by the Rev. Megan McDermott
One of my divinity school classmates stood at a podium in our chapel and read aloud from Ada Limon’s gorgeous poem, “How To Triumph Like A Girl.”
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!
But mainly, let’s be honest, I like
that they’re ladies. As if this big dangerous animal is also a part of me…
She continued on, completing the poem, before another woman got up to read.
It was stirring to hear this poem I loved—that proclaimed to me something of “the huge beating genius machine” inside me—jumbled up with worship and Scripture. That day’s chapel service at Yale Divinity School’s Marquand Chapel was one I had been responsible for organizing. Everything was centered around the Magnificat and the liberating potential of a woman declaring, “he that is mighty hath magnified me.” The idea highlighted by the service was that sometimes God does not want to diminish us, particularly if we already feel diminished or are diminishing ourselves in unhealthy ways; instead, the service lifted up the possibility of God guiding us into living more largely. This has been an important concept in my own spiritual life, particularly in my struggles with self-esteem and internalized misogynistic messages from my experiences in Catholic and evangelical spaces.
During the service, we read the Magnificat along with poems and other readings connected with that theme (like Ada Limon’s poem which may have very different content but, for me, captured something of a Magnificat spirit), prayed, and sang.
Through a part-time position at the divinity school’s chapel, I helped plan many services, but this is one that sticks in my memory—one that felt like something that I was maybe meant to give my community.
Getting to create services like it was one of the things I most loved about going to Yale Divinity School. One of the benefits of going to YDS was that I was able to both receive deep formation in my Episcopal tradition through the Episcopal seminary within YDS, Berkeley, and also participate in a larger, ecumenical institution. However, one of the more unfortunate consequences of this set-up was that it often felt like my most creative work—like the Magnificat service—fell outside of my Episcopal studies.
It sometimes seemed like the part of me that was drawn to creating (the part that’s been writing since childhood, that studied creative writing in college, that entered Yale with an interest in feminist liturgy and religion and the arts) was somehow a separate part of me from the self discerning a call to the Episcopal priesthood—or at least, that this creative part of me had to be appropriately sequestered and controlled.
I didn’t feel like I had a model, at least in the Episcopal world, for how to use my gifts and interests—readily welcomed by other communities—within the liturgical boundaries of our denomination, outside of the obvious context of preaching.
I don’t think this is especially a problem of where I went to school as much as it is a tension for our denomination and its commitments. Being situated within the Episcopal Church raises some of the following questions for me that I have a feeling might resonate for some others: How do we hold to an ideal of common prayer and established liturgy without vilifying the very notion of creativity—without associating new words with danger? How can we be, as ministers of the Gospel, creative, serious, and thoughtful, and not see those things as being at odds with one another? And how do I, and other clergy and laypeople who feel called towards things like writing prayers and liturgy, use our gifts to the service of our church? Particularly for those who are ordained, how do we use those gifts in a way that does not violate any of the commitments we have made?
Some of these questions have burned more brightly at certain times than others. Admittedly, many have fallen to the wayside as I focus on getting my “sea legs” as a priest, in my first call as an associate. Some plagued me more heavily during the ordination process—along with worries that I was not “Episcopal enough” for the priesthood, even though this is the denomination I’ve embraced and that has embraced me, the one that has recognized my call, the church to which I have pledged myself and the church which I call home.
Because these are questions that I hope I approach thoughtfully, I must admit that I bristle when I hear some who are more reluctant about liturgical revision suggesting its proponents are only concerned with “novelty.”
For one, there are many issues of justice and theology behind a desire for new and revised liturgies. The gendered language we use for God is not a “novel” issue to me or to many others, to name just one example. People don’t want new words just for the sake of newness: they want something that, according to their theological understanding, better speaks to who God is than what we currently. To label those with such concerns as seekers of “novelty” is dismissive of the theological passion that many bring to the subject of liturgical revision.
Of course, many writings out there enumerate the theological concerns that might undergird liturgical revision in our church. Personally, I find the most powerful articulations of why we need to expand our language for God in the writings of Catholic feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson.
Though I could expand this essay in that direction, as a defense of gender-inclusive or -expansive language, I instead feel compelled to address the very idea of creativity in liturgy itself.
On a basic level, novelty can simply be defined as newness, and therefore, technically, the desire to create anything new could be construed as a desire for novelty. However, “novelty” in these conversation is usually not being employed as a neutral term, but as a pejorative one, with a connotation that implies a certain kind of newsness: a shallow newness that is only concerned with being new, a newness that is for show instead of substance.
To label any new creation as novelty is an insult to the very gift of creativity.
Of course, Episcopalians will have their thoughts on the times and places creativity could be utilized, which I appreciate and respect. But I think there is a problem when that conversation inadvertently makes creativity sound shallow or dangerous.
I will leave it to the theologians to discuss creativity and newness more systematically, but as a priest and a poet, what I want to offer today are reflections on my own personal experience of encountering newness in worship and how far from shallow those experiences have been.
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My last year of seminary, I had a part-time job at the University Church in Yale, an ecumenical congregation serving the university community. As part of my position, I often wrote prayers, such as calls to worship or prayers of confession. Occasionally, I would use a Book of Common Prayer text because it said what I wanted to say better than I could’ve or better than anything else I found. But sometimes—much of the time—I didn’t.
Writing these prayers is something that I miss. They were an offering of specificity and creativity meant to speak to a particular group of people at a particular time, in conversation with the particular texts that were being proclaimed that day.
That’s not to say that all my prayers sung with the Spirit. But that is to say, I don’t think writing them was an exercise in being novel or trying to shake things up.
It does, I suppose, suggest some bold belief that I might contains prayers within me that are worth other people praying (and so might many of us).
I know that these are not beliefs that everyone necessarily holds—or at least, not without those beliefs being tempered with great concern. Truly, I understand the desire of congregations, or at least certain persons in them, not to be “subjected” to the “whims” of a clergyperson. However, I do think there’s a pessimism in that rhetoric that doesn’t quite capture the breadth of possible reaction to new liturgical language. Because the reality is, people won’t always experience change as something that they are subjected to in a negative way. Sometimes people will experience new words as encapsulating something they’ve felt but haven’t been able to articulate; sometimes people will experience new words as an invitation into a new way of thinking; sometimes people will experience new words as freedom and affirmation. The other reality is that sometimes the people who are asking for new language are parishioners, while the clergy are the ones holding fast to more traditional language. Clergy aren’t the only ones who desire change, which sometimes seems implied in conversations around liturgical revision as novelty.
To use an example from preaching, I think about the reactions I receive when I use she/her pronouns or maternal language for God in my sermons. I used to expect that I’d get blowback on this, but I rarely ever have. I’m sure that this would be different in other ministerial contexts, but it’s been my experience that 1) either the language is unremarked upon and maybe not even noticed or 2) it receives a grateful comment from a woman in the congregation who feels empowered to hear God described in that way.
The pessimism I often hear around revision doesn’t account for the possibilities that new language may actually be serving the needs and desires of a congregation, rather than just the interests of the clergy.
When I think about the pessimism and anxiety in our conversations around liturgical revision, I often wonder what some of our ecumenical colleagues overhear. Some of these colleagues spend time each week crafting prayers for their congregations and creating liturgies for their people. I don’t envy them because I know the type of effort, care, and time that goes into it. I truly am grateful for our set liturgies in the Episcopal church—that I don’t have to start from scratch each week—that I can, for instance, take that time and spend it instead on doing more research for my sermon or putting more preparation into my middle/high school Bible study. However, a preference for set liturgies should not lead us into language that is disparaging to the often-holy efforts that our peers are doing in other settings.
Of course, attention to ecumenism is often one of the reasons people feel most anxious about revising the prayer book, worried that new words will take us further away from our Catholic and Orthodox siblings, among others. Many times, I question the way that Episcopalians discuss unity and ecumenism because there seems to be a prioritizing of unity with certain parties over others. The fact of the matter is, there are many, many Protestants who would have little offense at the new liturgies the Episcopal church might produce. There are many who might, in fact, feel like new liturgies would better align with their churches’ more robust commitments to expansive language, for instance. Who counts, then, when we talk about wanting to be unified? It sometimes seems like we prize unity more with the churches that are furthest from recognizing the fullness of our ministry—or at least, this is how it seems from my perspective as a woman who’s a priest and has left behind her Roman Catholic tradition.
Certainly new words would not distance us from communities like the University Church in Yale, where I once worked, or others all over the country and world whose pastors and ministers dwell with God and God’s Word each week and endeavor to honor God through newly-composed prayers. To these communities, the idea of having “authorized” liturgies at all still creates distance between the ways that we approach worship compared to them. Expanding our possibilities doesn’t mean we have to lose our identity, and it doesn’t necessarily means losing relationships with other Christians.
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As I mentioned at the beginning of my piece, the other space, besides the University Church in Yale, where I most often got to try out liturgical innovation was Marquand Chapel, which holds a service every weekday of the academic year at Yale Divinity School. Both during my second and third years, I was a chapel minister, a student position that involved working with other students and the Dean of the Chapel on creating a variety of services drawing on the student body’s different Christian traditions.
Working on these services sometimes felt like letting others into my heart and the places where God was most deeply speaking to me. Other times, when collaborating with student preachers,
working on these services felt like helping them communicate the word from God that was on their hearts.
One of my interests entering YDS was exploring “feminist liturgy.” Throughout this work, I was challenged to craft liturgy that at once gave voice to feminist theological conviction (or the convictions/topics being explored by our preachers) without making worship about that conviction—to keep the central focus on worshipping God, in whatever new or creative form we were attempting.
In my Episcopal context, I am a faithful lectionary preacher, so I’ll admit, in this job, it was a fun change of pace to craft a service without the confinement of the lectionary. I wouldn’t want to be in a church where I had that freedom all the time, since I love that the lectionary forces me to deal with texts I’d rather avoid. However, I appreciated the chance I had in Marquand to lift up messages intentionally, ones that were haunting me, ones that might not have naturally risen out of whatever texts I might’ve been assigned through a lectionary. Besides that being the case with my Magnificat service, it was certainly also the case when I preached a senior sermon there on Rahab, whose story is not in our lectionary. In Marquand, I experienced a unique freedom that allowed me, and others to, raise messages that were counter to what we sometimes heard in church—messages we needed to hear, messages we need to share.
I wonder how often the desire for liturgical change is about the things that go unsaid—about lifting up messages that we don’t usually get to hear when we’re together—messages that we need to combat harmful things we have heard in the name of God.
In addition to organizing services, I also attended services at Marquand, getting the benefit of experiencing God in the variety of ways we worshipped. The newness, at least for me, didn’t distract from entering God’s presence, but enabled me to experience God in different ways. For example, we sometimes would celebrate Communion in something closer to a Baptist approach, where little plastic cups would be passed around and everyone would wait to drink together. This is very different from what I’m used to in the Eucharist, but I often found that the time I had to hold and look down at my cup was prayerful and focused me on the blood of Christ in a way that was different than my usual experience. To be clear, not every service spoke to me (just as not every service at an Episcopal church will), but when you have a lot of things thrown at you, there’s a good chance that at least some will manage to stick and impact you.
During those years of seminary, my soul felt nourished by being able to experience the steadiness of Berkeley’s Morning Prayer and Eucharist alongside Marquand Chapel’s more multitudinous ways of entering into worship.
As I wrote in a blog post following my first year of seminary, “I appreciate, immensely, that I can start my day with Morning Prayer and with the Eucharist—but I also like being able to walk into another chapel everyday where we draw on different traditions within Christianity and where there is more room for innovation and experimentation. What will I do, I wonder, when I no longer have that space?”
To be honest, I am not sure in what ways both steadiness and a more experimental creativity can exist alongside each other in the Episcopal church, but I do know that there are spiritual benefits to both kinds of practice. I do know that I wish I could more regularly experience both, and I wonder how many people in our pews might feel the same.
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All of these reflections are not arguments for any particular revision (though I, of course, have my own opinions on that), and they certainly aren’t arguments for the Episcopal Church adapting a completely freeform approach to liturgy.
What I hope they can be received as, however, are thoughts on why the “novelty” accusation is dismissive of the deep reasons that people might crave new liturgies. I hope they can be received as a request that our conversations don’t lose sight of how creativity can be a source and site for so many encounters with God, and as a suggestion that talking about newness in a primarily suspicious register can be harmful in our relationship to creativity, one of God’s greatest gifts.
After all, our Scriptures both invite us to “sing to the Lord a new song” (Psalm 96:1) and to also return to those things that have been found foundational to our faith—or, as it says in one epistle, to “hold fast to the traditions that you were taught” (2 Thessalonians 2:15).
We must make space for both the ancient and the new in order to faithfully express Christianity today. We might disagree on how exactly both those things should manifest itself in prayer book revision and the authorized liturgies of our church, but in doing so, may we never imply a fear of or lack of openness to the new things that God might be capable of doing in our midst, even in our worship.
The Rev. Megan McDermott is a priest in western Massachusetts.
