John Ainslie
Music & Liturgy 50.1 (November 2023)
When you enter a church’s worship-space, you pass over a threshold (Latin limen). You leave behind the world of work and ‘useful’ things. Here everything is symbolic: there is nothing of utilitarian ‘usefulness’. Even the seats
or benches have kneelers or hassocks (ever met them elsewhere?). The space is traditionally high, encouraging
the entrant to look upwards—heavenwards, even in this age of space exploration. The principal horizontal
focus is an altar, or a tabernacle, or an east window beyond it. There are statues with votive candles before
them, which people, even of little faith, feel it is right to light—often in remembrance of someone they knew
and loved who is now ‘up there’. There is a crucifix, often a dominating feature, sometimes not with a
suffering figure but, strangely, one crucified but wearing a crown and priestly vestments. In a church of the
Eastern tradition there is a face in the highest roof area looking down—the ‘pantocrator’, the ‘ruler of all’—and
indeed the space is decorated to represent ‘the heavenly Jerusalem’. Why? Because church space is intended to
be neither wholly on earth nor entirely in heaven. It is ‘betwixt and between’. That is the essence of liminality:
a transitional state in which we have left something behind but have not yet reached the next place (note 1).
For anyone who cannot read the symbols, the church space and what takes place in it make no sense. For
those who can, they speak of a kind of experience that cannot be easily described, if at all. It is why good art
and architecture and music—expressions of the human spirit beyond words—play such a significant role in
expressing what takes place in church. They are intended to convey a ‘sense of the sacred’ (2). Here we are in the presence of an Other that is way beyond mere thingness (3).
This sense of the beyond diverts one’s attention away from oneself and one’s personal everyday concerns—one’s self-centred intra-dependence, to use Bruce Reed’s term (4)—to an awareness of a wider, indeed limitless horizon beyond oneself—extra-dependence. The right hemisphere of the brain—intuitive, imaginative, creative—takes over from the left hemisphere—programmed, managerial, administrative: the master from the emissary, to use the title of Iain McGilchrist’s 2009 book (5).
Baptism and Initiation
You take holy water from a stoup—or preferably from the font—and make the sign of the cross. You thus remind yourself of the first time you passed over that threshold, at baptism. In doing so, you activate the fact that you received not only a ‘Christian name’ at your baptism; you received into your life—or rather, were enveloped and adopted by—God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. That is your new passport, for your new Christian ‘personality’ (6).
If you had been a catechumen in the early Church undergoing baptism, you would have divested yourself of your worldly finery and faced west as you renounced the devil. You would have then turned around to face east, descended into the death of the water and risen on the other side to the new life of the resurrection.
You would have entered and passed through the ‘liminal womb of new birth’ (7). You would then have been vested in a new uniform, a white garment, which you would have worn throughout Easter week until Low Sunday, Dominica in Albis, the Sunday in white clothes. In this way you would have been inducted and fully integrated into a new community (8).
The whole process of leaving behind, undergoing initiation, and aggregating into a new community is a rite of passage to which Arnold van Gennep drew attention over a hundred years ago. Victor Turner, among other anthropologists, observed the same rite of passage in African tribes some fifty years ago (9). The initiates there would withdraw from their natural social community and spend time together, during which all were equal and all would experience the same initiation equally—something quite contrary to the authoritarian structure of their society. Turner invented a special term, ‘communitas’, for this extraordinary equalising, anti-structure community.
(I write this paper just after the end of the 2023 Synod of Bishops, during which the pope, cardinals, bishops, priests, deacons, religious and lay people all sat round the same tables, at the same level, and listened to each other. It too was an anti-structure, aimed at reviewing the traditional structure and mission of the Catholic Church.)
Gathering, Emptying, Listening
Back to our threshold. We have arrived, perhaps with our family, for Sunday Mass. In olden days we might
have been summoned by the ringing of a church bell (10). Others are congregating, people we may not meet
at any other time. This is no ordinary sociological community. In it everyone is equal, including even the priest before he assumes his leadership role—a communitas. ’There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus‘ (Galatians 3:28). So it would be more fitting to call this communitas by the biblical term koinōnia—a word that signfies both fellowship and communion, a fellowship already existing by virtue of common (koinē) baptism, symbolised and realised in the gathering of the assembly, and now to be sealed by sacramental communion (also koinōnia). Indeed, when Mass begins, the priest may wish the assembly ‘the communion of the Holy Spirit’.
And now, to assist in the process of setting aside our intra-dependence, we confess to God our introspection and self-centredness, and ‘empty’ ourselves (cf Philemon 2:6) to acknowledge our extra-dependence, accepting God’s presence and lordship in our lives. Letting go, letting God.
‘Speak, Lord, your servant is listening’ (1 Samuel 3:10). With opened hearts and minds we listen to Holy Scripture, and become aware that not only is space different here, time is different too. We hear readings, all of which were written two millennia or more ago. Yet we are persuaded that not only are they being read and actualised now, it is God himself addressing us through the reader (11). Most gospel readings in the older rite began ‘In illo tempore’—‘at that time’. They could also start ‘today’, ‘at this time’, ‘now’. For their proclamation is for our absorption and implementation right now. We are not in chronos time but in kairos time (12). In God’s time without-measure, anamnesis telescopes past, present and future into an eternal ‘now’ (13). Indeed, our lives in God’s kingdom started with baptism, granted by God’s grace in his divine providence, and will never end (14).
Thanksgiving
Bread and wine are brought forward. Originally they were symbols of local produce and local work, constituting the local community’s offering of ‘fruit of the earth and work of human hands’. The collection and perhaps other offerings are also presented at this time, also as symbols of earthly goods created by God’s creatures being returned with thanksgiving (Eucharist) to their creator, from whom we have everything we possess and are. We are not (intra)dependent on them, but (extra)dependent on their creator.
The Eucharist is a circle within a circle, a ritual within a ritual, a place within a space, infinity embedded in a larger sacred story. The first threshold one crosses is into worship itself, from the outside of the liturgical
container to its inside. However, the second threshold crossing is to the inner chamber; bread and wine on the
table in the centre of the circle. This repeating collective ritual wraps around the symbols of a story. The space
between the communicant and the icons of chalice, bread and presider is the liminal domain of mystery (15).
The altar itself constitutes a threshold. It is at once something both near us and beyond us (16). Near us because we gather around it—at least figuratively—to be fed food and drink as from a dining-table. Beyond us because this is no ordinary meal and this is no ordinary table. Its traditional designation as ‘altar’ (at least in Catholic theology) reminds us that the Last Supper constituted the sacramental form of Jesus’ imminent sacrifice on the cross. Our ritual is an act of worship, indeed the anamnesis of Jesus’ supreme act of worship to his Father and ours—his self-sacrificing death, leading to his glorious resurrection. It also prefigures a future heavenly banquet on the other side of the threshold.
There is an open door in the eucharistic experience. God stands on the other side and beckons us across the threshold into that dangerous space where he is present… The whole history of the Church is about this struggle at the threshold. When we celebrate the Eucharist we are standing with the whole of a great cloud of witness[es], seeing not only the accomplished work of the cross—but the invitation into the Kingdom work of the Church. God stretches out his hand and says of the bread, ‘behold what you are, become what you see.’ (17)
Communion in Christ
The elements are bread and wine, but we, together with the priest in our name, pray for the Holy Spirit to descend on them ‘like the dew-fall’ and make them something else—the sacramental Body and Blood of Christ (18). The elements pass through an invisible threshold into a different mode of existence. This is the divinisation of creation, something akin to the transfiguration that the apostles witnessed and experienced on the mountain (Mark 9:2 and parallels). Communicants receive the transmuted bread-become-Body-of-Christ so that they may enjoy koinōnia in that Body and become members of it. Indeed, for Pope Benedict XVI, as for Teilhard de Chardin before him, the whole goal and purpose of creation is to become divinised by the God who created it (19). Sacraments, especially Holy Communion, are liminal transitions between creation and divinisation.
We approach the time of Holy Communion. But first we symbolise our mutual fellowship by exchanging the sign of peace with our fellow siblings-in-Christ. Since emergence from the restrictions of COVID, the namaste gesture has become popular. It is indeed appropriate for the sign of peace since it shows not only fellowship but also respect to and for the person greeted. Its distinctiveness draws attention to its symbolism at this moment in the liturgy.
Then we commune in Christ together with our fellow members of his Body, our fellow-communicants. By doing so we commit ourselves to a task: to be not only communicants but communicators of such koinōnia when we go out through the church doors at the end of the liminal event. It creates an inescapable ethical imperative. We have renewed the ‘new covenant in [Christ’s] blood’, and covenant means commitment. We are to be a priestly people ‘glorifying the Lord by [our] lives’, divinising the world into the Kingdom of God. Worship is not just a one-hour Sunday activity. ‘Worship is the submission and sacrifice of our lives for the purpose of glorying God in everything that we do; it is our total life response to God’s creative and redemptive acts.’ (20)
Conclusion
The liturgy is liminal, real but redolent of another reality. The older meaning of ‘symbol’ is not as a substitute for the thing symbolised, but rather something that brings about what it symbolises (from Greek sym-ballein, to throw together), just as a kiss denotes love, a handshake friendship. How to bring the spirit of the Sunday liturgical communitas into our Monday-to-Friday communities? (21) Liturgy is a progressive renewal event, giving
space to its participants to empty themselves, to let God fill their emptiness and energise his power within them. Let go, let God, let God act within and through us for the growth of his Kingdom, his reign over hearts and minds and all creation.
Notes
1 cf Joas Adiprasetya, The Liturgy of the In-between in Scottish Journal of Theology 72:1, 82-97
2 The title of the concluding chapter of Iain McGilchrist’s magisterial The Matter with Things ( 2021, 2023). See also R. Kevin Seasoltz, A Sense of the Sacred (2005)
3 cf Romano Guardini, Liturgy and Liturgical Formation (2022) p.32-44.
4 Bruce Reed, The Dynamics of Religion (1979) who distinguishes S-activity (symbolic) from W-activity (work).
5 Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (2019)
6 cf Nathan Mitchell, Meeting Mystery (2006) p.45
7 Timothy Carson, Rosy Fairhurst, Nigel Rooms & Lisa R. Withrow, Crossing Threshold: A Practical Theology of Liminality (2021) p.88. I am deeply indebted to this book for many insights.
8 In the Reformed tradition, the ‘threshold’ is represented by the ritual of ‘the right hand of fellowship’ extended to each arriving worshipper. I wish more of our Catholic churches could boast a warm Ministry of Welcome.
9 cf Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969).
10 It was good to learn recently (November 2023) that bells are being installed at a church in Tiverton, Devon, to the annoyance of local residents. Muslims similarly have their muezzin.
11 ‘For in the liturgy God speaks to His people and Christ is still proclaiming his gospel’ (Sacrosanctum Concilium n.33).
12 Whereas chronos refers to chronological or sequential time (“the time is nine o’clock”), kairos signifies a good or proper time for action (“it’s time to do this”). cf Mk 1:15: “The time (kairos) is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is close at hand”; Gal 4:4: “But when the fullness of time (kairos) had come, God sent forth his Son”.
13 Christian anamnesis is the ‘strong’ recalling of a past event (the saving death and resurrection of Jesus Christ) and its actualization in present and future (kairos) time.
14 Sebastian Temple’s Make me a channel of your peace is quite incorrect in asserting that ‘in dying we’re born to eternal life’. That birth was our baptism, not our death.
15 Carson, op cit., 87-88
16 In his Meditations before Mass (2014), Romano Guardini entitles two separate chapters The Altar: Threshold and The Altar: Table. See also Albert Gerhards, Wo Gott und Welt sich begegnen (2011) p.134-141 Der Altar – Mitte oder Schwelle?
17 Frank Emanuel, The Liminality of the Eucharist in The Resonate Journal (2005) with acknowledgement to St Augustine. This remarkable paper by a Protestant writer is an appeal to his brethren to be aware of the Eucharist as a liminal experience.
18 And indeed descend on everyone in the gathered assembly, that they too may be made ‘an eternal offering’ to the Father (Eucharistic Prayer III). Note too that in the epiclesis the presence of Christ is humbly solicited, not presumptuously decreed.
19 cf Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy (2000) p.28
20 John Mark Hicks, On Going to Church in Leaven 6:1 (1998)
21 cf Carson, op cit p.181-200