One of the things I like about crafting liturgy is working with the perichoresis between theology, expression and context. I choose the word 'perichoresis' because it has the sense of 'dancing around' in Greek but is also the word used for the dynamic mutual indwelling and interrelating predicated of the Holy Trinity. Theology is in the dance of liturgy because we Christians try to pray together "in truth": that is we try to express things in a way that bears faithful witness to God and schools us in godly habits of thought.
Expression is about the form and choice of words, phrases, grammar and metaphor. It includes things that have currency in poetry like assonance, rhythm and striking phrasing. It includes style and register. And, beyond the verbal, it might take in decor, sound, action and generally the material world immediately around the act of worship.
Expression and theology interrelate with context which is to do with the culture of participants, the particularities of the occasion and the physical constraints and possibilities of the space being used and human physiology and psychology.
Anyway, moving from that general consideration of liturgy, I want to consider a bit of written liturgy which I've realised over the last few weeks doesn't work properly when enacted by a congregation. This has been on Sunday mornings at our local churches and more recently at a clergy gathering where we said Evening and Morning Prayer together.
Here's the bit that caught my attention, from Morning Prayer for Ascension to Pentecost, it's the final bit of the service, though the issue is replicated in other post-Easter liturgies.
Expression is about the form and choice of words, phrases, grammar and metaphor. It includes things that have currency in poetry like assonance, rhythm and striking phrasing. It includes style and register. And, beyond the verbal, it might take in decor, sound, action and generally the material world immediately around the act of worship.
Expression and theology interrelate with context which is to do with the culture of participants, the particularities of the occasion and the physical constraints and possibilities of the space being used and human physiology and psychology.
Anyway, moving from that general consideration of liturgy, I want to consider a bit of written liturgy which I've realised over the last few weeks doesn't work properly when enacted by a congregation. This has been on Sunday mornings at our local churches and more recently at a clergy gathering where we said Evening and Morning Prayer together.
Here's the bit that caught my attention, from Morning Prayer for Ascension to Pentecost, it's the final bit of the service, though the issue is replicated in other post-Easter liturgies.
May the Spirit kindle in us the fire of God's
love.
All Amen.
All Amen.
Let us bless the Lord. Alleluia, alleluia.
All Thanks be to God. Alleluia, alleluia.
The difficulty with it is the double alleluia in the leader's line. In this case the responsoral phrase is more normally
"Let us bless the Lord
Thanks be to God."
What happens persistently in live church contexts, including the clergy gathering I was at, is that where the double alleluia is postscripted to a phrase commonly used in a responsoral phrases, it disturbs the normal pattern. With such short phrases, congregations don't tend actually to read the book or service sheet because they just know these bits and respond almost automatically. The result is that the double alleluia said by the leader at that point crashes into the start of the response by the congregation coming in at the end of "... the Lord." -where they normally do.
Awkward.
A liturgy bad arising from forgetting the context of human psychology.
I would suggest that the solution is relatively simple. Start the sentence with the double alleluia ("Alleluia, alleluia. Let us bless the Lord.") thus leaving the end of the cue phrase unmolested so that the habit response can clip in as normal with the relatively easy addition to the end of the response-phrase ("Thanks be to God. Alleluia, alleluia").
Now I think that it is understandable why the phrase was written like that. There is the symmetry of ending the call and the response phrases alike and there is the dynamic of 'festivalising' a regular phrase. But the habits on which the latter dynamic rest undermine the practicality of the former poetic.
This is a good example of how liturgy needs not only to pay attention to words and actions 'off the page' but also to the way that human beings do stuff.
Another difficult piece of liturgy can be the so-called Kyrie confessions. "Kyries" are the phrases that go thus in a traditional liturgy:
Lord have mercy
Lord have mercy
Christ have mercy
Christ have mercy.
Lord have mercy
Lord have mercy
Again, bold type indicates congregational response to the lead voice at that point. There are variations on the wording (adding 'upon us' or having each phrase three times giving nine lines in all split between voices or even all said together). The form I'm on about is the one reproduced just and the possibility of using the phrases as summary phrases following each of three sentences often drawn from the Psalms which draw us into confessing our sins. Thus, for instance:
Show us you mercy and love that your people may rejoice in you
Lord have mercy
Lord have mercy
Think on us according to your faithful love
Christ have mercy
Christ have mercy.
We acknowledge our faults and our sin is always before us.
Lord have mercy
Lord have mercy
All Thanks be to God. Alleluia, alleluia.
The difficulty with it is the double alleluia in the leader's line. In this case the responsoral phrase is more normally
"Let us bless the Lord
Thanks be to God."
What happens persistently in live church contexts, including the clergy gathering I was at, is that where the double alleluia is postscripted to a phrase commonly used in a responsoral phrases, it disturbs the normal pattern. With such short phrases, congregations don't tend actually to read the book or service sheet because they just know these bits and respond almost automatically. The result is that the double alleluia said by the leader at that point crashes into the start of the response by the congregation coming in at the end of "... the Lord." -where they normally do.
Awkward.
A liturgy bad arising from forgetting the context of human psychology.
I would suggest that the solution is relatively simple. Start the sentence with the double alleluia ("Alleluia, alleluia. Let us bless the Lord.") thus leaving the end of the cue phrase unmolested so that the habit response can clip in as normal with the relatively easy addition to the end of the response-phrase ("Thanks be to God. Alleluia, alleluia").
Now I think that it is understandable why the phrase was written like that. There is the symmetry of ending the call and the response phrases alike and there is the dynamic of 'festivalising' a regular phrase. But the habits on which the latter dynamic rest undermine the practicality of the former poetic.
This is a good example of how liturgy needs not only to pay attention to words and actions 'off the page' but also to the way that human beings do stuff.
Another difficult piece of liturgy can be the so-called Kyrie confessions. "Kyries" are the phrases that go thus in a traditional liturgy:
Lord have mercy
Lord have mercy
Christ have mercy
Christ have mercy.
Lord have mercy
Lord have mercy
Again, bold type indicates congregational response to the lead voice at that point. There are variations on the wording (adding 'upon us' or having each phrase three times giving nine lines in all split between voices or even all said together). The form I'm on about is the one reproduced just and the possibility of using the phrases as summary phrases following each of three sentences often drawn from the Psalms which draw us into confessing our sins. Thus, for instance:
Show us you mercy and love that your people may rejoice in you
Lord have mercy
Lord have mercy
Think on us according to your faithful love
Christ have mercy
Christ have mercy.
We acknowledge our faults and our sin is always before us.
Lord have mercy
Lord have mercy
All well and good. It is simple enough to be used without books in front of congregants if necessary, it allows for scriptural content and flexibility.
However, I have noticed that it can sometimes lead some congregants into the embarrassment of saying a line out loud when it is not the congregational turn yet. When that happens, I think it is because the pace can (rightly) be slower and reflective, with perhaps a pause after the interposed sentence which, combined with the anticipation of the exact same words being repeated can lull some congregants into thinking with one part of their brain that they should be saying something.
The only ways I have found to head that off while preserving the spaciousness of the exercise is to be quite attentive to my tone of voice: not to drop the tonal range at the end of the sentence in such a way as to invite a sense of finality which often cues a response, rather to say it in a way that suggests there is something else coming. The other technique is to make sure that the phrase is said in such a way as to allow the 'Lord/Christ have mercy' to follow very promptly from the sentence so that the lead voice (mine in this case) has begun the cue phrase before someone else can start saying the phrase.
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