Liturgy as God's Language School

Liturgy as God’s Language School By John D. Witvliet ne of the most remarkable aspects of parenting toddlers is witnessing how they learn to talk. Their discovery of how to connect thoughts and desires with words is surely one of life’s greatest miracles. My wife and I have had the privilege of witnessing this miracle in our four children. From our parental perspective, it appears that healthy speech habits don’t come naturally. Young children need to learn to say “thank you,” “I’m sorry,” and “please.” Parents need to practice and prompt these basic conversational moves over and over again! Think of this as parental linguistic formation. Yet eventually—if sporadically—these words become part of the way toddlers negotiate relationships in the world. There are few moments quite as sweet as hearing a sudden, unprompted “thanks daddy” ater many months of rehearsal. These words also begin to sculpt the internal afections of these young toddlers. Theorists like Semenovich Vygotsky suggest that our language not only relects our thoughts but also shapes our thoughts. Language creates new modes of relating to other people. It evokes and awakens new emotions—emotions we might not have were we not given the words to name them and form them in us. I love you. . . . I’m sorry. . . . Why? . . . Come again—I’m listening. . . . Help! . . . Thank you. . . . Bless you. . . .Words like these are building blocks of healthy relationships. Every good marriage, intimate friendship, and close relationship depends on words like these. When marriages fail and friendships disintegrate, it is usually because some of these speech habits are let unpracticed. O Learning to Speak Liturgy These are also the building blocks of our relationship with God. One of the most provocative and inspiring word pictures in all of Scripture is that God is related to Dr. John D. Witvliet is the director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship and an associate professor of music and worship at Calvin College and Calvin Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He spoke at the 2006 NPM Regional Convention in Grand Rapids. Portions of this address appear in slightly revised form in his recent book The Biblical Psalms in Christian Worship: A Brief Introduction and Guide to Resources (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007). Pastoral Music • April-May 2007 the church like a marriage partner. God establishes with us a promise-based relationship. The God of the Bible is not just interested in being contemplated or appeased; this God is interested in the give and take of faithful life together, with good communication right at the center of it. Ample evidence for this claim is the Bible’s songbook—the 150 psalms—each of which expresses at least one essential communicational habit for a people in a covenant relationship with God. The psalms teach us, to use Walter Brueggemann’s phrase, that “biblical faith is uncompromisingly and unembarrassedly dialogical.”1 This patern of alternation depicts what Raymond Jacques Tournay has called the “prophetic liturgy of the temple.”2 It is important that the church invites us not only to think about this relationship but also to practice it. And one of the places we do that is in public worship. When we gather for worship, the church invites us to join together and say to God: “We love you.” “We’re sorry.” “Come again—we’re listening.” “Help.” “Thank you.” In fact, the order or structure of liturgy could easily be construed, in part, as a series of such communal speech acts. To use a phrase from Thomas G. Long’s recent book, Testimony, worship is “God’s language school.”3 The problem is that, like toddlers, we don’t have a natural inclination to say any of these things to God. As is the case with toddlers, these speech habits in us take practice and discipline. Whether we prefer “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you,” or “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof,” a key point to recall is that this language in either form does not come to us naturally. If we are not formed to do so, none of us are all that likely to say to God half the things we say in the liturgy. But the practice and discipline are worth it, forming us over time to express our deepest fears, hopes, and joys in simple but profound ways. This formation in a shared language turns out to be very challenging for communities for, on any given Sunday, each of us comes to liturgy with something diferent to say. Some of us come ready to tell God “thank you!” Others of us want to scream “why?” And if we’re honest, we all need to say “I’m sorry.” In other words, some of us come ready to sing Psalm 100, others Psalm 13, and all us, if we’re honest, need to speak Psalm 51. The liturgy, fortunately, gives room for all these essential words. It helps each of us express our particular experi19 ence, but it also invites us to practice the language that represents what someone else is experiencing. Authentic worship involves both expressing our deepest feelings in the moment and practicing the best relational habits in our common covenant with God in Christ. It would be reductionist to limit our view of worship to say that it is like a weekly marriage therapy session, in which we learn to practice good habits. But it wouldn’t be a bad place to start. Just as the people of Israel met in solemn assembly to renew their covenantal vows to God (see, for example, Joshua 24 and Ezra 8–9), so too, we meet in public worship to renew the covenant God has established with the church in Christ. My irst plea, then, is for all of us to recover this very simple (but profound) understanding of liturgy. This metaphor—learning a shared language—is hardly the only metaphor by which to understand liturgy and formation, but it is one of the most accessible. Habits of Listening Worship is not, of course, a one-sided conversation. In worship, we not only talk to God, but God also speaks to us. Through Scripture and sermons or homilies that echo Scripture, God assures, challenges, comforts, and convicts us. And through water, bread, and wine, God blesses us, assures us, and nourishes us. It turns out that we, like toddlers, also need practice at listening and receiving. In fact, listening is even harder than speaking. Part of the diiculty we have is learning to be quiet long enough to listen. Part of the diiculty we have is that we do not receive gits well; we would rather be in control of the git-giving process. Still more diicult is cultivating the aptitude to receive words of both comfort and challenge, messages that inspire us as well as messages that disturb us. Yet all of 20 that is what liturgy ofers. We need to practice hearing God’s comforting words and take them to heart. We also need practice at hearing biblical words that unsetle our way of thinking about the world. Ater each liturgy, try asking yourself to name ways in which the service communicated both comfort and challenge, cultivating over time the aptitude to atend to both kinds of messages. Every worshiping community forms us to receive the gits of God in a diferent way. One way to sense this is in how people evaluate worship. At a Sunday aternoon neighborhood gathering or family reunion, one person might say: “Worship at my church was wonderful this morning. I really found some practical advice I can use this week.” Another might say: “The liturgy was so good today. For the irst time in weeks, I had the space in my life to really pray.” In certain Calvinistic congregations, a parishioner might say to a preacher: “What a wonderful sermon today! You really convicted us all of our guilt.” (As they say of Calvinists: They are never happier than when feeling lots of guilt. This, it turns out, is shared experience ecumenically). If full-orbed “speaking habits” in worship form us to say a whole range of things to God (We love you; we’re sorry; we’re listening. Why?), we also need full-orbed “listening habits” that form us to receive diferent kinds of gits from God: comfort, challenge, nourishment, and calling. My second plea, then, is to become more intentional not only about our practice of talking (or singing) during worship but also about listening—and listening for the very diferent kinds of things God may be saying. Liturgy as Life’s Soundtrack The speech that we are talking about, however, is not simply a language for liturgy. These speaking and April-May 2007 • Pastoral Music listening moves stay with us all week long, helping us cultivate relational depth as we encounter God. As Tom Long explains: The way we talk in worship afects the way we talk in the rest of our lives, and vice versa. . . . The words of worship are like stones thrown into the pond; they ripple outward in countless concentric circles, inding ever fresh expression in new places in our lives. . . . Worship is a key element in the church’s ‘language school’ for life. . . . It’s a provocative idea—worship as a soundtrack for the rest of life, the words and music and actions of worship inside the sanctuary playing the background as we live our lives outside, in the world.”4 Each of these speech habits is a way to practice for spontaneous moments of prayer. In worship, we practice certain atitudes or speech paterns that we need to take with us into the world. • In worship, we sing: “All creatures of our God and King,/ Lit up your voice and with us sing: Alleluia.” In life, we drive home on a rainy day and are surprised by the joy of an unexpected rainbow. Internally, we could simply say: “What an interesting phenomenon.” But instead, we might instinctively say: “Alleluia. Praise God from whom all blessings low.” • In worship, we sing: “Kyrie eleison.” At home, we watch the television news, with its nightly litany of wars and rumors of wars, and we say not merely “time for the game show” but: “How long, O Lord? Have mercy, O God.” • In worship, we learn to pray epicletically, asking the Holy Spirit to work through gits of word and water, bread and wine to nourish our common faith and strengthen us for the journey. At home, we might pray for the Holy Spirit to open our eyes to the needs of those around us. In the words of Regis Dufy: “Emmaus is not only the name of a town in the Gospel of Luke; it is also a state of mind.”5 • In worship, we listen atentively to the reading of Scripture to discern God’s call in our life. In life, we hear in a phone call the need of neighbors and hear God’s call to assist them. We hear in the encouragement of a teacher or mentor the gracious presence of God who blesses us through each other. In these ways, liturgy becomes the soundtrack for life. When formed by liturgy to speak in certain ways and to relate to God, the world, and those around us in certain ways, we live most faithfully when we let those speech paterns—and the deeper relational capacities they inform—become our daily, spontaneous responses to God, the world, and those around us. This is, in part, what is meant by life “coram Deo,” “before the face of God.” My third plea, then, is to discover again the connections between liturgy and life, to discover how the internal soundtrack by which we live can be nothing less than the liturgy of the church playing in and through us 24/7. Pastoral Music • April-May 2007 Moments and Habits in Relational Life Notice that these words of liturgy and the rest of life are signiicant because they are all about sustaining relationships. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex reality, let me suggest that efective relationships take two types of interactions: those I will call “habits” and those I will call “moments.” “Habits” are those ritualized expressions that mark every relationship, whether we know it or not. When you say “good morning” to the members of your family or co-workers, even when it’s not a good morning, you are practicing a relational habit. When you send your friend a birthday card, even when you don’t seem to have time genuinely to feel what the card expresses, you are practicing a relational habit. In daily human life, relationships cannot be sustained without these habits. Just as young pianists rehearse scales and young soccer or basketball players practice passing skills, so we need relational habits to form our muscle memory. This is relational hygiene. My third plea, then, is . . . to discover how the internal soundtrack by which we live can be nothing less than the liturgy of the church playing in and through us 24/7. “Moments,” on the other hand, are those sweet times of profound intimacy, of sincere emotional connection. They are oten spontaneous, unplanned, and profound. Genuine love, genuine remorse, genuine forgiveness, genuine gratitude—all of these genuine sensibilities, all of these marks of authentic relationships, come to us, bringing together heart and mind, soul and voice in moments when we feel most alive. But here is the challenging relational secret that is hard to learn: Most of these genuine moments come in the context of practicing habits. Indeed, these kinds of moments cannot ultimately be engineered. We can hope for them, pray for them, and celebrate them when we receive them. But we can’t make them happen. What we can do is practice our habits—faithfully and with expectancy. Barbara Brown Taylor tells of her experience as a litle girl learning ballet. She remembers all the time she had to spend practicing the dance moves: It would have suited me to spend the whole hour admiring myself in front of the mirror, but my teacher kept insisting that I come away from there to learn the basic positions essential to ballet. Under her tutelage, I learned to bend my feet this way and that, sometimes straining so hard I feared my knees would pop from their sockets. I arched my back, I held my head up, I made perfect Os with my arms. I stretched and sweated over the positions until my bones ached and my muscles yelled out loud. Then one day I got to put them all together, bending and rising and sweeping the air like someone to whom gravity 21 El camino de Santiago no longer applied. I got to dance.” [And then she adds:] “That memory sustains me in worship, where I practice the basic positions of faith. They are called kyrie, gloria, credo, and sanctus. Each one requires my full atention and best eforts; each one teaches me a particular way to move, so that when God invites me to put them all together, I may jump with joy to join the dance.6 life with our family and friends, when we faithfully practice good habits, we open ourselves to receive as git the kinds of genuine afections which correspond to nothing less than the deepest longings of human aspiration. I say all of this because of the temptation we musicians face to engineer holy moments. If we only pull out one more stop on the organ, add one more obbligato instrument, or—heaven forbid—modulate up a key for the last stanza, we are bound to engineer some goose bumps for The biblical psalms are the foundational mentor and guide in this vocabulary and grammar for worship. In a provocative and inspiring book, Eugene Peterson speaks of the psalms as the tools God has given us to form in us a vibrant and well-grounded faith: “The psalms are necessary because they are the prayer masters. . . . We apprentice ourselves to these masters, acquiring facility in using the tools by which we become more and more ourselves. If we are willfully ignorant of the psalms, we are not thereby excluded from praying, but we will have to hack our way through formidable country by trial and error and with inferior tools.”7 Indeed, the Psalter of the Hebrew Scriptures is the foundational and paradigmatic prayer book of the Christian church. Time and time again, worshiping communities have returned to the Psalter for inspiration and instruction in the life of both personal and public prayer. Some of the most auspicious liturgical reform movements in church history—including those of sixth century monastic communities, sixteenth century Lutherans and Calvinists, and I say all of this because of the temptation we musicians face to engineer holy moments. people. On the other hand, we also can be tempted to squelch holy moments, to lead liturgy in such a way that communicates that we expect nothing will really happen there. It is as if we plan ahead of time not to be inspired, comforted, or challenged. My fourth plea, then, is to recover a piety of both faithful practice and expectancy—both “habits” and “moments”—and to invite others to join us in this journey—an epicletic piety. In liturgy before God’s face, as in relational 22 Psalms as Mentors April-May 2007 • Pastoral Music the twentieth century Liturgical Movement—have called for a renewed appreciation for the liturgical possibilities of the Psalter. Early African American expressions of Christian worship were known for “a kind of ecstatic delight in psalmody,” and the psalms are also both a point of comparison for understanding black spirituals and a source of inspiration for recent black Gospel music. If we want to understand the DNA of the Christian faith beter and to deepen our worship, there are few beter places to begin than with careful and prayerful engagement with the psalms. At root, this conviction arises from the place of the psalms within the canon of Scripture. The psalms, like all Scripture, are “inspired by God and useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proicient, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16–17). The words of the Psalter are reliable and trustworthy, though, to be sure, they can also be challenging, perplexing, and even disturbing. For several commentators throughout the history of the church, this conviction about the value of the Psalter suggested that praying the psalms was one of the best ways to pray “in the Spirit” (Ephesians 6:18, Jude 1:20). Indeed, when we pray these texts, we are, in a profound if elusive sense, praying the words the Spirit has given us. In the words of Thomas Merton: “Nowhere can we be more certain that we are praying with the Holy Spirit than when we pray the Psalms.”8 In John Calvin’s words, when the psalms are sung, “we are certain that God has put the words in our mouths as if they themselves sang in us to exalt his glory.”9 The psalms stretch us. They teach us to say things we never would otherwise say. Over and over again, I have been struck by how the psalms encompass both sides of some of the most striking divisions within Christian communities today. The psalms speak of both social justice and personal transformation; they embody hand-clapping exuberance and profound introspection; they express the prayers of the exalted and the lowly; they are fully alive in the present but always point to the future on the basis of the past; they highlight both the extravagance of grace and the joy of faithful obedience; they express a restless yearning for change and a profound gratitude for the inheritance of faith; they protest ritualism but embody the richest expression of ritual prayer. The psalms will invite us to say things to God that we never imagine we would say to God. My ith plea, then, is for us to recover the psalms as the chief mentors in prayer. today. It is accessible enough that it can be used to good efect in a 300-word entry in parish newsleters, an opening devotional in a children’s choir rehearsal, or short homily. Its signiicance comes from the fact that it so clearly helps us see that good liturgy is not merely expressive of what we already experience but rather forms us for something greater. Liturgical participation is all about conversion, the daily dying and rising with Christ that constantly hones, shapes, and re-converts us to image Christ more faithfully. Indeed, the largest issues about worship today, I would suggest, are not about the style of the liturgy or the complexities of negotiating symbols and texts in a multicultural era, or even about authorized translations of key texts. They are about whether we will approach liturgy as genuinely formative of nothing less than a corporate covenantal relationship with God. So many of us walk or drive to parish liturgies hoping for nothing more than a benign occasion of minimal engagement. All the while, corporate worship ofers us nothing less than a school of listening and speaking that will fundamentally reshape the way we encounter the God who creates and redeems us. May those of us who lead worship—or aspire to—be the irst to matriculate in this school. Notes 1. Walter Brueggemann, The Psalms and the Life of Faith (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1995), 68. 2. Raymond Jacques Tournay, Seeing and Hearing God with the Psalms: The Prophetic Liturgy of the Second Temple in Jerusalem (Sheield: JSOT Press, 1991). 3. Thomas G. Long, Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian (Hoboken, New Jersey: Jossey-Bass [Wiley], 2004). 4. Ibid., 47–48. 5. Regis A. Dufy, ofm, An American Emmaus: Faith and Sacrament in the American Culture (New York, New York: Crossroad, 1995). 6. Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Cambridge, Massachusets: Cowley Publications, 1993). 7. Eugene Peterson, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer (San Francisco, California: Harper and Row, 1989), 4. 8. Thomas Merton, Praying the Psalms (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1956), 18. 9. See Ford Lewis Batles, “John Calvin: The Form of Prayers and Songs of the Church,” Calvin Theological Journal 15 (1980), 160–165. The Largest Issue My primary reason for speaking of worship as a language school is not because this is a new idea or because it generates penetrating or evocative conversations with leading philosophers or cultural critics. My reason is that it is one of the most accessible ways of addressing one of the most signiicant issues about worship facing churches Pastoral Music • April-May 2007 A bronze marker for the pilgrim route to Santiago is set in the pavement in Bordeaux, France. 23