To
begin, I want to express my gratitude to the FDLC board and membership
for this recognition; it is a privilege indeed to find myself standing
this evening among “so great a cloud of witnesses.”
Second,
I want to acknowledge my debt to those giants–women and men–on whose
shoulders all of us stand when we work for the renewal of our church’s
worship. For myself, I have to confess that I’ve never had an
original thought in my life, and I freely admit not only that I’ve
relied on the kindness of strangers, but that I’ve depended, always,
on the faith, courage, skill and expertise of those who’ve been
generous enough to teach me not only by their thought and writing, but
by the witness of their lives. As I often say to students,
the best theology is written by people who don’t know they’re doing
it; and similarly, I suspect, the finest liturgies are celebrated by
communities whose faithful gatherings, Sunday after Sunday, attract
precious little scrutiny from either the media or academic
professionals. The poor, after all, are by definition negligible
and unimportant, so it is often difficult to notice that their
cries and prayers are what get all the rest of us into heaven.
Third,
I want to recognize that an award like this has little to do with
honoring an individual, but it has everything to do with
celebrating the dangerous vocation we share in common. I
call it a “dangerous vocation” because, as you well know, liturgy
isn’t work we plan and do for God, it’s work God does among us,
for the world’s sake. Our vocation–to use Annie
Dillard’s astonishing image–is to serve as “Mohawks along a strand
of scaffolding.” Dillard’s prose is far punchier then mine, so
I’ll quote her here:
“The
higher Christian churches . . . come at God with an unwarranted air of
professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they
were doing . . . In the high churches they saunter through the
liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since
forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to
bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked.”
(Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm [New York: Bantam Books ppb.,
1979], 60.)
As
you may know, persons of the Mohawk tribe were once heavily recruited
for work in the construction industry because of their legendary
reputation for surefootedness at dizzying heights. They appeared
to saunter calmly along a skyscraper’s steel beams quite oblivious to
the 600 feet of sheer nothing that stretched between them and the street
below. Ours, I’m suggesting, is the perhaps unenviable vocation
of serving a liturgy that belongs to someone else (God and
God’s People), to serve it “as though we knew what we were doing”
(even though we don’t), and to serve it without stopping to notice
that the chariot of orthodoxy threatens to topple over a cliff.
For
yes, the church we love and serve is surely the Body of Christ and the
Spotless Bride of the Lamb, but it also a train wreck–and has
been, I suspect, ever since somebody thought it would be a good
idea to ask the question, “Who among us is the greatest?” (See Mk
9.33-37) I hardly need to remind you that the progress of
liturgical renewal over the past two decades has been–well, let us
say, “uneven.” As Ed Foley says, “If you think things are
going well today, you need to ask your doctor to lower your
medication.” Perhaps I fall into that category. Yet as I
look ahead the future does not seem bleak or dismal to me. Perhaps
that’s because, at my age, I tend to see visions of a golden beach in
Key West or a sunlit retirement villa nestled along Italy’s Adriatic
coast.
But
truth to tell, the real reason for my optimism is people.
Forty-three years ago, largely through the work of periti like
Fred McManus and Godfrey Diekmann, Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum
concilium made the breathtaking decision to entrust the liturgy
to the people, by stating unequivocally that “in the
restoration and promotion of the sacred liturgy, the full and active
participation by all the people is the aim to be considered before all
else” (SC 14). Notice that the Council did not say the
“aim to be considered before all else” is the
avoidance of abuses, or the placating of disgruntled traditionalists, or
the placing of tabernacles in the “sanctuary area,” or the
translation of Latin editiones typicae into bowdlerized English.
(Incidentally, Thomas Bowdler, whose work and name gave us the verb
“bowdlerize” got his reputation by an publishing an “improved,”
prudishly expurgated, “family” version of that naughty English bard,
William Shakespeare!) Note too that the Council spoke of the “restoration
of the sacred liturgy”–a clue to the clueless, surely, that the
state of the Missale Romanum in 1962 did not exactly represent
the acme of good liturgical practice.
So
the Council–knowing full well that PEOPLE are liable to spit
up, spill things, munch Cheerios from plastic bags during the homily,
squirm in their seats, snore during solemn moments, and otherwise whoop,
wheeze, wail, and wiggle–knowing all this full well, the
Council entrusted the sacred liturgy of our church to “full and
active participation by all the people.” We experts may not
know what we’re doing, but I suspect the Spirit that inspired Blessed
John XXIII to call a council did. God’s People are feline;
they always land on their feet, even when their leaders land on their
butts.
I
believe, moreover, that the most vital impulses in Christianity today
are not to be found either in ancient churches confident of their
longevity, wealth, influence, power, and celebrity, or among
sprawling suburban mega-churches, or among conservative evangelicals who
seem to believe the politics of Benito Mussolini were enlightened and
progressive because he made the Italian trains run on time. Now,
as always, religion is freshest among people willing to re-imagine it,
people willing to dream, people willing to think the unthinkable, people
willing to love life’s dangerous places, people willing to move toward
the edge of the raft. In his book How the Other Half Worships
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), photographer and
writer Camilio José Vergara describes his experience, over four years,
of visiting and worshipping in retrofitted storefront churches in
blighted urban neighborhoods across the United States. “I
searched for places,” writes Vergara, “where the homeless, the drug
addicted, and those recently released from prison go for food, shelter,
and clothing, and get those things plus religion.” (How the
Other Half Worships, 281). From a Roman Catholic point
of view, the religion these hustlers and ex-cons get may seem too
simplistic, emotional, or theologically naive; yet, as Vergara tells us,
they all found one thing in abundance at those clapboard parishes: viz.,
people who care; people willing to listen and make a difference; people
who aren’t ashamed to hand “a few sheets of toilet paper . . . to
those who need to use the bathroom” (ibid.). “In these houses
of worship,” Vergara concludes, “I found an oasis from a world
obsessed with celebrity, youth, possessions, and status. If I had
felt it in me, I would have repented, become a believer, and perhaps I
would have walked with God.” (ibid.)
So
what about us? Can we old liturgical warriors–we dangerous
Mohawk wannabes–still learn new ways to walk with God in worship?
Can we renew our faith and hope in people at a time when pundits tell us
that “reform” is over and that “liturgical renewal” is a fading
fantasy? I think we can, if we remember that it’s not we
who are preoccupied with God; it’s God who is preoccupied with us.
God has given us the blessed and dangerous memory of bread to light our
way, to ease our journey, to feed our bodies, to comfort our spirits.
And
bread remembers.
It remembers the
seed-kernel–sown in the golden heaviness of autumn, nested under
fertile loam, buried in the long sleep of winter as high overhead, in
the frozen sky, bright morning stars dance at the coming of their
Creator.
It
remembers the sudden sprouting of spring, the rush of sap through root
and trunk of trees, the young sun’s slow return.
It
remembers the chirping ebullience of summer, the merciful rains, and
growth steady as tides pushing the waters of the sea.
Bread
remembers.
It
remembers the harvesters’ songs, the sharp sickle and the mill’s
agony, the crushing of seed against stone.
It
remembers meal ground and sifted, filtered to fine flour.
It
remembers the pressure of a woman’s hand–the baker’s kneading,
mixing, churning; the pungent yeast’s ferment; the rising warmth in
the dark silence of the oven.
It
remembers being lifted on wood to cool in the slanting light of late
afternoon.
It
remembers the knife’s edge, the sacrifical surrender, the blissful
balm of butter.
It
remembers reaching its destiny by being broken, torn, passed, and
shared–food to fuel grateful bodies.
Bread
remembers.
It
remembers the One who ate and drink with sinners–the despised, the
unclean and the unwanted.
It
remembers that God welcomes the hungry and homeless; the chorus of
crying children, the hurt, the hunted, the have-nots; the “little
ones” who are shut up or shut out.
It
remembers that God’s reign belongs to the poor, the mourning, the
meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, folk with a fire in their belly for
justice.
It
remembers the desperate prayer of a single mom or an addict, the sobs of
a Chilean mother mourning the child who “disappeared.”
It
remembers our cancers and chemotherapies, our beautiful children and
sputtering marriages, the promises we kept–and the ones that kept us.
Bread
remembers, and if it
could talk, it would say, “Come to me and taste God–salty as the
river of our blood, sweet as honey and apricots, smoother than oil,
stronger than death.” (This section on “bread
remembers” has been adapted from a short piece I wrote in January,
2002, for Eucharistic Minister.)
As
Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Hope is the thing with feathers . .
. that sings.”
So let’s
get going. We have songs to sing. We have work to do. Thank
you.
