The Sound of the Liturgy: How Words Work In Worship

By Cally Hammond

Cally Hammond looks at how words function as carriers of semantic content (communicating facts and doctrines; telling stories; articulating emotions and spiritual perceptions) and then contrasts this with words as they function as physical entities striking the ear, so as to evoke emotions, memories and spiritual perceptions. This basic antithesis between words as carriers of meaning and words as evokers of feeling, emotion, and memory leads to four chapters that explore in fascinating detail the four main aspects of liturgical speech: posture, repetition, rhythm and punctuation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SPCK
• Release date: Jan 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9780281069552

Cally Hammond

The Revd Dr Cally Hammond is the Dean of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. She previously worked in rural parishes in the diocese of Ely and is the author of Passionate Christianity (SPCK 2007).

Book preview

Introduction

With the Lord’s help, I shall say a few things about presentation.¹

Three problems with words

Words as signs

Most of what happens in worship happens without precise attention being paid to it. Worshippers do not all attend divine service with the mindset of a critic, looking for weak points; many do not give much attention to why they are going, beyond the fact that it is somehow right, or expected, or good for them. Even when they are looking forward to participating in the liturgy, it is unlikely that they are doing the mental groundwork for a complete appreciation of the intellectual content of the words of which the service is composed. Almost all the material out of which an act of worship is constructed consists of words. So it is important to be clear from the outset of this book what words are understood to be, to help make sense of how they function. Augustine classifies words together with bodily gestures: just as a nod is a ‘sign’ to the eyes indicating assent, and a flag is a sign to the troops from their commander of what formation to take up,² so certain sounds can be ‘signs’ to the ears. Musical instruments can convey a limited range of signs to the ears; but words, he argues, have gained complete ascendancy when it comes to human beings conveying ideas to one another. Writing, moreover, was invented to stop words being evanescent and ephemeral. But Augustine leaps straight from this pedestrian sketch of how words work into an observation so sharp that the whole of this book is really a kind of search for the answer to his question:

Imagine that someone made a statement: ‘Some people exist who are holy and perfect . . . faithful and true servants of God who have come to the holy water of baptism and . . . bring forth fruit of a double love, i.e. God and neighbour.’ Why is it that someone who speaks thus brings less delight to his hearer than if he expressed the same meaning by quoting from the Song of Songs, when it tells the Church, ‘Your teeth are like a flock of shorn sheep coming up from the water, all of which produce twin young, with not a barren one among them’? Surely one does not learn anything more than by the factual statement in plain words without the assistance of the simile?³

Words used to convey factual statements touch the hearer in a very different way from the poetic expression of this Scripture verse (Song of Songs 4.2): Augustine follows the standards of biblical exegesis in his own time, by interpreting the teeth as an image of the destruction of the sinful self before conversion, and the flock of sheep as a metaphor for the Church, which following its ascent from the (baptismal) water is wholly fruitful. He admits that he cannot entirely explain this process by which pleasure is increased by the oblique approach to truth and identity; but he knows that it is real, and good:

No-one is in any doubt that we take more pleasure in understanding things by means of imagery.⁴

So one aim of this book is to show how words work as signs in worship, beyond their most basic function as conveyers of information.

Words in translation

Liturgical language is littered with traces of the communities that produced it and the languages they spoke: from Hebrew (‘alleluia’;⁵ ‘amen’; ‘hosanna’); to Greek (‘Kyrie eleison’); to (most of all) Latin (all the titles of the canticles and incipits of the psalms in the Book of Common Prayer (BCP 1662) are given in Latin. The worshipper is always being reminded, by constant exposure to these words, of the cultures that have contributed to the growth of the Church. But translation is not always easy, and words do not map simply from one language to another. I have recently been working on a translation of Augustine’s Confessions. Very early in the process I had to made a decision on how to translate the key Latin noun confessio (and its cognate verb confiteor/confessus), which Augustine places with great care in order to mean very specific things. In English the word ‘confess’ has a mostly negative flavour, which is not the case in Latin (there it is more neutral). As Augustine says elsewhere, the Latin for ‘confess’ can mean (1) to admit wrongdoing but also (2) to declare praise. So in my translation I decided to keep on using the English word confess/ion, even though by doing so I was forcing the word a little way out of its customary semantic range (which does allow for the ‘praise’ meaning, but which is mostly weighted towards the sense of admission of guilt).

I did this partly for practical reasons. Had I used a different word to cover the ‘praise’ sense of confessio, I would have obscured a feature of the text which, for me, is fundamental: namely that for Augustine the praise and guilt aspects are two sides of the same coin, and the only word that does justice to both is confessio itself. ‘Confession-negative’ and ‘confession-positive’ belong together in the life of the worshipper. And if I wanted the reader of the English version to know whenever Augustine was employing ‘confession’ language (which was so resonant and important for his message in the book as a whole) I would otherwise have had to find some other means of indicating that this significant term was at hand.

So I chose to stretch the boundaries of the word, and to extend its semantic range a little, ‘just’ to avoid clunky repetitive explanations on the page. I risked the loss of an immediately clear meaning for the sake of giving more depth and nuance to my Englishing of what Augustine had originally written, and the message he wanted his readers to hear.

This difficulty in shifting between one language and another is closely analogous to what the liturgist faces in moving between the world of everyday discourse and that of ‘divine service’. Some think the language used in church should be immediately comprehensible, others that it is better to use language which is archaic and mysterious. What is more, many confuse simplicity of structure or expression (e.g. ‘God is love’; ‘I am the bread of life’) with simplicity of meaning.⁶

Liturgical language⁷ is a constant exploration of just this dilemma between immediate comprehensibility and long-term depth. To take another analogy, I think of a modern oil-painting I bought when I was a student. It hangs in the hall of my home; I pass it every day, often without looking or noticing it. But whenever I do give it my attention, it continues to repay that attention because the artist (Nick Schlee) has given such lively fluidity to his portrayal of a landscape of fields under a stormy sky. There is a richness about the use of colour and movement in the landscape which is still delighting me after 25 years. And it has taken a long time to get to know the painting properly. Sometimes complete absorption takes time.

Words as actions

So far words have been considered as ‘signs’ or mediators of information, whether directly or obliquely (‘words as signs’), completely or partially (‘words in translation’). But words have another function, which it is difficult to describe fully in this book because of the extremely strong taboo still attached to the kind of words necessary to the argument. I am talking here about ‘swear words’.⁸ There are two main kinds: blasphemy (about God) and profanity (‘Anglo-Saxon’, ‘four-letter words’). The use of blasphemous swear words is ubiquitous: O my God! O Christ! O Jesus! Blast! Damnation! Hell! In other languages than English, such blasphemies are more offensive than the profanities that rank as worst in English: Host! Tabernacle!

Swear words are qualitatively different from ‘normal’ words. They are acquired in early childhood, learned as words we have to know, and need to understand; but which must not be used. They are among the last words to persist when dementia sets in and other kinds of speech have trickled away. What matters here is the power of such words when they are used as substitutes for action (e.g. instead of hitting or breaking someone or something); and how they have a proven power to reduce pain. The sharp outlet of taboo speech has a measurable physical effect. It is rooted in a part of the brain that is nothing to do with cognitive reasoning and the exercise of intellect; and there is no substitute for the real word, despite the ubiquity of euphemisms such as ‘dash it’ or ‘shoot’. Some words are taboo; everyone knows and understands them, no one uses them freely. This is equally true of the divine name,⁹ which Jews held to be so sacred that they would not speak it, and so its true pronunciation has been lost. In many Christian churches, the word ‘alleluia’ is not said in Lent, and becomes (a curious phenomenon) temporarily taboo.

What matters for worship and liturgy is accepting that certain words have a valuable linguistic function of communicating non-verbal information more concisely and immediately than a long series of non-taboo words. Some language about God works in the same way as swear words. It belongs to the realm of the pain-relieving, anxiety-reducing, balance-restoring realm of human interaction. There is a degree of difference between, say, the propositional statements of the Creeds, which are spoken with at least some attention to semantic content; and the Sanctus, which begins with a triple anaphora so powerful – ‘holy, holy, holy’¹⁰ – that it crosses the boundary into the world of an acquired verbal behaviour analogous to swearing. It is not so much a statement of fact as the antonym of a blasphemy – an expression of love at the level not of rational thought but of feeling, instinct and action.¹¹

Functional liturgy

So there are three aspects of the use of words that require constant care to interpret: how they act as signs; how they express meaning; and how they affect worshippers and effect things. This book is about a cluster of inter-related themes focused on the operation of words in the relationship between intention and action in (mostly) public worship; between formality and spontaneity; between what is spoken once and what is reiterated. Interwoven with these themes are more technical questions about how words ‘work’ in worship, how they are set out on the page, how sacred texts are composed, translated and applied. The aim of this admittedly wide-ranging argument is to overcome ingrained assumptions of the superiority of verbal over physical in worship, of semantic content (what the words ‘mean’ or signify) over physical effect and affect. Hence the beginning of the argument proper with a chapter titled ‘Posture’: which is a shorthand for the disposition of the body in public prayer, whether in static positions or in movement. Posture works as the foundation on which the sounds proper to good liturgy are built.

This idea of this book has been simmering away on the mental back-burner ever since I was at theological college in the 1990s. That was when I started to confront properly, and honestly, some fairly basic questions about why I prefer some forms of worship to others. Again and again I came back to the question of words. In my life before ordination, I worked on ancient Greek and Latin texts, I was immersed in a world where precision in language really mattered: the placing of an adjective here, a noun there; or the shaping of a periodic sentence to show how each subordinate idea related to the main one.¹² The periodic sentence is a factor in liturgical texts that is frequently encountered, but not always recognized for what it is. It is especially important in openings of prayers addressed to God, such as the Collects (see ‘Punctuation’); and in the prefaces of the many forms of eucharistic prayer: these speak to God, through the priest, in the congregation’s presence, with its permission, truths about God and his nature and his three persons, which make the action being undertaken meaningful. By this means they become a teaching tool akin to the Creed or Collect. It was once a mark of distinguished written style and good education to be able to join a number of dependent clauses together in a mutual relationship to a main verb: the form of the periodic sentence was like an icon of the inter-related ideas that usually go to make up any complete thought. It was admired and imitated in early examples of English prose, but abandoned later in favour of simpler, shorter, non-periodic sentences such as are more commonly used today.

The real meaning of rhetoric

In the ancient world, rhetoric was the basis of all higher education. It is important to say at the outset that the term ‘rhetoric’ in ancient times carried none of the negative connotations that it does for us. Today, ‘rhetoric’ carries a connotation of padding, hyperbole and empty (even deceitful) persuasion. Then it was a learnable, transferable skill in persuasive communication by means of artistic speech, which encompassed not only written compositions (which were rather a side-effect or by-product) but also the spoken word in every public sphere – law-courts, political assemblies, and of course religious congregations.¹³

Rhetoric was a system of rules and conventions governing expression, extending not only to vocabulary or choice of words (diction) but also arrangement (microcosmic, the putting together of each word next to another) and structure (macrocosmic, the whole speech/address/composition). And, at least as important as these, it included expectations of what the orator or public speaker himself ought to be: ethically, morally, intellectually. The public speaker who wanted to persuade (i.e. to use rhetoric successfully) needed to know how to suit his style to each kind of audience; to appeal to their prejudices, flatter their vanity, inspire their patriotism. He needed his voice, hands, face and whole body to collaborate with what his words were striving to achieve. Hence gesture, expression, voice and body language also formed part of the rhetorical curriculum. Rhetoric was not a matter of bombast, exhibitionism or deceit (though it could include any or all of these). It was a complex and intellectually challenging discipline which, especially in the writings of Cicero (106–43 BC), came to require one further talent of the successful public communicator: at least the appearance (and preferably the reality) of interior morality to match his exterior demeanour.¹⁴

All this needs emphasizing because of the argument that unfolds in what follows. Every part of it depends on persuading the reader to abandon any possible prejudice against carefully constructed presentations of ideas; or pre-planned, rehearsed liturgical choreography; or rubrical subordination of individual choice to a general direction to the whole congregation. All these are not, as is so often supposed, phenomena at odds with genuine religious expression or feeling. Individual worshippers may be well aware that one may reach the heights of spiritual fervour and intensity of devotion as much through set forms of liturgy and worship as through self-consciously ‘spontaneous’ ones. But they often lack the information and background to see why and how this may be so; and to break through the prejudice, so firmly inculcated first by the Reformation and then by nonconformist religious revivalism, that in faith and worship, formality and sincerity are necessarily at odds with one another.

There is a superfluity of material that could be drawn on to make that case, and to explore how corporate religious experience can be enhanced by self-aware and well-informed practitioners who understand how to work with, not against, the grain of human talents and capacities. But I cannot claim a competence to deal with all such material. I do not claim to be an expert liturgist in scholarly terms, though, like all clergy, I am well versed in the praxis of the faith-community I inhabit. But the long and close study of ancient texts and ancient rhetoric, together with experience of translating diverse texts into readable English and interpreting them for readers, does produce a sensitivity to the placement and resonances of individual words and phrases in liturgy. When this is combined with an understanding of historical, anthropological and sociological perspectives, it becomes possible to adopt what can be called a ‘functional approach’ to liturgy. This means putting at the centre the question of how liturgy works.

Liturgical language

The linguist David Crystal highlights six functions of language as being particularly significant to liturgy:¹⁵

All six have their part to play in making sense of the language used in worship. But these functions of language are not to be taken in isolation. Instead, they are one means of expressing four even more fundamental elements which, I shall argue, combine together to create the ‘sound of the liturgy’. That ‘sound’ includes both literal sound (what noises we create and absorb in worship) and metaphorical (the resonances of our liturgical actions, including the ones we may not actually recognize as liturgical at all. The four elements that make up the theme of this book are: repetition, rhythm, punctuation and posture.

Speech and text: worship as dialogue

Where does the construction of worship begin? The question is asked primarily in terms not of denomination, congregants, venue or style of service, but of something much more basic. When worship is studied as a phenomenon, there is an ineluctable pull towards the beguiling clarity of text. Written manuals, devotional books, liturgical instructions: they seem to provide clarity and definition in a sphere where the reality of the thing itself is only experienced in the act of participation. We can no more experience the reality of an act of worship by reading such texts than we can enter into the emotional reality of a musical concert or a football match by reading the reviews or reports in the next day’s newspaper. For some kinds of human experience, it is essential to be there.

If the construction of worship does not begin with texts, where does it begin? One thing which the texts do usefully make clear here is that any liturgical text is encountered as a representation of a dialogue. It may be a dialogue between the worship-leader and the congregation, or between all those who are present and God the Father, or occasionally the Son or the Spirit. In every case, this duality is the key: whatever else worship may be, it is not something that makes sense, or comes to life, on its own. Worship demands dialogue – between minister and people, between the people themselves, between people and/or priest (on their behalf) and God. This constraint gives to worship its innermost matrix, for which a number of terms are possible – duality, dyad, antiphonality. What matters is that the number is always more than one. Moreover, the two physical phenomena predicated of individual worshippers which drive the sound of our liturgy are also dualities, and as such suggest harmony and balance: they are bipedality and breathing. We stand on two feet, each side of us mirroring the other; two hands shaped to oppose each other, two arms to lift or extend; and we inhale, and exhale. The actions of walking (left right left right) and breathing (in out in out) govern the antiphonal sound of our liturgy. This will become clearer as the argument proceeds.

Posture, repetition, rhythm and punctuation

Two of the sections of this book are concerned with the physical expression and experience of worship: the section on Posture includes a survey of ancient and modern practice in arranging the body suitably for prayer, and some suggestions about what can be learned from ancient method to enhance modern worship. The section on Repetition includes an examination of language and text, as well as incorporating the understanding of the impact of frequently repeated acts of worship, and how they can carry a positive rather than a negative spiritual charge.

After this analysis of the resonances of physical actions and verbal repetitions in worship, the argument turns to more technical matters: under the section on Rhythm, I explore how liturgical English emerged from its pre-Reformation Latin matrix; and look at how a careful deployment of words, giving attention to sound as well as sense, can both enhance the spiritual effect of the words and also – and this is a key part of the aim of this book – help restore to Anglican worship a positive value for the learning of texts by heart. In the past, it was a common practice for children to be made to learn each Sunday’s Collect. Here it becomes clear why this was a relatively easy task compared to learning other kinds of prose. The power of the liturgy to ingrain in the worshipper the texts she or he hears week in week out is a crucial part of Christian formation; but it depends on a number of factors over which the individual worshipper has no control. These include how the text has been translated from its original language, (a) to convey the semantic content (what information it contains, e.g. ‘Christ died for our sins’) and (b) to compose the English version in such a way that its adherence to the natural rhythms of the spoken language makes it easily memorable. Here the great exemplar must be the BCP 1662: generations of Anglicans have absorbed its theology and spirituality through coming to know its texts by heart.

The last of these main themes, Punctuation, is concerned with the ways in which liturgical texts are designed upon the page and presented for congregational use: how does the layout help the reader? What signs are used and commonly understood between worship-leader and congregation, to make the service run smoothly and inclusively, not leaving out those who are unfamiliar with the rite? It should be noted here that the most basic difficulty with the modern liturgy of the Church of England is simply this: that it is so utterly dependent on complex written texts. It demands a fairly high level of literacy to cope with the language involved; not to mention the theological complexities underlying both the mysterious technical words like ‘incarnation’ and the apparently simple and familiar ones like ‘flesh’, ‘light’ and ‘word’ – which turn out, within a liturgical context, to carry a heavy load of encoded meaning.

So the capacity, not to say necessity, of a human being breathing in and out is the base unit with which all acts of worship have to co-operate. The body cannot be ignored or minimized in worship; it has to be exerted in order to remain engaged, and that may be done through standing to sing, or kneeling (or these days more likely sitting) to pray, both of which are forms of exertion of the body, making physical demands of the worshipper. The fundamental rhythm of in-breath and out-breath is what gives shape to the earliest forms of worship we have access to within the Judaeo-Christian textual tradition – the Psalms. Their basic form uses parallelism to harmonize with the breathing in and out that makes the rhythm of the pray-ers, at the same time as it remains the very breath of life.

Formal and informal

This is an era in the life of both Church and society which values individual choice over corporate identities; and which is inclined to depreciate the value of symbolic actions in worship, in contrast with the transmission of semantic content – in other words, preferring factual or propositional information to value-added (or ‘encoded’) physical actions such as rituals or sacraments. It has not always been so. There is no reason to think it always will be so in future. But this is the state of affairs at present. Christians may be the inheritors of a vast culture of ritual and symbol, but today they are often adrift without any knowledge of its language, lacking the real understanding to defend the meaning of such rituals and symbols in terms other than the transmission of information. To take an obvious example, on Good Friday, how does the individual Christian express an understanding of the event? Only by reading the story in corporate worship? Or by combining the retelling of the story with genuflexions, prostrations, and adorations of a single physical object taken to represent the actual cross on which Christ was crucified? The reading part makes sense in a modern context – ‘We are transmitting information about what happened.’ The physical expressions of devotion, though they feel full of significance to those who enact them, are more problematic. What is the meaning of such actions? Are they dangerous, or open to misunderstanding? What beliefs do they encode, and how can we decode and read them? There is always that consciousness of needing to explain, ‘Yes, it is understood that the cross being used for the devotion is only an icon for the actual cross; and that those who adore it are not worshipping the object but expressing their love for what it embodies before them.’

It may be helpful here to mention something about the nature of texts, both ancient and modern, which will help us to understand what kind of things we are dealing with. Unlike some other modern languages like Greek or Welsh, English is not conscious of having two forms, one for colloquial, koine, spoken English, the other for formal documents and compositions such as newspapers, letters, speeches, novels. Yet our ears are finely tuned to the kind of language and structures that are appropriate to particular contexts. It is unlikely that anyone introduced to Her Majesty the Queen will greet her with ‘Wotcha! How’ya doin’?’ or ‘Awright?’ There is a kind of language that we feel is appropriate for talking to God, too. It contains formal elements such as the use of complex adjectives (‘incarnate’; ‘triune’), formulae (‘almighty and everlasting’; ‘most gracious’) and carefully polite articulation (‘you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than either we desire or deserve’). But in the days when English still had two forms of the second-person pronoun, one for plurality and politeness (‘you’, ‘yours’), one for those close and familiar (‘thou’, ‘thee’, ‘thine’), God was always addressed as one close, intimate and familiar, never politely and distantly. When we look at texts written for worship, they may be more formal in tone, or more colloquial; but they can