Nice work if you can get it

Catherine Madsen

The Bones Reassemble: Reconstituting Liturgical Speech

Davies Group, 2005. xi + 207p. $24

Catherine Madsen's bravely conceived, brilliantly argued, beautifully written book might be enough to launch a liturgical revolution or nurture one that had already begun.

But then again it might not. Madsen certainly draws on a dazzling variety of Jewish, Christian and secular sources, from history and literature, linguistics and psychology, Scripture scholarship and translation studies, to point the way for contemporary liturgists--and to point out some of their blunders. But, to vary a Pauline theme, if the trumpet nails all the notes, the army that shows up may not be all that impressive.

Madsen's main subject is what worship in our time can say, and how it can say it. Perhaps inevitably, she concentrates on liberal Reformed-Conservative and Protestant congregations, because orthodox Jewish services, like the Christian liturgies of Rome and St. John Chrysostom, are less open to change. Unfortunately, much of the new language being heard in such venues sounds rather lumpy. Theological purists "may prefer credible content in unmemorable style to untrustworthy content in memorable style;" but Madsen flatly disagrees: "Unmemorable style is untrustworthy." Contemporary worshipers need speech that does justice to their painful, contradictory world. In one of her many lapidary formulas, she concludes that, "A literacy is needed that can hold uncertainty, endure doubt and shame, and arrive in the end not at security but at stamina. As at the Tower of Babel, syntax is destiny."

We know where to find such magical language from the past: in the Bible and the Kaddish, in the best work of Tyndale, Cranmer, Donne and Christopher Smart. And, not surprisingly, many of those words were forged amid the trauma of exile, persecution, or martyrdom, in times that were both tormented and creative. But in an age whose rhetorical models are marked by toneless colloquialism, therapeutic cliches, political correctness, and dumbed-down simplicity, finding a meaty, forceful idiom won't be easy. Madsen cites a number of killing examples, such as the Reconstructionist prayerbook's "I rejoiced whenever people said to me,/ let's journey to the house of THE UNSEEN!" and instantly forgettable hymn lines like, "Wor-ship the Lord and his Son,/ te-ll him that he's Number One!" or "Suff'ring with us./ Christ Jesus raises consciousness." (Hey, it's the least he could do.)

Speaking of therapy, Madsen has nothing against it. In fact, the only viable response to our wounded condition is to talk about it. But even in such well-intentioned and fairly skillful modern attempts to address that condition religiously, such as Thomas Troeger's "Holy and Good is the Gift of Desire," a hymn about sexual violence, Madsen's perfect pitch immediately detects false notes:

  God knows that our violence is mixed with our dust:
  God's son was a victim of violence and lust,
  for Jesus revealed that women will trust
  a man who in action is tender and just.

Madsen notes the problematic establishing of Jesus as a feminist icon: Does the "for" mean that Jesus was crucified because of his tenderness and justice to women? If so (and that's a stretch), how much inspiration can either women or men find in someone who apparently never had a wife or lover? "It is hard," she writes, "not to see this invocation of Jesus as (the gentlest and most generously intended) theological opportunism"; and she can't imagine--nor can we--the hymn getting any long or widespread use. Alas, Madsen can't come up with any instances of really recent first-rate liturgical language--even though she's broad-minded enough to admit such un-and ex-believers as Blake, Dickinson, Ruskin, George Eliot, Hardy, and Yeats into the choir of "post-Reformation" liturgists.

The key to the macrocosmic trouble Madsen is dealing with may well lie in her own title: In Ezekiel 37 the dry bones do not just "reassemble" (intransitive verb), they get breathed on mightily by the ruach of the Lord. And then, as John 3.8, famously reminds us, "The wind bloweth where it listeth." The kind of heroic language Madsen longs for, and understands so well, may simply not be available now. Maybe our liturgical writers have the same hopelessly tin ears as our preachers, commencement speakers, and political ghostwriters. Maybe the fault is in our relentlessly banal culture (what was the 17th century equivalent of, say, the Left Behind series or, for that matter, The Da Vinci Code?) Maybe Madsen has come before her time or, worse yet, too late.

In any case, one could hardly ask for a more vigorous or incisive commentator not just on liturgy, but the entire religious scene. As befits so keen a reader of sacred texts, Madsen's prose crackles with persuasive wit. "Job's near-silence after God speaks to him from the whirlwind is a kind of convalescence from words." "Philip Roth's Portnoy who wanted to 'put the id back in Yid' was no talmudist; the id had never been missing." Brava, Madsen!