“Inculturated Liturgy Challenges Preaching to Flower”
by Bruce Barnabas Schultz, O.P
Associate Pastor, Our Lady of Lourdes, Atlanta, GA
Black Catholic worship as we know it today
became possible in the mid-1960s when the Constitution on the
Sacred Liturgy was issued by the Second Vatican Council
(1962-65). The constitution opened worship to local languages
and encouraged “inculturation” of the liturgy. The first U.S.
Mass in English featured a hymn, “God Is Love,” by Fr. Clarence
Rufus Joseph Rivers, the first African American to be ordained a
priest for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, who received a
10-minute ovation. Fr. Rivers pioneered what he termed
“Soulfull Worship” and soon was joined by other composers and
choir directors to bring a new musical wind into Catholic
rites. These pathfinders showed how prayer in African American
congregations could be both authentically Catholic and Black –
by deftly blending traditional hymns and Gregorian chant with
Spirituals, Gospel, and jazz as well as new compositions written
expressly for Catholic worship.
The composer and liturgist Rawn Harbor
quotes Fr. Rivers in Let It Shine! The Emergence of African
American Catholic Worship: “The other parts of the Mass need
to be brought up to the relative level of excellence that we are
beginning to achieve in our musical performance.” This 1978
observation called for preaching, proclamation and prayer to
match the poetic power of the “soul-touching music”. In his
Let It Shine! essay, Harbor draws from Black Catholic
liturgical thinkers in identifying 23 “performance values” to
spur transformation of African American Catholic worship,
including
·
The whole range of African American culture is brought to bear
on the liturgy;
·
The Black experience is taken seriously, and Black culture,
spirituality and religiosity are broadly defined;
·
Use of the wisdom, scholarship and expertise of Black Catholic
theologians and pastoral leaders to develop a Black hermeneutic
The 8th performance value
speaks directly to music:
The liturgical artistry and skills of the
traditional Black Church are readily
utilized to fashion the varied components
of a liturgical event – that is, it makes use of poetic and
dialogical oratory; it incorporates a broad range of religious
music (spirituals, hymns, anthems, gospel, metered music; it
makes conscious appeals to the emotions and feelings of the
assembly; it engenders a sense of enjoyment and psychosocial
satisfaction among the assembly; it displays interactive
familiarity between ministers and the rest of the assembly; and
it strives toward good drama). [pp. 127-8]
Another scholar of African American
Catholic liturgy, Fr. J-Glenn Murray, S.J., notes:
“What makes our worship uniquely Black is our indomitable and
uncanny ability to ‘sing the Lord’s song in a strange land’!
(Psalm 137:4)” [“The Liturgy of the Roman rite and African
American Worship,” Lead Me, Guide Me: The African American
Catholic Hymnal, vol 1, 1987]
The
African American Catholic “religious experience is shaped by
African factors as well as by those on these shores,” according
to Plenty Good Room: The Spirit and Truth of African American
Catholic Worship (U.S. Catholic Bishops, 1991), whose
principal author was Fr. Murray. This unique blending mirrors
the mélange present in African Diaspora culture in general and
in a whole range of music – jazz, blues, gospel, mambo, and
reggae, to name a few. Robert Farris Thompson in his Flash
of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy
writes about a Black Atlantic performance style that has grown
out of the collision of West African and Western Eurocentric
musical patterns, a performance style “informed by the flash of
the spirit of a certain people specially armed with
improvisatory drive and brilliance.” Thompson explains: “Since
the Atlantic slave trade, ancient African organizing principles
of song and dance have crossed the seas from the Old World to
the New. There they took on new momentum, intermingling with
each other and with New World or European styles of singing and
dance. Among those principles are
·
the
dominance of a percussive performance style (attack and
vital aliveness in sound and motion);
·
a
propensity of multiple meter (competing meters sounding all
at once);
·
overlapping
call and response in singing (solo/chorus, voice/instrument
– "interlock systems of performance);
·
inner
pulse control (a "metronome sense",
keeping a beat indelibly in mind as a rhythmic common
denominator in a welter of different meters);
·
suspended accentuation patterning (offbeat phrasing of
melodic and choreographic accents);
·
and,
at a slightly different but equally recurrent level of
exposition, songs and dances of social allusion (music
which, however danceable and "swinging", remorselessly contrasts
social imperfections against implied criteria for perfect
living).” [page xiii]
These
very qualities, which Thompson identifies above, are present in
the sacred song of African American Catholic worship. Plenty
Good Room notes: “The ‘soul’ in African American liturgy
calls forth a great deal of musical improvisation and
creativity. It also calls forth a greater sense of
spontaneity. The African American assembly is not a passive,
silent, nonparticipating assembly. It participates by
responding with its own interjections and acclamations, with
expressions of approval and encouragement.”
The
liturgy in Black Catholic congregations can be the rich
flowering imagined by the liturgical pioneers. “African
Americans are heirs to the West African musical aesthetic of the
call-and-response structure,” notes Plenty Good Room,
“extensive melodic ornamentation (e.g., slides, slurs, bends,
moans, shouts, wails, and so forth), complex rhythmic
structures, and the integration of song and dance.”
The
late Sr. Thea Bowman, F.S.P.A., the godmother of inculturated
African American liturgy who is being brought forth for the
process of canonization, notes in the introduction to Volume 1
of Lead Me, Guide Me that Sacred Song is
·
holistic: challenging the full
engagement of mind, imagination, memory, feeling, emotion, voice
and body;
·
participatory: inviting the
worshipping community to join in contemplation, in celebration,
and in prayer;
·
real: celebrating the
immediate concrete reality of the worshipping community – grief
or separation, struggle or oppression, determination or joy –
bringing that reality to prayer within the community of
believers;
·
spirit-filled: energetic,
engrossing, intense; and
·
life-giving: refreshing,
encouraging, consoling, invigorating, sustaining.
Plenty Good Room also notes that
“African American Catholic worship may be greatly enhanced by
spirituals and gospel music, both of which are representations
of this aesthetic. But classical music; anthems; African
Christian hymns; jazz; South American, African-Caribbean and
Haitian music may also be used where appropriate. It is not
just the style of music that makes it African American, but the
African American assembly that sings it and the people whose
spirits are uplifted by it.”
Just as the Negro spiritual proclaims – "Plenty good
room, plenty good room. ... Choose your seat and sit down." –
Black Catholic worship is inclusive and welcoming of all styles
of music. The music in some African American Catholic parishes
is so strong and vibrant, that it challenges the preacher and
the presider to elevate their preparation and delivery of the
spoken Word of God, drawing from the deep wells of the Black
cultural experience, Scripture scholarship and Church
tradition. Gospel lyrics, lyric poetry and prose, memorable
sermons and historic events – all have given me good ground for
preaching recently. For example, recently I’ve quoted from the
preaching in the hush arbor by lay evangelist “Baby Suggs, Holy”
in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the narrative poems “Judas
Iscariot” and “Simon of Cyrene Speaks” by Countee Cullen, and
the sermonic poems in James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones,
in particular “The Creation.” Father Clarence Rivers’ challenge
to the liturgy in 1978, still holds today:
“the other parts of the Mass need to be brought up to the
relative level of excellence that we are beginning to achieve in
our musical performance.”
