Liturgy News

Words printed on a page are inert. Between the pages of a book, human language is pressed to death like the dried flowers beloved of scrapbook artists of the Victorian Age. Words fall silent in print. They might remain shut in a book on a library shelf for centuries until they are liberated by the human eye and produce meaning once again.

The Scriptures too are written down and bound into books but, as Paul writes to Timothy, you cannot imprison the Word of the Lord (2 Tim 2:9). God’s word is a saving event. God said, let there be light, and there was light… So we call Christ the Word of God, the decisive intervention of God’s love in the world. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God and the Word was God… The Word became flesh and lived among us (Jn 1:1, 14).

The reader in the liturgy gives voice to the scriptural text, liberating it from the printed page. In the proclamation, God addresses us in a human language event; God intervenes in the unique present, speaking to us in the here and now in words we hear and understand. By the power of the Holy Spirit, the risen Christ is present between the voice and the ear. We encounter God in a meeting of human hearts, in the faith-full presence to one another of reader and hearers. The Voice and the Ear: we lend our bodies to the saving work of God.

We would do well to reflect on the voice in the liturgy. How do we handle the voice in the liturgical space?

When we renovated the Cathedral of St Stephen in Brisbane twenty years ago, this reflection consumed a considerable amount of energy. The whole project was intended to create a worship space that was austere and dignified in the manner of the great Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals of Europe. The pursuit of ‘warmth’ or a ‘communal’ feeling through carpet, drapes or upholstery would not be allowed compromise the dimension of the transcendent which is an essential component of any worship space. The commitment to a certain austerity however was to have one significant drawback – the acoustic.

The scientific acoustic testing which had been done on the cathedral turned out to be of limited value because, once the new cathedral was ready with its hard surfaces of stone and timber, the reverberation time lengthened considerably. This is fine for music but difficult for the intelligibility of speech. Sound absorption panels were installed under the seating. However it took several years before an adequate microphone / amplification system was achieved. Part of the issue concerned different understandings of voice in the liturgy.

We were trying to recognise that the human voice is the primary instrument of the word and that God’s word is proclaimed in the liturgy by a person of faith for a community of faith. It is a real human event in which God speaks to his people. The mechanisation of the word, or its electrification through microphones, amplifiers and speakers, should support the human act but not overwhelm it. Such a liturgical philosophy is diametrically opposed to prevailing culture of the pop concert or television studio.

St Stephen’s Cathedral was built, as cathedrals were for centuries, before the advent of sound systems and yet they were places for preaching and the proclamation of the word. But this requires a certain approach to the voice. The speaker needs to be able to project the voice across the space, pacing the speech to listen for the echo bouncing off the back wall before continuing. We found that hardly any of our readers or presiders was able to do this. They were too used to speaking in a careful and nuanced way to the microphone and letting the sound system do the rest.

I still maintain the ‘old-fashioned’ approach can work well. A year after the cathedral was reopened, the early medieval Play of Daniel was performed in the cathedral. The spoken word and even the mouth harp were perfectly clear and audible throughout the cathedral without amplification. I have reluctantly come to accept that such an approach is too doctrinaire for the twenty-first century.

Nevertheless, a recognition of the primacy of the human voice does lead to a certain circumspection with regard to the technical equipment of amplifiers and microphones. They must be of good quality so that they reproduce the human voice naturally and without distortion. We should keep microphones turned down. Readers should learn how to project the voice and regularly practise in the church without a microphone. Throwing the voice out to the people in the middle and back of the church will change the pacing and intonation of the proclamation. It becomes a public act with the whole assembly, not just a quasi-private event at the lectern upon which the assembly is allowed to eavesdrop. It will require a good lungful of air and physical effort on the part of the reader.

For this reason, I also argue that lapel radio microphones are generally unsuitable for liturgy. They are excellent in the television studio and encourage a conversational intimacy with the hearer. But unless they are carefully used, they do not facilitate speaking in a public communal event which the liturgy is. If we put too much emphasis on the technology of sound, before we know it we will end up like Pavarotti at the opening of the Olympic Games: to get the ‘best’ sound, we will play a digital recording and lip-sync.