Holy Conversation: Spirituality for Worship (review)

In 1945, an Anglican Benedictine, Dom Gregory Dix, called liturgical scholars away from their search for the Eucharistic prayer from which all others were thought to have sprung, convinced that such a thing never existed. He suggested instead that numerous texts had arisen simultaneously, varying greatly from place to place. Different as they were, however, they shared a common structure. This insight was Dix's most enduring and most referenced—though hardly his only—contribution to liturgical scholarship. Dix called the structure of the Eucharistic action, "the shape," and his book, The Shape of the Liturgy, became a classic. While later scholars challenged some details of Dix's reconstruction of the early liturgy, his work became a signpost, redirecting the attention of scholars and influencing the creation of the many new rites that emerged across the Christian spectrum and throughout the world in the mid- to late-twentieth century. Jonathan Linman's Holy Conversation: Spirituality for Worship is squarely in the tradition of Gregory Dix.

Long before Dix, another monk, Guigo II (+ c.1193), recognized that lectio divina, too, has a consistent shape: lectio (the actual careful reading of the text, with reference to objective secondary treatments), meditatio (the subjective encounter with the text), oratio (the response in prayer to the previous two ways of engaging the text), and contemplatio (the affective, potentially wordless encounter with the Holy). Linman, if he is in the school of Dix in his approach to the liturgy, is in the school of Guigo in his approach to lectio divina. He does expand upon the monk's work by suggesting two other necessary movements: preparatio (the many necessary steps before the actual time of reading) and missio (the action that follows and emerges from the experience of sacred reading). All of this comes together in Linman's Holy Conversation, where he convinces us that the Eucharistic event and lectio divina have the same six-fold shape.

While Dix was concerned with the shape of what happened only at the altar (the four-fold shape of taking, blessing, breaking, and giving of bread and wine), Linman is concerned with the shape of the entire Eucharistic event, from the car ride to church on Sunday to the seemingly non-liturgical routine of the days that follow. Worshippers' movement into the liturgical space and their entrance into the ritual action corresponds to Linman's preparatio; the proclamation of the Scriptures, to Guigo's lectio; and the preaching, to his meditatio; the prayers for the church and the world, to oratio; the Eucharistic action, including the reception of Communion, to contemplatio; and (returning to Linman's expanded categories) the dismissal and missioning (both words having, of course, the same Latin root) to missio. This six-fold shape is the classic Western pattern (or, as liturgists call it, the classic ordo), and the Eucharistic rites of most mainline Christian churches, especially those with a strong liturgical tradition, follow it.

The parallel shapes of lectio divina and Eucharist are not just an interesting coincidence. In Holy Conversation, Linman shows that the corresponding shapes suggest that the attitude a reader brings to lectio is the ideal attitude for apprehending and celebrating the liturgy. Linman seeks to instill it in his readers. The Eucharist (and, by extension, all liturgical prayer) is a contemplative event, more like lectio divina than surface appearances might suggest.

As Christians often set up an antagonism between contemplative and liturgical prayer, even in the so-called liturgical Churches, this is no small matter. Those greatly invested in contemplative practice can caricature liturgy as rote gestures and mindless ritualism, while those greatly invested in the liturgy can caricature contemplative practice as solipsistic Gnosticism. Linman breaks through this wall of suspicion and brings the reader to common ground where the liturgical is approached precisely as the contemplative. The relationship between contemplative and liturgical prayer could as easily be approached from the opposite direction: that the contemplative is an echo of the liturgical. That is not Linman's purpose. Still, the...