Liturgical prayer in a post-Holocaust church

Encounter, Winter 2002 by Anderson, E Byron

"I have taken an oath: To remember it all, to remember, not once to forget!"1 For many liturgists, especially those in "prayerbook" traditions working at liturgical reform and renewal over the past halfcentury, a defining moment of the twentieth century was the promulgation of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council. The Constitution both reflected and encouraged a spirit of ecumenical conversation and scholarship concerning the patterns, practices, and theologies of the Christian sacramental life. But as Clark Williamson and others have prophetically argued, perhaps the defining moment of the twentieth-- century Church continues to be the Jewish Holocaust in Europe. This moment offers a different invitation. As we have listened to and learned from other Christian communities in the reform of liturgical rites, we have yet to listen to the synagogue and the continuing voice of lament present there. The Holocaust remains largely invisible in and to the Church today, certainly in the regular prayer life of the Church. We provide or participate in occasional services of remembrance but, as with our discomfort with Lent or Holy Week, we prefer that such occasions not be too frequent. In what follows, I want to explore some of the recent conversation about the possibilities for Christian liturgical prayer that accounts for the Jewish Holocaust.2 I follow this exploration with a brief review of several liturgical prayer forms that may provide opportunity for such a response.

Given the context of this essay as a celebration of the theological work of Clark Williamson, I want to begin by locating the question of liturgical prayer in a post-Holocaust Church in Williamson's own work, particularly in his discussions of the purposes and theologies of the Christian sacramental life. Let me highlight four claims, two referring to prayer and sacrament, two to God's faithful action in Jesus Christ. In his most recent book, Way of Blessing, Way of Life, Williamson claims that the "function of prayer in public worship is to bear witness before and to the congregation as to who God is, who Jesus Christ is, who the neighbor is, and who we are."3 Here is a fundamental claim: in public prayer we bear witness, we remember and "re-member" a community of faith in relationship to a particular God, the God of Israel and Jesus Christ. In an earlier book coauthored with his colleague Ronald Allen, Williamson provides a second claim: "Liturgy is a miniature of our experiences in the world from the standpoint of the religious vision... We live out the vision that we act out in liturgy."4 That is, in addition to bearing witness to what God has done, the community gathered in prayer looks toward what God will yet do in covenantal faithfulness. A third claim, developed in Williamson's discussions of the means of grace, focuses on God's present action in Jesus Christ: "Jesus Christ, as preached in the church and present in the sacraments, does today what he did in his lifetime: he confronts his followers with the call and claim of the God of Israel."5 What is both remembered and anticipated implicates the Christian community in an act of meaning-making in the present, which, as present action, continues to constitute the Church in its relationship to God and creation.6 Finally, Williamson poses this christological claim:

Christ re-presents the same grace of God that had earlier been re-presented to the people Israel and that continues to be re-presented in the synagogue. Hence, we must understand the grace of God in Christ as the light of God's continuous faithful dealing with the Israel of God.7

These four claims pose significant questions for the Church and the shape and content of the Church's liturgical prayer. How can the Christian community bear witness to the God of Israel and Jesus Christ if, in its prayer life, it denies the history of the Jewish people? In what ways are our prayers "deformed" when we limit our vision of the future to that of the heavenly Jerusalem as an image of the Church to the exclusion of Israel, when our vision is that of "us" and "them," the Church and Israel, the "redeemed" and "unredeemed"? In what ways are we constituting ourselves as a people of faith when the meaning we attribute to our liturgical and sacramental celebrations does not bear witness to the significance of Jesus Christ as the one who comes as a Jew to Israel, for the sake of Israel's and, by adoption, our redemption? These questions become more pronounced in a church culture that is increasingly inattentive to the history of suffering in the world and, preferring easy praise over lamentation, is unfamiliar with prayer language within synagogue and church that enables us to respond to this history. Liturgical response to these questions is difficult. Consider, as an extreme example, the contrast between "free church" or "non-prayerbook" communities and those in which the whole of the Psalter provides the daily communal language of prayer. The first are generally unwilling to "legislate" standard liturgical resources for their communities and thereby leave these communities "free to forget" the history of suffering. In the second, the rhythm of lamentation and praise is not only regular but also relentless. Lest I be charged with unfairness in this contrast, I note, nevertheless, that those communities that do not hesitate to "legislate" liturgical prayer have been just as able to legislate silence on the Holocaust and the history of suffering imposed upon Israel by the Church.