lectern

Evaluating the Place of the Lectern, Pulpit, and Bible

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This article clarifies the purpose of the lectern (here discussed using the synonymous term ambo), pulpit, and Bible. Embellishments that characterized these items in earlier times are less appropriate when the action of proclamation is emphasized over the adoration of beauty.

The proclamation of sacred Scripture is of central importance in liturgical celebration. The lector proclaims the Word of God from the book at the ambo. The ambo and book are active elements in the liturgical action and should not be perceived simply as inert objects. They derive their special quality from the holy action itself in which the body of Christ celebrates liturgy. Ambo and book are symbols in the action of the living Word of proclamation.

There is a trend in our celebrations toward excessive, or the wrong kind of, reverence for the book itself. One of these trends is lifting up the book after the proclamation while announcing, “This is the Word of the Lord.” This focuses on the book as if it were the reference point of the announcement. This is misleading. The proclamation by believers to believers is the Word of the Lord, not the book.

Enthroning the book is another way to suggest that the physical book—its pages, its writing, rather than faith proclamation—has the primary call upon the assembly.

We must ask ourselves whether we are in danger of doing with the action of proclamation what we did with the action of eucharistic meal sharing. Are we shifting the focus from the action itself to the elements of the action? With the Eucharist, our attention went from meal-sharing by the assembly to the tabernacle. With the liturgy of the Word, we are in danger of shifting from proclamation to the book and its ambo-throne.

The elements of bread and wine in the eucharistic action are critical in the faith action of meal sharing. The book is crucial in the faith action of proclamation, but the focus needs to stay clear.

The liturgy of the Word is an active and participatory communal experience. Nourishment from the Word of God in Christ is the experience. Participation in the proclamation by lector and hearers is the event of faith that unfolds in the liturgy of the Word, and this is the experience that counts.

In the Middle Ages, the book was much larger than today’s book and often covered with precious metals encrusted with jewels of breathtaking beauty. In an era of superstition and illiteracy, when only the clergy and a few other elites could read, the front and back covers of the book were decorated with biblical images. As a kind of icon, the splendidly decorated book was a glimpse into the world beyond, summoning one’s imagination to search the precincts of mystery. When the book was not being used in the liturgical action, it was sometimes suspended over the assembly, manifesting in this way Christ’s presence to the community. Like the tabernacle, the book was where Christ’s presence was preserved, a piece of dazzling beauty that, when opened, revealed the presence. The more jewels, the more real the presence must have been! All the while, however, the possibility existed that one might worship the book rather than venerate the presence manifested in the book.

Vatican II and the mandate of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy emphasizes that “the treasures of the Bible be opened up more lavishly so that a richer fare may be provided for the faithful at the table of God’s Word.” This summons does not suggest that we should open up the biblical treasures by prominently displaying the open book on the ambo or by creating wonderful covers for the book or building beautiful ambos for its enthronement. The “richer fare” refers to a broader scope of the biblical content being made available regularly to the praying assembly. The reference is to active participation in the faith-event of proclamation.

A visual symbol used in liturgy is a visual form of an experience or an action. The symbol is an action, not a thing. It is an event. The word symbol should really be heard as a verb because it is an action that reveals an experience. Opening up symbols, furthermore, does not require that the symbol be reinvented. It is the reshaping of the symbol, in the culture of the people, that makes the experience richer and, thus, makes it possible for people to own the experience. Making the ordinary extraordinary is what makes the old new again and creates emotional involvement in the event.

To participate fully and to experience the liturgy of the Word does not mean merely being able to see the book when the lector announces, “This is the Word of the Lord!” Participation means active listening and grasping the Word that is shared. Our former understanding of liturgical space as the house of God (Domus Dei), with its interest in sacred objects, needs to be enlarged by the ancient church’s sense of the liturgical space as the house of the church (Domus ecclesiae). When the community gathered, its priorities had to do with the community action. Experience is the primary symbol, not the book or the ambo where the book is placed or from which it is read.

Book and ambo are critical elements in the experience of proclamation. The sacred text, printed and bound with beauty and handled with reverence, is proclaimed at the ambo, the place that is the table of the Word of God. This table provides nourishment for the hunger of the assembly. Its form, scale, and materials establish its identity and dignity while providing balance and support in relation to the altar table.

Historically, the ambo was not a piece of furniture that evolved into a pulpit. Early Christian worship in the homes of community members placed the Scripture proclamation and homily in the midst of the assembly. Basilicas, which replaced home liturgy, had the presider (bishop) speak from the cathedra (chair) that was placed in the apse behind the altar. Other clergy used the sanctuary steps or a raised platform; it was this area that was the ambo. The ambo was a place, not a piece of furniture.

In the Middle Ages preaching often occurred outside of Sunday liturgy. This led to the development of the pulpit. As the book of Scripture used for preaching became smaller, the pulpit became larger. Eventually, the pulpit developed an overhead canopy that functioned as an acoustical soundboard, a necessary feature because the pulpit was so far removed from the congregation.

Until recently, the pulpit was overdecorated with multiple symbols and was large, often overshadowing the altar. It overwhelmed the preacher and functioned as a theatrical device meant to entertain the passive congregation.

Like the medieval book cover, the pulpit encouraged imagination through its decoration. Indeed, it became a liturgical “thing” separated from everything around it, an elaborate stage built up before the audience but separate from it. Very much like pews with closed ends that removed their occupants from everyone else, the pulpit was the stage for one person, separated from everyone else. The idea of active participation in a shared proclamation of Word was not central.

Although ambos are to be substantial in character, their design should be open so that the book and the proclaimer will be perceived as part of the gathered assembly. Environment and Art in Catholic Worship suggests reshaping the ambo as a symbol whose primary function is table of the Word: “Like the altar, it should be beautifully designed, constructed of fine materials and proportioned care, fully and simply for its function.” The liturgical documents do not suggest making the ambo look exactly like the altar. They encourage a clarity appropriate to its special function. Though both Word and Eucharist nourish, they have individual requirements in the way they do so.

The long tradition of the church as patron of the arts needs to be opened up again. When symbols are reshaped into vernacular forms, the community can make the symbols their own. The ambo, properly located and designed, can provide a sense of place for a new and lasting experience. Ambo should be part of the architectural space that provides an environment of clarity and excitement demanded by the symbols we use. The old is new and the ordinary extraordinary.

The Church Building as a Setting for Liturgical Action

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The following comments discuss the relationship of the design of the worship space to the actions that take place there. The function and significance of these actions provide the needed guidelines for liturgical architecture.

The church building and setting for the liturgical assembly. Nothing more, but nothing less. Liturgical worship happens in space, and space is shaped into place by the meaning people discover within it. Jews and Christians have shaped space into place by discovering that the Creator abides throughout creation. Christians especially can never forget the spatial concreteness the Incarnation entails. God did not become a movement, a concept, an ideal, or even a committee, but a man of flesh and bone with a parentage, friends, a language, a country, a home. He inhabited not just a time but places, streets, rooms, countrysides, and by his presence in the flesh he changed them all. The memory of this has never died because his continuing presence by grace, faith, and sacrament still does the same in the world through his body, which is the church, enfleshed locally in the liturgical assembly.

It goes counter to Christian instinct, therefore, that the place in which the church assembles should be devoid of all evidence of his presence or that this presence should be regarded as temporary, capricious, or discrete so as not to restrict him or inconvenience the assembly. He restricted himself by becoming incarnate, and the assembly’s only inconvenience is his real absence.

Raw space becomes liturgical place through the change his presence by grace, faith, and sacrament causes. Liturgical place is thus not a monument to the pastor’s tastes or the locale in which the assembly feels most comfortable. Jesus Christ’s incarnate presence caused notable discomfort even for those who loved him best, and he is reported to have resorted to violence on one occasion when faced with the obduracy of the temple clergy’s tastes. Liturgical place belongs to the assembly only because the space it occupies is first his. He alone makes it a place by specifying its meaning as distinct from all others. To this specification the assembly can only be obedient; for it the assembly can only pray even as it cooperates with him by faith in its specification.

What the church building shelters and gives setting for is the faithful assembly, the church, in all its rich diversity of orders from catechumen to penitent, from youngest server to eldest bishop. As it meets for worship of the Source and Redeemer of all, the assembly is the fundamental sacrament of God’s pleasure in Christ on earth. The eucharistic food and drink are the sacred symbol of this ecclesial reality, which Paul calls simply Christ’s body. Christian instinct has been to house this assembly as elegantly as possible, avoiding tents, bedrooms, and school basements.

The assembly uses its place to do something in. This is the liturgy, by which the assembly celebrates the nuptials of all things with their Creator. Because the celebration outstrips being merely an instruction, a pageant, a meditation, a preachment, or an act of therapy, the assembly, as a rule, has kept its place open for movement on the part of all. Furniture is used for a public purpose and for those who find it difficult to stand or move.

The strong and elemental openness of liturgical place makes for dynamism and interest. It is a vigorous arena for conducting public business in which petitions are heard, contracts entered into, relationships witnessed, orations declaimed, initiations consummated, vows taken, authority exercised, laws promulgated, images venerated, values affirmed, banquets attended, votes cast, the dead waked, the Word deliberated, and parades cheered. It is acoustically sonorous, rarely vacant of sound or motion. It possesses a certain disciplined self-confidence as the center of community life both sacred and secular. It is the Italian piazza, the Roman forum, the Yankee town green, Red Square moved under roof and used for the business of faith. It is not a carpeted bedroom where faith may recline privately with the Sunday papers.

Find the most serviceable places for the altar, font, and chair and leave them there. Altars on wheels, fonts that collapse, and presidential chairs that fold away do not free but neuter liturgical place. Since crucial values are perennial rather than disposable, they flock with usage to sustained focal points and thus help to reduce raw space into human place. Crucial values so incarnated become roots for people’s lives. Gymnasia rarely play a profound role in most people’s maintenance of a secure identity.

Altar and font normally should be fixed, elemental, and powerful in their simplicity, free-standing to allow access from all sides, and worthy of the assembly that surrounds them. The amount of space surrounding each should be scaled to the size of the assembly. Neither altar nor font should be so close to the other as to compete for attention or to confuse each other’s purpose, dignity, and quite different kinds of liturgy. The altar is a Table to dine upon. The font is a pool to bathe in, a womb to be born from, a tomb to be buried in. Bathing and dining areas are rarely found in the same room, except in churches.

The presidential chair should be modest but not trivial. It is best located not primarily in reference to the altar but to the assembly, perhaps in an open area in the nave of the church facing both the lectern and altar along with the rest of the assembly. This would shift the ceremonial focus of the liturgy, except for the eucharistic prayer, into the midst of the assembly itself, where it seems to belong given the nature of Christian worship. Outside baptism and the eucharistic banquet, the form this worship normally takes is that of a liturgy of the Word in which the Word is heard and responded to by the whole assembly, ministers included. Locating the ministerial area and the president’s chair in the midst of the assembly may thus be the most versatile arrangement.

As the name implies, the lectern is a reading stand rather than a shrine competing with font and altar. The shrine of the gospel book is the altar. The shrine of the gospel itself is the life of the faithful assembly that celebrates the Word liturgically. The gospel book, which is “sacramental” of all this, is constantly in motion, being carried, held, opened, read from, closed, and laid rather than left somewhere behind votive lights or under lock and key.

The altar and the baptismal font are the primary spatial foci of the liturgy. The altar Table is kept free of contraptions such as elaborate bookstands, pots, cruets, plastic things, electrical apparatus, aids to piety, and the efforts of floral decorators. The book of the Word and the sacrament of the Word are adornment enough.

The baptismal area is kept free of rumpled vestments, cotton wads, stacks of reading material, and folding chairs. The pool itself is kept clean. It contains what is called “living water” not because things grow in it but because it moves to give life to those who lie in death’s bonds.

Liturgical things are designed for the assembly’s purpose. The church building houses the assembly. It is neither a museum for ecclesiastical art nor a pious attic. All it contains should possess a sober splendor congruent with the assembly and its sacred intent.

Bread and wine should be just that, not plastic disks and grape juice, not corn chips and lemonade. The assembly uses bread and wine as food and drink in the Eucharist. These should be present in form, quality, and quantity to correspond with a banquet’s usual liberality, keeping in mind, however, that this banquet’s purpose is not to fill bellies but to give thanks to the Source and Redeemer of all things. The Eucharist, like the Supper that remains its prototype, fills one with more than food, rejoices hearts with more than wine.

Cups, plates, flagons, and bread boxes should be ample. Cluttering the altar with many small cups is logistically and symbolically inelegant. Use one cup of some significance together with a clear glass or crystal flagon large enough to fill smaller cups for Communion later. The same principle holds for the bread plate: Use a single large one from which bread can be transferred to smaller plates for Communion later. The Eucharist that becomes a fast-food operation might be compared to a baptism that proceeds from eye-droppers or aerosol cans.

Vestments are sacred garments rather than costumes or billboards. They are meant to designate certain ministers in their liturgical function by clothing creatures in beauty. Their symbolic strength comes not from their decoration but from their texture, form, and color. The basic vestment of major ministers is the stole, which bishops and presbyters wear around the neck and deacons wear over the left shoulder. No other ministers wear stoles in the Roman Rite. Ministers ordained to lesser orders may wear albs. When laypersons carry out liturgical duties it is more fitting that they wear their own clothes as members of the assembly, which is no mean dignity in itself. Dalmatic, chasuble, cope, and miter can be handsome garments and should be worn as complements to the assembly whose purpose at worship is never merely utilitarian but festive.

Books are means rather than ends. Even so, they should be worthy of the Word they record and of those among whom the Word has taken flesh.

Good images are neither accidents nor fantasies but knowledgeable accomplishments that go beyond what can be observed either now or in time past. As John Meagher says, they are meant to evoke the presence of mysteries the mind has glimpsed, to remind us of the ancestral heritage of worship, to tease us out of mere thought lest we forget that history does not fence in truth, that we may not substitute critical understanding for reverence, that our knowledge is not so complete or accomplished as we often assume, and above all that our memories mix with our longings and our joys to put us in touch with our deepest sense of home.

Churches are not carpeted. While rugs and runners may occasionally enhance liturgical place by adding festal color, carpeting in quantity wearies the eye and muffles sound. Even with a good electronic sound system, which is a rarity, a carpeted church often has all the acoustical vigor of an elevator. The ambiance of a carpeted church, moreover, is too soft for the liturgy, which needs hardness, sonority, and a certain bracing discomfort, much like the Gospel itself. Liturgical ambiance must challenge, for one comes to the liturgy to transact the public business of death and life rather than to be tucked in with fables and featherpuffs. The liturgy challenges what Quentin Crisp calls the general notion of Christianity as a consolatory religion, as something nice that Jesus of Nazareth could say to those who turn to him for comfort.

Furniture is significant and kept to a minimum. Pews, which entered liturgical place only recently, nail the assembly down, proclaiming that the liturgy is not a common action but a preachment perpetuated upon the seated, an ecclesiastical opera done by virtuosi for a paying audience. Pews distance the congregation, disenfranchise the faithful, and rend the assembly. Filling a church with immoveable pews is similar to placing bleachers directly on a basketball court: It not only interferes with movement but changes the event into something entirely different. Pews are never mentioned in Roman rubrics, nor is there any record that being without pews has ever killed Christians in significant numbers.

Banners are decorative images, not ideological broadsides or opportunities for tricky piety. Rather than a festal gesture for the assembly, banners often are a form of disposable ecclesiastical art bearing disposable thoughts which foster disposable piety. Such banners should be disposed of.