After finishing my Sacramental/Liturgical Guided Reading class, I’ve come up with a few definitions.
Liturgy: The event/experience of ontological space and action that functions as a Christological matrix of the grace of God.
Sacrament: Grace/gift/experience and understood by Christians in liturgy.
Sacramental: Experiencing the event of Grace.
The books that helped develop such an understanding were:
The Sacraments in Protestant Practice and Faith by James F. White
Liberating Rites: Understanding the Transformative Power of Ritual by Tom F. Driver
The Eucharist and Human Liberation by Tissa Balasuriya
Extravagant Affections: A Feminist Sacramental Theology by Susan A. Ross
Beyond Ritual: Sacramental Theology after Habermas by Siobhán Garrigan
Doors to the Sacred: A Historical Introduction to Sacraments in the Catholic Church by Joseph Martos
Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Experience by Louis-Marie Chauvet
I have totally abused your scheme for my own purposes. Feel free to view the wreckage on my blog.
PS - Interesting thoughts…I’m still mulling…
I like the definitions of sacrament/sacramental.
Not sure about the definition of liturgy. If I read you right you’re saying that liturgy is basically whenever/wherever we experience the grace of God through Christ, right? To me that would be a sacramental event but not nessarily a liturgical one.
It seems to me that any definition of the liturgy must reckon with the linguistic and theological roots of the word, i.e. as “the peoples’ work”. I’m not sure we can define liturgy without talking about the church as a people gathered for worship.
I agree with you Halden. Chauvet tears apart metaphysics and runs with language using Heidegger, Derrida, and Levinas. I think you would like Symbol and Sacrament.
One might be walking down the road and reflect upon creation. But a Christian reflects on such grace through the understanding of the memory of Jesus, which is distilled in the Eucharist. Simply, the community gives the Christian a way of language and being (while the community was already formed by the language in the first place), language which in itself is knowledge and experience/body (rather than a conduit to knowledge).
Importantly, the gift of grace and the reciprocation is embodied in language and embodiment. Grace and reciprocation of grace is inherently done in one’s body; any response to grace is liturgical, or at least understood by the community’s liturgy. Therefore through our body’s response, we respond in rites and rituals, some formalized and codified, while others are ad hoc.
I just don’t think I can have a liturgical experience alone. Liturgical is by its very nature a communal, ecclesial event.
I have Chauvet’s book now. I got it on the basis of your quotes. Looks like good stuff.
Read some stuff on liturgy and sacrament by the Orthodox, they are way ahead of most us western minds here!
I don’t know if they’re ahead, but they certainly do have a different way of understanding, and deeply so.
Halden,
I have a hard time separating liturgy from sacrament because it is through liturgy that we have a clear, Christian understanding of grace in a holistic way.
I also want to avoid understanding language as a conveyer of terms or experience - it is experience of grace and therefore grace itself.
I, like you, understand it in communal terms because it is communal, and therefore any experience we do have is read through previous ontological space and relationship - reflection on creation itself is only understood through the language of the community. Our being in the world, and reflection on humanity’s life in creation, is done at the most common denominator, our body. Our literal, physical body. When we do a physical action, even if it isn’t already previously written down, it can be liturgical if it embodies or recognizes grace.
For instance, when I go back to Alaska, I like to spend time in the mountains and sometimes by myself. When I respond to the revelation of creation by moving amongst it, raising hands, singing/humming, or other things, this can be a liturgical experience because something is physically being recognized and the grace of God is washing over my being. However, I could not respond as I do without being given the language to do so, without the memory of action in liturgical space, without still maintaining relationships with others in the Christian community.
“We must allow a great many books to go unread, and a great many social visits unpaid, in order that we may concentrate on Christ.” P.T. Forsyth
To me it seems pretty aximatic that not all things liturgical are sacramental. The church may gather to make confession of faith, sing songs, preach the scripture, pray and so on, but that does not necessarily mean that all of those liturgical acts are automatically sacramental in nature. It’s perfectly possible for me to pass the peace and not experience grace. It seems to me that the sacramental supervenes on the liturgical and ultimately the sacramental is beyond our control, intruding into our liturgies and into our lives when and where God wills to do so in Christ.
Theres a few important points that Chauvet makes that I agree with and want to run with:
One, grace is understood in terms of gifting. And two, there are two acts when talking of grace, grace which we do not control, but the second we do, called reciprocating. It is through both grace and reciprocation that the action of gift and re-gifting is completed.
Importantly, if we separate sacrament from liturgy, then we fall into past notions of embodiment and language. In effect, liturgy as language becomes a conveyer of knowledge rather than language being the actual knowledge itself. So, if starting from an understanding that liturgy is an experience of grace because language is our way of knowing (since it is language that forms us, rather than us forming language), then, in a sense, liturgy is grace embodied. The liturgy — the act of remembrance and the constituting of the body of Christ — itself is given to us. With this language (language in the fullest sense of the word - ie. senses, organization, etc.) Christians interpret the rest of their encounters with grace. Quite simply, it is through the memory of Jesus that we understand grace to exist. Therefore, even if we may not experience a mystical feeling, that does not mean grace does not exist in that moment, for even at the fundamental level of ordering our humanity, grace exists.
An Orthodox sacramental would be Christ is present in and to the soul, the desire of theosis…transformation and recreation in Christ.