This Assembly of Believers: The Gifts of Difference in the Church at Prayer

By Bryan Cones

“Among the symbols with which the liturgy deals, none is more important than this assembly of believers.”

This claim made in the 1970s forces the local church to consider those within its congregation, and recognise the gifts and challenges of difference within the church community. In 'This Assembly of Believers' Bryan Cones seeks to take seriously the pastoral context of a congregation, recognising the physical ability, gender and sexuality of those who make up the congregation.

Starting each chapter with their lived experience, Cones poses important questions of the liturgy in light of these experiences before realigning the liturgy to demonstrate the positive theological significance of the marginalised within the congregation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Nov 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9780334059738

Bryan Cones

Bryan Cones is a presbyter in the Episcopal Church, a former book editor at Liturgy Training Publications, and was managing editor and columnist at U.S. Catholic magazine. He has served as adjunct faculty at the Episcopal Divinity School, and holds a doctorate in liturgical and practical theology from the University of Divinity in Melbourne, Australia.

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This Assembly of Believers

This Assembly of Believers

The Gifts of Difference in the Church at Prayer

Bryan M. Cones

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© Bryan Cones 2020

Published in 2020 by SCM Press

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The Scripture quotations contained herein are from The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America, and are used by permission. All rights reserved.

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Contents

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: In Search of the ‘Boundless Riches of Christ’

1. ‘This Assembly of Believers’: The Primary Symbol at Work

2. Assisted Reproduction: The Baptizing Assembly

3. ‘Christ Is Present in His Church’? Gender, Presiding, and the Primary Symbol

4. The Pastoral Care of ‘the Sick’: Assembling Bodies with Impairment

5. Equivalent, Equal, or Something New? Adjustments to Marriage in the Primary Symbol

Conclusion: ‘How Beautiful the Feet’: Discerning the Path of the Primary Symbol

Bibliography

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: In Search of the ‘Boundless Riches of Christ’

‘Among the symbols with which the liturgy deals, none is more important than this assembly of believers.’¹

The quote that opens this introduction, indeed, the quote that opens every chapter of this book, comes from a decades-old teaching document, now abandoned,² of the US Roman Catholic Bishops’ (then) Committee on the Liturgy. Its author, an acerbic³ though well-loved Roman Catholic presbyter named Robert Hovda, was among the company who laboured mightily to bring to practice the insights of the twentieth-century North Atlantic liturgical movement. Back in 1978 his words, still energized by the Second Vatican Council’s 1963 Sacrosanctum concilium and weighted with episcopal authority, continued to fuel what was then a still-expanding change in the way Roman Catholic assemblies were keeping Sunday and other days, with parallel movements among other Western Christians.

By the time I began my own study of liturgy in 1993 at Conception Seminary College with Joyce Ann Zimmerman as my first teacher, it had already been around for a while. But at some point – and I do not remember when – I was reading (or re-reading) Environment and Art in Catholic Worship and found Hovda’s phrase as if for the first time. It has since become the primary lens through which I imagine and interpret what some Christians of my Western traditions are up to when we gather as a liturgical assembly. It also drives most of the questions I ask about those gatherings. I hope it has also been my primary concern in my ministry within ‘this assembly of believers’, first as a baptized member, later as one charged with ‘shepherding’ a community’s prayer, and more recently as one of its baptized and ordained presiders in the Episcopal Church.

Particular periods of ministry in ‘this assembly’ have reaffirmed for me Hovda’s claim. They have also raised further questions, particularly concerning how the differences gathered in the liturgy’s ‘primary symbol’ contributed to the meaning of what the assembly celebrated. At Dignity/Chicago, an LGBTQIA+⁴ Roman Catholic liturgical community in Chicago, Illinois, where I helped prepare Sunday Eucharist, the marriage of same-gender couples, the baptism of children of such couples, and the pastoral care of sexual and gender minorities have made me particularly sensitive to the appearance and treatment of these differences in the assembly. Such liturgies also alerted me to the ways in which the practice of assemblies gathered around particular differences, in this case marginalized ones, both contests and expands the received liturgical tradition, for example about the nature of marriage and family formation.

This has also been true in more broadly representative assemblies. My more recent liturgical ministry in an Episcopal church in suburban Chicago, where I served as a presbyter, included a significant number of members with cognitive differences and physical impairments. In their company I noticed more and more the ways in which persons whose bodies do not conform to majoritarian norms⁵ of ‘temporarily able-bodiedness’⁶ or cognitive function are consigned to the ‘bleachers’ in the liturgy, and so made spectators, as if at a football match.⁷ I wondered then and now how attention to such differences might both contest and enrich the received liturgical practice and the reflection it generates.

Because of these and other assemblies, I have become particularly interested in the ways in which human difference within the assembly – especially differences made marginal by society, by church, or by both – contributes to the meanings generated by liturgical celebration. While affirming Louis-Marie Chauvet’s claim that the ‘diversified Sunday assembly’ is the ‘most typical [and] sacramentally exemplary of the church’,⁸ I confess that I rarely encounter sustained reflection on what particular differences contribute to the full expression of the liturgy’s ‘primary symbol’. I am curious to discover ways in which attention to difference in the assembly may disclose or conceal the paschal patterns of what Hovda calls the ‘liberation-and-reconciliation’⁹ that liturgy is intended to make present.

More specifically I am interested in how Hovda’s basic theological insight about ‘this assembly of believers’ might be fruitfully explored to generate a more robust theology of the liturgical assembly through its difference. I hope to build upon the insight of M. Shawn Copeland that ‘[t]he sacramental aesthetics of Eucharist, the thankful living manifestation of God’s image through particularly marked flesh, demand the vigorous display of difference in race and culture and tongue, gender and sex and sexuality’.¹⁰ Such difference gathered in the liturgical assembly is the foundation for what Copeland terms ‘eucharistic solidarity’, though one in no way limited to the Eucharist. My primary contention is that the generous reception and articulation of human difference through the liturgy contributes as yet unappreciated dimensions to the sacramental imagination of an assembly and of assemblies in communion with each other.

This project, then, is a fundamentally liturgical theological endeavour that attempts to interpret an assembly’s theologia prima¹¹ through the differences it gathers. Because it begins, on the whole, with actual liturgies, it is also fundamentally pastoral, in that it begins with actual assemblies and actual people within them, individuals who through their own difference refract some new dimension of the ‘primary symbol’. My approach takes seriously the actual bodies in the room as the first ‘text’ of liturgical prayer, who then appropriate, cite, pray and otherwise interact with liturgical books, lectionaries and received ritual practice. When viewed through the lens of the ‘primary symbol’ gathered in its embodied difference, that heritage is often found wanting or unfinished, unable to fully express the ‘full human stretch’¹² of ‘this assembly of believers’, and thus in need of ‘adjustment’, that is, reform or expansion. It is my hope to propose assembly practice that might better refract the ‘boundless riches’ (Ephesians 3.8) or ‘maturity … the measure of the full stature of Christ’ (Ephesians 4.13) among its members.

Even as I approach the study of the liturgy with a view to its reform, I nevertheless do so through paradigm examples of patterns of Christian liturgy widely shared across churches. This reflects not only my pastoral liturgical experience but also my fundamental confidence that historic patterns of Christian liturgy have brought those who practise it to encounter with the living God. In doing so, I place myself in the company of ‘critical classicists’, including Gordon Lathrop and Stephen Burns,¹³ who both acknowledge the limits and failures of historic Christian liturgy while also affirming its ongoing potential to mediate the presence of the triune God in Christ. This book proceeds, then, as if through the ecumenical ‘prayer book’,¹⁴ beginning with widely shared patterns of baptism and Eucharist before moving on to the so-called ‘pastoral liturgies’ involving prayer and anointing for those who are sick and rites of committed relationships under the heading of ‘marriage’. My contention is that attention to difference within the ‘primary symbol’ unveils occlusions or gaps in received liturgical texts and practice, reveals as yet unappreciated theological contour and steers the growth and development of that same widely shared tradition. It is addressed to those engaged in the practice and development of that tradition gathered broadly in such organizations as the North American Academy of Liturgy and Societas Liturgica, among others. It is also no less addressed to those charged with shepherding the prayer of assemblies – or those studying to do so – in the common patterns of liturgical prayer this study addresses.

My own contribution to the shared endeavour of liturgical reform and renewal begins by surveying four leading voices in the discipline of liturgical theology in which my work is situated – Robert Hovda, Teresa Berger, Margaret Mary Kelleher and Gordon Lathrop. The combination of these authorities provides a lens for describing, appreciating and interpreting human difference in the assembly as a source for theological reflection, which in turn contributes new dimension, contour and significance to Christian liturgical and sacramental practice. In conversation with them, I insert my own questions and perspectives to articulate a method for exploring a pastoral liturgical theology of ‘this assembly of believers’ in its embodied particularities, the dimensions of which I trace in the first chapter. It then proceeds in succeeding chapters to explore four examples of Christian liturgy with attention to difference – baptism, Eucharist, prayer with the sick, and marriage – inspired by and roughly following the three-step method of pastoral liturgical theology articulated by Mark Searle,¹⁵ which begins with empirical description, proceeds with interpretation and then engages in a criticism.

The second chapter explores the baptism of an infant born of the union of two women, juxtaposed against the far more normative (but not universal) presumption of a child of male and female parents. Focusing attention on the particular, vulnerable, undetermined body of the infant brought by her mother draws attention to the open-endedness of the Christian assembly, which at its best is capable of holding manifold expressions of difference. The third chapter explores how a change in the gender of the presider at Eucharist, long restricted to men or those perceived as male,¹⁶ affects the symbolic contour of the eucharistic assembly through its ordained presider and, by extension, other identified leaders within the assembly. In this case, the identification of the presider with the person of Christ, who bears a unique ‘presence of Christ’¹⁷ in the assembly, is troubled by the difference between the presumed male gender of Christ and the gender of the presider who represents ‘him’ in liturgical leadership.

The next chapters turn to liturgies that mark particular moments in the life of a person. Of these, the first explores the limitations of the ‘anointing of the sick’ and its analogues in denominational resources to recognize bodies with impairment as ‘full, conscious and active’ members of the ‘primary symbol’ in and through their impaired bodies. Attention to the fundamental equal dignity of persons with impairments highlights a gap in the received practice, one that renders persons with impairment invisible through the ritual performance of binary categories of ‘sick’ and ‘well’. It further occludes the shape of the image of God in the assembly, thus ‘disabling’ the ‘primary symbol’ by limiting its signification. The fifth chapter turns to the changes in the assembly provoked by the marriage of a same-gender couple, which poses fundamental questions about the historic practice and theological meaning of the marriage of different-gender couples, especially in ways that propose the male party to a marriage as superior to the female party. A same-gender couple casts into sharp relief the theological justifications underlying this practice, which assemblies have only begun to engage with.

In each chapter, liturgical celebration – whether actual celebrations identified and described, or patterns of celebration common to many assemblies – is augmented by reference to liturgical books as well as to the theological reflection of those who bear the difference in question, with interpretive privilege granted to voices representing differences that have been made marginal or invisible. The goal of these explorations is first to unmask the occlusions and gaps – termed by Lathrop antiliturgica¹⁸ – generated by the treatment of difference in the assembly. These appear as ways in which the practice of the assembly prefers some differences and marginalizes others. Each chapter then goes on to propose ‘adjustments’ that might unravel and correct practices of antiliturgica – necessary but insufficient alone – and also make more transparent the positive theological significance of what has been made marginal in the ‘primary symbol’. The conclusion proposes broader ‘adjustments’ toward liturgical practice that takes seriously human difference as a necessary and fruitful dimension of an assembly’s theologia prima. These proposals sketch pathways for the continual reform of how ‘this assembly of believers’ practices its received heritage and how renewed practice might inform future ‘prayer books’,¹⁹ however conceived.

The outline described above – the choice of liturgies and the differences engaged – immediately signals limits. I do not propose to do anything more than press Hovda’s contention about ‘this assembly of believers’ through the data available to me, largely restricted to my own direct experiences of liturgy among ‘this assembly of believers’. These I seek to place in conversation with those who write on the topic of liturgy in my own and other traditions, and others still who write of their experience in the assembly, with particular attention to the reflections of those who experience themselves excluded from it. As such it is not a work of quantitative sociology but a synthesis of critical and theological reflection about liturgy and human difference.²⁰ At the same time, because I contend that any liturgy can provide the opportunity to ‘encounter the living God’, I am confident that my own ‘participant-observation’²¹ over 20 years provides an adequate starting point – and only that. What I do hope to propose is a new lens or set of lenses through which to approach and interpret an assembly’s theologia prima, which others might use in their own reflection in ways beyond what I attempt here.

Still, that places a narrow limit on the kinds of differences I can engage with, primarily those I bear myself or experience more directly, for example as a gay cis-gender male. I also attempt, more cautiously, to engage differences to which I am ‘adjacent’, in particular other gender and sexual minorities, and persons with impairment, largely due to my own experience of impairing injury and that of my partner. Further, as one who has learned much from the theological reflection of women, especially those who identify as feminist, I hope to write as one who is ‘feminist-adjacent’²² to acknowledge my debt both as a theologian and as a gay man to their pioneering work. To the extent I am able, I seek to privilege the theological reflection of those who bear or are closely ‘adjacent to’ the differences under discussion.

With these limits in mind, there are many embodied, culturally encoded human differences I do not feel competent to engage with convincingly, notably differences related to skin colour and ethnic identity, which are crucial to any conversation about difference in my home US context, though I have made some attempts in the course of this research.²³ As a white²⁴ US citizen with multiple advantages from my own dimensions of human difference, I have not yet discovered how I might engage with other ethnic and cultural heritages as a single author without falling into traps embedded in my own, with their history of racism and colonization.²⁵ I will be glad if some day I might be able to say something ‘reconciling and liberating’ about being white and a citizen of the United States.²⁶ In the end it is my hope that whatever value lies in these pages might continue the ongoing conversation about the shape of Christian liturgy and graced human difference within the assemblies who take it up.

Like liturgy itself, this work would not have been possible if not for the friends, colleagues, teachers, and partners who have helped shape not only my thinking but my practice of prayer and ministry. First among these is Joyce Ann Zimmerman, who helped me discover my love of liturgy and start me on the road to preparing and studying it at Conception Seminary College; the monks at Conception Abbey further shaped my own thinking by their prayer. The community of Catholic Theological Union in Chicago drew me further, not least the liturgical work of the likes of Kathleen Hughes, Edward Foley and Mark Francis; later, the staff of Liturgy Training Publications and its then-director, Gabe Huck, gave me the opportunity both to edit and to write. I am grateful also to the faculty and my colleagues at the Episcopal Divinity School, where I studied and then had the opportunity to teach, both of which laid the groundwork for this book. There I met my friend, colleague, and later thesis advisor, Stephen Burns, with whom I developed this work as a doctoral thesis at Melbourne Australia’s University of Divinity, at both Trinity College Theological School and Pilgrim Theological College. I am indebted to Stephen not only for his relentlessly positive encouragement and help in shaping my research, but also for his unfailing generosity of spirit and faithful friendship. I could not have asked for a better colleague and partner in finding my own theological voice. I am grateful also for Anita Monro, who offered further direction to the thesis behind this work as well as her own work, upon which mine relies. Ann Loades and Don Saliers served as its readers, and I am grateful for the attention of these two scholars from whom I have learned a great deal. The University of Divinity provided generous financial support and grant funding for the research that led to this book, as well as to other articles that contributed to it. Judith Atkinson and the church in her house, including Damola, Dominic and Stephen, offered support of a different sort, in so many ‘home eucharists’ of shared faith, generous laughter and gentle reality checks. Without Judith’s good humour and friendship, I could not have managed the shift from the US to Australia, or from life with my partner to life away from him. As to my partner, David Lysik, there are no words sufficient to capture his contribution: it suffices to say that the liturgical theology expressed is as much his insight as mine, its focus a testament to his own intellectual discipline, and the research and learning behind it resourced from his liturgical, teaching and presbyterial ministry. I could not have a better companion on the Way.

To those voices I must add other conversation partners, few of whom will (or even can) write of their own experiences. These are my fellow members of the assembly, who through their own differences have unveiled to me the boundless riches and full measure of Christ, in particular the assemblies of Dignity/Chicago, St John’s Episcopal Church in Chicago, and St Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Wilmette, Illinois. Their witness – as infants, elders, queer, many-gendered, impaired, neurodiverse, nearing death, parents, partner, friends – has invited me into ever-deeper living waters. It is for them, and in gratitude to them, that I attempt what follows. It is my sincere hope that this work will suggest new steps toward assemblies eager to nurture Saliers’ ‘full human stretch before God’ among all their members through all our differences.

Notes

1 Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy 1977, para. 28, p. 18.

2 EACW was replaced by a successor document, Built of Living Stones, Washington, DC: USCCB Publishing, 2001.

3 Friends and colleagues note Hovda’s ‘sharp edge’, with Gabe Huck averring he had ‘more than a little of the curmudgeon in the second meaning of the word: one who hates hypocrisy and pretense and has the temerity to say so’. See Huck 2003, p. 2.

4 Throughout this study, I will use this acronym as an umbrella designation for gender and sexual minorities.

5 This expression comes from my partner, David Lysik; it evokes for me Stanley Hauerwas’ ‘tyranny of the normal’, explored more fully below. See Hauerwas 1986a, pp. 211–17.

6 This expression comes via Eiesland 1994.

7 Aidan Kavanagh (1982, pp. 21–2) laments the ‘bleachers’ (a common US reference to seating for spectators at a sporting event) placed on his liturgical basketball court. I suggest that the obstacles he identifies are not limited to those found littering most liturgical spaces. On the contrary, they are just as likely to be found in liturgical books.

8 Chauvet 2001, p. 34.

9 Hovda articulates ‘reconciliation and liberation’ as two key dimensions of Christian mission the assembly rehearses in its liturgy. See, for example, Hovda 1988b.

10 Copeland 2010, p. 82.

11 As will become obvious, I rely on my own appropriation of Aidan Kavanagh’s account of liturgical theology as the ‘adjustment to deep change caused in the assembly by its being brought regularly to the brink of chaos in the presence of the living God’. See Kavanagh 1984, p. 74. The relationships between theology as experienced in liturgical performance (Kavanagh’s theologia prima or the historic lex orandi) and reflection upon it in the form of both liturgical texts and Christian doctrine (theologia secunda or lex credendi) have been the subject of wide reflection, including from systematic perspectives. See, for example, essays in Vogel 2000. Kevin Irwin and David Fagerberg have made further efforts since Kavanagh: see Irwin 2018 and Fagerberg 2004. For my own part, while I seek to maintain a primarily liturgical method – that is, rooted in liturgy as celebrated – my reflections are inevitably influenced by biblical and liturgical texts that may appear in celebrations, as well as others’ theological reflections about liturgy, which in turn influence my own attempts at liturgical theology. I do not propose to give a new account of liturgical theology as such. At most I hope to propose a new set of lenses for liturgical theology, however theorized and construed.

12 The expression reflects the work of Don Saliers: ‘[P]articipation in the liturgy requires our humanity at full stretch’ (Saliers 1994, p. 28).

13 Burns notes that Lathrop (1993) develops this expression. Burns’ own account (2018, p. xi) summarizes well my own: I am also (in Burns’ words) ‘to a great extent prepared to take Christian liturgical tradition – itself plural – on trust, yet also eager to subject the tradition to many questions’. I am grateful to Stephen Burns for the opportunity to explore the edges of my own critical classicism with him as a colleague and conversation partner in the course of this research.

14 The range of denominational resources I have consulted broadly reflects the Western ecumenical range of the ‘North Atlantic’ Roman Catholic and Reformation churches as they appear in US contexts, with some attention also to Aotearoa–New Zealand, Australia, and England. As a Christian of both Roman Catholic and Episcopal/Anglican heritage and practice, with most of my experience rooted in such assemblies, I tend to focus on the liturgies of the Episcopal Church as found in its 1979 Book of Common Prayer and other resources; and the rites of the Roman Catholic Church in their various books. More recent ministry in a joint Anglican–Uniting Church in Australia congregation has exposed me to the latter church’s development of its Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregational liturgical heritages as gathered in its 2005 Uniting in Worship 2 [UiW2].

15 Searle 1983.

16 As Teresa Berger notes (2011, p. 138), the historical record indicates that at one time eunuchs and those who would today might be termed ‘intersex’ were ordained as priests and bishops.

17 Sacrosanctum concilium [SC], para. 7, which identifies the ‘person of [Christ’s] minister’ as ‘the same now offering … who formerly offered himself on the cross’. See Vatican Council II 1996, p. 120.

18 This dimension of Lathrop’s writing is explored more fully in Chapter 1 and reappears throughout the study. See Lathrop 2003, pp. 181–92.

19 Revision of liturgical books is a live question in my own Episcopal Church, a task I think is long overdue. See Cones and Burns 2014; Cones 2016; and Cones 2020b.

20 Kathleen Hughes (1999) attempted something broader, the research foundation of which was ‘scores of conversations and interviews with hundreds of people’ (p. xxi). I seek diverse voices through a different listening strategy – consulting published work – but it seems wise to me to return as much as possible to my fellow members of the assembly for their own interpretations of what is going on when we gather.

21 The role of the participant-observer as applied to the interpretation of liturgy by Margaret Mary Kelleher will be explored more fully below. See Kelleher 1998a, p. 23.

22 While I acknowledge that one can be a feminist regardless of gender, I prefer ‘adjacent’ to acknowledge that my own feminist contribution lacks the embodied experience of those who identify or are identified as women.

23 See Cones 2018 and 2017a.

24 Sharon Fennema (2015, pp. 277–9) has explored ‘whiteness’ as a cultural heritage that appears in liturgy. Ruth Duck (2013, pp. 47–51) has explored some of the liturgical heritage of ‘White Protestant worship’.

25 The study of liturgy through postcolonial lenses is just beginning; I have found helpful introductions in two sources: Fennema 2015, and Jagessar and Burns 2011.

26 As a way of acknowledging these limits, I co-edited Liturgy with a Difference: Beyond Inclusion in the Liturgical Assembly (Cones and Burns 2019), in the hopes of engaging those who can speak with their own authority of such differences (and others) and liturgy. I am grateful to those colleagues who brought their wisdom to that project: Teresa Berger, Stephen Burns, Susannah Cornwall, Miguel A. De La Torre, Edward Foley, W. Scott Haldeman, Michael Jagessar, Rachel Mann, Bruce T. Morrill, Frank Senn, and Kristine Suna-Koro.

1. ‘This Assembly of Believers’: The Primary Symbol at Work

‘Among the symbols with which the liturgy deals, none is more important than this assembly of believers.’

One of the enduring fruits of the twentieth-century North Atlantic liturgical movement is the recovery of the liturgical assembly as both the common protagonist of the liturgy (as opposed to spectator of the work of clergy on its behalf) and the privileged expression of the Church (as opposed to its institutional structures). These recovered yet traditional insights about the liturgical assembly were developed over the course of decades in the early twentieth century¹ and enshrined in documents such as those of the Roman Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council, including its Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum concilium and its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen gentium.² They were also taken up by other churches of the West, resulting both in teaching statements³ and several editions of revised liturgical books.⁴ These developments in theological reflection and in liturgical practice have led to a conviction among many theologians across communions that the gathered liturgical assembly is both symbol of the Church and foundation for Christian life and ministry.⁵ Aidan Kavanagh, for example, has written convincingly that the assembly celebrating its liturgy is the Christian theologia prima, or ‘primary theology’ – which he describes as the ‘adjustment to deep change caused in the assembly by its being brought regularly to the brink of chaos in the presence of the living God’.⁶ Thus the assembly celebrating its liturgy occupies foundational space as the ‘ontological condition’ of theology itself. US Roman Catholic presbyter Robert Hovda has developed this contention in a number of contexts, summarizing the theme with the arresting and breathtaking – and as yet underexplored – assertion that

among the symbols with which the liturgy deals, none is more important than this assembly of believers. … The most powerful experience of the sacred is found in the celebration and the persons celebrating, that is, it is found in the action of the assembly: the living words, the living gestures, the living sacrifice, the living meal.⁷

This book seeks to narrate, interrogate, and develop the contention that ‘this assembly of believers’ is the ‘primary symbol’⁸ of the liturgy by pressing its significance in relation to the embodied and culturally encoded human particularities⁹ and differences present in liturgical assemblies and experienced by its members, which have been overlooked as sources of positive theological significance. By scrutinizing key voices and literature in this discipline, it seeks to uncover new dimensions of a liturgical-sacramental imagination that both question received norms and practices, and open pathways to new patterns through which liturgical assemblies can embody and enact – that is, signify – the liberation-and-reconciliation revealed in the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ. Such practice has the potential to embody the unique koinonia or communion in the Church¹⁰ made possible in and through the contours of human diversity found in the gathered