Joel – you may not be aware that this way of praying the Lord’s Prayer has a long tradition. One solution to your point about rushing through the words in the liturgy is to use less words. I personally am wearied by the verbosity of so much “liturgical worship.” Said slowly I’m sure the “required” parts of a Sunday Eucharistic liturgy take little more than 5 minutes to recite – yet people appear to love to turn them into pious poetry recitals. Less is more – in my opinion.

Mark I love your suggestion that liturgy also needs to move through “read” to “mark, learn and inwardly digest.” Is there any parallel that the NZ Anglican Church has omitted this classic collect from our Prayer Book?

Peggy, if you have followed this thread it is arguing that the moments of addressing the congregation (eg. at the start, sign of peace, start of the Eucharistic Prayer, dismissal) ought to be addressed to the congregation and not to books. If a presider cannot memorise these few I suggest they are in the wrong ministry. I highlighted in previous posts that NZ has done a disservice in increasing the variety and confusing responses at these very points. Certainly eg. praying the Eucharistic Prayer including singing it one might discretely have a text.

Christopher, you enlarge my point exactly: once one is fluent in a language one can use it creatively and flexibly – that is what I hope for similarly in liturgy.

Linking this to linguistics the parallel is that of a beginner in a language who has learnt only fixed expressions and who is thrown by something outside the rote. The rules are prescriptive and also very limited and the practicer of language or liturgy lacks the confidence to move outside those rules, because from their perspective the rule will have been broken, the language won’t communicate meaning or the liturgy will be invalid.

With fluency in language there comes the ability to move beyond the rules, to be creative with the language, knowing if there is effective communication or not. This is the level of poetry and humour and language as natural as breathing. The parallel with liturgy is that the forms are so well understood and so deeply internalised that they become the material of a creativity which is both true to the forms and also responds to the prompting of the Holy Spirit.

But language at a beginner’s level is like liturgy read with heads in books, frightened to engage with others, and more significantly, unable to reflect critically. For example (as in ANCK) to reflect on the dismissal rite and to see isn’t it odd that the dismissal “Go out and proclaim the gospel” is actually regarded as a rubric with the effect “Sit down and listen to the notices”. Or that sometimes because of confusion in understanding the lectionary the gospel of the entombment is read in the Easter vigil. It takes a basic level of fluency to see that these practices are, in terms of the whole picture, rather odd. Without this fluency the result is heads in books and the impression that the priest is following a particularly difficult recipe.

This is where the problems of liturgical education are acute in the Korean context. It’s easy to educate seminarians or curates, but as one said to me, “It would be suicide if I talked about any of this with my priest”, because that would be a challenge to the priest’s seniority. And just as it’s hard to break out of a level of barely functional linguistic ability because the very tools needed for that are lacking, so it’s very hard to break out of the liturgical equivalent.

Thanks Bosco for sparking off this discussion. (And I am sure ANCK is not as bad as I might be suggesting – there are many excellent things here – as well as the “opportunities for reflection>”

While I certainly agree that liturgical language needs to be directed into the midst of those who gather to worship, and not slavishly be read from books, it also must be recognized that some officiants have better memories than others. For some officiants, this may mean developing better reading skills, so they’re not so tied to the page; for others, this may mean periodically having someone film them during a service, so they can see themselves as others see them in worship. If the liturgy is sung, many of us need to have the musical line at least readily available, if not constantly in front of our faces. Few of us are equipped to extemporize, either in said or sung liturgies. In any case, it seems to me that a main concern for all who officiate or read for gathered worship should be to have due concern for preparation, presentation, and above all, for spiritual intention and humility.

With regard to the linguistic history, you wrote: “In the sixteenth century the English language became acceptable whereas previously in England French and Latin had dominance as the respectable languages.”

The 16th c. did see a patriotic interest in promoting English literature, but actually, English had become acceptable & respectable as the primary language of England over a century earlier: In the mid-14th c. the Statute of Pleading made English the language of the courts, and using English also became common in Parliament. Throughout the 15th century, English was the national language, even if French and Latin remained languages of international learning, theology, and diplomacy.