Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Louis Weil was the James F. Hodges Professor of Liturgics at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California. His ministry has included missionary and academic work in Latin America. In his work as a teacher of liturgy he has lectured on five continents. He was a member of the Standing Liturgical Commission from 1985-1991. He died in 2022.

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LITURGICAL SENSE

CHURCH PUBLISHING INCORPORATED

Contents

Chapter One

The origins of this book lie in my experience with students during a half-century as a teacher of liturgy. As my style of teaching developed, I found it quite natural to draw upon my experience as a worshiper and as a person who has participated in liturgical celebrations in a wide variety of contexts. In that experience I have quite often simply been an ordinary Christian in a pew on Sunday morning, but always with my eyes wide open as to what I was seeing and hearing in that particular celebration.

I have learned that it makes an enormous difference if a priest is the presider, or an assisting minister, every Sunday. The perspective shaped in that context can inhibit an awareness of the view from the congregation. Generally speaking, clergy may be expected to know what is intended in the rite, but what is it that the people see? As we shall observe in this book, what the people see is sometimes quite different from what is intended.

In the context of the classroom and in my work with seminarians, I have always been aware that the students were candidates for ordination for whom a course in liturgical studies must include an orientation toward their own future ministries. After ordination they would have pastoral responsibility for the liturgical norms of the community to which their bishop would assign them. It was in this context that I came regularly to draw upon my own experiences as a worshiper, and to point out both the positive and the negative aspects of countless liturgies in which I had participated over the years.

Thus, in my teaching I chose not to speak only at a theoretical level in which a teacher might be concerned primarily with reference to historical or theological data. As appropriate, I aimed at placing the wide range of liturgical issues within the context of actual liturgical experience. Sometimes these were quite positive examples of what one might describe as good liturgical models upon which a pastoral norm might be based. Similarly, when I described a poor liturgical model, I was able to analyze with the students why this model was not effective, or even how it embodied a theological understanding which actually contradicted the theology of the Church as to the meaning of the rite. This method brought home to them an awareness that the parish priest is not merely repeating the authorized words found in the Book of Common Prayer, but is also, in the ritual choices that are made, embodying the theology in which the rites were grounded—or potentially, even if unintentionally, subverting that theology.

This approach was nurtured in me through the experience of my own seminary formation with regard both to the theology of the sacraments and the understanding of liturgical worship which is the foundation of the prayer book tradition in Anglicanism. At the time of my own seminary training, these two aspects of the liturgy were actually taught in two different contexts. The attention given to sacramental theology played a relatively minor role in the basic course in theology.

What is most striking to me in this is that when, for example, Baptism was discussed in class, no reference whatever was made to the rite of Baptism as found in the then-authorized American Book of Common Prayer of 1928. Similarly, the Eucharist was discussed, again not in great depth, without reference to the text of The Order for Holy Communion as it was being celebrated throughout the Episcopal Church, including our seminary community each morning in the chapel.

I have asked myself countless times why sacramental theology was given little attention, and why what was taught did not make reference to how a sacrament was celebrated in the prayer book rites. I think that at least part of the answer is that there was a general feeling that, after all, "we know what Baptism is; we all know what Eucharist is ... and we know what Ordination is." But the extraordinary flowering of research on the sacraments during the past few decades has shown us that both historically and theologically we had only an impoverished sense of the rich complexity of these rites and their meaning in the history of Christianity.

When I look back on the approach to the teaching of liturgy that was standard during my seminary years through the lens of my personal experience as a teacher of liturgy, I find it quite amazing that the two primary sacramental actions of the Church were not discussed with any reference to how the Church actually embodied the theology of these two "dominical sacraments" in our liturgical celebrations. There was a kind of disconnection, which of course I accepted at the time as a seminarian, but which I came to reject in my own ministry as a teacher. Years later, in conversations with clergy who had attended seminaries other than my own, I learned that the approach I had experienced was characteristic of the general approach to the teaching of liturgy across the Episcopal Church at that time.

Although the curriculum at my seminary did include a required course which was titled "Liturgics," many other schools did not require even a basic course in liturgical studies. When I inquired about this, I was told that in some places liturgy was seen as a matter of "practical theology"—thus not an academic subject with which the seminary faculty should be concerned. It was expected that a newly ordained deacon would learn these practical aspects of ordained ministry during the one-year curacy that was then normative upon completion of the three-year seminary program.

Other aspects of liturgical study, such as the historical evolution of the liturgy in the life of the Church, including the developments and conflicts about its theological meanings, might be available as electives for seminarians for whom this was an area of special interest. But when it came to what a presider or officiant might actually do in matters of ritual practice, most of the newly ordained would be shaped by the particular manner and style of the rector at the parish where they were assigned, from whom they would learn how the rites were to be done—at least in that particular parish. To be frank, often the rector's own seminary training in liturgy had left him, in this regard, with little more than his own preferences.

Among Anglicans, the primary intention was always a kind of liturgical obedience to the particular rite, not only the authorized words of the rite, but also the rubrics within the rite. Although those rubrics tended to be rather minimal in the various versions of the Book of Common Prayer as authorized in the provinces of the Anglican Communion, they were considered as obligatory as the texts themselves as an expression of prayer book conformity which a candidate promised at the time of ordination. For clergy formed in this tradition, fidelity to the rubrics was seen as their primary obligation with regard to the performance of the rites of the Book of Common Prayer. This absolute conformity was generally obeyed in principle more than in practice, since, as I observed again and again in visits to different parishes, adherence to the Book of Common Prayer was interpreted to mean an adherence to the local model, that is, to "the Prayer Book as we do it here." But the principle of prayer book conformity itself operated as a powerful symbol of...