Non Solum: Bodily Imagery in the Liturgy

“Why is it that the two things people are most reluctant to speak about are how we come into the world (human sexuality) and how we leave (human death)?” (Charles Gusmer, And You Visited Me: Sacramental Ministry to the Sick and the Dying, 174)

It is only when the liturgical life of the church can fully embrace, ritualize, and sacramentalize sex and death, the poles of human existence, that all of the rest of human life can be fully embraced, ritualized and sacramentalized as well.

During Lent, a friend wrote to me about the entrance antiphon for the Fourth Sunday. The text of the antiphon read: “You will find contentment at her consoling breasts”? My friend was unsure what to do. Should they use the proper entrance antiphon or should they use another text which was not so “controversial?” They choose to use another entrance antiphon after deeming this antiphon inappropriate.

There are many texts in scripture and in our liturgies which utilize imagery deemed inappropriate by our society today. Even something as natural as breastfeeding has become sexualized and banished from public discussion. The ancients had no problem with such imagery because of their connection to “the circle of life” – to borrow a phrase from Disney. But we do not live in the time of the ancients. Puritan ideas permeate American culture. Our bodies are divorced from the sacred and relegated to the profane. This is especially the case in the liturgy.

It is ironic that in today’s sex-obsessed culture we are uncomfortable with such language in our liturgies. As the disconnect between our spiritual lives and our bodies widens, our liturgies become more cerebral and less grounded in a key part of human existence. Society’s unease with language surrounding our bodies is troubling to me because it sterilizes our liturgies and tends toward Gnosticism.

Perhaps imagery such as this is no longer appropriate in our public liturgies. What are we to do, however, when it comes up?

I think our inability to address “the circle of life” in our liturgies creates an environment in which the Church and her sacraments lose their resonance with the lives of the faithful.

What are your thoughts? How would you respond? Please comment below in an appropriate and respectful way.

Editor

Katharine E. Harmon, Ph.D., edits the blog, Pray Tell: Worship, Wit & Wisdom.

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Comments

21 responses to “Non Solum: Bodily Imagery in the Liturgy”

  1. Jeff Rexhausen

    Just as funerals offer an opportunity to “embrace, ritualize, and sacramentalize” death, weddings offer an opportunity to do the same with sex. But how often does this occur? Where does the Church provide opportunities to do so?

    The third nuptial blessing used to read: “that they may together rejoice in your gift of married love,” which at least offers a suggestion of their sexuality.

    The new translation reads: “living out together the gift of Matrimony,” which is almost guaranteed to not connect with the bride and groom, much less most other people at the wedding.

    For our wedding, my wife and I and priest sat in front of a banner with the words from the Song of Songs: “Arise, my friend, my beautiful one, and come!”

    Couldn’t we at least look for opportunities to use such scriptural images of sexuality more often at weddings?

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  2. Christian McCOnnell

    I think things have become quite pathetic if the Old Testament image of Jerusalem (or any city) as a mother is somehow “controversial”. I would have been inclined to sing the antiphon as is, and respond to any controversy with “Oh, grow up”—pastorally rephrased, of course.

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  3. Christian McCOnnell

    Perhaps in our marriage rites, we should revive the medieval rite of blessing the marriage bed. That would make them antsy. 😉

    Reply
    1. Halbert Weidner

      @Christian McCOnnell – comment #3:
      THERE is an Italian movie…tree of the wooden clogs featuring north Italian peaants . At every turn when you could expect the writers to take easy cheap shots at the Church and the faith of the peasants, it does not. The most wonderful scene for me in the light of the posts came when the young poor couple who have no money for a honeymoon, go off to authies’s convent. The movie portrays a real order…blue bonnet sisters of charity, a real down and dirty order who did work nobody else would touch. When time comes for the couple to go upstairs to the nuptial bed, the nuns go up the stairs holding candles and when the door to the bedroom opens we see that they have pushed two single beds together and decorated them with a canopy of pine branches and candles. Amazing scene among many others that take faith seriously. Al Pacino loved this movie and so do I.

      Reply
  4. Pádraig McCarthy

    The feast of the Assumption this year had me thinking of the sacredness of our bodily reality. If God honours Mary (and us, in the resurrection), not disembodied spirit or soul, but the total reality, then we, as children of God, are called to show honour and reverence to our own bodies and to others in the same way. So I put it to the congregation: “Have you ever given thanks for the gift of your body?” The Incarnation is not in order to disembody us, but to realise the divine in the full human reality. We seem to be able to face into the physicality of the crucifixion, but much less the physicality of the Nativity.
    Many years ago, when that reading from Isaiah 66:10-14 came up on the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time C, our scheduled reader was a girl of about 13 years. In case she would feel self-conscious reading it, I asked her if she was okay with it, and she was perfectly at ease with it.
    (If I were to ask her the same question today, I might perhaps be more insecure myself unless her parents were present, for fear I might be perceived as making an inappropriate remark!)

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  5. Lee Bacchi

    Christian McCOnnell : Perhaps in our marriage rites, we should revive the medieval rite of blessing the marriage bed. That would make them antsy.

    +1

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  6. Alan Johnson

    ……. and of course salvation comes through our bodies in the pouring of water and the eating of the Eucharist and the anointing with oil. This physicality is one of the things I find most attractive in Catholicism.

    Reply
  7. Pádraig McCarthy

    Christian McCOnnell : Perhaps in our marriage rites, we should revive the medieval rite of blessing the marriage bed. That would make them antsy.

    There’s a good precedent for this from Tobias and Sarah (Tobit 8:4-8). Of course, given Sarah’s history, they had strong motivation! 😉

    Reply
    1. Philip Sandstrom

      @Pádraig McCarthy – comment #7:
      Another pre-Reformation phrase in the Englished Rite for Marriage had the groom say to the bride at the ring ceremony: “with my body I thee worship”.
      The Book of Common Prayer continued this usage. It and the pre-Reformation usage only had ‘one ring’ given from the man to the woman. Now it is commonest to have a ‘two-ring’ exchange — so the phrase could be added for the woman to say also to her new husband while putting the ring on his finger. It certainly emphasizes the real importance and the real exchange and the bodily aspects of Marriage.

      Reply
  8. Matthew Roth

    Philip, the editions of the pre-Conciliar Rituale Romanum for use in England and Wales used a shortened form of that prayer (only the “With my body, I thee worship, In the name of the Father, etc.”), the longer version being left, sadly, to the Book of Common Prayer. It’s wonderful. I wish first for the BCP prayer to be the text and then for the Elizabethan-style English to be allowed in this country (USA).

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    1. Paul Inwood

      @Matthew Roth – comment #9:

      The actual text in use before the post-conciliar revised Rite of Marriage:

      With this ring I thee wed,
      this gold and silver I thee give.
      With my body I thee worship,
      and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.
      In the name of the Father, etc.

      In contrast,

      N., take this ring as a sign of my love and fidelity.
      In the name of the Father…

      seems a poor substitute, especially if you call to mind the bridegroom in Brisbane who, so the story goes, said to his bride

      N., take this ring as a sign of my love and fertility.

      At least that must have added a physical note to the proceedings.

      Reply
      1. Matthew Roth

        @Paul Inwood – comment #10:
        Ooh, thanks Paul. That’s wonderful.

  9. Maximilian Hanlon

    The 1662 BCP is also very helpful here in another respect. Consider the following from “The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony” which unambiguously acknowledges that marriage exists to sanctify sex:

    “…and therefore [matrimony] is not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand…to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding; but…in the fear of God, duly considering the causes for which Matrimony was ordained. First, It was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name…”

    Reply
  10. Todd Orbitz

    @Christian McCOnnell

    After our wedding, the Priest who married us came by to bless the house I had just bought. We were leaving Rome the next day for our honeymoon.

    We asked, and he blessed our marital bed with a blessing that predated the old Rituale.

    7 kids later, we are thankful for it.

    … and yes, he was in full Communion and worked for a Roman Congregation

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  11. Alan Hommerding

    At a sacraments workshop, I referred to our bodies as our BSUs – Basic Sacramental Units – in an incarnational/sacramental religion, our bodies and senses are the primary ways that we engage everything – the sacred and divine included.
    I think that the aversion to sex and death are the proverbial tip of the iceberg . . . I don’t believe that we really have a deep entry into meal, washing, and touch (anointing) either. Consider all the ways the sacraments attached to those entities have been minimalized.

    Reply
    1. Gordon E. Truitt

      @Alan Hommerding – comment #14:
      The approach Alan takes is reflected in the May issue of Pastoral Music, with the title “Sacrament of the Body.” It focuses on the body as central to Christian worship (“Our Embodied Worship”) in song, initiation, healing, and matrimony. And Ed Foley reflects on “body knowing” and our abiding mistrust thereof.

      Reply
      1. Alan Hommerding

        @Gordon E. Truitt – comment #18:
        Interesting, Gordon – it was in an Ed Foley workshop that I used the term “BSU” (basic sacramental unit)!
        As I recall, my larger context was a song by Right Said Fred (who brought us “I’m Too Sexy”) . . . “Don’t talk, just kiss” – which I thought was a rather succinct expression of the sacramentality of sexuality.

  12. Philip Sandstrom

    On the phrase ‘you will find contentment at her consoling breasts’ from the 4th Sunday of Lent — anyone who finds objection to this should be reminded that women quite normally again nowadays will nurse their children — and sometimes even in Church if the child needs the nourishment. And secondly, that in many Churches in Europe (and ofttimes in the States at least in museums) one of the normal ways of showing the role of Mary as Mother of our Lord Jesus, the Christ, is to show her nursing Jesus with her breast exposed. Why should anyone ‘back off’ from this normal ‘motherly function’ being applied to the the Church as the New Jerusalem and our ‘source/wellspring for life’? It is to be uncomfortable with something which emphasizes the normal place of Holy Mother Church and God’s People within the ‘philanthropic love of the Holy Trinity’. And in the context of the preparation for ‘rebirth’ in the Church and using the RCIA during Lent.

    Reply
  13. Pádraig McCarthy

    Look back over the names of those who sent comments.
    Now see how many of the names are normally of the female members of the church.
    “What would men be without women? Scarce, sir…mighty scarce.”
    ― Mark Twain
    Of the church we have to say the same!

    Reply
  14. Sean Keeler

    Remembering my long-ago HS freshman year Ethics class, I’d love to hear the response to readings from Kings wherein the term “men” is replaced with “them that pisseth against the wall.” Now THAT was Bible study.

    Reply
  15. Kimberly Hope Belcher

    We had the Tobit reading in which Tobias and Sarah pray in the marriage chamber, but whereas the suggested version ends with “Amen, Amen,” and obscures the context, we included the whole of verses 4-9a, ending: “Then they went to bed for the night.” I loved it.

    Reply

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