Love songs to the dead: the liturgical voice as mentor and reminder

Cross Currents, Winter, 1998 by Catherine Madsen

The book begins with a reminder of the original meaning of orthodoxy: "right worship," not right doctrine. "This is very radical," Kavanagh says. "It implies that worship conceived broadly is what gives rise to theological reflection, rather than the other way around" (3). Belief is an intellectual byproduct of what the community does in its precipitous need to worship:

Worship in Spirit and in Truth is never abstract, nor does it happen on some noetic level which is undifferentiated like a Cartesian grid. Liturgy happens only in the rough and tumbled landscape of spaces and times which people discover and quarry for meaning in their lives. This is an artistic enterprise. (138-39)

It is, therefore, a physical enterprise, which responds to the needs of the body: order, rhythm, repetition, a sense of purpose, a sense of stability. It is an intuitive enterprise - not in the debased sense of intuition as a vague, mindless knowingness resistant to explanation, but in the sense that intuition is too quick and too complex for explanation, linking up apparently unrelated elements in a flash of coherence. And it has to do with survival: social survival, the linking up of apparently unrelated individuals into a unity. "Societies which cannot cohere on a level which transcends individuality," Kavanagh says, "will not long remain either human or social" (137).

For Kavanagh liturgy is a form of "critical reflection" which takes place in community over a span of time, increasing with each repetition the community's sense of what it is and what it owes. "Liturgical repetition is thus a knowledgeable accomplishment" (139), a collective work of carefully nuanced art, that cannot be grasped all at once - which may explain why newcomers to any ritual are inclined to feel alienated, and why every attempt to simplify liturgy and make it "accessible" is likely to fail in some measure. The acts done in public must become part of each person's privacy; there are no short cuts. The community's method of critical reflection must establish itself in the individual mind.

Kavanagh also sees the liturgical act - and this is crucial - as containing an inherent instability. "The liturgical assembly's stance in faith is vertiginous, on the edge of chaos" (75). Worship is not simply a celebration of life but an uneasy confrontation with our own powers. The curiously tense relationship between nature, artifact, and God in both Jewish and Christian tradition points to this instability: nature in itself is considered inarguably good, but nature under our hands becomes subject to moral scrutiny. Where a natural thing is changed into a made thing - "when grape drippings become wine, when grain becomes bread, when color and surface become icon - . . . the discourse heats up" (40). When nature becomes artifact, idolatry becomes possible. Kavanagh never quite says that this anxiety extends to the actual practice of liturgy - that there is always a doubt whether a ritual artifact is a sacrament or an idol - but there is; perhaps this is what gives worship its fervency, its abandon, because in consenting to worship we are taking a risk.