulary as possible.  This frequently made sentences impossibly long, complex, and grammatically incorrect.   I think this was not the intention of the Fathers of Vatican II.

            Fagerberg does not accept either that theology should be approached through liturgy or vice versa.  Two defining attributes of liturgical theology are:  “it is theologia prima and it is found in the structure of the rite, in its lex orandi…. It recognizes that the law of prayer establishes the Church’s law of belief” (84). 

            Nathan Mitchell takes a different point of view.  As far as he is concerned,  lex orandi,lex credendi is meaningless.  It is circular, each term depending on the other.  Instead, he says that “liturgy is God’s work for us, not our work for God.  Only God can show us how to worship God” (97).  “Christian liturgy begins as ritual practice but ends as ethical performance” (98).  This was a difficult reading, but I understood it to be saying that we can prepare the liturgy all we want, but we are not in control of the way it turns out.  It is God’s gift to us.  The meaning of the liturgy can only be seen in how our lives are changed by it.  Do we care for the needs of our neighbors?  This is the lex agendi that Mitchell refers to.  Can we respond to the “subversive element of indeterminacy” that it introduces?  The liturgy is a language of the body, of gestures, singing, walking, tasting. 

Mitchell ends this passage in a way that brings it together for me: 

Liturgy embodies emptiness, powerlessness – that “absence” in human life where God’s word and ours are surrendered into mutual presence that creates communion without suffering confinement.  Worship is inescapably embodied and iconic; it makes us – we don’t make it.  Why?  Because liturgy is the moment when God’s own Word places itself at the mercy of the body, at the mercy of human flesh.  In liturgy, God’s Word surrenders to world, to history and to bodies” (101).

What relation does this survey of the use of a small Latin phrase make in my life?  I guess it explains to me why I have such a hard time accepting the dogmas about Our Lady:  the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption (especially the latter).    

In terms of my ministry, I think that it is true that the way the group of women with whom I have been working in the prison have been praying together for the past several months has had an effect on their beliefs.  This has not been an official liturgy, but it has been wonderful to see.