Liturgical Narrative and the Imagination

Abstract

Paul Ricœur’s narrative hermeneutic provides a unique lens for interpreting liturgy as narrative. Liturgy begins with the collective, prefigured knowledge of the assembly and configures symbols, music, prayers, scriptures, and actions into an interpretive narrative. This process engages the liturgical assembly’s imagination to synthesize its unique narrative of God’s divine story. This paper explores the function of imagination in the formative process of liturgical narrative arguing that imagination shapes human knowing and being through liturgical narrative.

1. Introduction

In twenty-first century American culture, the word “narrative” commonly refers to a fictional story, a literary form, or an unseen voice in a movie. Perhaps less often, “narrative” is also a crucial component of human cognition and plays a critical role in human formation (Hauerwas and Jones 1997). The narratives we tell about ourselves shape our understanding of the world around us, our personal identity, our relationships, and our faith. Narratives require imagination to synthesize images, symbols, characters, and actions into a plot. Imagination is a synthetic process that shapes human knowing and being, and it is a critical part of narrative formation.

Philosopher Paul Ricœur describes narrative as the interpretive process of narrating life as a synthesis of events, characters, time, place, and actions (Ricœur 1991). Like stories, narratives have a beginning, middle, and end. Narratives also create meaning through the act of synthesizing elements of the plot into a cohesive whole. Each time we narrate our life and faith we create new meaning and understanding. Narrative, then, is the process by which we interpret life as it is lived.

According to Stephen Crites, all of human experience has a narrative quality (Crites 1997b). He identifies two kinds of stories in human life. Mundane stories are the events of our lives, while sacred stories are the stories that shape our understanding of the world and our place within that world. Crites claims human life exists within time and in the context of a sacred story, but is described through the mundane stories of our lives. People learn the sacred stories that shape their identity by enacting the story repeatedly over a lifetime.

Sacred stories, or myths, are shared by a community and are transmitted through a ritual embodiment of the narrative. It is impossible to separate the narrative from the ritual or the ritual from the narrative. Ricœur writes, “what the myth says, the ritual performs” (Ricœur 1989b, loc. 782). As a form of ritual, Christian liturgy is the performance of God’s divine story in the world. It makes the story of faith real and present in the life of the gathered assembly.

Faith narratives require some level of imagination to believe in the unseen and hope for the future (Heb. 11:1). This is also true in the narrative performance of liturgy. According to Thomas Schattauer, “liturgical imagination takes the words and actions—all the things of worship we know and expect—and makes them ever-new to those gathered in the present moment” (Schattauer 2019). Liturgy weaves together the scripture, symbols, and actions of faith into a narrative shaped by the unique imagination of the gathered assembly. An exploration of the connection between liturgical imagination and liturgical narrative suggests that imagination powers the liturgical narrative, as it configures human knowing and being.

2. Liturgical Narrative

In the Christian tradition, the Bible contains a written form of our sacred story, but it is the narrative telling of the story in liturgy that shapes the Christian understanding of the world. Paul Connerton believes the story is embedded into the heart, mind, and body of the participants. He writes, “in habitual memory the past is, as it were, sedimented in the body” (Connerton 1989, loc. 1562). The repetition of the story from week to week invites the participants into the story and embeds the story into their lives. Participants become part of the story, and the story becomes part of the participants.

The Bible, of course, includes many literary genres that exist in relation to one another. Genres are usually understood as categories or classifications, but Ricœur talks about them as modes of discourse (Ricœur 1989c, loc. 540). Narrative, poetry, prophecy, and other genres function as discourse within each biblical text, between the text and the reader, and between the texts themselves. For example, each Psalm carries with it an internal dialogue from beginning to end. Every reader engages the Epistles from a unique perspective. The Gospel narratives are informed by the narratives, prophecy, wisdom, and Psalms from the Hebrew Bible.

Like scripture, liturgy uses several modes of discourse to embody the larger story of God’s divine work in the world. Gordon Lathrop describes worship as a gathering in which “the Bible is read and then interpreted as having to do with us” (Lathrop 1993, p. 15). The prayers, hymns, actions, and symbols of the liturgy carry with them, implicitly or explicitly, the biblical story. Mark Searle describes this narrative quality of liturgy as narrating God’s divine plan throughout time (Searle 1982). He notes that the liturgical assembly becomes part of the unfolding narrative and bears some responsibility for what is yet to be.

In a similar way, Ricœur argues we are narrators of our own story (Ricœur 1991). He claims the stories we narrate about ourselves are what make us human. Ricœur’s narrative hermeneutic is derived from his textual hermeneutic through an understanding of “text” as meaningful action, sign, symbol, or anything with a relatively fixed meaning (Ricœur 1981). He describes a three-part process that begins with a prefigured understanding, moves through a critical explanation, and develops a new understanding, or second naïveté (Ricœur 1984). The new understanding then becomes the prefigured understanding and the interpretive process repeats indefinitely.

The relationship between text and action is an analogy. That is, an observer interprets actions in the same way a reader interprets a text. As narrators of our own stories, we interpret actions, signs, and symbols of our lives as we narrate their meaning. We are constantly configuring the narrative (the text) and reconfiguring our lives (the reader). While we can never fully control the events of our lives, we can control how we synthesize them into a narrative. Thus, we interpret life at the intersection of the stories we tell and the life we live.

Ricœur’s narrative theory is built on the concepts of muthos (emplotment) and mimesis (imitation) as derived from Aristotle’s Poetics. Emplotment is understood as the organization of events, people, actions, symbols, and time as they are represented in the narrative. For Ricœur, emplotment happens in three mimetic movements that he calls prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration (Ricœur 1984). In this sense, narrative is “inventing another work of synthesis—a plot” (Ricœur 1984, p. 5). Narrative is the synthesis of events, people, symbols, and actions into a temporal plot. Each week, the liturgical narrative describes what we know at the beginning of worship, narrates the story of God’s presence in the world, and prescribes a reconfiguration of our knowledge, what Ricœur calls a second naïveté.

The narrative process also shapes our identity as a conversation between self and other. Ricœur uses the Latin words, idem and ipse, to represent the relationship between an unchanging self (idem) and an ever-changing other (ipse) as a dialectic of personal identity (Ricœur 1992). Idem is the part of identity that remains constant within oneself and across time, while ipse is the part of our identity that develops over time in response to the world around us. The dialectic between idem and ipse occurs within the process of narrating life and faith. At the beginning of the story, idem and ipse share a prefigured understanding of identity. Throughout the narrative, they configure and refigure each other. Eventually, the two arrive at a new understanding of identity. Christian identity, then, might be understood as the dialectic between the constant, unchanging tradition (idem) and the unique, ever-changing assembly (ipse).

The organization, or emplotment, of worship is a theological act that interprets the Christian narrative and forms Christian identity. It is where the faith story intersects with the identity of the assembly. According to Ricœur, the meaning of any narrative “wells up from the intersection of the world of the text and the world of the reader” (Ricœur 1991, p. 430). Thus, when the liturgical assembly gathers to embody the story of God’s divine plan, the meaning of the narrative emerges at the intersection of faith traditions (the text) and the assembly (the reader). This process invites the assembly to become part of the liturgical narrative, and the narrative becomes part of the assembly.

3. The Liturgical Narrator

If liturgy is a narrative, then the narrator and subject of liturgy is the gathered assembly. Liturgical assemblies gather to enact the story of God’s divine action in the world. No two assemblies are the same. An assembly with the same people in the same place still gathers at a different time. The people themselves are changed over time. Thus, while the historical, traditional story of God remains the same, each liturgical assembly is unique. The liturgical assembly narrates its own changing identity in conversation with God’s unchanging presence in the world.

Liturgy requires a liturgical assembly to synthesize the symbols, images, sounds, actions, and words to create meaning. In fact, Lathrop argues that the liturgical assembly is the most important “thing” of liturgy because without an assembly the symbols, words, time, and space have no meaning (Lathrop 1993). The people gather to do the theological work of liturgy, and the embodiment of liturgy requires people “to set these symbolic objects in motion, to weave them together in a pattern of meaning” (Lathrop 1993, pp. 88–89). Liturgy does not exist without the people of the liturgical assembly, but the people do not narrate individual stories. Rather, the people serve as one narrator and interpreter of the divine story.

The liturgical assembly, then, is composed of many people, or characters, which act together as one liturgical assembly. This is not unlike the many identities each person has in their own lives. Developmental psychologist Dan McAdams argues that humans are composed of many characters, or imagoes, which work together to create individual identity. He defines imago as “a personified and idealized concept of the self” (McAdams 1993, p. 99). For example, my imagoes of mother, pastor, musician, and scholar do not exist individually; they are all part of my personal identity, and they work together to interpret the world around me. Likewise, the many people, or characters, gathered in the liturgical assembly work together to narrate the story of God’s divine acts in the world in conversation with their collective identity.

Each liturgical assembly is “a unique presence of God and various members of the community, such that, when gathered, concretize in the here and now… a communion of the human and divine” (Zimmerman 1994, p. 48). The collective gathering of people with God creates a space for holy conversation and divine narrative. Joyce Zimmerman draws on Ricœur’s identity dialectic to describe the nature of the assembly as a collective subject. She names three interpretive actions of the assembly: participation, distanciation, and appropriation.

Participation is defined as “a fundamental ‘belonging’ to a particular tradition” (Zimmerman 1993, pp. 38–39). Participation, then, is a function of idem (same) as a constant throughout time and space. On the other hand, distanciation is the interpretive function of ipse (other) that allows the assembly to narrate the story from a unique perspective. Participation and distanciation exist simultaneously as interpretive actions of the assembly. They function as both a dialectic with each other and as a narrative discourse between the story and its narrator. Finally, appropriation is the interpretive act that results from the liturgical narrative. It is the interpretative act that Ricœur might call the second naïveté. According to Zimmerman, appropriation is enacted in a Christian life.

The assembly serves as the liturgical narrator as they participate, distanciate, and appropriate the liturgy at the intersection of God’s divine narrative and the human experience. It seems appropriate, then, that Ricœur believes a theology that interprets the intersection of God’s divine plan and human action and “calls for the narrative mode as its primary hermeneutical mode” (Ricœur 1989a, loc. 2695). In this sense, liturgy is a narrative hermeneutic and the assembly is the narrative interpreter. The assembly acts as one subject to interpret the liturgy.

Each liturgical assembly is a unique gathering of people, and each person comes with their own life narrative. Even when the same people gather at a different time, they are not the same. The changes may be small and hard to identify, but each assembly is a new and different gathering of people. Their personal narratives, and therefore their collective narrative, have developed and changed since they last gathered. This new liturgical assembly narrates its own, new dialectic with God’s divine plan.

4. The Liturgical Imagination

The narrative process draws from a collection of images that already exist in individual or communal memory. The liturgical assembly uses its collective imagination to narrate a unique dialectic with God’s divine story. According to David Power, the Word of God comes to us in many biblical and liturgical genres with a “holy imagination” at work in configuring our understanding of the world (Power 2011, pp. 172–73). Imagination makes the narrative real and present in the life of the assembly. It allows the liturgical assembly to place itself in the story, embody the narrative, and experience Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. Liturgical imagination weaves together the songs, symbols, and actions of worship into something we know and experience.

To understand liturgical imagination, we must first look at the definition of imagination. In his study of faith formation, James Fowler defines image “as a vague, felt inner representation of some state of affairs and of our feelings about it” (Fowler 1981, p. 26). Images are the sights, memories, and feelings of human experience. These images are generated and organized by our imagination as a tool for interpreting life. Fowler argues that images are the beginning of human life and represent all knowledge and experience. Everything we see, taste, hear, feel, and smell is gathered by our senses and stored in our memory as images. These images become part of the stories we tell about ourselves, and our shared images create meaning for our lives together.

Gathering and organizing images is only one function of human imagination. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant argues that imagination is a cognitive function of the human mind (Kant 2003). It is a synthetic act of organizing knowledge into understanding. In this sense, imagination is a verb. That is, imagination is not simply a collection of images, but the act of synthesizing them into an understanding or meaning. Rolf-Peter Horstmann takes Kant’s argument further by suggesting imagination is a series of synthetic activities that “contributes to the realization of one synthetic act” (Horstmann 2018, p. 34). Imagination is the ongoing process of collecting and synthesizing several parts into a whole.

Ricœur also draws on this dual understanding of imagination. He defines it as both “rule-governed invention and a power of redescription” (Ricœur 1989d, loc. 2137). The rules of imagination include the collection of images that are redescribed, or organized, in a new way. There are rules of cognitive knowledge that exist before the interpretive process of redescription, but imagination always goes beyond the text and points us toward something new. It has “the power to open us to new possibilities, to discover another way of seeing, or acceding to a new rule in receiving the instruction of the exception” (Ricœur 1989e, loc. 4090). Imagination integrates the knowledge of what was with the experience of being now and the understanding of what is yet to be. It is both epistemological (rules) and ontological (redescription).

Ray L. Hart also sees two aspects of imagination. He claims imagination is both a “mental act” of cognition and a “way of being human” (Hart 1979, p. 184). He argues that humans are always learning and always revealing new meaning in life and that imagination is an essential part of this process. Humans, according to Hart, are always unfinished and engaged in a process of self-revelation. Humans are always in the process of being human. Hart aims “to show that a hermeneutic of revelation shares in, and is formally coextensive with, a hermeneutic of human being” (Hart 1979, p. 182). Imagination is an essential part of the revelatory process that forms both our way of knowing and our way of being. It forms our knowledge and experience of the world around us.

Yet another definition of imagination comes from Crites, who also focuses on the formative nature of imagination. He defines it as “the activity of holistic formation, forming the sorts of multidimensional images, associated, and presented against a complex visual, aural, narrative background, that make up immediate experience. Indeed, imagination is a synthesizing activity in the formation of experience” (Crites 1981, p. 72). Imagination is a complex, formative human activity that synthesizes knowledge and experience into something new. Jullian Hartt questions Crites’ definition of imagination, claiming knowledge and imagination are both functions of human cognition (Hartt 1997). Hartt’s argument suggests that cognition alone forms a human identity independent of narrative and experience. It may be more accurate to define cognition as knowing, experience as being, and imagination as the integration of knowing and being into a formative narrative.

There are some common threads in these different definitions of imagination. First, imagination is a collection of images, or pre-existing knowledge. Second, it is a synthetic act that weaves together the collection of images or pre-existing knowledge. Third, imagination is a formative act that shapes human experience and identity. Finally, imagination is both ontological and epistemological, meaning it shapes both our knowing and our being. Drawing on these common themes, imagination might be defined as the synthesis of epistemological knowing and ontological being into a formative narrative of human becoming. In the liturgical setting, imagination is the act of knowing, experiencing, and synthesizing the words, actions, sights, and sounds of liturgy into a formative faith narrative.

5. The Narrativity of Liturgical Imagination

Schattauer identifies six forms of imagination that create a “well-formed liturgy” as scriptural imagination, sacramental imagination, ecclesial imagination, eschatological imagination, contextual imagination, and ritual imagination (Schattauer 2019). Each liturgical assembly engages these forms of imagination as it narrates the liturgy. Thus, liturgical narrative cannot exist without imagination and liturgical imagination is inherently narrative. Since both narrative and imagination are synthetic acts, the synthesis of Schattauer’s imaginative forms might be called narrative imagination.

Scriptural imagination integrates several biblical genres into a larger narrative. Ricœur describes scriptural imagination as “a narrative and symbolic form of imagination” (Ricœur 1989d, loc. 2204). He notes that imagination is at work in the text itself, in reading the text, and after reading the text. Imagination is an ongoing process before, during, and after reading scripture. Scripture is a written text, interpreted by narrator, and lived by those who read, hear, and narrate the story.

Crites describes the Gospel as a narrative that unites the life and death of Christ with those who hear and narrate the story (Crites 1997a). Liturgy, then, is an act of scriptural imagination at the intersection of the biblical narrative and human experience. This occurs in the reading of scripture, but also in hymns and prayers that imagine the relationship between life and scripture. The liturgical assembly imagines scripture as it narrates the actions, words, and symbols of liturgy.

Sacramental imagination narrates the meaning of sacred things and sacred words. David Power describes the verbal polyphony of biblical genres and the intertextuality of sacrament as a language event, made real through sacramental imagination. He writes, “it is within prayer that the sacramental imagination exercises creativity, construing what has been heard in the scriptures to meet new situations” (Power 2011, p. 175). The words of scripture and liturgy have their own sacramental meaning when they are spoken aloud as proclamation and prayer.

The symbols of bread, wine, and water are familiar things, but it takes sacramental imagination to see them as body, blood, and bath. These sacred things do not carry independent meaning, they are in constant juxtaposition with each other and with sacred words (Lathrop 1993). Sacramental imagination allows the bread to become Christ’s body and the wine to become his blood. The assembly imagines the sacraments through prayer, song, and word as it narrates the meaning of bread, wine, bath, and word.

Ecclesial imagination narrates the identity of the church as the body of Christ. Ricœur argues that ecclesial identity is shaped in relation to sacred texts (Ricœur 1989f). He identifies liturgy, and specifically the Eucharist, as a sacred text because it institutes a sacred act within the assembly. The body of Christ is both present in the gathered assembly and transcendent across time.

Canonical texts and symbols connect each assembly to the body of Christ. Ricœur argues a congregation is changed when it strays from the canonical texts and symbols of the Christian faith. The Lord’s Prayer, for example, is shared with Christians around the world in their own language. Changing the content or omitting the prayer changes the assembly’s relationship with the universal church. It is one thing that connects assemblies as they imagine their connection to the larger body of Christ across time and space.

Eschatological imagination looks ahead to narrate the telos, or the end goal of liturgical performance. Unlike theater, liturgy is performed in an enacted manner that integrates symbols, time, and action into the lives of the participants. According to Richard McCall, “the anamnesis of the act of the Triune God, using symbolic means, to enact that Trinity in the lives of the enactors, transforming them through faith into the church” (McCall 2007, p. 103). He describes anamnesis as creating a new, real event in the present that recalls the past events of our story.

McCall claims all performance modes have an end goal, or a telos. In liturgy, he argues, the end goal is the formation of a Christian identity and world view. This is an ongoing process of interpretation that evokes Hart’s “unfinished man” and Ricœur’s “second naivete”. A benediction, for example, often acknowledges the end goal by offering a charge to the congregation. The assembly imagines a telos as it rehearses its role in the Kin-dom of God.

Contextual imagination narrates the unique culture and experience of each assembly. In his book, Common Worship, E. Byron Anderson wrestles with the church’s tension between unity and diversity (Anderson 2017). In one sense, liturgical assemblies are united by the common practice of worship, but there will always be cultural and experiential differences. Culture, experience, and context are always part of the liturgical narrative.

Liturgy is, by nature, a contextual experience. While the fundamental texts and symbols of liturgy are the same, the narrative performance of liturgy is unique to each context. The assembly’s sacramental, ecclesial, and ritual imaginations remain in constant conversation with its unique traditions and practices. The most obvious example of this is the many musical styles that exist in churches around the world. Each assembly imagines the liturgical narrative in their own way to remain relevant in the assembly’s context.

Finally, ritual imagination narrates the liturgy itself. The narrative imagination of the assembly interprets the sacred story through the ritual. Liturgy, then, is a ritual that enacts the sacred story of God’s action in the world. Like any myth–ritual relationship, the ritual cannot be separated from the narrative. When rituals change, the narrative changes.

At the same time, humans are imperfect people with imperfect imaginations. Liturgical narrative can form a strong faith and Christian life, but it can also form a questionable theology and practice. The narrative changes when the communion table is moved to the back wall, or the Passing of the Peace becomes a ten-minute greeting. Thankfully, the assembly imagines the ritual anew each time it gathers to narrate the story and rehearse its Christian identity.

Liturgical narrative goes beyond the biblical story to include music, symbols, action, and proclamation. It is an interpretive act in which the assembly actively participates in the hermeneutical process of narrating sacred texts. From Ricœur’s perspective, liturgical imagination is a narrative discourse between the assembly’s prefigured knowledge and its experience of recalling God’s divine story. In this sense, narrative imagination is the primary mode of liturgical theology and the synthesis of Schattauer’s six imaginations.

6. Conclusions

Imagination and narrative are essential functions of human life and faith. They are complex processes that shape personal and communal identity. Imagination collects and synthesizes our pre-existing knowledge into experiences of knowing and being human. Narrative weaves together, or synthesizes, the characters, place, time, and events of life into an interpretation of human identity.

Understanding imagination as a formative, synthetic process may be the first step into starting a broader conversation about the function of imagination in liturgy. The present paper is an initial exploration of the relationship between liturgical narrative and imagination. Future studies may engage additional scholars and continue to challenge common understandings of narrative and imagination. The practical application of these theories should also be addressed.

In the context of Christian liturgy, narrative imagination is both an ecclesial performance of the story we know and an eschatological rehearsal of what is yet to be. Liturgical imagination draws on prefigured knowledge to narrate human experience and prescribe narrative identity. The eschatological nature of liturgy relies on the ability to imagine the unknown future. The liturgical assembly engages its collective imagination to synthesize the words, actions, and symbols of worship into a narrative. Liturgical imagination powers the formative narrative of Christian liturgy, as the assembly configures human knowing and being.