Symbols are a primary means by which the truth of the gospel is communicated. They communicate to us through all our senses and on many levels, to our thinking and our feeling, our memory, and our imagination. Further, symbolic language serves to unite Christians, giving them a common reference point and experience that transcends divisions within the Christian community.
Artists Are Primary Communicators
We can’t do anything right in the work of reform and renewal of the church if we do not first realize its importance. We are not decorators to a reality that is essentially abstract and cerebral. We are, in fact, primary communicators, ministers, and evangelists, since our work is in and with and for the Sunday assembly where the faith community celebrates its identity as church and shares its nourishment—where humans are formed, not merely brains informed. We are communicating the gospel at a level that precedes, and is fundamental to, all theologizing and all administration.
What is the symbol language of our “primary and indispensable source,” the liturgy, and how are the environment and arts part of it? By the terms symbol and symbol-language I mean primarily the stories of the Bible proclaimed in the Sunday assembly and the actions we call sacraments done by the Sunday assembly. The environment is the skin, the space, the enabling scene of that assembly, that proclamation, that action. Its arts are the skills of music, rhetoric, movement and gesture, design and craft in the making and using of all things necessary for sacramental worship (from architecture and images to vessels, vesture, utensils, and books, and so on).
Communication among human beings, including what Jews and Christians believe is God’s revelation, puts the environment (its shapes, colors, textures, smells, flavors, tones) and all the imagining and skills we call the arts right at the center of the enterprise. So when poor, deluded creatures dismiss environment and art considerations in any of the ways with which we are so depressingly familiar, what they are really doing is dismissing the way God touches us, loves us, the way God reveals the divine design and will, the way in which we are invited to share the vision of God’s reign, justice, and peace for all, liberation and reconciliation for all, and therefore the way we are to know ourselves as a church and our mission in the world. There is nothing luxurious or precious about these concerns.
Symbol-Language Appeals to All Our Human Levels and Faculties
Unlike our prose discourse and our verbal formulas, so terribly limited by their vocabulary as well as by the time and place in which they are conceived, the symbol-language of liturgy is comprehensive, classic, and seminal.
Since we believe the biblical covenant and the paschal mystery are God’s invitation to a new way of life, a new orientation of our lives, and not merely to an oath of allegiance or a set of ideas or a party line, symbol language is its favorite as well as its most adequate communication. Symbol-language appeals comprehensively to all of our human levels and faculties and to the whole species in all of its variety. Its types are deeply embedded in our common human roots, escaping the Babel of our different languages, customs, ways. It engages not merely the listening and idea mechanism but the entire person, through song and speech and silence, through gestures and other forms of movement, through touch and taste and smell and sight and hearing, through its evoking of memory, recollection, fantasy, imagination—acting out in liturgy (rather, enabling the Sunday assembly to act out) the liberating and reconciling deeds of God in living rite, as the commitment of the baptized.
From the liberating bath of immersion into baptism’s newness to the reconciling meal, where we share equally one holy bread, drinking from one holy cup, in the Eucharist’s solidarity—in every rite of public worship, this multidimensional symbol-language admits the inadequacy of our feeble words, respects the terrible mystery of God, excludes no means that might, however obliquely, penetrate our defenses with vision and with hope.
But this can’t be unless we take it seriously unless we play hard at it unless we give our ears and our hearts to those biblical stories, our minds and our bodies and our imaginations to those sacramental actions and gestures. When the liturgy thus becomes ours, our very own, we can begin to catch the vision of God’s reign, of what we and our world must become—liberation and reconciliation.
And the stories and the actions and the gestures will not grab us in this way until we learn to absorb them fully, with no abbreviations and no shortcuts: space—not constructed on the model of the auditorium but made for liturgical action; the baptismal bath—immersion, done to the full; the Lord’s Supper—bready bread, broken, shared; real wine—poured out and drunk from common cups. Significado causant. The sacraments have their effects through what they signify—our experience of them. We have been positively ingenious in depriving and robbing the sacraments of their signification: by our “practicality”; by our desire for convenience; by our aversion to work. Our liturgical world has been verbal—anything else is incidental. Opening up the nonverbal to signification and experience is a revolution that has hardly begun.
Symbol-Language Unifies Us on a Biblical and Sacramental Level
Symbol-language is catholic, universal, not only in its comprehensiveness but also in its classic character. It is a great gift to have covenant sources that reveal God’s design and make us partners in its realization—and do it in a classic way, a way that applies to all times and all places. No blueprints. No party line. No concrete instructions for exactly what must be done right now in our lives, in our political and economic organization, in our other cultural and social affairs. Those things God trusts us to work out with the talents we have been given and in concert with the rest of the human family. Only the direction, the orientation, the goal is clear in the Word of God who is liberator and reconciler—justice and peace. Everything is to be measured in that direction. And it is that direction in our sources, as well as their ambiguity about our concrete steps today, that invites a multitude of different insights and interpretations … and with all of these joined in the church, we make a bit of progress toward consensus. That’s why at our best (and we are rarely at our best) we are so loath to stifle controversy. Because we are all so limited individually (none of us being the whole Christ), it is through our sharing of different interpretations about what to do that we may eventually arrive at some common interpretations as the body of Christ.
That classic, catholic character makes a lot of people nervous. What it wants to do is challenge us to respect each other and be open to learning from each other, recognizing our need for each other, to be, as church, the body of Christ. If we have a deep unity on this symbolic biblical and sacramental level, then we can trust each other to grow up and bring our own consciences and human gifts to a common solution of problems. But if we have lost that deep and classic oneness, then there is nothing left but a sect, a party line, forced and literal conformity on a relatively superficial level.
Reform and Renewal Are the Very Nature of the Church’s Existence
Another characteristic of the symbol-language I am discussing is its seminal, unfinished, evolving, developing nature. God’s revelation itself is progressive, as the Bible, Judaism, and Christianity prove, and indicates a living tradition, a continuous creative process, by which God draws human history inch by inch toward a fuller realization of the freedom and oneness God has already given us in faith. That is why reform and renewal are the very nature of the church’s existence and not merely an era or a diversion in its story.
What a relief! Who could abide the church if we thought it was a finished, completed, perfected reality? Any more than we could abide ourselves as individuals, if we thought we had no possibilities of change, of growth, of development! Our understanding and living of the Good News is always in process, conditioned by our time, our place, our culture. All that is in God is dynamic, moving (not standing still and not retreating) toward God’s reign of justice and peace. We imagine and experience in rite and bring to our work and world possibilities of greater justice, firmer peace, more freedom from oppressors or addictions, more oneness in diversity for all God’s children.
Art always sees nature, the world, and humanity not as inert, static, fully developed accomplishments of the past, but as en route, on a journey, full of promise and of as yet unrealized possibilities. True art will have nothing to do with a static, rear-guard, the-old-times-were-the-good-times conception of life or of the church. In art, we bring our human intent, our express desire, our will, and our commitment to a work of creation. Not resting in what has been but increasing the good, the true, and the beautiful, drawing what is to be out of what is with our imaginations and our work.
In this seminal character, this openness to growth and development, the arts are like the gospel itself. No wonder they are so bound up with its symbol-language and that their ministry is so indispensable to its proclamation and celebration.
How Do We Go about Our Project?
Now to a few remarks about the means we use for our project. How do we prepare an environment that enables and enlists the arts that serve this critical symbol-language of our rites? Power corrupts, as we all know. To approach our function in these matters without reflection on that fact of human experience would be foolish indeed. Clericalism and what was for a time considered clerical power are fading—not rapidly enough, but fading nonetheless.
One of the great gifts of the reform efforts thus far since the Second Vatican Council has been stemming of our perennial drift toward idolatry, a purification of our notion of God, the holy otherness of God, that has, as its complement, the rediscovery that we are all creatures, no matter what hats we wear or what offices we occupy. All of us are gifted in different ways, yet all of us are limited. Relating again the clergy and any other specialized ministries to their basis in the common ministry of the community of the baptized has shattered the long-tolerated illusions about exclusive clerical connections with the divine. Slowly we regain a healthy notion of church, including recognition of our need for specialized ministries—a need that does not require pretension.
We must not be apologetic about this development, as if this health were somehow a weakening of ministry or offices of leadership. It is their strength, and this conciliar era is a gift of God. This moment of reaction is merely another instance of our well-proven resistance to repentance.
Now that we are beginning to move from what had become autocratic to a more communitarian and consensual sort of decision making, we have to remember that the new committee, although it is more representative of the community than the old autocrat, is no more than the autocrat a source or guarantee of competence. The committee has to do the same searching for artists, architects, designers, craftspeople as the autocrat had to do. When the autocrat did not do this searching and finding and freeing of appropriately competent artists, and instead assumed that because he had the job he had the gifts, we witnessed the environmental and artistic mess of our recent past. If the new committee is going to act in the same way, the results will be just as disastrous.
Committees and collegial structures of all sorts are necessary and important developments in the church. But we must not confuse their function with any of the particular competencies that environment and art require. A liturgy committee, for example, should have a basic understanding of the faith community and of the full, conscious, active participation of all its members required by its liturgy and of what the rites require in terms of personnel and equipment. But when it comes to the ministry of reader, the committee has to search for that particular trained talent of public proclamation. The old autocrat who understood human limits (many did not) searched out, employed, and paid individuals with appropriate training and talent for the job to be done. The new committee must do the same and should be able to do it more effectively, given its representative character and its presumed knowledge of the community and its resources. It is a tragedy when the new committee simply inherits the old autocrat’s power, without any feeling of responsibility for seeking and hiring those highly individual and particular competencies and charisms. One of the marks of the church, as a community whose common ministry is liberation and reconciliation, should be a deep respect and reverence and gratitude for the gifts of others and a feeling of need for them. We recognize this when we are dealing with tasks of plumbing or bricklaying. We tend to forget it when we are dealing with building or renovation, with design and the arts in worship.
Conclusion
We pray and think and talk about how our faith communities and local churches can create environments and solicit arts that will not only embody but also encourage and enable the kind of human experience through symbolic communication we call liturgy. We are given the thankless task of being goads, prodders, gadflies, stingers of consciences (including our own). We get tired. We’d like to have somebody pat us on the head and say “Thanks … thanks!” But if we are serious about where we are or are coming from, our job is to struggle against human nature’s preference for the misery it knows, its fear of the new and different. But when the job is done and space begins to form the faith community that worships in it and with it, encouraging and enabling with its awe-inspiring beauty and its warm human scale and hospitality, the full, conscious, active participation of the entire Sunday assembly—then, if we are still alive, we can bask in the glory. For now, however, it is all uphill.