Liturgical Theology after Schmemann: An Orthodox Reading of Paul Ricoeur, Geoffrey Ready

it's a great honor and privilege for me to be here presenting this book to you this evening I have read it there was some doubt as to whether that was gonna happen read the first chapter in last chapter I was told but let me tell you it is it is a really really impressive book and hopefully I can convey that in a few short minutes here with my presentation of it now what I cannot do and will not do in this space is just sort of summarize the whole book for you I don't think that would be of any use to you I think a lot of us come at this not necessarily even being familiar with who paul ricoeur is let alone the application of his interpretive lens to the symbolic world of the Byzantine Rite but what I hope to do is to convey in a fairly short space why this book is important and why I found that it's important so I'll kind of attack it from that position I will give you some idea of what you can find within the book but I really wanted to convey to you where it sort of sits within the the realm of liturgical studies I mean it presents itself as being part of a tradition and a conversation by saying that it is liturgical theology after Schmidt and it sort of indicates a kind of temporal spatial place and I hope that by this talk you'll have some sense of where that exactly lives I want to start with talking about the gospel that we had this past Sunday in the Byzantine Rite it is the second Sunday of Lent and we read the gospel from st. mark about the healing of the paralytic the one who was brought by his four friends and they found that there were so many people crowded around the door they couldn't get at Jesus so they went up onto the roof the friends did and they ripped off the roof and laid they let their friend down on his bed into the midst of the people to where the Lord was and he was healed and why I want to speak about this is that it's also the commemoration of st. Gregory Palamas only of course since the 13th century 14th century but st. Gregory himself preached on this gospel it's kind of a unique situation where we have a saint who ends up on a particular day in the gospel for that day he's already written a sermon for us was very handy and so st. Gregory focuses on the aspect that we get towards the end of the parable which is that the man is told to lift up his bed and to walk and all of the people that you see milling around give glory to God they say we've never seen anything like this before now you might be thinking I'm about to say we've never seen anything lori forgot I'll get there but that's not your going that's not where I'm going at the beginning here so what does st. Gregory say about this and it's really instructive I think he compares the encounter of this man carried by his four friends and the roof being ripped off and the the bed being laid down and the healing the forgiveness of sins and in being able to stand up and carry his bed away with all of the people giving glory to God he compares that to the liturgy he says this is what is supposed to happen when we go to church and press pacifically he says that what we are supposed to emerge is like the light by which we know that there is Sun and we give glory to the son by the fact that there's light that permeates the world so our emergence out of the liturgy is supposed to be as that light that then people can be guided by that back to the source of the light and give glory to that this is that's what the import here in this encounter with the Lord Jesus there is transformation there is Transfiguration there is healing there is this resurrection the son hasta sees and the man is able to go out and what do all the people do they glorify God for what's happened okay that's what liturgy is supposed to be doing that's supposed to be our experience now as you probably know father Alexander Schmemann spent a good deal of his life kind of reflecting about what liturgy is supposed to be doing and why maybe it's not doing it and he threw the really the invention of liturgical theology as we have it today obviously in concert with others and basing himself on the whole course or small movement that came out of out of Western Europe within the Catholic Church but he really paid a lot of attention to this question why is it that what we see in liturgy you know isn't happening and for him there was this divorce this divorce between on the one hand what the liturgy itself is all about and on the other what he called the targa piety the people's experience or understanding of what was going on in the liturgical you know experience and a lot of people were profoundly affected by women's approach that people started to pay more attention to what was in the liturgy itself right what does the text say what how is the service celebrated what what is the meaning that we can look at and through the liturgical texts and I mean this is profoundly affected the whole study of church life and sacraments and and liturgy and so forth over the lasts you know 30 40 50 years and it's exciting to me still to see in a classroom we're doing a sacraments course many of you here tonight when we talk about it we look at the service of baptism when we see people the light bulbs that go off in people's minds as they see this is what this is all about I never understood that when I really pay attention to the text here or to the prayers to to the to the symbols to the rituals and so forth I really see this coming alive and that's just tremendous the scales drop off our eyes that we hear illumined we can go at liturgy in a new and renewed way and in followers and urse Rehman's terms the liturgical piety as it were approaches the liturgy itself right and for him it's not even just liturgy but what was the liturgy with a capital L almost the Ordo the the fundamental structure of God's relationship with with with the world that is mediated through the liturgical experience and the sacramental experience so this we kind of breeze things together it's very exciting and in a way we can kind of assume well the way to fix this problem you know full-stop would be that everybody has this experience we can be great if everybody came to the Toronto School of Theology and took courses and we could all study the liturgy in this way and then everybody would know how to do it and wouldn't it just transform us so that we could indeed go out into the world and be the light that draws everybody back to the Sun right that's how it's all supposed to work st. Gregory says so father's Irish Roman says so isn't that wonderful well that really was the kind of assumption that that was made that this is through education through through the Terkel renewal not by changing the liturgy but by getting people to pay more attention to what's in it and following Shemin we have obviously people like father Adan Cavanaugh who is a Benedictine who taught at Yale I was profoundly influenced by what Raymond was writing about and he me similarly agreed with him his famous book on liturgical theology here's just a small sample of what Cavanaugh says and just see how reminiscent it is of what's in Gregory Palamas was saying about how liturgy works the liturgical assembly stance in faith is vertiginous on the edge of chaos only grace and favor enable it to stand there only grace and a rigorous divine charity permit the assembly like Moses to come away whole from such an encounter and even then is with wounds which was deep as they are salutary liturgy is important it's transforming it impacts us with a the Assembly is transformed by an encounter a real encounter with the Living God and goes out into the world isn't this marvelous right and he famously posits that you don't actually have to be a you know a scholar to do this you don't you can be just someone who is open to the movement of the Holy Spirit and to God's work and he calls the person mrs. Cavanaugh oh sorry Mrs Murphy who's Catholic would have been mrs. Murphy if his mother maybe right missus this is Murphy and she is this this the one who is open she's the primary liturgist and he calls this what happens in the Liturgy this transforming experience that is theology itself theologia that's where it happens when the when the assembly is transformed by that encounter with God he though is willing to admit that it doesn't always work in an even way on when he speaks about liturgical theology done in the realm by real people by the mrs. Murphy's of this world its face is known only in silhouette its method is elusive its practitioners nameless its results problematic so like chemin you know this idea we need to bring the church of a piety together with liturgy and how do we go about doing this Cavanaugh says it's there and yet it's hard to get it how do we actually kind of make sense of this following up from chemin and Cavanaugh we have David Fager Burke now famously people talk about the chemin Kavanagh favored Fager Berg school of liturgical theology sometimes like father Andrew Lau in his book on Modern Orthodox thought adds galava I'm wondering tonight if we might add butcher but we'll get to that so we've got chemin Kavanagh Fay gerberg Figaro teaches at at Notre Dame and he decided that we need to address this problem the problematic of how we can actually get this work how does mrs. Murphy truly get transformed and go out into the world and be that that air filled with light that points us back at the Sun he talks about his definition of liturgy is the Trinity's perichoresis cannot extend it to invite our synergistic ascent into deification it just trips off the tongue it is it sums up really his whole method which is that this is God himself revealing himself through his encounter with human beings in liturgy it's an extension by God canosa's is the is the descent right the abasement of God to our level that he can bring us up to his divine life and that synergistic implies our cooperation into deification phases but if that's what liturgy is about then for Fager berg and he builds on ideas that are already there in Cavanagh he says that what we need is an asceticism a liturgical asceticism if liturgy is heaven on earth and fail logia that's the true theology that comes from the encounter with God is deified union with God then asceticism is demanded and asceticism he says as the discipline which increases the measure by which the Christian can participate in the liturgical life okay so ultimately if you want to be Mrs Murphy functioning properly you have to be an ascetic you have to pray you have to fast you have to have a real spiritual commitment you have to care about this you have to want to extend liturgy into life and life into liturgy have to make those kind of connections because it's our cooperation with God God descends but if we're not there to meet him right then there isn't going to be an ascent in 2000 you kind of need four men to carry you on your bed you need to rip off the roof and be and be let down that's a lot of ascetical effort implied just there for that saving encounter to take place in other words liturgy assumes according to vega berg that a human being is in his Worth capacitated uses a squirtle a-- capacitated for worship for participatory knowledge of God for theologia something has to happen for the human person to be enabled to do this we can't just assume that this is going to work and it isn't innocents only happen in the university classroom by everybody learning about liturgy also wonderful as that is and as exciting as that is it's not the solution for all and even implied in this figure burrs own kind of solution here is just a bit of shifting the goalposts because now not only does everybody have to be a good liturgical participant able and open to the movement of God now they off to be ascetics and is that maybe a little bit too much to met the demand of Mrs Murphy I was thinking the other day I saw this on Facebook and I thought I'd share this somebody put up a meme right and and it's quite humorous but how to be a parent in 2018 so I'll share this with you explain how it relates to liturgy but this is what people it says in the mean make sure your children's academic emotional psychological mental spiritual physical nutritional social needs are met while being careful not to over stimuli under stimulate improperly medicate helicopter or neglect them in a screen free plastic free body positive socially conscious egalitarian but also authoritative nurturing but fostering of independence gentle but not overly permissive pesticide-free two-story multilingual home preferably in a cul-de-sac with a backyard and one and a half siblings spaced at least two years apart for proper development I'm a parent this resonates with me compared to how to be a parent in every generation before ours feed them sometime now why this I share this with you how to litter Joy's in 2018 okay make sure you factor in insights from ritual studies anthropology performance theory linguistics speech act theory literary theory semiotics and symbology psychology spiritual development statics phenomenology etc taking note of course that our late post modern society has moved from secular to to secular three the congregants faith is fragile eyes within the disenchanted imminent frame of contemporary life compared to how to litter Joy's in past generations worship God together now I'm not dismissing any of that it's all important in the classroom we bring that to bear it's exciting but boy is it tiring like it is to be a parent these days so what can we do we have a book but in the first instance one might look at this and say is this yet another approach or model just another thing that we have to take care of in 2018 as we worship you know just as I got to grips with all the other stuff now here comes paul ricoeur and i have to read him right so the book is an exploration of the symbolic world of the byzantine rite within the framework of paul recurs philosophy and the first reaction is side you know those of you writing MA or doctoral theses will know that there's a time you come across another book it's exciting but at the same time really exhausting because you think just when I thought I had everything all the Ducks are in a row here comes another duck right but wait what is it about paul ricoeur that could be helpful and I know he looks a bit I love that picture so that's what attracted what is it that paul ricoeur can do that isn't just adding you know to this panoply of the things that are out there and it's it's maybe this witch doctor butcher has indicated in the heart of this book the guiding thread of Ricker's thoughts is the notion of the capable human being l'm capped okay so if we think back to our problem our problematic with liturgy is we need a capable human being we need the capacitated human being failure berg says liturgical asceticism Cavanaugh says you know with Shrem and you know we just need to get people to look at the liturgy a little bit more and all those people out there say well it's ritual studies performance theories communications theory it's all these different things that were told to look at we'd get all the ingredients right the human being will be capacitated to do this but why recur is interesting is that he actually kind of devotes his life to this whole question what makes a person capable right so here's a quote from David Kaplan on record that the very last part of this is where dr. butcher in his book picks up with this quote I wouldn't found the book and I wanted to quote the bit before because the bit after is a little bit complex for those of you who don't know recurve so I thought this might set the stage a little bit but Kaplan says this about Ricker Ricker argues that the notion of capability forms a link between philosophical anthropology language and moral philosophy it also forms a link between human action and human suffering capabilities are intertwined with our vulnerabilities and the various figures of other mnestheus language others and so on and recur tries to show how we can conceive of a notion of the self that is neither an ultimate foundation nor a fragmented illusion but a capable person who is able to do any number of things the most fundamental of which are speaking acting suffering recounting and being responsible unraveling the interrelated threads of the concept of capability has taken recur a lifetime so that's what recur is trying to get a capable human being someone who can speak act suffer recount and be responsible this starts to sound like the kind of person we need for liturgy that they can be encountered transformed that they have true theology and then emerge into the world and people say we've never seen anything like this we give glory to God because the light points us back to the Sun so how does this relate to liturgy well this is a quote now from dr. butcher's book page 59 it is the question of how to construe the liturgical faculty of lungcap app how to discern in such a one the form of shemin's Omo adorns the worshipping human being that will impale our reading and reflection upon recur conversely put it is the question of how liturgy as an instantiation of recurs axiom that the symbol gives rise to thought manifests all mocap acts that the capable human as specifically or more cap acts day the human person capable of God this I detect is somewhat of the thesis of the book and I hope I've come close to finding that so what does this mean well this is a quote from the book as well it's from record directly himself and I thought it really kind of drives the point home because this is his take on what liturgy is because R occurs not just this Western philosopher and phenomenology and thinking about all these kinds of things he's also a Christian he's also somebody who experiences precisely what we're interested in the liturgical encounter with God that transforming encounter I am grateful he says to liturgy for delivering me out of my subjectivity for offering me not my words or gestures but those of the community I am happy with this objectification of my emotions in entering into the ritual idiom I'm delivered from emotional effusion I enter into a form that in turn forms me forms me by taking up in my own way the liturgical texts I become text myself the narrative shapes me I am joined to God's story right art my story becomes God's story in prayer and song indeed by the liturgy I am fundamentally divested of preoccupation with myself behold the salutary disorientation that situates the eye amidst community the individual amidst history and the human person amidst creation beautiful beautiful expression of what liturgy is capable of well what does this book do in terms of of that question how is it that human beings are capacitated for this liturgical spirit how can we go about thinking about that what it really demands is a hermeneutic a new way of understanding and interpreting liturgy and the human person to see how these come together now it could be in olden days you didn't need that right you just worshipped God but we have a complexified society in which these kinds of things have to come to the fore so how do they do that well if liturgy itself serves as a site of hermeneutical inquiry right liturgy itself is the place where interpretation happens where we encounter God's story where we reveal our own pre-existing stories where we try to shape those somehow together and then emerged transformed by the bigger picture God's narrative in our life then in some sense liturgy is the place of hermeneutical in quality of interpretation now this is completely consistent with you know Cavanaugh's idea of in the liturgy you know this kind of the thesis that the congregation brings with it and then there they encounter the antithesis in God and then somehow out of that emerges theologia proper the synthesis of transformation you know by that but now we're just talking in terms of hermeneutics which is very useful for us where we are situated in in place so throughout this book we look at how recur talks about the ritual symbolism the whole symbolic structure of our of the world around us and in fact of our language and our thought also our ritual selfhood how does our self which isn't on the one hand you know those two things they're kind of the the truth that totally fragmented cellphone on this side or some sort of other objectified a self that emerges in encounter with with the divine how does that self play a role in all this and then the whole concept of transformation the whole sending out into the world as one who's transfigured and transformed by the encounter so just very quickly this is a very very quick rundown of what's in this book to summarize all of this would take a course really but just so you have some idea of what we're talking about here in recur there is the fundamental idea that the symbol gives rise to thought the symbol is a sea one of the things that the symbolic structure of the world and all of the the things that the surround us are actually what lies before we even formulate meaning you know that language itself emerges out of and our thoughts are our ideas out of a symbolic you know structure and the symbols are they carry many meanings they're bounded you know water we talked about this in our baptism you know liturgy a few weeks ago those are in the sacraments class water has so many different meanings right it can mean life and death it can mean cleansing it can mean all these different things but it is bounded it doesn't mean everything but it means an awful lot of different things right so symbols are polyvalent they're they they have a lot of expressive meaning to them and those that the plinks been a symbol to our articulated thoughts and language and speech and so forth is the whole concept of a metaphor metaphor is a kind of organized symbol system the sentence as it were where symbols might be the individual words but in recur symbols have this surplus of meaning this rich fill a sense of meaning in the universe and they also are inter subjective they help us to kind of navigate our worlds beat us and the world around us but us and other people so symbols are the way we kind of organize any metaphors and they're performative they actually they push us forward they create meaning for us so in the liturgy all of that symbolic structure in ritual and the words and everything they come together to actually create new meaning and create narrative create that the bigger picture in which we can kind of immerse ourselves and in the Byzantine Rite this is particularly highlighted by the interplay between language that is katha thetic that's the negative you know that when we say God is incomprehensible unknowable beyond all all expression and so forth and then the katha fad or the positive sense so we play back and forth with these this dialectic - and that enriches our kind of experience of meaning in liturgy and I really like this phrase the the ontological vehemence there's a phrase that Ricker uses that that in fact as a whole the metaphors that are in the words and acts of the liturgy give it an ontological vehemence it means it pushes us forward it pushes that meaning forward it means that the the ritual itself has a performative creative character to it so if we this is all embedded already in inch women who says pay attention or it's an allergic it does stuff if the only you knew about it so we this is recur then dr. butcher now through record looking at the liturgy and saying if we just are aware of what's happening in and through us as a community we can see how it's working so we're schwimmen was saying it does look at the liturgy now we have an explanation a lens for understanding how it's actually functioning the next idea is the idea of ritual selfhood and like symbols themselves are the which have this kind of polyphonic polyvalent which surplus of meaning ourselves do as well in liturgy the liturgical south which is summoned to that encounter is not just unitary it's not just one thing right the liturgical self operates on different levels we see that it's throughout the liturgy you pay attention this next time you're listening to a canon in the church or or hymns on a feast or the different voices that come to the fore sometimes we speak with one voice with the whole community sometimes we speak to our own soul you know we address ourselves kind of within sometimes we speak on our own sometimes we take up the the the words of the mother of God or of the saints or even of God Himself speaking to us and so forth there's all these different layers of meaning and self which we are all wrapped up into so that liturgical self is operating on these different levels and recur accounts for this in he has this whole idea of the there's us and there's the the other nests of us you know we kind of have to get to grips with the kind of stable person within us there's the Edom and then we've got the EPA which is the the the the the me or the self that is in kind of progress in transformation you could almost say image and likeness you know could work are on this level but but ultimately in liturgy these things are trying to be integrated and and and move forward in community and we have to be aware of our embodied selves the other persons that includes God himself and also the testimony of our own conscience that the ways in which as I said the liturgy operates almost sometimes between us right if you read there's Canon of scene and roof creek how much of it is actually an internal dialogue of ourselves but based on again the narrative of Scripture which comes alive you know in literacy filled with all the symbolism a quote from the book through narrative we negotiate the tension between our awareness of ourselves as both remaining who we have always been they eat them and simultaneously have ever becoming more and other than we were before so that's the space if liturgy is this hermeneutic space for this activity that's precisely what we're negotiating now even within our own selves ourselves in relations to others in ourselves in relation to God the paralytic encounters friends the community God himself in that gospel and liturgy attests to the selfs portentous recognition of itself as k-pax day summoned to a doxological vocation that's ultimately what all of us are called to be that's the full likeness right when we are fully capacitated to give glory to God that's the oume other ones that we see Sherman and Kavanaugh and others talking about this is the capacitated little liturgical ascetic of Fager burg this is how it's it's further explained in in return the third aspect is ritual transformation and there's a lot to be said about this as many aspects that - the one I want to just maybe highlight here is the idea of liturgy as a form of embodied remembering and it's how the narrative of history the narrative of the Scriptures of salvation history the events of salvation are experienced by us liturgical II you know through the feast through the different service of the church through the sacraments and so forth that in fact worship or liturgy proves itself to be the site paddocks a loss for an appropriation of the historical intentionality of the Gospels the performative arena of liturgy provides the context for the interactive of narrative time with chronological time so God's story becomes our story precisely as we experience this in liturgy and it provides us a new way of seeing that's what theoria means and ultimately compelled you know this ontological vehemence we're talking about it compels us to go from text to action to go back out into the world carrying our bed right so that others can glorify God in us we pass from a narrative mediation of the temper to a temporal mediation of the narrative right and recur has a couple of different hermeneutic or narrative arcs throughout his his writings earlier on he talks very much about what so-called hermeneutic arc later on the the narrative arc which it is the three different stages prefiguration configuration and refigure a ssin by the way I had to turn off the spellcheck on every time I wrote refigure a Shinto put refresh the earlier narrow a hermeneutic ark was participation and then dis tan CA ssin and then appropriation and that was an understanding that we it's more or less the reader and text right the reader comes to text with a preset understanding right the participation that already exists in the meaning of that text but through the encounter with the text there's a crisis right there's a bit of a there's a separation between us and the text something is amiss there's some sort of pushing you know in in ritual studies they talk about you know the the liminal state right you're in victor turner you'll you'll hear this kind of talk about the the idea that in the encounter with some new and overwhelming meaning where were pushed into a state where everything is kind of chaos and so forth and then the return from that to true meaning is where we appropriate that meaning and in our you know our existential lives were able to kind of make sense of that in a new way and a way that that hermeneutic reflects what Calvin was talking about earlier we we saw that idea you stand on the edge of chaos right that you state's a vertiginous state in the liturgy and so for this emphasis on the the very you know the liminal state that liturgy puts us in well recur later in his life moves to a kind of different arc which is what he calls the narrative arc similarly prefiguration like you know the participation is that what you come into the this the thing with but when he talks about configuration it's a much more positive sense rather than it's not negative in the the liminal state or that push into distance iation but there is a sense in which there's a real crisis a real clash with configuration he talks about this almost like a synthesis of our prefigured story with gods and in this case in the case of liturgy the story that we're coming into account encounter with so liturgy takes on there's more positive you know kind of it and then finally we're II figure that again we're pushed out the ontological vehement sends us out into the world and we can be transformed and live that transformed life giving giving glory to God so it's interesting one of the things that's highlighted in the book is that certain authors have picked up on the earlier model and certain of the old on the later one they tried to kind of fit them together whether configuration and distance iation can work together is a is a kind of open question I think liturgy kind of does both you know I think it's true as ritual studies people would would say there is a sense in which the liturgy presents a world that is completely upside down I wrote a paper not too long ago which which highlights the idea of liturgy as Carnival you know that somehow like in the Middle Ages where you every you know the very hierarchical Society you everybody knew their place but you got to Carnival and everything was changed everything all the structures of the world were upended you know poppers could be princes and princes could be poppers and all of that in some sense liturgy does actually function in that up ending way it is a carnival it is as it there's the sense in which all of the structures of this world are kind of upended but ultimately I do like the positive image of our story being melded with gods that we are then becoming the full likeness of who God is so a just a by the by I said earlier that this is not just another thing another method you know now in addition to talking about liturgy as you know performance and I read a book not too long ago beautiful book that you know the whole liturgy explained in terms of Aristotle's Poetics and in all the different stages that that the audience goes through including you know the the kind of tension and release and and so forth and then you know somebody else will write about it as you know long organs horizons of meaning in the public and the private horizon coming into it and you just think you have to add one after another after that so why is this different well I think it's different because it's not just simply adding another thing it provides a framework of what I call tension and paradox it's a helpful conceptual framework for holding methods derived from ritual studies communications and performance theory so on intention this is actually the lens through which we can make sense of all that other stuff on the Shelf right this is the key to making some of these things work together and already in the book there's some examples of how that works in just a second so one of the quick big questions that comes up in looking at liturgy and some methods and frameworks and theories and methodology will fall on one side and some on the other but is the meaning that we're looking for in liturgy is it from the text or is it from the actual doing of liturgy now at the ultimate extremes on one side you say you just read the text you know whatever is written there all the meaning is embedded there the very few people who actually you know argue that the very least they're saying look at the rubrics to imagine pause it the kind of ideal liturgy that comes out of that and that's often what we're doing in the classroom right we're saying okay you know the person for baptism is brought forward they're facing West at this point they've got their arms in the air the facies that put their arms down and all this has symbolic meaning let's look at it it may be that it's never celebrated that way that nobody ever does that they're all babies anyway so what are you talking about but we have a kind of idealized liturgy or sum of all the liturgy liturgical possible performances in the text other people particular in the ritual studies the anthropological side of the spectrum would say no that isn't liturgy liturgies only when it happens you have to go and look at real liturgies and each liturgy is only one liturgy it's only you can only talk about that one you can't even bring them you know together so how do you resolve that because there's this huge debate in liturgical studies which which approach is the right one will recur here comes to the rescue and this is an example of what I'll say is he is almost the the meta framework that solves a lot of these these things is talked about specifically in the book how in fact recurs whole concept of the innocence like the narrative arc and and the transformation that takes place through our encounter with text text itself is actually performative right and in fact the text that we have of the liturgy is the result of previous performance it embeds the meaning of what's already happened it carries it with it and in fact it already anticipates further performance and so it sits amidst performs you can't talk about text without talking about performance nor can you talk about performance without talking about text because even if you're that anthropologist you're probably an ethnographer writing things down right writing texts about what you've just observed and that needs interpretation and so text and performance aren't opposites they in fact are embedded into one so weaker here comes to the rescue and says you know only make sense of this you don't have to fight quite so much as you've been doing another example close with this it's positive you know they it's proposed in the book this is a famous question that Catholic theologian Romano Gardini asked in the earlier part of the 20th century about symbol and about liturgy and how it doesn't work so much anymore would it not be better to be to be there would not be better to admit that man in this industrial and scientific age with its new sociological structure is no longer capable there's our word again of a liturgical act and of course now you've got people in two sides of a spectrum answering this question right that it's completely disbar stand and separated from all of the liturgical symbols that are implied in in our services you know our Vespers service is built on the whole idea that at a certain time of day it gets dark right and in many cultures not just in early Christians you would get together and you would liked the family lamp that was a ritual that people performed and the lighting of the lamp symbolized the the light and the protection against the darkness and all of the things that walk around in the dark that you can't be sure of and it was about drawing together and focusing on you know the community and in Christ of course that takes on the greater meaning that as the very last you know ray of the Sun fades behind the Sun behind the hills you know we begin to sing oh glad some light right and we've turned to the true light and so all of this and do you put all the colic prayers of Vespers it's all about what walks in darkness and God being the true light the true God the one who enlightens us and so forth well we now have electric lights and we don't worry about dark who of us ever lives in the dark unless you go out into the the countryside so just for example are any of these things meaningful to us who have warmth and light and electricity and technology and everything we're completely separated from all this so on one hand people say no it's not meaningful we have to have a new liturgy for a technological age on the other hand people say no it's completely still you know still meaningful and we have to just maybe re-educate people the same way you have to focus on the teks we have to focus on symbol and and and bring that back will recur again kind of comes to the rescue here by talking about precisely the fact that we do always inhabit symbolic worlds and those symbols are powerful you know they build themselves into metaphors and they have multiple layers of meaning and those have ontological vehemence and we need to pay attention to them and that somehow that we can through our place in liturgy which is that interpretive matrix for our our world we can still make sense of this the answer to this is no it's not better you know to leave sigh but Ricker doesn't just simply say you know leave it as it is but let's pay attention to that multi of polyvalent nature of symbol and and really understand how it is that these things can can inform and drive us forward in the world the last part of the book is an application of all of that to the service of the great blessing of water and it is it's beautiful those of you know that service will really enjoy the the the way that all of the theory of the book comes into its own you know if you only read that part then you would still have a lawful law because it is the theory comes alive in the explanation of that service but I do just want to close with the quote that's at the very end of the book because it ties together the this service as a metaphor for the whole enterprise of interpretation that we're called to do in the liturgy it is striking that recur uses the metaphor of travel describe the work of interpretation presenting its hermeneutical philosophy as a long route through the landscape of symbols an indirect narrative itinerary to the hidden reaches of personal identity ultimately seen to be otherwise inaccessible so using this lens you know we can begin to make sense of the continued landscape of symbols that we inhabit and liturgy still is meaningful for doing it and it goes on this metaphor corresponds to the a law of the great blessing of water so here we get the how it mirrors what's happening in the blessing in which the procession of the clergy and faith will set forth from the relative safety and security of the church proper towards the wilds of the water where they will seek God at once known and unknown their Exodus images the journey theology must make out of the precincts of its natural home into the turbulence of the philosophical stream there to cast forth the cross of Christ and witness him conquering the dragons that lay there Nick is a beautiful image of what we need to do as as people studying theology is not to be afraid of going forward and using these lenses like the hermeneutics of a polo record to be able to make sense of precisely that transforming encounter with God that we have in liturgy come back to that first icon of the of the gospel that we can indeed become capable of this right that we can as leaders of liturgical worship as interpreters of liturgical as the mrs. Murphy's in the world that we can make sense of the liturgy and our place within the world in our counter with God from from that so the Jeffrey I Wow you know we're very much looking forward to your book launch and I can promise you that when it appears and I really hope and pray that there will be many many books that you also publish and Bryan can do Stosh I can promise you that I'll spring for the wine for the food whatever it is the reason I'm particularly grateful to father Jeff already is because I did a really nasty thing to him was it just two weeks ago or maybe three weeks ago two weeks ago I said listen we're in a real calm we don't want to do it we've got we want to kind of do this in a you know and in a fuller way and we'd like to have someone who would do sit would you agree father I mean as you can see not only has he digest this but you know what it's like to put together a PowerPoint like this and it's just so father God bless you just just brilliant we we were so grateful and I'm sure I express the sentiments of all of us here so we now move on to to Brian QA and any comments that you want to make thank you all for coming that was extraordinary father like Rico has a book called oneself as another and I felt a total sense of Altera t as if I was discovering this this time and you got it like now you can dismiss your servant school it's okay everything I was trying to say father Jeff forgot it that's one reason we Cal talks about the surplus meaning and I would not have been able to do that presentation on my own book because we can never any of us find in what we read what someone else will find and it just it's astonishing to me how how other it all seems because and Raquel talks a lot about this he talks about how once the text is written it leaves the hands of the reader and it is open for conversation with anyone or the writer rather and it does not belong to the to the writer anymore and we were talking about this a little bit our in our class earlier today in crisis Savior Eastern Christian perspectives how the pre know the prophecies of the Old Testament the prophets perhaps did not sometimes some cases had very it seems a very dim sense of the way in which their prophecy would be fulfilled and it's only much later that the light is shown refracted back on the significance of the suffering servant passage for example in Isaiah and so it's actually really exciting for me you know how the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes says of the making of many books there is no end and I know father Peter wants to bring it on but we also know we've all been around were you know used to book sales and you realize that something that has value it's like a car when you buy it as soon as it's off the lot it depreciates and so whether it be 5 or 10 or 15 or 50 years from now I'm sure this will have will be you know selling for much less than July it's a night in the in the in the seat bikes used book sale over there but if along the way if along the journey it brings dare I say the joy of learning and the passion for reconnecting with what we experience and we're so blessed to have the freedom to experience on such a regular basis in our churches in this country and please gone through that to be as father so eloquently said to be to be refigured us to be configured so that we may in turn refigure world then like that's what it's all about no I think that's what it shipped it's key what I guess it should be about as well so I would like we ordered a lot of food and father Peter is very gracious to pay for the food and it's Indian food paul ricoeur was not Indian either was all you mush mammoth neither were statistic evidently but but I'm half Indian and so I appreciate the father Peter indulging me that an instead of serving you pierogies we have we have vegetarian a vegan Indian food with some fish pakoras for those who would like to indulge themselves a little bit within the context of the fast and so I don't want to delay unless people have some really outstanding questions I think we can take those up in our discussion together maybe can ask some of the gentlemen to move the chairs into something of a circle and people can get their food because there's a lot of food and it's just a right amount of food I think for the right amount of people so I hope you can all stay and and eat and drink we have some wine and if we can then you can mingle out they are come back in here and then those who want to ask questions can do so but I feel so filled by father Jeffrey's presentation that I thought I don't want to hear myself answering is that okay [Applause]

Channel: Sheptytsky Institute

Views: 4,786

Keywords: Liturgical Theology, Geoffrey Ready, Paul Ricoeur, Sheptytsky Institute, Brian Butcher, Eastern Christian Studies, Eastern Catholic Church, Peter Galadza

Id: D7y2cGdFE94

Length: 51min 8sec (3068 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 16 2018