The Liturgy of Life by Ricky Manalo

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Of the books about worship I have recently read this was by far the most interesting, because despite the rhetoric of the others this was the only one that actually engages with “ordinary” peoples faith and practice.

Manalo's, writing in an USA Roman Catholic context, starting point is concern that since Vatican II the emphasis on the people's participation in the Mass has also devalued and marginalised a range on other formal and informal liturgical practices.

He takes the term Liturgy of Life from Peter C. Phan who defined it as the “universal experiences of God and mystical encounters with God's grace in the midst of everyday” - which prompts Manalo to realise that “the Eucharist is not so much the source and centre of my life or the church's life; God is.” This might seem blindingly obvious, yet how much of the church's practice denies this truth. As someone coming firmly from a Eucharistic tradition, who will find every reason to oppose the introduction of a non-Eucharistic service, I have for a number of years had this itch that using the Eucharist as the metaphor for every Christian activity is unhelpful.

He points out that “There is a general assumption that individuals commit ' to an entire, single package of beliefs and practices of an official religion,' when, in fact, many people come to negotiate a variety of religious and spiritual practices...” - how many people have you meet who explain that they would like to be a Christian but they can't believe in such and such random dogma – and you are like - OMG you think any of us believe that? I often find that those outside the church take our doctrines far more seriously than we ourselves ever would do.

But Manalo is also helpful in pointing to the ways in which there are a whole range of “religious” practices that are not directly related to going to church, and therefore the assumption that the decline in church attendance also marks a decline in religious disposition / an increase in rationality is without foundation.

I go to church because of my faith, I don't have faith because I go to church. But one of the wisest thinks I have read is Manalo's quote from Irene Duller, a born and bred but perhaps is many people's eye border-line lapsed catholic, she defines 'church' as “a place that you know God is there. While God can be everywhere, sometimes I'm not present. So it's kind of like that calibration: I'm here; God's here. God is everywhere but sometimes you need to be present to actually feel it. But I think factually, God is everywhere. You could find God anywhere.”

You could find God anywhere, but generally you don't – you need something to frame the encounter, to make you pay attention. The Eucharist is a powerful opportunity for encounter with the Lord, but it is not unique, just as Thomas and Paul had authentic but totally distinct encounters with the risen Lord, so the Eucharist is only one form of encounter. Never let us think that our Tabernacles can contain out God, he who burst from the tomb knows no boundaries – every-time we set a limit on his love he burst out and expanses our imagination.

One of the people Manalo interviews is Helen Rosario, (key stats, 87, widow, Filipina) whose house is full of icons – and I if I can work out how to add pictures to this blog, I will show you that I am not so far behind...

Radical Sending by D Prentiss and F Lowe

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Another book about how to enhance the missionary character of the Church.

Despite agreeing with the fundamental point of Prentiss & Lowe's argument – that Church is a place from which you go out, not a place in which you huddle for warm and comfort I struggled to engage with the book.

They use the metaphor of a church as a “base camp” - it is not a bad image, but they work it thread bare... They are best when they are quoting others...

For example the Lutheran pastor and educator Dwight DuBois who reflects that “This [the equipping of church members] doesn't need to be another program, something “more” that people can, should, or ought to do. As one theologian in the missional church movement said, our task is to 'guide people to identify God's calling, to recognize the gifts and opportunities they have, to provide them with the biblical and theological training to incarnate the gospel in their particular fields, and then to commission them to that ministry.”

That is to say, you equip people to be witnesses in their existing “secular” contexts, rather than framing “vocation” in terms of full- or part-time “ministry”. In the Winchester Diocese this might be a Bishop's Commission in secular employment?

Because, quoting DuBois again, “Pastors are not called to get people to assist them with their ministry; rather, the pastor is called to assist the people, the laity, with their ministry both in the church and in the world.”

Key to the idea of “radical sending” includes an emphasis of the liturgical dismissal – the words “go to love and serve the Lord” are for Prentiss and Lowe perhaps the most important of the whole liturgy, and if pressed to select just one word, they would undoubtedly choose “go”...

This is all to the good, but we have to ask if our practice actually affirms this dynamic? In the Church of England, at least, these powerful words sending us out into the world are generally preceded by an exhortation to “stay” for tea/coffee and fellowship. This might entirely undermine the intention to the liturgical sending out of the people – but even without the coffee how many people would go from Church to radical mission in the world, when it is Sunday lunchtime and there is a roast waiting for them at home?

They also quote Teresa of Avila, words that really spoke to me, and I will reproduce, but allow them to speak for themselves...

May today there be peace within.

May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be.

May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith.

May you use thoase gifts that you have received,

and pass on the love that has been given to you.

May you be content knowing you are a child of God.

Let this presence settle into your bones,

and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love.

It is there for each and every one of us.

Creating Missional Worship, Fusing Context and Tradition by Tim Lomax

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Seem to have read a run of books about worship and mission recently – which have been interesting as much for the points when I disagree with them as when I agree.

One of the questions prompted (as opposed to asked) by Lomax, and a lot of what is sometimes call “Alternative” worship, is whether there is a difference between a “ritual” and a one-off “symbolic” action. Lomax, like many, uses the term “ritual” to cover one-off actions that add “colour” to times of worship, but places them in the same bracket as actions repeated over years, even generations. The power and potential of a one-off symbolic action and an oft-repeated, time-honoured, action can not be taken as being equivalent.

When Lomax gives examples of “contextual” worship/mission these seem to all involve a resource rich middle-class Church providing some form of supportive activity to a needy “other”. I would not want to appear to question the need for the Church to be active in the support of the “poor” or others who are disadvantaged and / or marginalised within society – but I worry about the assumed power dynamics of “us” doing things for “them” which might actually work against their empowerment. I also worry that we might act as if the middle class, the comfortable, have no needs of their own – maybe the Church finds it is easier to address the material needs of the “other” than address, or even acknowledge, the spiritual needs of its own?

In considering tradition, Lomax is helpful in pointing out that you need to understand the “why” of a tradition if you are go to perpetuate it with integrity – sometimes the “what” will in fact have to change in order for you to be faithful to the “why”. Lomax claims that tradition used to be contextual, but I am not quiet sure I agree – isn't the definition of tradition the point when it has migrated from the context of origin – that we continue to hold something dear beyond its direct response to the world around us? To define tradition as Lomax does appears to leave it at risk of becoming a feather blown endlessly in the wind.

Lomax is probably in direct opposition to Pridmore's conclusion when he decides that “traditional liturgical texts may be an unhelpful barrier to many in worship” - noting as many as 5 million adults in England are “functionally illiterate”. Lomax feels that we need to provide simple and short texts. But even his quote from the National Literacy Trust points to the fact that it is obtaining information from “unfamiliar sources” that can cause problems. There might be a need for simple texts, but there is a greater need for familiar texts – while we think about the needs of those will limited literacy too often, I feel, writers of liturgy assume that means these people are also unintelligent. I am not sure it is literacy that makes are inherited texts inaccessible – illiteracy in England when Crammer complied the Prayer Book was far great than it is today, and yet Crammer's words were lived and breathed by generations – so there is something else going on.

Lomax asks “Have you ever left an act of worship feeling that you weren't allowed to be yourself...?” and suggests giving worshippers the opportunity to express “what is in their hearts and minds in their own way?” My problem is that in most of the times when I have felt worship was most limiting myself expression were the times when we were told to “share with your neighbour” - most contemporary worship is unrelentingly upbeat, where to admit you are miserable can feel like a serious transgression, while it is hardly fair to “dump” the rage in your heart on the unsuspecting stranger sat next to you. Our liturgical tradition at its best, like the psalms, gives us words of joy and of sorrow, speaking of our delight in the Lord but also our anger at him too.

This is one of those books where its heart is in the right place, but it is just on a different wavelength from me.

Playing with Icons by John Pridmore

Can be found on Amazon 

Through this exploration of various memoirs, John Pridmore offers insights into the spirituality of children, and indeed the spirituality of the adults we grow up to be.

Part of this is to draw attention to the ways in which children tend to be more focused on the present while adults fill their heads with nostalgia or worries about tomorrow. Pridmore quotes Philip Simmons that “...the present moment, entered into fully, is out gateway to eternal life” - the more we are able to inhabit the present the more we are in fact inhabiting eternity.

The world children live in can be full of myths and imagining – but as Picasso said “Everything that can be imagined is real” - the richness of their world is not one to be dismissed as fantasy.

Reflecting on the encounters with “church” that are recalled, he writes “If as a young child I am given to understand that I am not yet fully one of the Christian family, then, however much I am entertained in church by kindly and well-meaning people, I will know in my heart that I am not really wanted.” This is usually deployed as an argument for including children in Communion, and while I agree with that, I worry that it is seen as a quick fix – you can receive Communion and yet still be alienated from the community – there is a need for a more all embracing response...

But he goes on “Adults, who are on the whole free to avoid the company of the egregiously unpleasant, forget what it once was to have been at their mercy.” but I am not sure how many adults are really that free? In lots of ways the choices of adults can be curtailed – by education, mobility, economic power etc. and when they are, often it will be without the hope that can sustain the child – the child can look forward to growing up and escape – adults may feel the limits of life have become fixed.

Pridmore uses the memoirs to construct a world of enchantment – a power for spirituality and religion that is not rooted in the rational. He is also, possibly accidentally, providing a case for the defence of the Prayer Book.

For example, when he quotes Anne Treneer “Yet though not a naturally religious child, I am glad I was taken to church regularly, initiated into the Christian faith, and helped to participate in the profound poetry of the Christian year. Though inattentive, I came insensibly to know the liturgy word for word, and to live in the double rhythm of the earthly seasons and of man's noblest imagining”

In another place he has Francesca Allinson recalling a friends account of Adam and Eve “She described the Fall as a lovers' parting: there was God, great and yet aching, impotent for all his Godhead to beget love except on the same terms as mortals, buying it as dearly as they... The story whether its events had actually taken place or not, bore within it its own truth of existence”.

And so he reflects “The stories are thrilling but so too was the language in which they were once told. In our contemporary anxiety to render the text of the Bible into a language which is readily intelligible – an anxiety amounting to paranoia, so addictive is the compulsion to produce ever more translations – we have forgotten that the intelligibility of sacred texts is not all that matters about them, certainly not to small children. We have seen [from examples of encounters with big old family Bibles etc] how important the feel of a Bible was to children we have met. So too, as we have now seen, was the sound of it. Sense is not served by disregard of the senses.”

Pridmore is yet another person questioning the current liturgical practice of the Church of England, on two fronts, first that our contemporary liturgy in attempting to use accessible language has lost its poetry and therefore lost its appeal, and second that endless variation of texts prevent them becoming familiar and inhabited – or as the collect puts it “hear them, read, mark, learn” and, perhaps most importantly, “inwardly digest them”. I have made this point before and will undoubtedly make it again. But Pridmore himself notes that his sources, those that when on to write, might be a bias source group – as group they are firstly likely to be disproportionally literate, but even among the literate they are likely to be attracted to richness of language.

Harvesting the Stars – A Pagan Temple at Lismullin, Co. Meath by Aidan O'Connell et al

Can be found on Amazon 

This archaeological monograph provides an account of the pre-historic ritual landscape discovered during the preparation for the construction of the M3 in Ireland.

There is always a challenge in the interpretation of “ritual” features when there is no written record of the belief system that created them. There must always be a certain degree of creativity in the development of the account of their meaning.

What becomes clear, at least, is the sophistication of the culture – there are a number of different phases to the landscape and a wealth of interrelated features.

Central to the account is the “temple” at Lismullin – this is the most significant feature discovered during this archaeological programme of work – but it sits within a wider landscape of other significant known features.

Of particular interest is its alignment to the Pleiades star cluster – we are familiar with pre-historic monuments being aligned to astronomical features – but mostly, like Stonehenge, these seem to be sun rises on key dates in the year. To be aligned to the stars seems to suggest that where ever happened in the enclosure must have happened at night, when the stars would be visible – but what happened and what it meant is largely closed to us.