Copyright: © 1996 Paul F. Bosch.
This document may be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes with credit to the author and mention of the Lift Up Your Hearts web site http://www.worship.ca/ as the source.

In essay number 3 in this series, Word Reductionism, Popular Piety, and the Three R's of Ritual, I identified three frustrations I've felt in a life-time of teaching worship, in formal and informal settings. In these paragraphs I want to address still another frustration, perhaps a result or implication of one or more of the three frustrations I've already identified. I'm referring to my own discomfort in the face of a liturgical pathology which I perceive, too often, in many worship leaders, that is, a carelessness concerning what I would call ritual clarity.

Ritual clarity -- again, the term is my own, and I'd be willing to modify or otherwise emend my designation, if you can suggest a better one -- is the instinct, laudable in worship leaders, that seeks to honor what is happening at any given moment in worship by a scrupulous attention to the function of the four great, irreplaceable, non-negotiable architectural "signs" in any space set aside for Christian worship: the font of our washing, the altar/table of our feasting, the ambo/lectern/pulpit of our reading and preaching, and the sedilia/seat of our worship leaders at prayer.

Ritual clarity, that is, regards each of these architectural "signs" as having a distinctive and characteristic function, and scrupulously seeks not to confuse those functions.

So, for example, following the instincts of ritual clarity, we would reserve the altar exclusively for the Meal; we would not utilize the altar at all during non-eucharistic worship, and indeed we would approach the altar at the eucharist only at the Offertory and thereafter.

So with the ambo/lectern/pulpit: we would be scrupulous to restrict its use to the reading of scripture and the proclamation of those scriptures in preaching; we would not use the ambo as a place of prayer. (The sedilia is the place for prayer -- standing, of course.)

That's the kind of thing at stake in what I call ritual clarity. And I believe worship leaders do their people a favour by observing these ritual subtleties with some scrupulousness. In honouring the principle of ritual clarity, that is, worship leaders are training their people in a finer discernment of what is going on at a given moment in worship.

Worship leaders who honour this principle are making crystal clear, at each moment, what is supposed to be happening in the assembly: Here at the sedilia, for example, we are praying; here at the ambo we are reading scripture or proclaiming it in homily or sermon; here at the table we are preparing and celebrating the holy meal.

Too often, in my experience, worship leaders are careless about ritual clarity, and such carelessness has the effect of obscuring the dynamics of worship, the rhythms and cadences and sequence of movements in our rites. And our worship is the poorer for it.