A few months ago, I found myself at an interreligious gathering of theologians for which the conveners had designed a shared ritual. Each person would be given several small pieces of brightly colored wax, and would place them into a container while naming aloud the particular qualities and contributions that they brought to our shared community. The wax pieces could then be melted down to create a candle that could be lit at all of our subsequent meetings. I had arrived early, and so I was given the job of placing small plates of colored wax at each person’s place setting before anyone else had arrived or had heard these instructions. 

This community ritual, which had seemed perfectly transparent and self-explanatory to everyone who had been told its meaning, unfortunately went rather gravely awry when my esteemed theologian colleagues began to arrive. All of them took one look at these plates of colored wax sitting on the table, deduced that they were quite obviously candy, and therefore proceeded to eat them! 

I relate this story not merely to poke gentle fun at my friends, but because it seems to me that Christian liturgists often fall into this same trap of assuming that our liturgical symbols are perfectly transparent to the uninitiated observer, or at least that they certainly ought to be. We sometimes assume that anyone should instinctively understand the meaning behind all of this ritual activity we engage in. But religious symbols often have an element that is opaque rather than transparent, at least before one is incorporated into the particular community of people in which these symbols function, and for whom they have meaning.  

I often send my undergraduates on site visits to different places of worship, and Christian liturgical symbols are frequently just as opaque to them as those pieces of colored wax were to my colleagues. Observing Roman Catholic mass for the first time, a Methodist student reported that while her church celebrates the Lord’s Supper with bread and grape juice, Catholics do a similar kind of ritual meal with a pancake and some kind of pale syrup. The thurible, swung ominously by a chain and smoking with incense, is frequently interpreted as some kind of weapon, possibly exuding “tear gas,” and serving to ward off the faithful lest they get too close to the sacred things. Students have more than once assumed that when the faithful approached the altar for communion, what they were receiving there was actually money: collected at the offering and then blessed and redistributed to the congregation in equal amounts.  

It would be possible, of course, to hear such reports and simply lament the collective ignorance of our increasingly post-Christian society. But that would be to assume that our liturgical symbols ought to be transparent and obvious to any uninitiated stranger who wanders through our doors. Such an assumption seems worth interrogating, because religious symbols often seem to derive their power precisely from being at least partially opaque and in need of communal interpretation. 

Historically, most early Christian preaching on the liturgy took the form of mystagogy —  catechesis that interpreted the sacramental mysteries of the church by ascribing many layers of meaning to both ritual objects and ritual actions. Many of these catechetical interpretations may admittedly strike the modern reader as far-fetched and strained. Does Psalm 22:6 (“I am a worm and no man”) really mean that Jesus is like a silkworm, and thus that clergy must always wear silk vestments? Does the priest truly mix water with the Eucharistic wine to represent the two natures of Christ, or is it simply that people used to add water to their wine before drinking it and theologians with too much time on their hands concocted a symbolic rationale? Is there any actual point to practices like reversing the direction of a procession in penitential seasons or knowing that you genuflect to the bishop and to the reserved sacrament on different knees? Or are these not simply myriad accretions that have built up over the centuries, and which now serve only to obscure matters that ought to be clear? 

Debates about how clearly Christian liturgical symbols should point to their referents are not new. Historically they regularly recur around particular points of liturgical practice, such as the famously fraught controversies about whether red wine or white wine is more appropriate matter for the blood of Christ. It is common in Roman Catholic (and Anglo-Catholic) circles to use white wine—  kinder to altar linens, and also a signal that we are not being too crassly materialistic about our “blood of Christ” language. It was historically a Protestant impulse to suggest that the wine really ought to look like the blood it represents. (“What on earth is that?!” asked a friend upon seeing the communion wine at my Anglo-Catholic parish. “The plasma of Christ??”) And yet, even the most Protestant of Reformers, who would insist that symbols should point directly to their referent without need of allegory or explanation, would never insist that we should use meat rather than bread to more accurately represent Christ’s flesh!  

When I was first introduced to Christian liturgy as an undergraduate, I subjected the clergy and lay leaders of my parish to an endless litany of “what?” and “why?”, demanding to know the meaning and the rationale for absolutely everything, from the names of strange new ritual objects to the reasons for particular gestures. Sometimes there was an easy answer, and sometimes I am sure that I was exactly like the proverbial toddler demanding an explanation for why the sky is blue! (Before my first Easter vigil, there was a minor parish crisis when no one was able to locate the grill. “But why do we need a grill at the Easter vigil?” I asked, mystified. “Because Christ is the light of the world, Liza!” my priest replied in exasperated distraction, clarifying nothing…) But my liturgical ignorance was not a source of distress to me, but rather of wonder. In this brand new world of strange rituals and opaque symbols, everything was charged with mystery, and even the simplest actions each seemed to contain endless layers of meaning and possibility. 

Our modern impulse for liturgical clarity seems to be correlated with a parallel way of interpreting the Bible. Most Episcopalians will loudly insist that they do not read the Bible literally, but in practice they often do, because most modern people haven’t actually been taught any other method of reading. Often we only pull the “non-literal meaning” tool out of our interpretive toolkit tactically, when we encounter a passage whose literal meaning we simply do not like. Most of us have never been taught to seek levels of spiritual meaning in a text as its own goal.  

Our lectionaries do us no favors here, for they tend to include only those passages that are obviously edifying in their literal sense: clear moral instructions for how to live, or uplifting stories about God and God’s people. I suspect that there are very few of us who have ever heard a sermon preached about the measurements of Noah’s ark, the meaning of the priestly vestments described in Exodus, or the description of Ezekiel’s chariot, even if those are the kinds of passages that historically have inspired some of the richest and most imaginative Christian homiletic reflection. When we reduce either scripture or liturgy to those limited portions of it that would be transparent and edifying to absolutely anyone, the possibilities for imagination and for wonder are somewhat flattened and diminished in scope. 

Mystagogy and allegory are not without attendant dangers, of course. The temptation to make the Bible or the liturgy mean whatever you want it to mean is very real, whether done from malice or simply from ignorance. It is also possible, both biblically and liturgically, to get so lost in the weeds that you completely lose sight of the plot. Moral formation and theological training therefore become tremendously important, as each layer of interpretation must draw people more deeply into the mystery of God rather than setting up an impenetrable wall through which the gospel can no longer be perceived.  

But if liturgy is stripped of everything that is difficult and mysterious and dangerous, left only with what is sanitized and obvious and rational, it is perhaps little wonder that many people increasingly see no need for it at all.  Most of my undergraduates self-identify as Christians, but almost none of them ever attend church. Church, they explain, is about hearing that God loves you and that you should be nice to other people. They frankly see no need to have those simple points reiterated to them every Sunday without any further depth or challenge or mystery, and I often find it difficult to truly fault them for that. It may be, therefore, that in reducing biblical and liturgical symbols to their clearest and most obvious form, we have stripped them of the sense of mystery that made them worth waking up on a Sunday morning for in the first place.