The blurb on the
back refers to this as a “magisterial book” - and I guess it is,
the trouble is that also means that for those with anything more that
a passing interest in liturgy and worship the ground it covers is
pretty familiar. I found myself often going “yes, exactly” and
very rarely, if at all, “I never thought of that”.
In the consideration
of the changes in worship that went along side the Reformation and
the Enlightenment Guiver regrets the general reduction of the liturgy
to the words alone. The lost of the involvement of the whole body.
Even today we see this, but it can be overlooked by worship leaders
as the clergy (and servers) are at the heart of action – meanwhile
the laity are sat looking on from a distance resulting in “much of
the detail can be lost to them, there is much less immediacy, and the
experience easily becomes simply boring. Even what little corporality
survives today in now coming under assault of laziness – the people
catch it from the clergy. Often a congregation simply sit through
most of the service. That kind of sitting shows a lack of confidence
in taking active part – it expresses sitting back, non-involvement
of the body…”
This is a theme I
have reflected on before and entirely agree with.
Guiver also, to my
mind, correctly notes that “Creative worship often runs into
problems... The paradoxical result is limited creativity or a lack of
edge… we are then left with a repetitive falling-back on common
gambits – candles, stones, projecting pictures” and, I would add
writing our sins on post-it notes – something I have been refusing
to do for the best part of a decade .
Thinking about the
faith that worship is responding to, Guiver provides the neat quote
that “Anything that can be reduced to static formulas and a fixed
system was not true tradition but a caricature of it”
While I also liked
his phrase that “The faith once delivered to the saints and
preserved in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, is called
to go forward balanced forever wobblingly on the narrow line of
trust.”
So now at Church I
quietly amend the Creed, so it begins “We believe, wobblingly, in
one God, the Father, the Almighty...”
And on the
importance of worship – he suggests that if there is any point at
all (and for many that is a big “if”) then it is of the highest
importance – as he puts it “If we need motivation for throwing
all our efforts into creating a vibrant, dedicated and praying
Church, we need only keep society’s problems before our eyes. For
society to change, it needs a vibrant and thriving Church in its
midst”
While, he also notes
that “If worship is in these ways to be compared with art, then as
in the arts nothing but the best will do. It might seem obvious to
say that worship should always be of the best, but we have habits,
which we even sometimes justify, of offering less.”
The points that he
makes might not be particularly original – but he does make them
well.
