THE LANGUAGE OF WORSHIP IN THE ELCA’S NEW WORSHIP RESOURCES

By Gracia Grindal

            The new books of proposed liturgies and hymns can be criticized theologically from a Lutheran point of view and they should be.  My concern in this note has to do with the language of both the hymns and the liturgies.  Writing language for worship is difficult.  The language has to be transparent, that is to say, language that does not draw attention to itself, and at the same time tough enough to suffer thousands of repetitions without wearing out.  The poet had best beware of this kind of writing.  Most poets and writers write so that people will commend them.  They write to draw attention to their writing and to themselves.  This is deadly to liturgical writing.  The language must not, under any circumstances, draw attention to itself.  It must be spare and elegant and memorable.   The language of the new services is, however, not spare.  It is full of itself, and written to draw attention to itself, first by its purple prose, then by its sheer length. 

            It will not be long, if these services come into use, before congregations will weary of the excess in the language. One of most excessive is one version of the flood prayer for baptism.

Holy God, holy and merciful, holy and mighty,

you are the river of life,

you are the everlasting wellspring,

you are the fire of rebirth.

Glory to you for oceans and lakes, for rivers and creeks.

Honor to you for cloud and rain, for dew and snow.

Your waters are below us, around us, above us:

our life is born in your.

You are the fountain of resurrection.

Praise to you for your saving waters:

Noah and the animals survive the flood,

Hagar discovers your well,

The Israelites escape through the sea,

and they drink from your gushing rock.

Naaman washes his leprosy away,

and the Samaritan woman will never be thirsty again.

At this font, holy God, we pray: 

Breathe your Spirit into this water,

and into all who are gathered here this night.

Illumine our days.

Enliven our bones.

Dry our tears.

Wash away the sin within us,

and drown the evil around us.

Satisfy all our thirst with your eternal fountain,

and bring to birth the body of Christ,

who lives with you and the Holy Spirit.

one God, now and forever.

The list of places where there is water in Scripture sounds rather like the Homeric list of ships in the Iliad.  One listening to it will begin to wonder where else there is water in the Bible. This is caused by the structure of the sentences.  It is well known among rhetoricians schooled in Cicero or Aristotle that a list of two, as in "oceans and lakes" sound balanced, where as a list of three sounds complete and full.  One can combine a list of twos into three clauses for example, and the hearer feels a sense of completion.  When one adds a fourth, however, it seems like a list that needs an etc. after it.  There could be more, the writer is saying, but I'll stop here.  Thus the listener begins to wonder about other places where water appears, and it tends to become comical or irritating, especially if one is trying to hold a baby and keep it from crying.  The list beginning with Noah, for example, should end after three, and each phrase should either get shorter or longer, as in the great verse from Isaiah 40: “They shall rise up on wings as an eagle, run and not be weary, walk and not faint.”  The ancient rhetoricians called that form an anti-climax because it was a list that grew shorter.  Its effect is profound because the language matches the meaning, sparely, but effectively.  A list of five places where water appears in .Scripture will quickly call forth mimics who will extend the list into absurdity.  Those who love liturgy and have written these endless prayers are really self-defeating because they will evoke weariness in the hearers or hilarity from those who find the lists tedious and, finally, funny.

            Furthermore, this is not the time to write new language for liturgy.  As one of the principles of worship states quite clearly we change the language of these services at our peril because we attack the spiritual memory of our people.  Ever since the LBW I have despaired of the baptismal service because it is so long and tedious, and impossible for babies to endure.  In addition the participants have to hold the LBW in order to participate and read along with the service, keeping them from the kinesthetic experience of the moment.  I am grateful that this service requires less reading from the parents than the previous one, but it is still too long.

            Secondly, the language of the hymns.  While I can appreciate the need to produce better translations, the ones I have seen tend not to be very skillful.  They are filled with inversions which do not sound very English and which could easily be fixed.  For example, the changes in “Praise, My Soul, the God of Heaven."  In an effort to remove male pronouns for God, the translator has changed the last line of the first stanza to "Praises everlasting ring!"  It would be much better and quite easy to have that line read "Everlasting praises ring!"  The third stanza is also quite amateurish:  "Frail as summer's flow'r we flourish, blows the wind and it is gone:  but, as mortals rise and perish, God endures unchanging on."  This verse has very little relation to the English we speak today, or poetry written in any age of English.  "Blows the wind" is an odd construction, but not as strange as "unchanging on."  The inability to find a better way to rhyme these verses is embarrassing.

            The post communion canticle "Thank the Lord, Your Voices Raise" suffers from the same kind of Germanic inversions:  "Tell the wonders God has done: freedom, life, the vict'ry won."  God has freed us, given us life, and won the victory (a three syllable word nowadays) he has not done freedom, life, and how ever "victory won" relates to the verb "done."  Another howler is stanza 5 of Ambrose' hymn, Savior of the nations come."  "Come, O ageless Father's Peer; gird your might in mortal gear." 

            There are numerous other problems with the new versions of old hymns.  Lutherans seem never to have learned English very well and have not, evidently, produced many good poets who can write hymns in modern English.  There's John Ylvisaker whose work does not appear in any of the new resources that I have seen.  Marty Haugen can also turn a phrase, but I have trouble with the theology of many of his hymns for the way they draw attention to what we are doing in the service, e.g.  "Here in this place."  Susan Palo Cherwien can also turn a phrase, but the poetry draws attention to itself, and causes me some theological problems, for example, in "O Blessed Spring," it is a bit problematic the way she forces the problem of the resurrection in a way I haven't seen in many years since the soul-sleeping controversy of my youth.-"As winter comes, as winters must, we breathe our last, return to dust; still held in Christ, our souls take wing and trust the promise of the spring."  Where do our souls wing?

            There are other theological issues with some of the new liturgies and hymns, but I have addressed them elsewhere.  This addendum on the actual language might be of help to people who sense that something is wrong with the language but can't quite say what.  Once again, the entire project suffers from a lack of writers who know their way around the English language and the difficulties of writing liturgical language.