Liturgy & Pastoral Care

The purpose of this post is to explore the relationship between liturgy and pastoral care. One of the most relevant texts in this regard is Elaine Ramshaw’s publication, Ritual and Pastoral Care.  In this study she makes the claim that “the paradigmatic [or model] act of pastoral care is presiding at the worship of the assembly”. (13)
 

Liturgical theologian, Elaine Ramshaw. Accessed from btfo2009.blogspot.com

An insightful pastoral incident

She gives a clue as to why she takes this view when she cites in the opening page of the book an incident involving a pastor she knows who had the practice of celebrating the eucharist weekly.  The incident to which she refers happened in a church where he had recently begun to minister.  It had come to his attention after a month or so that a particular woman in the congregation never received Communion.  However, about three months after his installation the woman for the very first time came forward and partook of the bread and wine.  When the minister talked to her afterwards she confirmed that this was the first time that she had gone to Communion since he had taken over and moreover, that she had not been to the table for many years.  Long ago she had gone through an acrimonious divorce and felt that her anger at her husband and her inability to forgive him had been an obstacle to her coming to the Lord’s Table.

‘But’, she went on to explain, ‘the way you celebrate is so hospitable, it made it difficult for me not to come.’  ‘Through every tone and gesture’, Ramshaw says, ‘my friend made it irresistibly clear that the whole service led to that table sharing where the community was united, so that finally she just couldn’t stay away.’ 

Her purpose in telling that story is that she saw it as an excellent illustration of the way pastoral care can be accomplished in and through ritual action. Now this is where our discussion has particular relevance to the essay on funerals. Ramshaw acknowledges that discussions about pastoral care in recent times have usually given ritual short shrift. That is, it has been down-played or even dismissed as an expression of pastoral care. In Ramshaw’s words, 

The public liturgical role of the pastor has often been dissociated from the ‘private’, individualized, counseling role that is considered the essence of pastoral care. However, she entirely disagrees with that perception of ritual. In her view it is the paradigmatical act of pastoral care. I am going to cite the full quotation and I am sure you will gain a greater sense of the point that she is trying to make.

'It is my conviction that the paradigmatic act of pastoral care is the act of presiding at the worship of the gathered community, and that this priority in no way contravenes the importance of the one-on-one, ‘private,’ counseling-oriented dimension of pastoral care or the psychological insights that today inform that dimension. Rather the pastoral act of liturgical leadership supports this as well as other dimensions of pastoral caring, giving them the focus and experiential quality that clearly defines them as ‘pastoral’.'

Part of what Ramshaw is saying here – is that when pastoral care in the more ‘one-to-one’ sense is complemented by the meaningful use of ritual,  the pastoral experience can be imbued with a sense of community and even of the transcendent.  Imagine, for instance, a pastoral retreat where the participants share the eucharist together in an informal celebration that allows them to express their care for each other and their common worship of God.

Interestingly, the perspective of this American Lutheran theologian was present in the thought of a German Catholic liturgical expert of a previous generation,  Fr Josef Jungmann, who similarly believed that liturgy, when it was actively engaged in, could have profound pastoral effects.  Addressing the First International Congress of Pastoral Liturgy at Assisi in 1956, and speaking specifically about the historical impact of the liturgy, he underscored his point by reminding his audience that, ‘The living liturgy, actively participated in, was itself for centuries the most important form of pastoral care.’

Activity: Spend a little time reflecting on an experience of liturgy or ritual that was beneficial pastorally in your own life? What made the experience a good one? 

The pastoral function of liturgical worship

Typical mainline worship service. Accessed at gracelutheranlibertyville.org



Given the positive place that some theologians give to liturgy as a means of pastoral care, I want us to think very concretely about ways in which church services can function pastorally and about why this is so.  To do this task more effectively it will helpful to address the question,  ‘What is worship?’ 

1.Worship as Service to God:  Many Christian communities have understood worship to be a service to God, a duty which his people perform as an act of obedience to the One who is the source of their life and salvation. The word worship carries with it the idea of ascribing to God the worth that is His right.

In many of our traditions we pray that God will accept our worship as a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, and this language of sacrifice is another way of talking about worship as service. Just as in the OT sacrifice was a sign of devotion to God, today when we talk about worship as a sacrifice it is operating in a similar way- a sign that we offer all that we have and are to God.

A potential difficulty or anomaly here is that while service or obedience to God is crucial to worship – our efforts in this regard do not earn us God’s favour.  They neither diminish nor increase the love that God has for us.  Ironically, though, our worship or service will do us good.

2.Worship as the mirror of heaven. For many Christians worship is an attempt to capture the worship of God which takes place eternally in heaven. Ceaseless praise is our ultimate human destiny. In giving ourselves over to worship now we are preparing ourselves for our ultimate vocation.  Of course, saying this, it must be acknowledged that we still have no real idea yet of what heaven will be like. We do, however, in a meaningful act of worship receive a glimpse of the Kingdom and are strengthened in our desire to live for that Kingdom and bring it into being.

3. Worship as affirmation: Many Christians believe that the primary focus of worship is to affirm, support and inspire Christians. Living the Christian life is challenging - but in worship we touch again the ground of our belief, and in do doing so are able to renew the struggle against the classic enemies of faith – the world, the flesh and the Devil. However, even this interpretation of worship has hidden difficulties. It is a markedly ‘insider’ affair with little attention being given to those who may as yet be outsiders. It is also a very comfortable understanding of worship which assumes that it is simply about being affirmed and never being shaken or challenged.

4. Worship as communion   In worship we make our relationship with God and with the Christian community visible. In this view worship forms and sustains essential relationships.  There is a recognition that we were created for relationship by God, and to express that relationship in every way possible is both God’s deepest desire and our highest calling. When he writes to Christians in Corinth, Paul is concerned that they understand that worship is meant to strengthen the Body (1 Cor 14: 26). Willimon puts it like this “If the community does not worship, it is not a Christian community. If worship does not upbuild and sustain the community it is not Christian worship” (1979:20)

5. Worship as proclamation:  Seen from another vantage point, the heart of Christian faith is to proclaim the good news of God in Christ. Worship is the public place where Christians gather to make that public proclamation and witness.

1 Peter 2:9 “You are a chosen race a royal priesthood a holy nation Gods people, in order that you might proclaim the mighty acts of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light”

Of course, a potential difficulty with this as the predominant model of worship is that worship must also be about listening as well as speaking. Moreover proclamation can end up sidelining God in favour of the target audience who are the recipients of the proclamation.  It was Tozer decades ago who identified that forms of worship, especially Evangelical worship, were in danger of displacing God as the central focus in favour of the sermon.  

Activity: Which of these definitions of worship are most significant in your understanding of worship?

Let us re-cap what we have been saying about the link between worship or liturgy and pastoral care. When human beings worship, God meets with them and they encounter him. As they offer all that they are to God, certain that nothing is beyond God’s knowledge or interest, he meets them and ministers to them.  In other words, God is at work through services of worship to care for His people, to remind them of His love and to challenge them to commitment or service. There is thus, at least potentially, a dynamic, closely integrated relationship between worship and pastoral care.  Of course, liturgy can also be repetitive and lifeless, but there is the promise of something more when real engagement takes place. 

The experience of worship functioning as pastoral care

Here are just a few examples of worship functioning as pastoral care. McDevitt, Dosen and Ryan (2006) describe a situation in 2005 where 23 schools in the Archdiocese of Chicago had to be closed down. This action affected 500 school teachers and over 4,000 school children and there was huge angst and pain for those affected.  The archdiocese was concerned that resources were made available to help the children cope with their feelings of loss.  A key part of all that was done was an act of worship which included prayer and reflection on the theme of the wounded healer.  There was also an invitation for each participant to offer a prayer of blessing for another person at their table.  This act was no mere sharing of pain but rather it was each one involved allowing his or her own experience of being wounded to soften his or her heart toward the other in his or her woundedness.  The opportunity for participants to minister to one another was a powerful closing to the day and something that helped the children and teachers profoundly.

A second example is a service of naming and thanksgiving for a child who had been stillborn many years before. The elderly lady for whom the service was conducted had never seen her baby (it had been taken to the incinerator by a nurse) nor had there been any acknowledgment that the child had had an identity. Although the vicar who took the service was not deeply engaged – the ritual which involved naming the child brought profound emotional release and healing for both the woman and her husband.

  

A third example which I want us to spend some time reflecting on,  in class involves a service developed by the Methodist Church in Ireland for use with those who had been victims of the Troubles.  The activity outlined below will be undertaken during the weekend session.

Activity: Take a copy and in groups examine how it might function pastorally, suggesting ways in which God might use that service to minister His care to suffering individuals.

Glebsch and Jaekle say that pastoral care has four main functions. These are healing, sustaining, guiding and reconciling. While there are many means through which these functions may be expressed, the point of this post is to affirm and utilize the fact that worship is one channel through which pastoral care may be offered.  Elaine Ramshaw in her book examines the basic human needs which she believes are met by ‘healthy ritual practice.’ 

Prayer for healing. Accessed at wau.org

 

 

1. A need to establish order: We all need stability, order and the reassurance of continuity in our lives.  Anyone who doubts that that need has only to observe a toddler for a week.  

Even though little children show great creativity and spontaneity, it remains true that they have an insatiable need for ritualization. The story must be read with the same words, the same inflection, and the same ritualized question–and-answer exchanges. The passion with which children insist on sameness shows their need for order, stability, and the reassurance of continuity in human interaction. 

And what is true of the toddler, is true of the pensioner and, true indeed, of everyone else. We need to know what is stable, what is reliable,  what is not subject to the pressures that make everything else around us change. Worship, especially services of worship which follow a particular pattern, can provide continuity and order in a rapidly changing world.  

Ramshaw tells us that the mistake of many pastors is to read all resistance to liturgical innovation as rigidity, and to mock the conservative impulse. The reality is that the need for order and continuity is fundamental to the way that liturgy or ritual works. Thus when people say, ‘We have always done it that way,’  it is not simply unwarranted resistance to much needed innovation, it can be the expression of a felt need for continuity in a rapidly changing world. ‘If my life has been turned upside down by redundancy, or divorce, or my children leaving home, it is still the case that in my experience of ritual or liturgy I am secure and there is a sense of order.’ Ramshaw argues that anyone who does not have deep respect for that hunger for continuity should not be meddling with other people’s ritual practice. 

However, Ramshaw is not advocating that nothing should be changed or that the ideal mindset is blind adherence to rigidly fixed liturgical forms. In her view,  absolute rigidity is a perversion of the purpose of ritual.  There is, and needs to be, scope for innovation and development but the introduction of change in ritual practice should be gradual and respectful of the need for continuity of practice. She sums her view up in these words, ‘[Healthy ritualization provides] the stability of a dependable context within which variance can delight.’ 

2. The need to reaffirm meaning: Another function of ritual is that it can communicate meaning.  Ramshaw puts it like this,  ‘…all ritualization communicates some sort of meaning, even if that meaning is as simple a message as ‘I will act as expected of me in this situation.’ What is invariably the case with formal rituals is that they carry the core meanings of the social group performing them, the meanings which determine that group’s world view.

Symbols in ritual make a tremendous impact.  Whether it be the cross on the wall of a church, or the act of giving bread and wine, or the veneration and reading of the Sacred Text,  individuals express the deepest meanings they know, and often meanings that are deeper than they consciously know, in their expression of ritual.  Ramshaw has a wonderful summary statement that tells us much about how ritual functions for us.

The human need to make sense of experience is universal and fundamental. Faced with the biggest questions of life and death, love and evil, the origin and destiny of the universe, we cannot pin down an answer in logical formulas. We turn to symbolic expressions of our trust in that which grounds the goodness in our experience and shapes the tradition in which we make our meanings.

3.The need to bond community: A third function of ritual is to bond community.  Indeed, following Durkheim, many sociologists and anthropologists have seen social bonding as the central purpose of religious and civil ritual.  Shared symbols and shared action focused on those symbols are thought to bond a community together through both the appearance and the experience of acting as one.

However, Ramshaw is aware that there is something problematic about making that claim for the church context and its ritual. She states that many churches seek to build community through community-building activities and programmes, but that they do not recognize that the sacramental or the worship life of the Church as the primary place to build community. As she puts it, ‘A congregation may form geographical ‘clusters’ or plan elaborate social events and never consider how its ritual life contributes to community.’

And that point is illustrated in the way that certain things can be done. She asks, what does it mean that people are initiated into the community in private services with only immediate family present? Or why in certain churches is the eucharist only celebrated four times a year when it is meant to be the sacrament of unity.  Her point is that there should not be a sharp dividing line between the ritual and the ‘social’ life of the church and that our instinct should be to find ways of uniting or combining them. As she puts it,

The point intended here is not an opposition between ritual and nonritual dimensions of community-making, but rather a reminder that whatever else we do together, the core of our communal identity is enacted in worship.

It is Ramshaw’s view that ritual can be enacted in such a way that it genuinely does create or nurture community.  The key is active participation. The more widely and actively people participate in a ritual, the more they experience it as their own, as part of their identity, and the more connected they tend to feel to the other participants.  The worse case scenario is where people go to church to simply hear the preacher and merely to tolerate the rest of the service. That is bound to make any accompanying liturgy or ritual action ineffective for creating community.

What is really needed is a church community which corporately performs this ‘work of the people’, enthusiastically participating in the hymn singing and liturgical songs,  actively engaging with the intercessions, sharing the peace with warmth and openness towards their fellow worshippers, contributing creative skills to the decoration of the church, taking on roles as readers or intercessors, contributing a singing or musical gift, and so on and so on.  When ritual or liturgy has that level of participation, then real community becomes possible.

Activity: reflect on a church setting where worship, liturgy or ritual helped create a sense of community?

4. The need to handle conflicting emotions: Ramshaw notes that one of the greatest threats to order, meaning and community in human life is the disruptive impact of ambivalent or conflicting feelings. Our love can be coloured by jealousy,  our caring by resentment, our respect by envy and our sympathy by disdain. As fallen creatures we are limited in our virtues. The old Reformed theologians deployed the very unappealing phrase ‘total depravity’ to sum up this paradox in our natures. The phrase was never meant to mean that we were as bad as we possibly could be. It meant that every aspect of our being without exception was coloured by sin. No part of us escaped the virus, so to speak. We were in that sense ‘totally’ depraved.

It is Ramshaw’s contention that there are two ways in which the use of ritual helps us to handle this conflict or ambivalence in our feelings.  The first way is by reinforcing the preferred positive emotion and the second by containing the expression of the unwanted, conflicting emotion.  The rituals of our churches, like many formal ceremonies, use the first method of dealing with ambivalence extensively, emphasizing and reaffirming the appropriate emotional attitudes.  Think about the Confession and the Peace as ritual acts which nurture positive attitudes and feelings. 

However, church rituals, according to Ramshaw, are much less successful at providing occasions to express conflicting emotional attitudes. This is sad because the Bible itself, particularly the Psalms and the Book of Job, gives much more freedom of expression than any of our normal liturgies do. Freedom to be angry, even with God. Freedom to question. Freedom to lament that which has been lost. Interestingly, the worship song by Matt Redmond (Blessed be your name) probably allows more freedom to express loss and pain than most of our set prayers. (Play You Tube of Redmond’s performance of this with the London Community Gospel Choir).  Ramshaw’s words are very opportune at this point in summing up ritual’s capacity to help us deal with our feelings of ambivalence,

In theological terms, we need to remember that biblical faith is not defined by suppressing one’s doubt and protest, but by addressing one’s trust and doubt and praise and protest to God as if it mattered supremely to do so.’ (p.33)

5. The need for life cycle rites: It’s at this point in the lecture that I want us to think about how liturgy or ritual aid ‘rites of passage’, particularly funerals, as these are the most painful and tragic of all rites of passage. 

However, before I talk specifically about funerals it may be helpful to say a bit more about what we mean by ‘rites of passage.’ The term was coined by the anthropologist Arnold Van Gennup in his book of the same name, first published in 1909.  For him, rites of passage were rites or ritual actions which accompany the passage of a person from one social status to another in the course of his or her life. The typical rites of passage are those that accompany birth, the attainment of adult status, marriage and death.

Arnold Van Gennep. Accessed at massivnews.com

Accessed at press.uchicago.edu

 

When Van Gennup looked at rituals related to such crises as death he saw three phases in these ‘rites of passage’: separation, transition, and reincorporation.  William Willimon believes that if we analyse the formal and informal rituals that surround death, we can group them around these three parts of a rite of passage. When a loved one dies, the bereaved experience a feeling of separation. The dead person is not there in his familiar chair nor at the dinner table in the evening, and the living begin the painful process of separating themselves from the dead.  The rituals that surround the wake, viewing of the body (should this happen), the graveside service, even the actual lowering of the coffin and sprinkling of soil on the lid, can all be visible, acted means of coming to terms with the separation of death.  To avoid such separation (perhaps by neglect of the rituals) is to postpone a necessary first step in the grief process and to run the risk of prolonging the pain of grief.

The second part of the rite of passage that surrounds death is the process of transition.  The person going through grief often experiences a time of limbo where their whole life is on hold and the world seems to stop. The person is dealing with what anthropologist Victor Turner calls ‘liminality’, the ordeal of moving across one of life’s significant boundaries. One day a man is married, the next day he is a widow. 

In the midst of this transition phase, the funeral service can play an educative function in helping the bereaved come to terms with the loss. Here the church says in effect, ‘When death comes these are things that we believe.’ As Willimon puts it, ‘The scripture readings, prayers, and hymns, all focus upon the values and beliefs that the Christian community uses to interpret the meaning of the crisis of death.’  Thus death is put in some meaningful, ultimate context.

Finally, there is the third stage in the process which is reincorporation. The mourners are separated from their loved ones who have died and are separated out for a time of special attention in which the community works in formal and informal ways to help the mourners make a painful transition. The goal of these actions is to enable the mourner to re-enter the mainstream of life. This is a crucial stage and will determine whether the future is bright or one which echoes the excessively morbid final decades of Queen Victoria’s life. The practice in many English parishes of holding memorial services for all those buried in the previous year often offers an opportunity, through ritual and homily, to encourage the bereaved to move on with their lives. Indeed, the habit of participating in ritual can also help to re-establish other necessary habits and patterns. Ramshaw suggests that we can learn a lesson in pastoral ritual from the Russian Orthodox Church, who have a two-part ritual for the dead: an evening service of mourning and eulogy followed by a vigil, and a morning mass of the resurrection. Thus loss and hope are held together in the church’s ritual embrace.

Activity: reflect on ways have you experienced funerals meeting pastoral needs?

6. Human need and theological integrity:  Finally, having now looked at the various human needs which God may choose to meet through worship, we need to talk explicitly about the theological problems which ritual can provoke. Elaine Ramshaw suggests that the power of ritual to communicate meaning is vitiated when ritual is known to lie or contradict experience.  She highlights three kinds of dishonesty which threaten ritual’s credibility as a carrier of meaning.

The first and most blatant type is for the ritual to make statements about the participants which are at variance with their real-life situations.  She cites the rhetoric of free choice in the Confirmation service when often it is parental or peer pressure that has been brought to bear on the teenagers being confirmed. Another example might be the funeral where, in terms of the ritual, there is a strong presumption of faith on the part of the deceased but the congregation knows that this was not the case. 

A second problem is the untruthfulnes that can happen when the worship leader imputs certain feelings to the congregation. For example,  expressing certain feelings of devotion which sum up part of the congregation’s state of mind, but which alienate the rest of them. Liturgical scholars call this the mistake of subjectivization, and they object to it not only because it risks inaccuracy and alienation, but also for the more theological reason that it focuses prayer on the praying person’s state of mind, rather than on the work of God.

The third common cause of ritual dishonesty is the manipulation of forcing people on the spot into ritual statements which they may not be inclined to make. An on the spot renewal of marriage vows, example!

Activity: reflect on where have you seen dishonest ritual take place?

7. The desire for liturgical markers or liturgy to mark life-cycle changes.

What do you think is happening when a couple with no church links come asking for the baby to be baptized? 

What human needs are being expressed in those requests?

Why do people feel that liturgy or ritual can meet that need?

What might your responses be as a minister to requests for ritual at significant moments in a person’s life? For example, a request that a couple’s stillborn baby be baptized?