Liturgical Hermeneutics
2002 Reston, Virginia
2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002
Convener 2002
Gil Ostdiek (professor of liturgy at Catholic Theological Union, Chicago)
Seminar Participants 2002
Byron Anderson, Mary Collins, Edward Foley, Margaret Mary Kelleher, Richard McCarron, Gerry Lardner, Daniel Ruff, Susan Smith, Dolly Sokol, David Stosur, Mark Wedig
Seminar Report 2002
Presentations
Ed Foley
Ed Foley’s presentation was entitled “A Survey of Methods of Reflection” in which he guided us through a wide range of methods, including: paleographic, philological, and codicological; rubrical-canonical; liberation/advocacy; philosophical hermeneutics; mystagogical/analogical; ritual studies/social sciences; narrative/language theory; historical; comparative/structural; and systematic. This survey provided a very useful backdrop for discussion of several questions: Are each of these a method, a perspective, or a lens through which to look at the liturgical event? Do different methods privilege certain kinds of data? Are there distinct purposes, procedures, and philosophical assumptions for the various approaches to reflection on the liturgical event? The conversation returned again and again to the value of using more than one approach and of attending seriously to the liturgical experience of the assembly.
Richard McCarron
Richard McCarron then presented three reflections on “The Negotiation of the Meaning of Texts in Performance.” The first focused on “hypertext” (i.e., the open-ended linking of texts in web pages) as a new economy of text. The text is no longer read in a linear or closed fashion. A text never simply is or means; rather, it generates itself in relation to other texts and the boundaries between text, authors, and readers shift continually in the interaction. Meaning, then, is not readily given and objective; it is deferred, accumulated, negotiated in front of the text, an event requiring appropriation by the reader. Analogously, do liturgical texts mean the way a web page means? The second reflection looked at liturgical text as oral text, drawing on “poetic orality,” Paul Zumthor’s work on analyzing texts in performance. Performance is part of a larger series of operations in oral communication: production, transmission, reception, storage, repetition. Thus, producing and setting a liturgical text down in an official book is only one phase. The meaning is mediated in performance, as much by tone, pacing, sonorous manipulation, bodily gesture, and props as it is by the actual words. Further, the hearers take part in the performance as well and the role they play contributes no less than that of the interpreter. In liturgical celebration the liturgical text “moves” and becomes discourse; it takes on a dynamic quality and its meaning can never be adequately understood through a purely literary hermeneutic. The third reflection centered on “intertextuality,” a term coined by Julia Kristeva. For Kristeva texts are not a closed system of signs and signifiers that refer clearly and immediately to themselves. Rather, they are spaces that can produce meanings by the very way they allow many previous or contemporaneous texts to cross paths. Every text, then, is constructed as a “mosaic of quotations,” every text is the absorption and transformation of other texts, both historical and cultural. The implication for liturgical texts is that they must be related to the social, political, and theological “texts” operative in a given period. They are more a “transformational surface” rather than a finished project. Each of these reflections sparked lively discussion on the roles performance and liturgical participants play in the construction and appropriation of meaning.
Susan Smith
Susan Smith led us through a session entitled “Experimenting with a Method of Liturgical Reflection.” She proposed an adaptation of the “Microscope Method.” The group members had been asked to reflect in advance on the events of September 11th, especially on the rituals they had seen, taken part in, or heard tell of. These reflections served as the basis for an exercise in the proposed method. The steps are to describe a ritual/liturgical experience; to identify a crucial moment or turning point and its attendant thoughts and feelings; to choose a metaphor that captures those thoughts and feelings; and to explore the world of the metaphor, asking what the metaphor tells us about who we are, what is made holy, what has changed, what our horizon now is, and what we look forward to. The exercise led to a searching discussion on metaphor, on distanciation, and on whether the metaphor chosen depends more on thoughts and feelings than on the rituals themselves.
In the final session we discussed Michael Driscoll’s vice-presidential address and made plans for the following year.