Why is it
that modern liturgies, which accurately express the beliefs of the
participants, often seem to fail as ritual while older forms, embodying what many
participants would find to be out-moded ideas, remain powerful? Two articles I read recently on the neurobiology
of music may offer important clues to a biological basis for what Pope Benedict
has identified as the tension between the hermeneutic of continuity and the
hermeneutic of rupture.
Ian Cross, director of Cambridge
University’s Centre for Music and Science, and Aniruddh
D. Patel of the Neuroscience Institute, have both written extensively on
music’s ability to create group experience.
Cross’s short piece, “Music and
Social Being,” and Patel’s Templeton Foundation essay, “Music as a
Transformative Technology of the Mind,” both argue that a regular pulse
draws participants into a group experience and and allows participants to share an experience in ways that may actually impeded by ordinary discourse.
Cross begins
by positing that, while music does not seem to have the same innate biological
basis as language, it does seem to have similarities across cultures that make
it more than an evolutionary remnant, as is demonstrated in the nearly
universal phenomenon of lullaby behavior between mother and infant. If one broadens the standard Western
definition to think of music as patterns of events occurring at regular
temporal intervals, dance, the chanting of religious texts, and other
activities that may not initially be defined by a given culture as music are
more easily seen as part of the larger phenomenon. Cross concludes that the key here may be what
he calls entrainment, the shared experience of the regular pulse, “which
involves the coordination in time of one participant's musical behaviours with
those of another… and the organisation of the timing of actions and sounds
around the abstracted pulse.” A group
of disparate individuals, in Cross’s thinking, are literally caught up in a
beat and brought into a shared experience.
This is easy enough for anyone who has been to a concert to
understand. Patel goes so far as to
argue that may be what makes music a key factor in adolescent identity formation.
While the
pulse of the music draws a group together, Cross believes that it is powerful
because of its light touch. Language, he
says, has coercive features, but shared musical experience allows those it
engages to feel that they are part of a common experience while at the same
time allowing individual interpretations of the exact meaning of that
experience. The power of music then lies
not in an ability to make people think or believe exactly the same thing but to
“modulate emotion and mood states,” drawing participants into something very
like anthropologist Victor Turner’s liminal state, but, as music is an
“unconsummated symbol,” it has a “floating intentionality.” Cross believes this openness minimizes
conflict by creating a shared sense of experience that is open-ended and
communicative and contributes to both social and intellectual flexibility. In this way, over the long course of
evolution, he says that music has created space for group interaction and
negotiation of the sort that Aristotle described as distributive justice and
that Cross calls a tendency toward social justice. Shared musical experiences then are a careful
balancing of group experience and of individual integration of that experience.
Cross and
Patel’s research seems to have two implications for liturgy: the need for pulse and the need to preserve
space for individual interpretation within the larger group context.
If we think
about older liturgical forms, pulse is everywhere, from the cadence of
plainsong and the language of the Missal to the choreography of the sacred
ministers’ movements at the altar. One
might go on to argue that repetition of these forms from week to week creates its
own larger rhythm. We can quickly
contrast this to some more contemporary settings where syncopated music in
unusual chords, less rhythmic and stylized prose, an emphasis on teaching via
sermons, and interruptions to explain and ascribe meanings to liturgical
actions fail to draw the individual into a rhythmic pattern. By extension, an emphasis on novelty and
innovation from week to week fails to create an identity within the larger arc
of the participants’ lives. In contrast,
the use of foreign and archaic language may actually add to the group
experience by concentrating the participants’ focus on the larger pulse and
flow, connecting disparate texts and embedding them more deeply in the
participants’ minds than straightforward exposition in everyday language.
Newer forms,
with a focus on teaching and relevance, while having the best of motives, may
actually be fighting against the evolutionary process. By breaking the flow of the beat to explain
and by teaching, which limits the realm of acceptable individual interpretation, newer forms may create disconnects that undercut the power of
the ritual action. A congregation that does
something new and different each week may provide a gratifying creative outlet
for its liturgists, but may be much less successful in creating a moving
experience for the participants in the pew.
Conversely, older forms may actually be more meaningful because the
individual is not repeatedly pulled out of the ritual experience by being required to
accept or reject rational content.
This is not
to say that older is always better and that newer forms are always
misguided. Older rites can be performed abominably
in ways that undercut their power—there is no need to recount the well-documented
abuses of American Low Mass culture in the days before Vatican II. In the same way, many newer rites consciously
or otherwise maintain a sense of cadence and flow. An excellent example here would be the prose
rhythms of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and, I would argue, its placement of
the exchange of the sign of peace so that it does not break the flow of the
Eucharistic prayer. To my mind, Cross
and Patel’s research create the basis for an argument to omit the exchange of
the peace entirely and to remove the sermon and other teaching functions from
the liturgical action. A sermon at the end of Mass, as was the custom in many
places in former times, might both allow the ritual to do its particular work of
building community and encouraging prayer and also give the preacher a more
receptive audience after an extended shared experience.
The idea of
gradual change embodied in the concept of a hermeneutic of continuity may be
appropriated here to look at how liturgical change happens in a way that is consonant
with the ways in which human beings have evolved. The idea that changes should come gradually
and are incorporated because praxis says that they “work” has much to recommend
it. The idea of sweeping changes to
update liturgical rites may seem to be a rational undertaking, but, in reality,
may do violence to the subconscious power of the ritual. One can easily argue that neo-pagan ritual
with its emphasis on drumming, drama, and dancing has hit upon something far
more powerful for communicating contemporary ideas about ecology and gender
roles than a clearly-stated, didactic modern language liturgy ever will. The neo-pagan circle creates a shared
experience built around a core set of values while allowing the participant significant
latitude for the ways in which he or she incorporates the experience. Self-consciously modern worship, on the other
hand, be it a progressive Eucharistic prayer written with the specificity of a
position paper or a conservative evangelical sermon documented in a flurry of
PowerPoint slides, may alienate otherwise sympathetic hearers because it denies
them the ability to contextualize the ideas in ways that fit their own
experience. Both fail because they are
not what my undergraduate philosophy advisor would have called “suitably vague.” This does not mean that there can be no
liturgical engagement with theological truth or moral imperatives, but it does
suggest that the text must leave room for the participant to receive and
incorporate the text aided by a good cadence to help it go down.
I have long
joked that all of the great religions with staying power are based on chanting
ancient texts in dead languages, be they the sutras, the psalms, or the English
prose of Thomas Cranmer. This very
initial scratching of the surface seems to suggest that neuroscience may agree. The findings are not so simple as saying that
older is always better and that newer is always misguided, but they do suggest
that older forms often embody the wisdom of experience. In the sursum
corda at the beginning of the Canon of the Mass the celebrant intones, “Gratias
agamus Domino Deo nostro” (“Let us give thanks to the Lord our God”) to which
the people answer, “Dignum et iustum est” (“It is right and just” or “It is
meet and right so to do”). Perhaps after
50 years of stressing “iustum” in liturgy we are about to rediscover that losing
sight of the power of “dignum” has equally unfortunate consequences.
