All of us who regularly preside at worship, are in the pews, or research and write about liturgy have stories to tell of liturgical celebrations that have gone wrong. Yet rarely (at least in my experience) do we think systematically about how liturgies can and do indeed fail. A recent book by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger (Rituale, 2013) includes a section that does exactly that (cf. also an earlier edited volume, When Rituals Go Wrong: Mistakes, Failure, and the Dynamics of Ritual). The author of the 2013 book, Rituale, a well-known German historian, conceived of her book as an introduction to historical ritual studies, and she works hard at showing that rituals are omnipresent throughout (in her case: European) history – outside of liturgical celebrations proper. She highlights, for example, rituals of political power (e.g., the installation of a new monarch), of legal practices (e.g., rituals of punishment), and of collective memory-making (e.g., yearly commemorations of decisive military victories). What really intrigued me, however, was the second part of the book, in which the author turns to more analytical questions. It is here that her reflections on “when do rituals fail” appear (pp. 211-226). Stollberg-Rilinger posits that it is precisely in the various ways in which rituals go wrong that they reveal their innermost meaning. I think she has a point there.
My own thinking turned to Christian liturgical celebrations (rather than rituals more generally) as I pondered the question of how liturgical celebrations may go wrong. Loosely following Stollberg-Rilinger’s analysis, here are some thoughts.
Given that no liturgical celebration – however well planned — is ever completely controllable, liturgical “failures” are quite normal. Whether, however, these failures become “liturgy-destroying” depends on the kind of failure taking place.
On the most basic level, there are simple accidents that accompany or interrupt a liturgy, from running out of consecrated wafers during communion to the fire alarm going off during a procession that includes lots of incense and candles. These are probably the most basic and also most frequent failures encountered in liturgical celebrations.
A second level might be that of liturgical mis-communication, when the liturgy means one thing and the worshipper understands another. Think of a traditional confession of sins stating that we are “heartily sorry” for our sins, which a child present hears as the worshippers telling God they are “hardly sorry.”
A third level might be that of the absence, emotionally-distanced presence, or defiance of worshippers, all of which mar what we think of as the constitutive element of worship, namely the gathering of the faithful. Here too a liturgy fails.
A forth level might be that of technical invalidity, an issue that has received quite a bit of attention already, especially in medieval sacramental theology. For today, think of a child trying to baptize her dying hamster; or a youth group wondering whether to celebrate the Lord’s Supper with Oreos and Coke.
Finally, and for Christian liturgy most importantly, one would have to name the ultimate liturgical failure, that of idolatry or, more broadly, of liturgy not engendering the encounter — under sacramental signs — with God and God’s redemptive presence.
The different possible liturgical failures sketched here (there are many more, I am sure) reveal something about what we think liturgy ought to be and do. What throws somewhat of a wrench into the attempt at theorizing liturgical failures is when one worshipper’s experience of failure is another worshipper’s experience of divine grace. And that is an issue Stollberg-Rilinger definitely does not explore.
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