Moral formation and liturgy: a response to Vigen Guroian - article in this issue, p. 372

Vigen Guroian has shown in his fine paper and in other writings that a major gulf has in modern times opened between Christian ethical formation and the area loosely labelled "liturgy", but including prayer, worship, hymns, etc. Traditionally these were commonly regarded as essential components of moral formation. Today, as part of secular societies' attempts to separate morality from faith, there is a strong move to treat moral formation as having little if anything to do with religious practice, and as being a secular and civil matter. This encourages the privatization of religion, and liturgy and ritual are viewed as having little bearing on moral formation, or even as having a negative influence in as far as they induct people into sectarian and deviant communities of shared belief, rather than into the responsibilities of citizenship in the "great societies" to which they belong. Liturgy, in other words, is seen as morally divisive rather than as nurturing virtues and practices which are of value to the whole community. Guroian has also reminded us that liturgy is more than moral formation; although it is "the ground from which grows all that belongs singularly to Christian ethics", it cannot be reduced to a kind of dramatized morality.

It is necessary also to acknowledge with Guroian that, at least in the northern hemisphere, liturgy in the broad sense is in a state of crisis, and this profoundly affects its capacity to act as an agent of moral formation. The broader context of the Sunday assembly for worship has been deeply eroded, particularly with the decline of family worship day by day, of practices such as grace before food, and of the whole notion that the worshipping community exercises discipline over its members, that there is a proper life-style for those who worship, that participation in liturgy involves and generates (among other things) a moral stance or orientation. If the link between worship and the moral life is forgotten or rejected, the understanding and the practice of liturgy are distorted, and moral formation becomes thin and fragile in as far as it no longer claims to be founded in some specific narrative or to draw on the resources of a tradition and a community of shared faith. Such gulfs need to be bridged if we are to have lively and effective moral formation and also authentic and relevant worship.

Three affirmations about worship need to be held together in tension:

1. The cult is the nourishing heart of Christian practice, central to any proper understanding of Christian and moral formation, discipleship and identity. Enactment of the liturgy -- both word and sacrament -- is the place where the church is most fully church. This is perhaps most clearly seen in the Jewish Passover rite, but it is present in all authentic worship. In the Passover, the youngest child present, representing those who are not yet formed, who have not received an identity, who have not yet heard and re-enacted the story often enough or in sufficiently different ways for it to have shaped their self-understanding, asks the key questions: "What do these strange and unusual actions mean? Why do we do these things?" The answer is oblique: the story is retold and re-enacted ritually, for this is the story that makes us who we are, a story which is replete with clues as to how the people of this story should behave and what their orientation in life should be.

2. The second affirmation seems in sharp contrast to the first. It represents a position which is found in many places in the New Testament, but particularly clearly in the Letter to the Hebrews. This is that the cult has been fulfilled, completed, superseded by the work of Christ. Worship continues in heaven in the constant intercession of Christ for us, but on earth the cult has now become superfluous, redundant. Indeed, carrying on the cult in any traditional sense impugns the adequacy and efficacy of Christ's work, which is his worship. What is left to us as "true worship" is the offering of our very selves, of the life of the community, poured out in service to others. Moral formation here rests not on the cult as something we do, but on what Christ has done and what Christ continues to do for us in heaven. Guroian has similarly stressed that worship involves "remembering the future", experiencing the eschatological future, encountering the heavenly reality now, and appropriating the past. Christian worship in this understanding is shot through with moral and behavioural assumptions; true worship is the joyful offering of the whole of life in response to Christ (Rom. 12:1); we participate through service in the constant self-offering of Christ.

3. My third affirmation is not so much theological as empirical. It is that worship often becomes frozen, like a fly in amber, in such a way that it appears to be a relic of a dead past without life or bearing on today's world or today's demands. I agree with Guroian's statement that "the deterioration of worship and disciplines of prayer has deprived the churches of necessary tools of discernment and creativity to build ethics from within the ecclesial body itself". But the reality of worship today is rather complex. It is, I suppose, encouraging that communist regimes regarded even worship that seemed rather moribund as a continuing threat to their systems, a kind of question mark against totalitarian regimes, and a challenge to the moral formation they attempted to impose. And it is strange how often, even in avowedly secular societies, intelligent but unbelieving people seek to recruit Christian worship as an instrument of some pattern of moral formation. It would be rash to reject almost any form of liturgy as entirely moribund and lacking in ethical force. After all, one of the functions of liturgy, as of scripture, is to preserve images, insights, perspectives and memories which sometimes seem to have spent their force and to belong to a past age in the hope (which has been proved true time and again) that some of them may be reborn and show themselves relevant to the context of a new age. But that is no excuse for failure to reform and renew liturgy. Indeed, the modern liturgical movement has opened up a whole range of fresh possibilities of mobilizing the formative possibilities of liturgy.