symbols

Questions to Ask about Your Worship Space

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This article asks the kinds of questions that force congregations to think about the power of their worship space to form worship that is faithful to the gospel and meaningful to all participants. The questions are asked in light of the Reformed tradition, but can be modified to reflect the specific theological commitments of any given worshiping community.

The sanctuary is the setting for most corporate worship experiences. Either by design or by interest, the worship committee often finds itself involved in the custodial concerns and mechanics of presenting meaningful worship in that space. While mechanical concerns are not to be ignored, theological messages presented by the setting need to receive attention as well. The worship committee can be the bridge between the congregation’s level of understanding of worship and the clergy’s role in utilizing the symbolic in response and instruction.

Take time to look objectively at your worship setting. Do the furnishings and architecture and symbols represent your congregation’s theology of worship? Do they tell a faith story or reflect socioeconomic values? Does the building focus on God, or has the building become the thing that we worship?

The Room. What message is communicated by the room itself? Does it generate a sense of awe or a sense of community? Do you want it to be a place for responding in worship—or a place for observing worship? What can be done to make a tiny church feel awe-filled? What can a large worship space do to provide a setting for “community”? Does the church with movable seating communicate an active, alive faith, or careless disregard for tradition? Most of all, is what you see in your sanctuary consistent with the theology of worship?

The Pulpit. Where is the pulpit located? Is the clergy “removed from” or “among” the people? Does its placement say what you believe about the relationship of clergy and laity?

The Table. Is it clear that the Lord’s Table is a table and not an altar? Is the Table intentionally placed either “removed from” or “among” the people? Would there be a powerful message in changing its location on some occasion? Does the congregation understand the symbolism of whatever arrangement or placement you are utilizing or tolerating?

The Baptismal Font. Where is your baptismal font or bowl located? Calvin would have placed it near the pulpit (the Word) and the Lord’s Table to indicate the unity of the three. Some of us, on the other hand, have begun to appreciate the placement of the font by the entrance to the sanctuary as symbolic of baptism as an entrance rite into the life of the church. What can be communicated if the baptismal font or bowl is very small or usually stored in a cupboard in the kitchen?

Other Visual Symbols. Are your symbols, including the cross, selected and placed with an eye to the message? Are the symbols, especially banners, ever changed, changed seasonally, weekly, or only when convenient? Have memorial gifts distorted the faith story? What is the value of floral arrangements? Can they enhance the liturgical year in addition to reflecting the seasons of the calendar? Does the lighting of a candle or candles, especially a paschal candle, have symbolic value in your congregation or is the lighting a housekeeping matter understood only by clergy?

Recently I heard of a church building program in which every design decision was made with an eye to its potential value for teaching and experiencing the faith. I also visited a sanctuary in which the baptismal font was padlocked and the chancel cross so small as to be nearly imperceptible. I am curious what a caring worship committee might do with each of these “problems.” In the first case, the power of the theology of the building and furnishings cannot be sustained if the symbols are neither taught nor space utilized consistently with their understanding. In the case of the second church, it is necessary to recognize the power of symbols for everyone in order to correct the messages now being communicated unintentionally. In careful planning of new worship space, the potential for empowering or at least stimulating the congregation by design and furnishing is immense. But the constraints of the already-designed or misdesigned facility require even more of the committee if the building is to say what we believe.

It is God that empowers our faith journey, but the use of the space has the power to detract or enhance the journey. The issues will not produce ultimately the right answers but will assist the faithful in understanding. We must take worship seriously enough to not miss opportunities to teach the faith and to carefully call it out in all that we do.

The “Public Language” of Church Architecture

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Church buildings should be designed with consideration of how the general public will relate to the space they define. Church architecture is one language by which the witness of the church may be made known. Church buildings may be valuable to a community both as a space for communal activity and as a symbol of what community stands for.

In a few pages of his classic book The Shape of the Liturgy, Gregory Dix described what it might have been like to come together for Christian worship in second-century Rome. It is very, very early on a Sunday morning, which was a working day in Rome. The setting is a somewhat generous home—typically a series of spaces surrounding the central atrium which might be open or covered. The tablinium, which is a couple of steps up, is the place of the bishop and elders. Others mostly assemble in the atrium, which has its pool, the impluvium, and the cartibulum, a small, blocky Table. There are many elements of the event that endure to this day and others that we might well recover.

It is noteworthy that the architectural setting had a humane and domestic character instead of a monumental one. This was quite fitting for the Christian concept of worship; the assembly was a sort of family reunion. In sharp contrast to most other religions of the time, Christian worship was very much a communal occasion and not an exercise in personal piety.

Another interesting thing about the place is that though it had architectural dignity, it was what we would call a “secular” place; the architecture itself had no ecclesiastical features. For as Justin Martyr said in the year 155 when Rusticus, who was the prefect of Rome, asked him where the Christians worshiped, “The God of Christians is not circumscribed by place, but is invisible and fills all heaven and earth. He is worshiped and glorified by the faithful anywhere.”

A third noteworthy characteristic is that the place was one of functional variability; it was not used exclusively for worship. Clement of Alexandria wrote, “We have no temples and no altars.” Typically, the structure was sturdy and durable; but the artifacts of worship, the lamps for reading in the early dawn, the books, fabrics, and vessels were portable and kept in storage between times.

These are qualities that we can, and I think should accept as continuities between the way early Christians conceived their places of worship and the way we conceive ours. Nevertheless, there was one very radical difference between worship in those early centuries and ours. Theirs were hidden from the public eye. Even when it was no secret, it was private. Neither the liturgy itself nor the structure that surrounded it was open to the public. There are circumstances like that in our world too, and those Christians who must worship in secret must feel a particular kinship with the early Christians.

But our condition is quite different and much happier. We may have if we wish, public worship; and we may build whatever we need and can. Their service and their public witness, charisma, and kerygma, were apart from the liturgy and outside the place of assembly; ours need not be separate.

Buildings and Symbol Systems

What are the implications of all these similarities and differences for those who design and fund the buildings of the church?

What I have to say emerges from the fact that architecture is not only a useful shelter but language. It is a silent language, a symbol system through which Christians can communicate. They speak of themselves, for one thing, reminding themselves Sunday by Sunday about the body of Christ—who they are and what they hope to be. And they speak to other people—the public—about the household of faith and what it is that binds this household together as believers and as disciples.

We are not, by the grace of God, a secret society. We address the public. One thing we have to say is that we receive life as a gift from the Father, and through the Son, forgiveness. It is only reasonable then that Christians respond in the way they design their structures. People who receive gifts of grace and love respond, if they are grateful, with a kind of vivid joy. And so there ought to be a kind of liveliness and joy in the language of our architecture.

There are a million ways of accomplishing this, and I can’t begin to tell you how. But I can say something about what a church building must not be. It must not be a dull, banal, prosaic, commonplace, architectural nothing. It must not be ugly. It must not seem to be something done only out of duty, or stinginess, a cowardly workaday drudgery. It should be a gift not in payment for but in response to a gift. A beautiful thing.

And of course, it must not only be a gift of the congregation to itself, but it must also be a gift from the family of God to others. For if we have received the gifts of life and forgiveness, and if we want to acknowledge the relentlessly loving God, we must be relentlessly loving in turn to the people about us—even in the way we build our buildings. Bonhoeffer described Jesus as being “the man for others” and said that it was only proper that his followers should also be for others.

So, if there is ever the impulse to say, “After all, it’s only a building for ourselves so let’s keep it down and not get too excited about it,” think again. Architecture speaks, and the language is public.

On the other hand, if there ever is the impulse to say, “Let’s build a great monument with a fine tower, so people all around can see it and say, ‘That’s where the Disciples go to church; they surely let themselves be known,’ ” think again. Is that tower just another self-serving billboard?

A Design for Others

The best way I can propose that Christians acknowledge God’s gifts is to approach the work as a few of the congregations we have worked with have. They have said to themselves: “We want a building that isn’t just for us; we want a building through which we can supply some of the unfilled needs of the community we belong to. It will be so planned and so available that it can be used for other purposes besides ours. And this will be our gift to the people around us.”

What that meant, of course, is that they didn’t build what we usually think of as traditional, single-use “sanctuaries.” They grafted onto the oldest tradition instead and built places that could have varied uses. A Catholic parish agreed that if they were in earnest about being hospitable to non-Catholics, they ought to avoid the typical array of Catholic devotional accouterments. So there are no holy-water stoups fastened to the walls (though there is a great vessel of running water at the door); there are no sculptured or painted stations of the cross (which exist instead only as signs in the floor along one wall); the only crucifix is one brought in on a staff when Mass begins; the stained glass is beautiful, but has no pictures of iconographic symbols; the tabernacle can be veiled with a screen; and the liturgical furnishings are movable, including the altar-Table. It is a place just about as secular as the house where the early Romans assembled. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a fine place for the Mass. We call the place not a church, nor a sanctuary, nor a nave. And it surely isn’t an auditorium. We call it a centrum—a fine hall for various kinds of assemblies of people, including liturgical assemblies.

A couple of other centrums we have designed have been used as banquet halls, even for such things as political dinners. Why not? They are noble rooms and anything that happens in them is made nobler by the environment. So a double gift is given: a place for the public event and an environment that bestows upon the event a dignity it wouldn’t otherwise have.

What the church says in this public language is what it ought to be saying: “We are the people for others. And even our buildings are intended to be vehicles of service to others.”

Symbols of Roots and Responsibility

Here is another sentence from the public language: Christians live in history, between memory and hope. Our present life is part of a thread that traces back to Jesus and beyond, and it will be spun on from us and through us into an unpredictable future. We have roots in the past, which we treasure.

Architecture supplies a visual and useful symbol of rootage and continuity. Human history is not at the end chaotic, aleatoric, a matter of chance and accident. We may not have very complete or secure knowledge of the order of time, but we do believe in order, and in destiny. And we do believe that when God gives us the stewardship of a piece of land and the means to build a piece of the world, we must do it responsibly.

What does “responsibly” mean? It means that we build coherent structures that are meant to survive because we believe in history. Buildings that can be symbols of our sense of time or our hope, and a good heritage for future generations.

We tend to look at old buildings in two ways. Sometimes we think of them as trouble; irritating, intractable, outworn candidates for the headache ball. And then there are those we cherish. They wear their datestones like medals of honor. What’s the difference? Generally, the first kind of buildings wasn’t really good even when they were new, and they got worse. The second kind was done well and beautifully. So, we adopt them as symbols of our roots and history.

But, one may ask, why should we strain ourselves to build well when the future is so insecure, change is so certain, and it is such a burden to do things well? San Antonio is a great city to supply an answer. For here in San Antonio, we have five missions built by the Spaniards 250 years ago. They built simply, durably, and beautifully. Today those missions are the treasures of the whole populace. They supply a heritage even to people who haven’t been in the city very long and aren’t Roman Catholics. They are occasions for wonder and pleasure, and a sense of rootage in a transient and fractured society. And what if they are no longer place of worship? Those ancient Spaniards gave a gift to more people in that architecture than any of them might have thought possible.

Accommodating Change

As Christians, we live in a context of change. We pray for change daily when we pray “thy kingdom come.” We bivouac, we live in contingency, we look for reformation, for renewal, for growth, and for change. How then should the language of architecture deal with this and at the same time deal with permanence, durability, and roots?

If we start with the conception of the early Christians and of the centrum, rather than with the conventional single-use ecclesiastically oriented place of worship, incompatibility disappears.

A centrum is a piece of secular, earthy (not other-worldly) architecture. It is essentially a beautiful assembly hall, intended for people, but not shaped around any one particular configuration of people and furniture. There aren’t any ecclesiastical motifs in the architecture. It’s just a nice part of the world, and a durable, permanent one capable of accommodating change.

Consider what is likely to change. Even if the centrum’s major use—perhaps for the time its only use—is worship, we know the patterns of worship will change. The numbers of people vary, the kinds of liturgical or paraliturgical events vary. And each condition of use has its own proper configuration of people and furniture, changing with the occasion and changing with the passage of time.

So in a centrum, we may accommodate change—even invite change—because almost all the furnishings (as in the early Roman house-church) are movable.

It is these things, these artifacts, that make a place convenient to worship. And their portability and changeability is the symbol that our life as Christians is provisional, contingent, a life of becoming as well as life of being. The people and the artifacts turn the place into a place of prayer.

Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey once said, “The beginning of all practicality in politics is a vision of things as they ought to be.” I think the statement is equally valid if you substitute the word architecture for politics. For like politics, architecture is a reflection of people’s self-understanding, and architecture, like politics, is the art of the possible. The beginning of all practicality in architecture is a vision of things as they ought to be. I’m going to suggest such a vision.

Somewhere in America

Imagine a fine big room that is vacant except for chairs arranged on three sides of a platform which is made up of sturdy, but movable modules. Someone brings in some plants and flowers in pots and vases. Some of these are put beside a pool of running water near the main entrance, some at other places around the room. The custodian hoists a great banner behind the platform. It is vermilion and white and has two words on it because it is Pentecost: “Fire! Fire!” He wheels out a cart full of hymnbooks and places this cart just outside the main doors. He opens the doors wide.

Some people come, take their books, and find seats. Ushers appear. More people come. The organist begins to play. A procession forms. Two people bring in a rug and roll it out on the platform. Four men carry in, shoulder high, a fine Table. Two candle bearers bring lighted candles and set them down. A deacon brings a colored tablecloth with a Pentecost motif. Another one comes with a fine book on a pillow and puts it on the Table (the service book). Then the choir comes in, each with a candlestick (because it is Pentecost), and they part at the door and spread the candles all around the perimeter of the room. Then comes a cross-bearer, with a staff and cross that is set in a position where it hovers above the heads of the people. And behind come the ministers who take their place.

The verbal part of the service then begins. But the service really began when the room began to be transformed (converted?) by the people and things that make it a place of Christian celebration. The movement and action aren’t over yet. When the time comes to read the Scripture, another small procession begins—two candle bearers and the bearer of a fine and large Bible. Nothing trivial is to happen here, like reading the Scripture from the back of the service folder. And when the Communion service begins, an elder brings a white linen to spread on the Table over the colored cloth, and the Communion elements are then brought to the Table too. At the end of the service, while the people are still singing, the procession reverses, and the centrum again becomes just another very fine part of God’s world, available for other worthy purposes.

So, architecture is a witness to being and becoming, certitude and contingency, the general presence of God in the world and the special presence of Christ in his body, the church.

A Noble Speech

There are a great many other things that this kind of approach to the language of architecture can reveal about the church. But now I ask you to think about the two words, public language, in a different context. I take my clue from the language of speech.

We have seen in the last decades some remarkable changes in the texts of worship. For instance, the Roman Catholics switched from Latin to English or other local speech in the liturgy. That’s the sharpest change perhaps and a very admirable one. But there have been others: an Episcopal priest wrote a book of prayers titled Are You Running with Me, Jesus? One of my sons came back from camp a few years ago with a new Table prayer: “Rub-a-dub, thanks for the grub! Yeah, God!” and another came back singing, “Be present at our Table, Lord” to the tune of the Gillette razor jingle.

Perhaps you may have the same fears as I—that the public language of our worship is being depreciated. The intent has had a certain validity. The artificialities of the public language of worship had separated religion into a discreet category of life. The language had no currency. So it has been contended that worship had no relevancy.

Something similar has been happening in the architecture of worship. The artificiality of the Gothic and Georgian was held under siege by a generation of so-called modern architects. Georgian and Gothic are pretty well gone, and good riddance. But the old styles were followed by uncertain, sometimes brash, sometimes capricious new forms. “Get with it, get hep,” many of them seem to be saying, and saying it too loudly. And more recently there has been a current that seems to use domesticity not as a paradigm but as a model. “The church is like a family,” they seem to say, “obviously the church building must be an oversize rambler.” Not long ago I was in a big new structure where the interior surfaces were wallpapered. And we’ve all probably seen new church buildings filled with the same modish chrome and plastic chairs that we see in restaurants and hotels. I’m all for using chairs, but not just any stackable commercial chair.

There is a difference between the everyday language and a public language. The everyday vernacular is surely acceptable for conversation and for private prayer. But liturgy is not conversation, and it is not private prayer. It is proclamation, or praise, or common prayer. Public language has its own style, cadence, and dignity. It is not esoteric, but it verges on poetry.

Some may object for fear that I am backsliding to the ecclesiastical jargon, the “language of Canaan,” with its circumlocutions, its pious embroidery, and its indirections and pecksniffery—the kind of speech that substitutes “he died” with “he forsook the fragile tabernacle of this world.” We’ve all heard this kind of quaint euphemism that weakens thought and camouflages reality. Architecturally, we do the same thing when we take the Latin cross—which is an image of the instrument of execution on which Jesus died—and camouflage it with sweet decorations or distort it into something elegant and pretty until it is no longer a symbol of the real tragedy and terror.

What we must have is a public language, both of speech and architecture, that is direct and real, noble and gracious. Listen to this: O God, for as muche as without thee, we are not able to please thee: Graunte that the workyng of thy mercie, may in all thynges direct and rule our heartes; through Jesus Christ our Lorde. Terse, unsentimental, rhythmic, full of feeling.

This is not the everyday vernacular. It is a public language, as good today as in 1549. The thee’s and thou’s have no inflated value, of course; you is just as good.

The virtue of Bishop Cranmer’s prayers is not that they are ecclesiastical jargon, they aren’t; they are a public language. For public language exists also in the secular world. For example: “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” That’s public language just as surely as Cranmer’s. Public language in speech and architecture is quite distinct from the vernacular. It is secular, but it is not commonplace prose.

Bridges Are Needed

Can we make the architecture of our church buildings a public language? Neither ecclesiastical nor trivial, but direct, real, earthy, secular, vigorous, and at the same time noble, gracious, and beautiful? How shall it happen?

Clearly, it won’t happen by accident. It won’t happen if we try to get by with half-skilled, half-educated, half-sensitized, and halfhearted designers. The distinction is much too subtle for mediocre sensibilities. We need the very best professional help we can get. There is one way toward the goal.

But there are aspects of this work that we can’t expect many architects—even the best designers and most responsible professionals—to bring, ready-made, to the work. We won’t find many of them very sophisticated in church finance. We won’t find that they know much about church policy and the processes of decision-making in church affairs. And we may find that they have not thought any more deeply about worship and theology and Christian piety than the typical minister has about the subtleties and complexities of architectural aesthetics and technology.

A bridge is usually needed. And that bridge is the consultant. A consultant can widen the people’s horizons regarding architecture and deepen the understanding of the architect in the areas of churchmanship, worship, and theology—and in the relationship of these things to architecture.

The issue before us, of course, is not so much how we get where we want to be; there are various routes. But we must clarify our visions. And I think that if we are careful about that, we will find that we are rediscovering and recovering some of the most ancient patterns of church life and grafting onto the most elemental traditions of our faith.

How Symbols Speak

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Symbols, including liturgical symbols, communicate to us on many levels. This article explores the profound nature of symbolic communication, based on the approach of scholar Paul Ricoeur, and offers suggestions for how liturgical symbols can be made to speak more clearly and profoundly.

The whole program of the liturgical revival may be summed up with the apt phrase used by Robert Hovda in a variety of places: “Let the symbols speak.” We long for our communities to be clear about the great central signs and actions that bear Christianity and speak it authentically to our time. We want to “unshrivel” these symbols and let them stand forth, ample, gracious, and full, occupying the whole time and space of the liturgical assembly’s gathering. We want to see anew that these symbols are the actions of a whole community, not objectified things under the control of a clerical few. And we want to learn anew how to take seriously the rich implications of these symbols as they propose to us new ways to see ourselves, our world, and our cultures held under the great mercy of God.

A growing ecumenical consensus tells us what these authentic symbols of Christianity are: they are a people washed and anointed into common life; they are that people gathered for the reading and interpretation of the ancient Scriptures; they are that people eating and drinking at a table of thanksgiving; and they are the lesser—but still important—signs that link individual or family life to the assembly’s symbolic purpose or reconcile alienated persons into the assembly.

We do not necessarily have such wide agreement on what exactly it would mean to present these symbols in their unshriveled fullness, or to build and to live following their implications. How large shall the pool of washing be? How does the speech of the assembly come to be marked with the same kind of symbolic authenticity we are seeking for the enacted signs? What does the communal character of the action mean for the nature of leadership and authority in the assembly? What are the links between the symbolic vision of the liturgy and social criticism? Just what is it that the symbols are saying?

We are working on these questions, and working hard, but the underlying question is always the same and always the most important: how can we foster this renewal of our symbols and our life? Or to say it again, what exactly shall we do to let the symbols speak?

Ricoeur’s Criteriology

A variety of scholarly analyses exist to assist us in this work by helping us determine how symbols do their “speaking” at all, how they mean. One of the most useful of these is the phenomenology or “criteriology” of symbols found in the introduction to Part 1 of Paul Ricoeur’s classic study, The Symbolism of Evil. The discussion occupies only a few pages, but a reflection on the structures of meaning proposed there may be very helpful for our task of letting the symbols speak.

According to Ricoeur, in every authentic symbol three dimensions are present: the cosmic, the oneiric (of or relating to dreams), and the poetic. A symbol is (a) a thing in the world in which the sacred is manifested to our community; (b) a thing which then figures in our dreams or, more generally, in our own psychic histories; and (c) a thing around which words and songs and names gather powerful meanings. Only on the basis of these dimensions or functions of a symbol ought one proceed to distinguish yet a fourth function or dimension, the reflective. A symbol is also (d) a complex of meanings that may “give rise to thought,” that may feed concept and doctrine.

Thus, to take one example, from earliest times the sun and the moon have presented themselves to some human groups as the basic—indeed, the most primary—manifestations of the sacred. Night and day and the cycles of seasons and tides experienced in relationship to the cycles and positions of the sun and the moon made those heavenly bodies available as symbols of the very cosmic order itself. To encounter the sun (or, in a transposition, the moon) was to encounter that beyond our world which held our world together. Moreover, the burning, blinding fire of the sun was an analog to the human experience that real order always has to do with danger restrained or transformed. The sun rises. The world has a center. And if all is well, in balance with the moon and water, the sun does not burn us up.

Sun and moon rise also in our dreams. the terrify us or they save us. They give us light for hunting or for working or for living. Their duality becomes the focus for our experience of father and mother and so of our own sexual identity. We fly with them. We become the center of meaning and order. But not quite. We hunt with the moon or are hunted. We reign with the sun and are burned up.

So the poets have a great resonance in us when they begin to sing. And their words and epithets and metaphors make even deeper the meaning we see in objects in the sky or the material that is interpreted in our dreams. Their words seem to carry the tribal order and our own psychic history. The word is itself the thing—the symbol—it names. “Great Light,” the poets sing. Or “Father” or “Mother.” They sing the tales of Phaethon or Icarus or Diana. Or they make a day the first day or the second and name it after one of the great lights. Then when the sun or moon rises on the tribe’s horizon or in our dreams, there is the name and the story and the order of the week.

What comes first—cosmos or dream or word? We do not really know, and Ricoeur is not proposing a history. His structure simply proposes that it is useful to see that all three aspects are present in any symbol, and in primary symbols, all three—the cosmic order, the dream power, and the poetic word—are the same. Of course, what is meant by the dream power, the “oneiric,” is not just the functioning of the symbol in our dreams; it is all that the symbol does in our individual psychic lives. For us now the symbol does not even exist as a “thing” apart from the word, but the word interprets and makes available a powerful cosmic and psychic experience.

A New Poetics

But in the Judeo-Christian tradition, at least, the poets speak on: the great lights, they say, and the days and weeks they rule are creatures, made by God. God—a word for that giver of order who is beyond all names and all natural necessities—may fly and burn and reign like the sun, may rise as the sun of righteousness. But God is not the sun. And, for Christians, Sunday is the order-giving first day now, chiefly because it is the day of assembly around the risen Christ, not the risen sun. Still, in this new poetics, the old cosmic and oneiric powers still resonate, bringing the order and the fears suggested by the sun to names we use for God or for the assembly’s day. And classically the positions of the sun and the moon were used to determine the dates of the great feasts on which the story was told of the salvation of God who is beyond the sun. So classic iconography has sun and moon on either side of the image of the crucified.

Surely, among Christians, further discourse on the doctrines of monotheism and of creation will be assisted by including some reflection on the cosmic, oneiric, and poetic functions of the symbolism of sun and moon, as well as on the transformation of this symbolism in the new poetics of the Bible. The symbol, says Ricoeur, gives rise to thought, and the thought is illuminated by rerooting it in its symbolic matrix. What Christians mean by “monotheism” is not so much a philosophical position derived from the experience of one sun in the sky and the suppression of the symbol of the moon, as it is the event that happens, in the conception of God and the world, when the new poetics says: “God made sun and moon!” The “event” that happens in the poetry, this revolutionary and surprising turn, must always be borne in mind in reflection on doctrine, or the doctrine is distorted into philosophy or ideology.

It is interesting, of course, to anyone who cares about symbols, to note that while we are all taught that the universe does not circle around either the earth or the sun, we still so mark our days and seasons with the passages of sun and moon as to bring to them, to quote Ricoeur again, a post-critical “second naiveté.” It is no wonder, then, that homiletic calls to hope for the sun of righteousness are still so moving to us, or that the Christmas and Hanukkah feasts that occur in the dark time of the sun’s return still have such a hold on our culture, quite apart from their Christian or Jewish content, their “new poetics.” Teachers and preachers and liturgists should note that even in this scientific age there is still room for the surprise, the discovery, the joy of the biblical poetics. “This light you long for at Christmas, lighting fires and candles and tree-lights against the darkness, midwinter protest—this light of order and peace already shines in the darkness itself. Christ born, God comes among our darkness and injustice and death—this is the sun. It shines in the bread in your hands, the cup at your lips.”

Basic Christian Symbols

But neither sun nor moon, though they have determined festal dates and given a name to the assembly day and lent imagery to our preaching and our hymns, is the primary symbol of the liturgy. A bath, an assembly-for-the-Word, and a shared meal—these are primary. Can Ricoeur’s schema of “cosmos, dream, word” illuminate these symbols and help us to see what we are doing in letting them “speak?” Or, rather, can we apply to these primary symbols of the assembly the adaptation of Ricoeur’s schema that I have used here: cosmic meaning, psychic power, poetic names and songs; then the new poetics of the Bible and so the symbols as the grounds for concept and doctrine?

Yes.

Take the symbol meal. Many communities of human beings have encountered a cosmic revelation of the sacred in a laden table: the food represents the cooperation of the fruitful land or the giving forest with human culture and work; the food means the survival of the tribe or family, the circle of shared eating, against famine and death. Because of these meanings, the food of a meal comes to signify more than its momentary utilitarian value. It stands for peaceful order and life; indeed, it carries intimations of a larger order than that enjoyed by this circle eating now. The symbol meal is used to integrate others into the community or to give an occasion for the enactment of secondary symbols that also manifest something of what we think to be this universal order: who eats first? who is admitted? what foods are there? what is the order of eating? The power of the symbol is heightened, of course, because it tames and transforms its opposite. We eat to live. But just so death is suggested: without eating we would die, and even now our life depends on the death of plants and animals which the forest or our agriculture have given us. In eating we are at the edge, the limit, of our possibilities. We know ourselves to be contingent, dependent, on that which is outside us—so we are before the sacred.

I also eat and drink in my dreams. I eat the tree or am eaten by the beast. I drink the magic cup or the stream that is the beloved. I come to a room that has been prepared for me or I am embarrassed or terrified at a common meal. Such might be images in anyone’s dreams. Eating or being eaten, slaking thirst or being poisoned, being terrified or richly delighted at a common meal—it is no wonder that there should be such oneiric themes since, generally in my psychic life, I face in hunger my limit, my death. And my earliest knowledge of another, and so of my emergent self, was at eating, was looking up across the breast at one who responded to my hunger. Eating, then, has always been communal. At the same time, it has always been powerfully, personally intimate. My contingency says: perhaps in that food there is order and peace for me.

And the poet sings. There are songs at the meal, telling what the tribe or community knows to be most true and using the order suggested by the meal as the occasion to tell it. There are histories and tales and stories of other meals—stories of fears and hopes and necessary labor—which thereby become part of what is eaten. Words are said to interpret the course of the meal, and names are created for the food and for the meal itself, as the singers broaden and complicate the reference of the cosmic symbol and deepen the material of my dreams. The words, the eating and the dreaming are one “thing,” one powerful symbol.

God’s Surprise

That “thing” is material for the biblical poetics; indeed, says the faith, it is material for the very grace of God to speak to us an unexpected mercy. So, for Jews and Christians, God is the source of food, and the principal words of the meal are words of thanksgiving. Such thanksgiving witnesses to an order of the world—“dominion of God” is one major metaphor in the meal prayers that transcends the security of the tribe or family or nation. Eating and the words are one “thing”: they are thanksgiving. And there are stories and songs at the meals, stories of God’s great mercy for poor people, and mercy making this people free. The meals themselves become witnesses to the covenant with this God. The people do not die; they eat and drink with God. These are covenant meals and sacrificial meals and festal meals and the Passover meal and the promise of the final, great, nation-feeding meal on the holy mountain.

The old cosmic, oneiric, and poetic resonances are all still around—the hope for land and culture to be united in order, the longing for life-giving food, the inclusion of references to death. But now they are surprised: God is the giver of land and culture and hope and life; the gift is to all peoples, and the real order is not given by our too early, foreclosing, frequently murderous “order.”

Still, the biblical surprise goes on. Jesus eats meals of the dominion of God and eats them with outsiders and excluded ones. Jesus’ own death is interpreted by a meal. Finally, the community’s meal, whereby it means to gather its gathering of many lost and poor ones into an assembly to witness to God’s order, receives Jesus’ witness, his death and risen life, as its principal food. And already in the letters of Paul and James, Christians begin the long critical process continuing until today, which asks whether the meal sufficiently represents the new order and justice of God. Eating and drinking, words of thanksgiving, Jesus’ witness, his body and blood, a community of outsiders made the people of God—these, by God’s grace, are all one thing.

The old cosmic, oneiric, and poetic references have been received and broken and reshaped. There is no salvation, finally, in our dreams or in our ancient symbols, no hope beyond our own necessities and projections. But in surprising grace, God saves all that we are—our hopes and our fears and even our dreams and symbols and stories.

Much of the same sketch could be made of water or of the symbolic complex word-in-assembly. So, for example, water is met as the cosmic order, as chaos tamed, as the source of fruitfulness. It is dreamt about as drowning or birth, as washing or sex. And stories are told of the community that lives by the water, defeats the water, survives the water, finds and drinks the water. Such water is received in the biblical poetics and then in Jewish and Christian rituals. But now, for Christians, its full force is broken open at a new thing—order and birth and the slaking of thirst where we thought there was only death, in the midst of human life in this world. God comes among us to share our lot and our death, and that sharing is washed over us to make us a new people, witnesses to God’s order, alive with God’s life.

And so word-in-assembly has been, as with the ancient reading of Enuma elish at the new year, the creation of the world each year afresh: people gathered around ritual word was a symbol of the cosmos. It has been oracle and the hope for a word for me. And it has been stories and songs of a people gathered to hear proclaimed the great charter or the fearful royal decree. In biblical poetics, it is the assembly of Israel to hear God’s word, God’s law; it is the people being in the covenant; it is the final assembly of all the nations. And then it has become, in the great surprise, the assembly of this collection of folk today to hear the word, to hear Jesus Christ risen, “beginning at Moses and all the prophets.”

Implications

Such reflections as these might follow from Ricoeur’s criteriology. And, indeed, much more could be said for each of the levels of meaning and each of the primary symbols of the Christian assembly. But this much is enough to suggest some answers to the questions we posed in the beginning. The pool should be very large, so large as to evoke the cosmic and oneiric references. The speech of the assembly, taught by the biblical poetics, should function symbolically more than didactically so that it keeps alive cosmic, oneiric, and poetic resonances while bringing them into a new crisis. The critique of order at the meal must continue with a new emphasis on the breaking of false authority and the welcoming of outsiders to the center. These must become part of what the symbols are saying.

Finally, this schema of symbolic meaning itself proposes three theses that can guide our thinking about renewal:

  1. The primary symbols in the assembly need to be recovered as full signs that readily evoke the cosmic, oneiric, and poetic. In such a fuller presence these symbols will be better able to evoke ourselves and our hopes for the world, our sense of humanity located in a cosmos, our fears, and failures.
  2. But we are not about a new paganism; there is no great hope in our symbols and dreams, but rather in these greatly evoked and greatly broken in the poetics and grace of God. The recovery of the symbols needs to be accompanied by a profound recovery of biblical catechesis and preaching, of mystagogy into the surprise of Jesus Christ. He is the bread and the water and the Word.
  3. This twofold recovery will protect us from a continuation of the use of symbols as mere illustrations of doctrine or as proposals of ideology. Such renewal will instead urge that doctrine is a reflection on the crisis of full symbols when they are used of Christ. And when the symbols are allowed to speak they propose a new world order greater than our justice, already present in God’s gift and forming us to lives of witness.

Symbols as the Language of Art and Liturgy

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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.