language

The language of worship is responsive both to the scriptural tradition in which Christians worship and to the cultural context in which the worship event takes place. The interplay between these forces is dynamic and formative, challenging the church to examine the language it uses in worship.

Someday church historians will sift the ashes of the 1960s and 70s and happen on the fact of liturgical renewal. During a twenty-year time span, almost every branch of the Christian community rewrote liturgy. Prayer books were published, draft services through to finished volumes. In addition, collections of prayers were put out (e.g., Huub Oosterhuis, Your Word Is Near: Contemporary Christian Prayers [Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1968]; Michael Quoist, Prayers [New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963]; Omer Tanghe, Prayers from Life [New York: P. J. Kennedy, 1968], and others) not to mention reams of experimental material. Not since the sixteenth century has there been such a dramatic recasting of forms for worship. Looking back, what can we say about the “new” language of worship?

Let us begin by bowing to the fact of inevitable change: a new liturgical language was necessary. Suddenly in the mid-twentieth century the English language, along with the other world linguistic systems, changed. In 1934, the fat Webster’s Dictionary contained about 450,000 words. By 1978, lexicographers guessed that perhaps 150,000 of the original 450,000 words were still in use. Meanwhile, particularly in the 1960s, more than 200,000 new words invaded the language (see David Buttrick, “Renewal of Worship—A Source of Unity?” Ecumenism, The Spirit, and Worship, ed. L. Swindler [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1967], 215-236). Not since the collapse of the Greco-Roman world or the dissolution of the medieval synthesis has there been such awesome reconstruction of the language. For three hundred years school children have plowed through Shakespeare with some understanding, now they reach for a “pony”: the world of words has radically altered.

Von Humboldt understood that people do not have a language, they live in a language. Language constitutes the world we live in and may also shape our identity in the world. So, when language suddenly alters, human consciousness is, in a sense, being reconstructed. All of which poses special problems for those who would scribble liturgy. Not only must prayers and forms of worship be translated into a new language, but they must also be reformed: the metaphors and images that speak faith to faith must be searched, weighed, and chosen anew. If, at present, theologians are mute, struggling to find referential language for “God-talk,” those who write liturgy are equally confounded. Is it any wonder that liturgical texts penned in the 1960s and 1970s are necessarily transient, fabricated in between-the-ages language that will in time beg revision? Language of transcendence is usually the product of an interrelation between faith and cultural “models” (often cosmological). We live now in what must be described as the death of the Protestant Era (A Catholic Era having ebbed some four hundred years earlier!), and we do not yet know what shape the Christian community will have in the future toward which God beckons us. So any liturgical language we attempt will require future revision. The worst mistake a committee constructing liturgy today could make would be to aim at “imperishable prose.” When language changes we have to rewrite words for worship—we have no choice, but our liturgical language as all language is currently in transition. So our liturgical writing is at best makeshift: unstable words stammering in the face of Mystery.

Liturgical language relates to Scripture on the one hand and a community of faith on the other: it is a people’s language responding to their constitutive revelation which is crystallized in Scripture. It was no accident then that liturgical renewal came hand in hand with the publication of new Bible translations. For centuries, Christian worshipers have sung Psalms, heard lections, and prayed remembering stories of God-with-us. Trace your way through twenty centuries of Christian liturgy and you will find in the forms of worship not only scriptural quotation but an astonishing wealth of scriptural allusion. So, quite obviously, contemporary texts for worship have been influenced in style and substance by new versions of Scripture—RSV, Jerusalem, NEB, NAB, Phillips, and the like. Those who complain that worship has lost loveliness or who long for elegant Elizabethan English usually bemoan recent translations of Scripture as well (although how anyone can translate crass koine Greek into soaring prose is a mystery!).

While liturgical language works off Scripture, it also relates to human language, to the speaking of a people. Therefore, historically, liturgical language has employed a minimal common vocabulary with theological precision. By speaking of a people’s language and mentioning a minimal vocabulary, we are underlining the fact that liturgy uses public language. Liturgies created by individuals, charmed into poetic expression, have seldom worked well: liturgical language is for a people to use, not admire. While liturgy is in the language of people, it must express a confession of faith: thus the primary criterion for liturgical language is theology. While liturgy moves from Scripture and employs the ordinary language of a people, historic confessions of faith govern liturgical expression. Like it or not, liturgies are theological documents, so that style, structure, image, and the like must be weighed theologically. Because communities of faith are in time and culture, ongoing theological controversies are bound to emerge in the production of liturgy and are usually resolved by means of political compromise (The committee that labored long over The Worshipbook argued over features of the Eucharistic Prayer for years!). All we are saying is that liturgical writing is a delicate theological pastime involving interaction of Scripture and public language, not to mention technical matters such as rhyme, syntax, metaphor, and the like.

Of course, underlying all liturgical language are what might be termed “models,” which in turn delineate fields from which metaphors may be drawn. For example, Daniel Stevick notes that the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, dating from the sixteenth century, draws heavily on the model of Sovereignty: God is King, his people are subjects; God is throned on high, his people bow in dependence (Daniel B. Stevick, Language in Worship [New York: Seabury Press, 1970], 41-52). Now, obviously, a quick tour of the book of the prophet Isaiah will convince anyone that the sovereignty model is biblical. But, just as obviously, the model was also cultural, for the prayer book was penned in a land unified by the majesty of a crowned head. (No wonder Anglophiles still trill Cranmer’s cadences with glee!) There are many, many other biblical “models” and metaphors in Scripture that may be more useful, indeed meaningful, to our current cultural setting. The problem nowadays is that some biblical models, cosmological (e.g., a four-cornered earth with umbrella-like heavens above) and social (e.g., a patriarchal society) may no longer speak for faith or to faith in our world. “Models” of transcendence are a peculiarly difficult problem for even though the seventies moved from nihil implicit in the fifties toward a sense of undefined Mystery, our sky (Henny Penny!) is still somewhat fallen. All we are noting is that liturgical metaphor will imply “models” and that such models will have to be carefully chosen.

Lately, we have heard a number of complaints to the effect that liturgical writings in the 1960s and 1970s failed to evoke a sense of transcendent wonder; like poetry, they failed to convey any feeling for “otherness”; a criticism which is no doubt true. Nevertheless, the complaint is worth analyzing more deeply. Obviously, liturgical writers are stuck with a language at hand. Twentieth-century English may well mirror our age: it is startlingly secular. A trip through Kucera and Francis’s Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English [Providence: Brown University Press, 1967] will confirm the suspicion that traditional sacral language has slipped out of use, and a study of metaphor may indicate what literary critics have idly noticed, namely that about the time of Proust, holy metaphor reversed and became a device to enhance the secular. Just as gender has largely dropped from the language so that the world is no longer richly sexual, leaving us to contend with personal pronouns and plumbing alone, so a sense of the sacred is no longer alive in our language and we are left bereft—“then the angels went away.”

Let us probe the matter more deeply still. Romantic hopes to the contrary, liturgical language is public language and therefore is less open to poetic systems than is supposed. Poetry is a metaphor, but a metaphor to function in public language must be in the public mind. A recent work by Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, confirms the notion that metaphors relate to “models” and that public metaphor is determined by models in the public mind: no models, no public metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). For liturgy to regain a sense of transcendent wonder we may have to wait for the re-forming of models in the cultural mind. What liturgy written between-the-ages can do is to go for what Paul Tillich termed “natural” symbols, namely basic metaphors associated with universal human experience—e.g., light, darkness, birth, death, height, depth, etc. while looking toward a rebirth of common faith and common “models” for faith. However, it is worth noting that great liturgies of the Western church have never been metaphorically elaborate or given to poetic flights; they have been remarkably matter-of-fact, terse, and governed by poetic restraint. No doubt, when framed, they were regarded as bland.

A more difficult problem for liturgical writing has to do with form. Attempts at developing new forms have been less than successful, particularly in the deluge of experimental material that was hustled off presses in the late 1960s. Liturgical writing has always worked in forms or from forms, most notably the collect, and the litany. Because forms are social products and are seldom the result of individual creativity, most successful attempts at liturgical revision are likewise seldom the result of individual creativity. Instead, such attempts have worked with inherited forms, modifying a given rather than fabricating something new. When in the 1930s poetry found a new voice, it did so by recovering patterns that were already lying about in ordinary language. Liturgy can adopt much the same tactic: traditional forms may be modified by the vitalities in ordinary public language. What liturgy cannot do is to be formless.

The collect form, brilliantly studied in J. W. Sutter, Jr.’s famous essay, is probably indispensable because it is good theology and may be native to the movement of religious consciousness (The Book of English Collects [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940], xv–liii). The theo-logic of the form is worth attention. While Sutter distinguishes three kinds of collects, we can examine what he labels “Type A,” which is composed of: (1) an address, (2) descriptive clause(s), (3) petition(s) or thanksgiving(s), and (4) an ending. The address usually features an attribute of God (e.g., “Mighty God” or “God of Compassion”) which is not only a confession of faith but may well be raison d’etre for praying. The descriptive clause which follows points to a basis for faith in revelation or in the community’s system of belief. So, for example, Israel might pray, “Mighty God, you drew back waves of the sea and let your people go through the waters … ,” remembering deliverance from Egypt through the Reed Sea. Usually, the address and the descriptive clause relate: would Israel call God “mighty” if the marvels of deliverance were not remembered? The petition (or thanksgiving) in turn depends on the memory found in the descriptive clause. Remembering how YHWH liberated the people of Israel from Egypt, we dare presume a promise of liberation now, “Set us free from every bondage,” and even guess God’s purpose in liberation, “So we may ever praise you.” The conclusion of a collect, in its simplest form, is “through Jesus Christ.” The conclusion not only recalls the impulse for all Christian praying, namely confidence in God’s love founded on revelation in Christ but also affirms faith that our praying is mediated through the high priestly intercession of a Risen Lord. Though some collects keep the form with greater care than others, every collect is a theological pattern with immense usefulness for public worship.

The collect has been with us for centuries, from the Shmone ’Esreh of Jewish worship to the present day, and has survived surely because it is theologically precise and does match the natural movements of faith-consciousness. The problem for writers of contemporary liturgy is how to retain the form while avoiding infelicities such as “you who” at the beginning of the descriptive clause. The Worshipbook embraces collect form and contains numerous collects, some of which may work:

Merciful God, who sent Jesus to eat and drink with sinners: lead us to your table and be present with us, weak and sinful people, that, fed by your love, we may live to praise you, remembering Jesus Christ our Savior. (The Worshipbook, [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1970], 15)

The collect form can, of course, be expanded or written loosely as a substructure within longer prayers, as in the following: Almighty God: by your power Jesus Christ was raised from death. Watch over dying men and women. Fill eyes with light to see beyond human sight a home within your love, where pain is gone and frail flesh turns to glory. Banish fear. Brush tears away. Let death be gentle as nightfall, promising a day when songs of joy shall make us glad to be together with Jesus Christ, who lives in triumph, the Lord of life eternal. (ibid., 185)

The astonishing thing about a collect form is that while it disciplines word with theological tough-mindedness, it also permits vitalities of ordinary language to function. Though the form is ancient it is open to contemporary usage. Here is a modified collect filled with the colloquial expression: Eternal God: your Son Jesus had no place to lay his head, and no home to call his own. We pray for men and women who follow seasons and go where the work is, who harvest crops or do part-time jobs. Follow them around with love, so they may believe in you and be pilgrim people, trusting Jesus Christ the Lord. (ibid. p. 190)

Notice, whether loosely built or tightly woven, the collect tends to produce disciplined terseness in prayer, poetic compression, and intensity, as well as a framework that is theologically appropriate.

The other major liturgical form is litany, a responsive system that has pre-Christian roots and has been employed century after century in worship. “The Grey Book,” a proposed revision of the English Book of Common Prayer printed in 1933, contains examples of the litany in its many stock forms, e.g., depreciations (“from … ”); obsecrations (“by … ”); suffrages (“that … ”), etc. (This revision was published in America as The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory [New York: Oxford University Press, 1933. For a useful discussion of different litany systems, see W. Maxwell, Concerning Worship [New York: Oxford University Press, 1948].) Now, clearly, many of the stock systems contain archaic responses and sometimes cumbersome grammar, but nevertheless, they may imitate natural modes of speaking before God.

Writers who employ litany form ought to become familiar with problems of internal sequence, as well as with a variety of possible constructions. If we adapt a form, or even break a form, we must first master the form itself in classical expressions. The Worshipbook contains a number of litanies, some of which are worth studying, such as the Litany for the Church, pp. 116–118 (by David Romig); the Litany of Thanksgiving, pp. 114–115, or perhaps the Litany for the Nation, pp. 127–129. These litanies work from classical patterns but modify form in various ways. Some of The Worshipbook litanies depart from traditional form experimentally, such as the less than successful Litany of the Names of the Church (pp. 121–123).

Before addressing matters of style, it may be well to rehearse an ancient controversy. The matter comes to a head in a little work by Luther entitled “A Short and Good Exposition of the ‘Our Father’ Backwards and Forwards” (Luther’s Works, Weimarer Ausgabe, VI, 21–22). Luther remarks that the Lord’s Prayer begins with a hallowing of God’s Name before it turns to our needs. Should the pattern be reversed by putting our needs first, then by the time we turn to God we may desire him not for his own sake but as answer to our clamorous needs. What is the content of worship, our needs, our religious affections, or God’s glory? The Reformed tradition has always opted for objective worship (e.g., Westminster Shorter Catechism, question #1—Q. “What is the chief end of Man?” A. “To glorify God and enjoy Him forever”). Of late, much liturgical writing seems to have plunged into subjective affect: “We are here, Lord, with our guilts and hang-ups, aware of our … ” While we may well wish to investigate religious affections, reading them in mirrored reflections of God’s presence to faith as some phenomenologially oriented theologians have recently done, the task is meditative and better suited to private devotion than to public acts of worship (see, for instance, R. R. Niebuhr, Experiential Religion [New York: Harper and Row, 1972], and Donald Evans, Struggle and Fulfillment [New York: Collins, 1979]). Our age seems to have been co-opted by the triumph of the therapeutic, so that worship may well be viewed by some as a psychoanalytic, on-the-couch speaking, but we may well be suspicious of liturgical language overloaded with “we” and “our” and “us.” Before God’s glory we may become aware of our human nature in a new way: the Lord’s Prayer does move from God’s will to human need, but the order of movement, as Luther observed, may be crucial. The object of our concern in worship is God remembered and anticipated, not a wallow of affections.

What is liturgical language? Earlier we noticed that liturgy is influenced by Scripture but made out of ordinary public language. Now we must distinguish liturgical language with greater care. Though liturgy employs ordinary language, it does so in an extraordinary way, by speaking to God. Some churches of late have begun worship cheerfully with:

Leader: Good morning.
PEOPLE: GOOD MORNING!

They use ordinary language in an ordinary way, forgetting its extraordinary function. The usage is a come-down from:

Leader: The Lord be with you.
PEOPLE: AND WITH YOU.

So liturgy uses ordinary language in an extraordinary way and, in doing so, stretches language, elevates language, producing a certain oddness. Now the alteration of ordinary language in worship is not necessarily in the direction of poetic diction. Yes, any speaking of God moves toward metaphor, the stuff of poetry, because our only recourse in making God talk is either analogy or mystic silence (never a serious Reformed Church option). But analogy once ventured begs correction. To say, for example, “God loves us with a Mother’s love,” immediately prompts recognition of categorical differences, for surely God-love is of a different order than any pale human imitation. The tension between analogy and counter analogy has always filled liturgical texts. Insofar as liturgy must use metaphor (analogy), the stuff of poetry, it will be poetic; but in recognizing the danger of analogy it must break toward prose, or tumble into silence when speech fails. Likewise, because liturgy must confess our states of being before God, it will use metaphor (“objective correlatives”), but again move toward prose acknowledging that states of being before God may be unique. (The phrase “objective correlative” was coined by T. S. Eliot. Eliot argued that inner states of being could only be expressed by making metaphor. For discussion, see William Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965], 667-669.) So, though liturgical language employs poetic devices it is ultimately too public and too practical to sustain poetic diction. Liturgical writers, slightly in love with the poetry of affect, tend to produce liturgies that sound something like second-rate T. S. Eliot: their language is seldom sayable by congregations (except with inward guffaws). (See for example material in The Chicago Theological Seminary Register LVII [May–July 1968]: 4-5.)

So liturgical language is woven out of ordinary public language used in an extraordinary way. Obviously liturgical texts must be said by a congregational “voice,” and therefore will tend toward a manageable minimal vocabulary and a short phrasing to permit breathing. Difficult polysyllabic words (such as “polysyllabic”) will of course be avoided, particularly words drawn from less-than-public spheres. Sociological terms and psychological jargon can be avoided, along with the lingo of management. Arthur Herzog’s little book The B. S. Factor will provide countless examples of language to be avoided in the writing of liturgy, from “input” to “organization” to “share” (as a verb) to “dialogue” (as a verb) to “church-wise” or any other -ize or -wise word (Arthur Herzog, The B. S. Factor [Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1974]). In worship we dare stand before God, but not with cant! Child-talk is closer to the language of worship.

Liturgical languages uses depiction: it is filled with imagery: we must see before we can pray. If we are going to pray for the elderly sick then, we will avoid general terms such as “afflicted” as well as clichés like “beds of pain.” We must imagine actual scenes. Recently we heard a young preacher pray for “people who are sick, who turn from side to side in pain, or stare at ceilings.” His images, perhaps cumbersome, were at least better than usual clichés.

Now, the difficulty in choosing images is that pictures we select may not match with common experience, they may be occasional or idiosyncratic. Nevertheless, liturgical writers can call to mind a range of images, assess them, and select those most likely to have a kind of “universal” validity. Dangers are many. One of the problems has to do with style, namely, adjectives. Adjectives in language designed for oral use are weak. While adding little, they increase words per line and therefore rhythmics. Too many “beats” per line will tend to obscure meaning or create a heaviness, a cloyed sound. So the problem for writers is to go for phenomenal precision for images, while at the same time avoiding the adjectival—no easy task. Another danger has to do with time and change. Images quite compelling, even “universal” in one moment, may no longer function as time passes. With social custom rapidly changing, we may have to acknowledge that all liturgical writing is transient, as transient as preaching. Though the Book of Common Prayer held up remarkably well for generations, perhaps such longevity is no longer possible. Opting for general, somewhat abstracted, language will not do, for instead of serving more people, it always serves fewer. Perhaps if cultural custom settles someday we may image with surety—fortunately, such a day is not near (Are all eras of cultural stability idolatrous?). All we are saying is that good liturgy will image, will depict the concerns of prayer.

Liturgy uses cadence. In all fine liturgy, there is rhythmic subtlety. Ideally, metrics in liturgy ought to be imitative, matching content, mood, or images employed. Because ordinary public language employs all kinds of rhythms in speaking, so will liturgy. Rhythms in liturgy are achieved by rhetorical and poetic devices; rhetorically, by double and triple phrasing; poetically, by internal vowel rhymes, occasional subtle end rhymes, by alliteration (sparingly), various tropes, etc. Virtually all of the collects in The Worshipbook are marked by cadenced language: some work nicely while others do not. Look at a prayer chosen at random, not as excellent (actually, it is a rather poor prayer), but as typical: Almighty God: in the beginning you made men and women to join in shared affection. May those who marry be filled with joy. Let them be so sure of each other that no fear or disrespect may shake their vows. Though their eyes be bright with love, keep in sight a wider world where neighbors want and strangers beg, and where service is a joyful duty; through Jesus Christ the Lord. (p. 184, adapted)

In addition to the variable length of the sentence, the prayer picks up “j” sounds in the first two sentences with “join” and “joy,” thus indicating, at least by sound, that joyful marriage is a fulfillment of God’s planned “joining.” “Fear,” a short word, is balanced by a three-syllable “disrespect.” The internal rhyme of “bright” and “sight” speeds the last sentence in which staccato words “want” and “beg” follow on complex words “neighbors” and “strangers.” The last phrase though started out in parallel construction with a previous “where” clause, returns to pick up the earlier “j” sound with “joyful.” The example was chosen, a weak prayer, does at least indicate the sophisticated patterns employed by The Worshipbook combining rhetorical phrasing and poetic devices. Now prayers can be overcadanced; they may overdo rhetorical phrasing—triads and doublets ad nausaeum—and may repeat poetic devices so that they become obvious, arty, and even “cute.” Nevertheless, a kind of studied ease of speech (rhetorical patterns) and beauty (poetic diction) are found in Christian tradition.

Language of worship, we have argued, works off of ordinary public language. As such it turns from the archaic that is no longer useful and, at the same time, fears the colloquial that is either transient or decidedly subcultural. Because public prayer has become a tradition through the centuries (collections have gathered “great” prayers of the ages), the tug of the previous form is strong. Have we not all heard contemporary prayers (using “you”) slip back into painful anachronisms such as “beseech” and even “vouchsafe,” or more subtly into what may be termed the prayer subjunctive (“O Lord that we might … ”). On the other hand, who has not been jarred by kitsch slanginess in “Give it to us good, Lord … ” and other unfortunate phrases. The Worshipbook has leaped into contemporary phrases more than other “official” prayer books. Most of these colloquial phrases may be found in the collection of prayers that concludes the book. Here you will find such contemporary expressions as “settle claims” (p. 179), “put down by” (p. 179), “hooked on” (p. 182), “grown up” (p. 184), “break up” (p. 186), “wide open to” (p. 187), “in touch with” (p. 187), “name-calling” (p. 187), “scorekeeping” (p. 187), “good times” (p. 188), “follow up” (p. 188), “go where the work is” (p. 190), “cover territories” (p. 190), “think things out” (p. 191), “lose track of ourselves” (p. 192), “no strings attached” (p. 194), “Weigh us down,” “cash on hand,” “travelling light” (all in one prayer on p. 199), “Go about your business” (p. 200), “fall in love with” (p. 200), as well as many others. The Worshipbook chooses such phrasing not to be “trendy” but to take hold of conventions that have developed in ordinary language and use them in extraordinary work of prayer.

Of course, the trick is to use ordinary expressions in a heightened, all but poetic diction, that brings out the true meaning and, at the same time relates to levels of experience common and profound. Clearly, The Worshipbook is attempting to relate to deep levels of human experiences when it describes grieving, “We pray for those whose tears are not yet dry, who listen for familiar voices and look for still familiar faces.… ” (p. 113. The repetition of “familiar,” and the ambiguity of “still” is, of course, deliberate) or in the odd participle ending of, “For growing up and growing old; for wisdom deepened by experience; for rest in leisure, and for a time made precious by its passing.… ” (p. 115)

Devices, systems, tropes—the words sound calculated, even manipulative. Nevertheless, liturgical writing is neither a calculated condition of other human minds nor a form of spiritual outpouring, the self-expression of a warmed heart: it is technical, hopefully, useful language offered to neighbors for the praise of God.

How does one write liturgy? A person who strives for immortality will end up sounding pretentious; one who tries to be “mod” will sound trite. Writing liturgy is a tough act, to say the least. You must be faithful to traditional faith in a language that is often less than serviceable. Our language is secular and, only now at the tag-end of a terrifying century, is coming alive again. For the liturgical writer, however, public language is all there is. The writer can scramble along the edges of language where transcendence finds expression, but it is not easy. Perhaps every liturgy is written before the time (better spelled THE TIME, perhaps). Note that in The Worshipbook the editor’s only signature is found in a final prayer. It reads:

Almighty God: you have no patience with solemn assemblies or heaped up prayers to be heard. Forgive those who have written prayers for congregations. Remind them that their foolish words will pass away, but that your word will last and be fulfilled, in Jesus Christ our Lord. (p. 200)