LITERARY THEORY AND LITURGICAL DESIGN
Photo by Alex Litvin on Unsplash
Wrestling with the early years of cinema’s debut around the world, English writer Virginia Woolf published an essay in The Nation and Athenaeum, a politically progressive newspaper in the United Kingdom. “Cinema” (1926) was, in one way, Woolf’s specific response to the German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), but in another way, Woolf’s greater response to the wider emerging art form of film. She’s certainly skeptical of it, criticizing film to be, “at first sight … simple, even stupid,” only interested in seducing the human eye, while completely disregarding the capacity of the human mind. (1) But over the course of the essay, she claims that “if so much of our thinking and feeling is connected with seeing, some residue of visual emotion which is of no use to either painter or to poet may still await the cinema.” That is to say that cinema has an artistic “essence” or “expertise” unique to itself: some ideas might only be successfully expressed in film.
In the spirit of Woolf’s essay, literary theories of adaptation focus on the unique essence of different art mediums, most especially that of literature and that of film, exploring the ways literature and film can (or cannot) be adapted one into another. Naturally, the adaption from one form to the other leaves much to be desired for the public. Harry Potter fans might have grieved the absence of a favorite literary nuance in one of the films. But frankly, that basic sort of cost-gain analysis leaves much to be explored in this theory of adaptation. The key is to adapt the essence, the central meaning; in doing so, in the words of Woolf, “when some new symbol for expressing thought is found, the film-maker has enormous riches at his command.” Symbols and meaning: this is where I believe that our work as liturgists comes into play.
I’ve grown skeptical in recent months while watching livestreamed liturgies. True, this pandemic has yielded an astounding amount of liturgical documentation, especially as congregations have attempted to capture their liturgical “normal” in their livestreams. More now than ever, we have an incredibly comprehensive snapshot of the actual liturgical practices of American Christianity. Where could the study of early Christian history be if scholars had access to such a wealth from those first centuries of the early Church? And certainly, there are valiant motivations to protect pre-pandemic liturgical life in our livestreamed worship, pastoral concerns being principal among them. Preservation ensures stability, reducing anxiousness in a time of unceasing anxiety.
But in any case, the great tragedy in our current life of worship is for congregations to simply replicate the liturgy into a livestream, ultimately denying the unique opportunities available in this moment and context. A tenacious strategy of preservation is understandable and commendable, but if we’ve learned anything from other eras of liturgical change, such tenacity might hinder the essential responsiveness and relevancy found in The Book of Common Prayer. To echo Woolf, when new symbols for expressing thought are found, liturgists have enormous riches at their command.
I’m not saying we should push past the limits of the Prayer Book, and this is not an argument for a congregationalist style of independent liturgy-making! The Eucharist still ought to be the principal act of Christian worship, and together with the Daily Office, they still ought to be the regular services of the Church. But consider Byron Stulman’s words:
“The usual interpretation of the Prayer Book has been that only those texts may be used which are explicitly indicated, but that ceremonial actions and gestures are permissible unless explicitly forbidden … This has resulted in a broad spectrum of ways in which an identical service is conducted in different congregations and circumstances.” (2)
As Stuhlman puts so perfectly, the diversity is in the different ways we adapt the identical services to our own contexts.
Let’s consider two very recent ordinations of bishops. I was struck by the creativity of two similar moments in two different services. For both the ordination of Frank Logue as a bishop in Georgia on May 30, 2020 and the ordination of Glenda Curry as a bishop in Alabama on June 27, 2020, the two dioceses used a hybrid model, blending pre-recorded material with livestreamed footage of the liturgy itself. In doing so, both services began with a collection of pre-recorded processions: videos of acolytes from presumably every congregation in the diocese, carrying their church’s banner, not in an auditorium or gymnasium that is now typical for such an occasion, but down their very own church’s aisle. In one way, these processions attempted to make up for a moment that likely would have happened at the in-person liturgy. But to have a montage of each banner –– in its own congregation carried by their own parishioners, at that –– was a breathtaking demonstration of the continued vitality of the two dioceses, a crucial essence of the Episcopal ordinal.
I was truly moved when I saw this display in the ordination in Georgia, but to see it again in Alabama felt to be more than mere coincidence. Indeed, Alabama probably didn’t come up with the idea all on their own; the likelihood that they saw Georgia’s service and decided to follow suit is high. Nevertheless, the fact that two different regions of the Church, with two distinct communities of Christians and congregations, believed that a specific way of adapting the liturgy would be meaningful and relevant to the people of God is not a coincidence. No, not a coincidence, but a sign to us all that the work of liturgical adaptation amidst ever-changing landscapes is essential to our work as liturgists and to our life as Anglicans. And frankly, regardless of how much we might yearn for resuming in-person worship, the outcome of such an adapted liturgy would not have been possible had it not been for virtual worship.
Thankfully, I don’t believe that the church’s newly acquired skillset from having crafted liturgies amidst a pandemic will go to waste. But the technological skills are not necessarily what will help us in the years to come. Liturgy in pandemic has been a great exercise for liturgical revision more widely. Not because we will move further into a realm of virtual worship, but because this now well-practiced process of translating and adapting liturgies into new mediums and contexts is at the heart of liturgical revision. Liturgical adaptation and liturgical revision are closely related, if not synonymous.
The work of liturgical adaption isn’t new for us, after all. Look at the twentieth century: the Liturgical Movement was focused on finding that essence of Christian worship, looking to the early Church for inspiration, and sorting through all of the attempts at “adaptation” in the centuries that followed, identifying where we got it right and where we got it wrong. As a result, The Book of Common Prayer (1979) was not a revision, but rather a rewrite, a more dramatically different end-result than we’ve ever had in our Anglican history of liturgical change. The essence? A liturgical theology grounded in Baptism, the Holy Eucharist, and the collectively shared ministry of the entire people of God. And even with contemporary pushes toward liturgical revision surrounding language for God and for one another, those that might advocate for moving away from such an essence would certainly be in the minority.
Look at today’s work of translating The Book of Common Prayer. To translate into a different language is, without doubt, the work of adaptation. The goal is to avoid wooden, word-for-word translations, and to instead create new idiom and poetry that can more successfully capture the essence of the original.
I’m incredibly proud of the Episcopal Church these days, and I hope you are too. Behind those cellphone and laptop cameras are liturgists who are courageously wrestling with the question: “How do we balance preserving the liturgy while also adapting its meaning to a new context?” My prayer is that we all might wrestle with that question, so when the inevitable day comes to put pen to paper on a new Prayer Book, our experience of adaptation in this way might inspire our later work of liturgical design and revision.
Virginia Woolf. “Cinema.” (London: The Nation and Athenaeum, 3 July 1926).
Byron Stuhlman. Prayer Book Rubrics Expanded. (New York: Church Publishing, 1996), viii.
