Alternative Use Of Music And The Arts In The Liturgical Tradition

Liturgy was once thought to imply prescribed text, music, movement, and environment and the proscription of everything else. Yet many liturgical congregations are attempting to plan powerfully imaginative worship experiences that use both traditional liturgical resources and a variety of contemporary practices from around the world. The following article describes the practice of one such congregation.

     Social historians distinguish the Great Tradition of a culture, comprising its high literature, art, music, science, and theology on the one hand; and the Little Traditions, comprising folk legends, art, music, ways, and religion on the other. These periodically cross-fertilize each other, often at periods of great creativity, or in the work of great creators, and especially often in worship. Our own period is pregnant with creative liturgical opportunity. The Christian church ministers today in a world of cultural confluence, where people communicate at both traditional levels on a scale unknown since European armies expelled the Moors in the early Renaissance. In such a confluence, acculturation—that is, sharing the gospel with people on their own traditional terms—inevitably becomes a two-way road. Western worshipers appropriate Eastern Christian icons sprung from roots in Hellenistic Greece, India, and central Asia; Christian monks take up Buddhist meditation methods; Roman popes collect and show African ritual art for church artists to copy—and Christianity shifts irreversibly. All world culture is ours to talk with, and the talk will change us. If we find ways to talk authentically and creatively, we too can hear the gospel anew.

Environmental Art

     St. Gregory Nyssen (Gregory of Nyssa) Episcopal Church in San Francisco joins the arts of Great and Little Traditions from many times and cultures, to celebrate the gospel through architecture, decoration, vesture, music, dance, and drama. Whereas some worship styled "folk" today applies a popular contemporary aesthetic to a conventional theater or lecture format for services, our liturgy format is participatory and incorporates traditional folk expression. Our floor plan, drawn from ancient Jewish and Christian synagogues, serves now as then to enhance congregational involvement. At one end of the building seats surround a raised platform [bema] with a preacher's chair ("Moses' Seat," Matt. 23:2) facing a raised lectern [ambo] at the church's center, backed by a tree-of-lights [menorah] and screen. Here people gather to hear the Bible, sing, comment together on the Scriptures, and offer their own prayers. The platform affords a place in plain view where we baptize, incorporate new members, and celebrate marriages in the midst of the congregation. Beyond the screen stands the eucharistic Table in the center of a wide open floor space. There the whole congregation processes, eats, drinks, and dances together.

     We embellish this plan to reflect the ethnic richness of the Christian missionary world through traditional folk art. Our walls bear large folk icons from the largest eastern Christian church, in Ethiopia; the screen behind our lectern is formed of Ethiopian crosses with their customary cloth streamers; our censers, too, are Ethiopian, and ring with little bells when the congregation processes through the church. Our preacher's chair, at the apex of the seating, is a Thai elephant howdah. The platform before it, and the furniture round the church, hold drums, bells, and gongs from all over the world. Our vestments and hangings come mainly from west Africa, where they are in daily secular use—as all Christian vestments originally were. These bubus, or inexpensive stuff, richly tie-dyed and free of symbolic ornament, represent a living tradition of human clothing, giving our assembly a natural colorfulness. (By contrast, many modern vestments look like donned curtains or upholstery, because that is what the fabric was designed for.) Much as Christians of every sort once wore the chasubles later vestigially relegated to clergy alone, we spread our African chasubles liberally among lay and ordained ministers, marking our presiding clergy by stoles of African stripweave worn over these.

     During most of the year we mix these vestments in an intuitive play of colors, following the simplest seasonal scheme, with festal days calling for the brightest cloth. Only in Holy Week do specifically symbolic fabrics appear. At our Maundy service commemorating the Last Supper, we celebrate the Eucharist within a meal, following the second-century Didache ritual. Removing our usual altar table, we fill the open floor with dinner tables. Above these, creating an air of intimate splendor, we suspend a ceiling tent of our richest African cloths, mixing some woven for royal wedding banquets with others made for funerals—a mixture fitting this emotionally complex event. On Good Friday, when we read the story of Christ's universal victory on the cross, we vest all our clergy and lay ministers in black and red folk-weavings made for sacred use by peoples outside the Christian church: Mayan priests' ponchos; Indonesian burial offering cloths; Moslem imams' pilgrimage cloaks. Thus we honor the faith and prayers of all the people with whom Christ's death makes one (cf. Col. 3:11). Then for Easter—a nighttime service with us, as with the early church—we produce our own folk art, filling the building overhead with a temporary art installation, which our church members create each year under the supervision of a nationally known artist in our congregation. At other seasons our children bring artwork they have made in church school, laying it on the altar with the eucharistic gifts.

Music

     But the heart of our liturgical and creative life is music. Whether drawn from Great or Little Traditions, St. Gregory's music chiefly serves participatory worship. A short opening rehearsal allows newcomers to join in freely with the rest. Our congregation sings three quarters of an hour of music altogether each Sunday, nearly all of which is sung a cappella or is accompanied by rhythm instruments. (A modern harpsichord and small organ stand by for occasional support.) We choose high quality music from a wide range of traditions: plainsong; Russian, Greek, Armenian and Arab chant; renaissance polyphonic chant; early American shape-note hymns; European and African folk hymns; white and Negro spirituals; and classic hymns in four-part harmony from the Episcopal church's Hymnal and other sources.

     And while singing these hymns the whole congregation dances—twice each Sunday, and for half an hour in our Easter liturgy. Congregational liturgical dance had an honored place in the early church, featured prominently in patristic sermons, and endured vigorously for ages, finally disappearing only in the eighteenth century. We restored it tentatively at first, as an Easter custom and soon found our people asking for it at normal weekly services. Now we dance at every Eucharist. Because patristic and medieval choreography is mostly not recoverable, we adapt traditional folk dances to modern liturgical functions, as early Christians probably did. Following the intercessions, clergy and people process together to the altar table in the ancient tripudium step (three forward, one back) which G. Diekmann brought us from a Luxembourg abbey, where it has been used for this procession since the fourth century. This dance ends with the kiss of peace shared enthusiastically round the church, and the eucharistic prayer, which is sung throughout. Then after hearing choir anthems at Communion and almsgathering, all circle the altar in a Greek folk step, singing a final hymn to the rhythm of drums, tambourines and Ethiopian sistrum rattles. (Many basic Greek steps date to the early church period or earlier. They are repetitive and quick for newcomers to learn. Among folk dances they have the advantage of moving sensuously sideways, allowing everyone to feel the whole church dancing together. Roughly a third of the hymnbook tunes will dance easily using only four or five such steps.)

     Musicians in the congregation contribute broadly to our musical life. A choir of gifted singers rehearse and sing anthems of the Great Tradition from many periods, often accompanied by harpsichord or small organ; drummers lend a hand; children learn seasonal hymns to share with us. Twice yearly St. Gregory's church sponsors a retreat for writers and composers, and through the year composers and arrangers within the church provide us with new music to try out, and adopt into out liturgy, and publish.

     Silence, too, is part of music, and is slowly returning to liturgical use today, though many parishes try it sparingly, finding that worshipers stir uncomfortably after only a short time, or feel uncertain what to do. St. Gregory's Sunday worship includes three two-minute meditative silences, begun with the ringing of Japanese, Tibetan, and Thai temple bells, whose long reverberations help everyone to fall into deep quiet. These bells are our most widely copied innovation; visiting clergy constantly ask us where to buy them. They make the silence work so well it has become the most popular single element in our service.

     On Christmas Eve we combine all these arts in a folk nativity play, as children and adults, players and audience act and sing out the ancient story of Jesus' birth. This play is rewritten each year from medieval source, to fit the gifts of those taking part, and forms the synaxis for our Christmas Eucharist. Other such plays may emerge into the liturgy during Eastertide, for example, as our children explore the deep bond between faith and art and life.

     At this writing St. Gregory Nyssen Episcopal Church is fourteen years old, and entering a new stage of artistic opportunity. Having outgrown our rented chapel, we have bought land and will soon build a church of our own, where we can give fuller expression to the confluence of liturgical art and music from around the world, and so serve the gospel and the church today.