{"id":41689,"date":"2018-04-26T14:35:53","date_gmt":"2018-04-26T19:35:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/?p=41689"},"modified":"2018-04-30T05:53:31","modified_gmt":"2018-04-30T10:53:31","slug":"the-mysteries-of-liturgical-sincerity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/2018\/04\/26\/the-mysteries-of-liturgical-sincerity\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mysteries of Liturgical Sincerity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pray Tell is pleased\u00a0<\/em>to feature the first article from each issue of<\/em>\u00a0Worship,\u00a0the \u201cAmen Corner,\u201d\u00a0<\/em>along with a response to it (forthcoming). This article is from the May, 2018 issue. Gracious thanks to editor Bernadette Gasslein and<\/em>\u00a0Worship\u00a0for reprint permission.<\/em>\u00a0Subscribe to\u00a0<\/em>Worship\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

by John D. Witvliet<\/p>\n

Deep in the archives of this journal are fascinating explorations of liturgical sincerity. In 1944, John Hennig testified: \u201cHowever bitterly our age may be accused of abandoning the standards of morals and religion, there is one point in which it is irreproachable, especially the younger generation, and that is its boundless longing for and scrupulous attachment to sincerity,\u201d over against those who are \u201cmerely external and habitual Christians.\u201d In 1949, Paul Doncoeur, S.J., described the burgeoning liturgical movement as stemming from a \u201cconcern for sincerity which the Church above all must support,\u201d contending that \u201cwe can put up with a certain formalism, a certain amount of routine in the procedure of parliaments or law courts. But [humanity\u2019s] intercourse with God must be carried out \u2018in spirit and in truth.\u2019\u201d[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

A centerpiece of many liturgical movements over the past thirty centuries, sincerity is both a concept and an experience that are full of mysteries. Among my mostly Protestant students, no theme is more contested, misunderstood, or cherished. For some, it is also at the epicenter of their quiet caution or explicit resistance to Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran and some Presbyterian and Methodist worship, as they instinctively echo what is arguably the most visceral of historic Protestant tropes: \u201chow can such regulated worship be sincere?\u201d They are, after all, students at a college and seminary named after John Calvin, with the Calvin-inspired motto, \u201cI offer you my heart, Lord, promptly and sincerely.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sincerity was indeed a central concern of the Protestant Reformers, a concern that intensified in subsequent centuries as Puritans, Pietists, Quakers, and Revivalists doubled-down on attempts to codify or re-ceremonialize liturgy, and promoted their own rituals of sincerity and spontaneity, a story well-told by Edward Muir, John Martin, Lori Branch, and Ramie Targoff among others.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

It is a history full of soul-searching exploration and liturgical experimentation. In my own Reformed tradition, the Westminster Directory for Worship split the difference between prescribed Anglican liturgies and free prayer, pairing rubrics and models for extemporaneous prayers, \u201cmixing sincerity and artifice, spontaneity and control.\u201d[3]<\/a> Dutch Reformed theologian Abraham Kuyper spent decades wrestling with metaphors that would best convey how liturgical forms support sincere prayer: were they like husks around a seed, a riverbank cradling a current, clothes which dress the body, an institution that supports an organism? [4]<\/a><\/p>\n

The standard historiography of Protestant concern for sincerity reaches far and wide, with writers developing suggestive theses about the Protestant roots of Linus\u2019 sincere admiration for the Great Pumpkin, the emergence of hipster culture, and the New Sincerity movement in literature and film spawned by David Foster Wallace.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

Slippery Definitions<\/strong><\/p>\n

Operational definitions of sincerity vary widely across cultures, centuries, philosophical frameworks, and Christians traditions.<\/p>\n

Anthropological perspectives are best poised to shatter simplistic definitions. What counts as sincere varies widely among cultures that value direct vs. indirect communication, low vs. high power distance expressions of authority, individualist vs. collectivist identities, tight vs. loose social norms, more constricted vs. more expressive approaches to emotion, those that emphasize interior experience vs. those that do not. Sincerity subtly dawns on the stolid faces of Danish fishing villagers in Babette\u2019s Feast<\/em> and erupts in expressive cries in Korean Tongsung Kido<\/em> prayer. Worldwide, some seminaries teach students to intensify emotion in their liturgical leadership, while others teach students to restrict it (e.g., the contrasting tone of Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical Anglican presiders). Whereas some traditions assume that individual spontaneous prayer encourages the purist form of sincerity, others resist this. Indonesian Marapu worshipers once responded to Dutch missionaries by lamenting extemporaneous Protestant prayer as \u201can excessive willfulness, a hubris that is at once dangerous and ineffective.\u201d[6]<\/a> Comparative interfaith discussions confront my students with the notion that sincerity is far from a universal preoccupation.[7]<\/a><\/p>\n

Historical studies further stretch us. My Protestant students are surprised to discover concern for sincerity in patristic monastic texts, in 12th<\/sup>-century monastic renewal movements, and in the nineteenth century Oxford movement.[8]<\/a> They puzzle over the mutual dependence between the Reformation and a new Renaissance emphasis on the expressive subjectivity of individuals. They find sincerity profoundly modeled in Romano Guardini and Alexander Schmemann.[9]<\/a> Their assumptions are particularly challenged by Nathanial Marx\u2019s conclusion that \u2018For most Latin Mass Catholics, . . . what they find most inimical to the cultivation of sincere, interior devotion is a compulsory informality and exaggerated spontaneity that comes across to them as predictable, banal, and theatrical\u201d[10]<\/a>\u2014a sentiment diametrically opposed to their prior assumptions.<\/p>\n

While most definitions of sincerity refer to concord between interior experience and external action, operational definitions across contexts may also include concern for proactive transparency, the correspondence of a given sentiment with a person\u2019s way of being over time, communal sincerity, and emotional intensity or vulnerability. While in some contexts sincerity is tightly defined, in many its semantic range extends to include almost any liturgical experience of inspiration, repose, ecstasy, tranquility, or \u201cbeing moved.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of this challenges any simplistic one-dimensional ritual-sincerity analytical axis that contrasts Orthodox and Catholic worship on one end of a spectrum with Quakers and Pentecostal worship on the other.[11]<\/a> Imagine instead three independent axes of analysis: the relative degree of emotional expression, the relative degree of prescribed ceremonial complexity, and the relative degree of emphasis on sincerity. This multi-dimensional view invites students to imagine how sincerity might be received as a gift in contexts strikingly different from their own.[12]<\/a><\/p>\n

Free Church Protestant Mysteries<\/strong><\/p>\n

After clarifying these complexities, it is a holy and mighty challenge to negotiate the dynamic discussions of sincerity that emerge among students whose spirituality has been formed in the juxtapositional vortex of historic Trinitarian confessions, the cultural forces of consumerism and individualism, the joys and vagaries of the \u2018worship industry,\u2019 the perceived authenticity of hipster culture, and the wild and woolly world of Protestant liturgical deregulation. I love them and our feeble attempts to work out our salvation with fear and trembling as we puzzle over questions like these:<\/p>\n