Liturgical Hermeneutics
2003 Indianapolis, Indiana
2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002
Convener 2003
Gil Ostdiek (professor of liturgy at Catholic Theological Union, Chicago)
Seminar Participants 2003
Jack Abel, Byron Anderson, James Caccamo, Pat Collins, Bryan Cones, Virgil Funk, Margaret Mary Kelleher, Leroy Kennel, Gerry Lardner, Joseph Martos, Richard McCarron, Gil Ostdiek, Kathryn Rickert, Susan Smith, David Stosur, Mons Tieg, Catherine Vincie, Mark Wedig, Fritz West
Seminar Report 2003
Our overall goal is to critically explore what liturgical celebrations mean and how we can know that. This year’s main theme, “Text, Performance, and Meaning: Conversations around the Works of Bridget Nichols and Martin Stringer,” was chosen to allow us to enter into the exchange between these authors around the question of where the “meaning” of liturgical performance is to be located: in the text, the performance, the participants, or somewhere in between.
David Stosur and Margaret Mary Kelleher led the first session on Bridget Nichols’ Liturgical Hermeneutics: Interpreting Liturgical Rites in Performance (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996). Stosur’s response focused on Nichols’ use of Ricoeur’s theory of hermeneutics. He identified the principal texts of Ricoeur utilized by Nichols and the aspects of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics which Nichols emphasizes: distanciation and appropriation, the logic of abundance, the Kingdom of God as limit expression and promise, speech/writing and the word/event relationship, and the memorial aspect of liturgy and the need for paths to utopia. Stosur raised six areas of critique/question about Nichols’ use of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. Nichols, he concluded, used selected elements of Ricoeur’s thought but did not do it full justice.
Kelleher characterized Nichols’ central concern as liturgical spirituality: performance of the rite to promote transformation of the participants. Kelleher surveyed some major categories employed by Nichols in her comparative study of Anglican ritual texts: Kingdom, threshold, faith and the Faith, and appropriation. Kelleher attended particularly to several elements in the author’s understanding of performance: the hermeneutic exchange in liturgical performance, the relationship between text and performance in the hermeneutic circle, the liturgy as a text which happens in performance, written performatives, and liturgy as a performative speech act. Kelleher noted that the author has an ideal, imaginary performance in mind. Nichols does not study actual events of worship and “performance” is limited to scripted speech-action.
In the second session Gil Ostdiek situated anthropologist Martin Stringer’s On the Perception of Worship: The Ethnography of Worship in Four Christian Congregations in Manchester (Birmingham: Birmingham University Press, 1999) and explained Stringer’s rationale for choosing a modified model of ethnography in doing his study of four worshiping communities. Ron Anderson summarized the four “case studies” reported in the book, noting Stringer’s emphasis on the engagement of participants’ experience. Anderson concluded that for Stringer worship works primarily through the individual’s memory of past liturgical events. He noted Stringer’s lack of attention to the liturgy itself (texts, etc.) as well as a tendency to impose his interpretative schemas.
Gerry Lardner introduced the third session with an overview of a non-textual approach from communication theory. This led to a far-reaching discussion on the interface between text, performance, and meaning. A recurring theme was the need to hold in balance the content and intent of the text (Nichols), the effect in the worshiper (Stringer), and the message systems at work in the performance (Lardner).
In the fourth session Richard McCarron followed up on last year’s discussion of the “negotiation of meaning in liturgical performance” by turning to the logics of knowing and liturgy. The question of how liturgy means, he argued, draws us into the interplay of modern and postmodern approaches to hermeneutics and epistemology. He then presented three areas of inquiry to spark our conversation and discussion. First, he surveyed the work of feminist philosopher Lynn Hankinson Nelson on epistemologies of community. In her analysis of meaning and knowledge, knowing is a dynamic communal process. Knowledge is not the individual’s property; rather, communities construct and acquire knowledge in a fundamentally social process. In reaction to accounts of meaning and knowledge constrained by linguistic models, McCarron took a cue from the non-verbal dimension of ritual and engaged an analysis of meaning and embodiment. He cited Horst Ruthrof who proposes a corporeal semantics in which the body and bodily sensation are the preliminary, foundational condition for meaning. The social construction of knowledge and the place of bodily knowing support an analysis of liturgical knowing as a form of praxeological knowledge. McCarron recalled Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a “collective fluency of a form of life.” The liturgical act inscribes an embodied knowledge of practices that may dispose people to act in redemptive ways in the world. Lively discussion followed.