Remarks on Dominican Liturgy
Published in Forum, Dominican Province of St. Albert the Great, 1973
The old monastic style of Dominican liturgy -to judge from remarks in Forum and other sources- is just about extinct in our province (St. Albert the Great, Chicago). Ibadan is the only place I know of where many of the best traditions of the old style survive in a contemporary African synthesis. Not only is the old monastic style practically extinct, but it also has almost no defenders. I can only point to Richard Woods in Forum n. 2 as one.
Before discussing our older and newer forms of community prayer (or non-prayer), I will state some principles:
- Dominican life is an apostolic life which presupposes a well developed contemplative life or life of prayer.
- Our life of prayer is an all-embracing personal affair, but it needs to be sustained by our community, and particularly by our community prayer.
- Our community prayer should measure up to certain standards in accord with good sense and Dominican tradition in as much as it represents the particular character or charism of our Order. (I cannot agree with those who say that any community prayer is sufficient for Dominican life, just so long as we are praying together.)
My position -if you haven't guessed- is that our traditional prayer forms, with some sifting and translation, are viable (to assert the least) for our communities today. To clarify and solicit support for this position I need to make some evaluation of our community prayer as we used to do it and as it is variously done today.
Our traditional community prayer
I will here outline what I think are the essential features of our traditional Dominican liturgy, point out how we fell short of living these essential features, and suggest some ways we can salvage these features in a contemporary liturgy. The features are three: structure, solemnity, and simplicity.
- Our old liturgy was based on a structure of praying together at certain hours of the day according to a certain format of psalms, readings, etc. This structure of hours had its own inner logic which was tampered with by our pragmatic formalism of packing the hours, saying them out of the right times (e.g. Compline after lunch), and saying them at all costs in order to comply with the law. Very few members of our province have any more such a legalistic or formalistic attitude which places the letter of the law above the purpose of liturgical prayer. But it is important to recall our one-time orthodoxy to show that our formation did not foster in us an appreciation of the structural logic of our community prayer. Once our consciences were emancipated or liberalized, all to many of us tossed out our traditional prayer in complete disgust and introduced poor or no substitutes.
What can be done? The basic format of our old liturgy seems to have been substantially incorporated into the new Roman liturgy of the hours and of the Mass. We had many beautiful incidental features which the new Roman liturgy lacks (e.g. the preces of Lauds in the Triduum of Holy Week, to mention only one); I see no reason why we shouldn't keep such features and, by the same right, invent new ones, rather than rush to patter our liturgies (different according to our communities) after every latest thing from Rome.
There are more radical possibilities. Some question the value of the Psalms at all as a Christian prayer. I cannot by that, but am willing to concede that the Psalms may be painfully repulsive during temporary stages such proponents are going through. Others, such as Quinn in the Liturgical Newsletter, question the value of having "chunks" of psalmody after the manner of monastic continuous recitation, still embodied in the new Roman format. I see no objection to shaping our major hours after the "ancient cathedral pattern"; as for the irreducible incompatibility of the monastic and ancient cathedral traditions, I am not prepared to judge. All I would insist on is some logic to the plan of the prayers, and above all some existential logic which would avoid over-attachment to a book by fumbling to recite every antiphon, hymn and versicle just as it is printed.
- Our traditional Dominican liturgy is supposed to have been characterized by solemnity, to use the term of the Constitutions. What does "solemnity" mean? In modern usage this word sometimes has the bad meaning of "stiff" or "excluding spontaneity" or "staged and theatrical". Certainly solemnity supposes a certain amount of ritual, or pre-planned structure of action which we learn and go through by power of habit. (Is this repulsive? But see how St. Thomas defends the value of habit as opposed to the necessity of having to deliberate every single act.) Individual style and spontaneity are necessary, but can work well only in the context of some structure.
Solemnity above all implies the use of artistic resources to enhance the celebration. These artistic resources include:
- physical motion and variations of posture,
- the surroundings of vestments and all that is involved in the setteing,
- special effects, such as lighting and incense (in many places now only a distant memory), and
- above all, singing. The liturgical books of Dominican chant as well as the acts of early chapters of the Order (see Jandel Constitutions, pp. 43-44) are evidence that in the beginning singing the entire office "in nota ordinis" was the norm in our houses.
In our former liturgy, the houses of our province did well regarding the first three items; the last item, singing, is where we fell short. Practically all our houses were dominated by a run-away office which was not only excused but also defended under the terms of "breviter et succinct". These words were originally formulated in the context of a sung office and were wrongly applied in our time to the recto tone office. Moreover they were never applied to the terribly dragged singing (especially at pauses) of Graduale or Antiphonarium chants.
Why resuscitate these old nightmares? One reason is because the old habits persist, and most of our places which chant the new office in English still do not observe enough pause in the Psalms and do not take a slow enough pace to permit a relaxed contemplative experience. The second reason is to point out that our formation in this province did not foster in us an appreciation for either singing or chanting the liturgy. Some of us may have enjoyed isolated gems like the Lamentations of Jeremiah or the "In exitu" of Sunday Vespers (the rare times some fanatical prior would impost singing it), but for the most part we came away with the feeling that this "opus Dei" was our "onus diei", or else a chance to vent our pent up frustrations through calisthenics and shouting psalms at each other (and at the same time, mind you, strengthening our vocal cords for preaching!).
As for myself, I rejoiced when I finished Dubuque and was at last freed from choir. Not that I hated the liturgy in itself (having learned to love it before I came into the Order), but no liturgy is better than bad liturgy; "corruption optima pessima". In spite of the "fidelity" of many of our houses and men to choir, in my view the liturgical practice in most of these faithful houses was so bad (and I mean bad!) that this essential element of our life was "substantially altered", and our whole Dominican life was in grave trouble. I also believe that our later crises and problems are largely the result of this corrupt community prayer. The family that does not pray (really pray) together does not stay together.
What can be done to maintain a standard of solemnity in a liturgy today? The minimum requirement would be to take it easy in any chanting of psalms, especially with regard to pause; if this is maintained almost anything else is tolerable. But where the community has the talent more singing can be done. Strangely, recent years have brought a breakdown of other elements of solemnity. Many places seem to have a casual armchair liturgy without posture change, standing, or going to the middle to read lessons; incense has gone; so has the singing of ministerial parts like the Gospel, collects etc. My experience with Islam, Coptic rite, and African religions has driven me in the same direction as Richard Woods in insisting on the importance of these sacral or ritual elements.
- Our traditional Dominican liturgy is supposed to have been characterized by simplicity. Obviously, this word does not mean "unsolemn", "plan" or "drab", any more than "solemn" means "unsimple", but historically it points to a difference which existed between some (Including Dominican) monastic liturgies and medieval cathedral, court, or high Benedictine liturgies. These latter were elaborate, requiring teams of professional artists, and were frequently theatrical. Even in the area of chant, one needs only to compare a typical chant text of the Dominican Graduale with the corresponding one of the Graduale Romanum to see the difference. The Roman chants demanded a high degree of virtuosity to be performed well, whereas the Dominican ones (not trimmed, but following another unelaborated tradition) suited the capacities of an ordinary community of men dedicated to the liturgy and the apostolate as well. Simplicity and sobriety were to be the mark of Dominican liturgy. (Cf. new Constitutions, n. 65.) In the performance of our former liturgy we lacked simplicity where our singing lacked energy, spirit, and rhythm. Occasionally too, much practice was put in for putting on an extravaganza for a particular occasion, while the day to day liturgy was left floundering.
The problem of simplicity is no longer that same as it used to be. We are quick to spot spiritless singing in our vernaculars. We also have a much more liberal attitude towards using our own cultural resources, so that drums, guitars, trumpets etc. do not strike us as theatrical. We can still sin by gimmickry and striving after effects instead of seeking a fitting harmonious enfleshment of our worship of the Father in the spirit, but such celebrations cannot adequately be judged by rules but by men who have the spirit of God and good taste.
Some new forms of community prayer
My remarks in this section will be spotty because I am not familiar with much of what is going on. As for modifications of traditional patterns, I have seen an excellent Sunday Mass in Dubuque. Elsewhere I have noticed the frequent four-hymn Mass, which, to me, is a wrong direction altogether, in that it is singing to accompany the Mass, not singing the Mass. Often too, the hymn melodies and texts are cheap and shallow. And sometimes the prayers and preaching are simply unprepared and unorganized casual conversation (bad spontaneity).
In some places, under the idea "Don't put new wine into old wineskins", a fresh start has been made with improvised and spontaneous prayer sessions, sometimes with charismatic emphasis. This approach has much to recommend it, since modifications of old patterns are often unsuccessful. (E.g., the American record "Freeing the Spirit", put out by the National Office of Black Catholics, is nothing but (good) Anglo-Saxon music. In Nigeria none of the implanted historic churches have succeeded in producing an indigenous liturgy; but the independent or Aladura churches have. [Note: true of 1973, not not 2010])
In spite of the avowed free character of these prayer meetings, if they are frequent or daily they inevitably develop certain structural patterns. In that case we have to ask "Are they good structures?" As regards solemnity, these prayer meetings are reacting against modern liturgies which demand constant intellectual participation in dry prayer formulas or theological and sociological "ratiocinations"; they concentrate instead on communion with God in the Holy Spirit. In groping their way to do so, they have tended to be ritually destitute or to borrow Protestant Pentecostal forms of worship. If the advocates of these prayer meetings had the opportunity to study the question, they might find themselves very much in sympathy with a solemn classical liturgy in which a dramatic ritual movement created an atmosphere of splendor and awe which was sustained throughout the unfolding action. The participants did not need to sing everything (there was a place for a choir) or pay attention to every word. They could lose themselves in the enveloping presence of God, not to escape from life but to be shocked into reality by the rigorous scrutiny and demands of God's Spirit, rather than struggle within the humanist limitations and prosaic secularity of so many post-Vatican II liturgies.
One of the desirable developments of the future would be to find a synthesis of the mystical desires, spontaneity and communal "charisms" of the presently popular Pentecostal movement (about which, however, I have certain serious reservations) with the liturgical solemnities of old.