75 - Worship Between the Holocausts

Worship Between the Holocausts
By Michael Downey

"The two holocausts, one fact, the other possibility (or probability), bespeak the reality of powerlessness, meaninglessness, and futurelessness. Here memory and anticipatory symbol converge. As symbols, the two holocausts are evocative of conversion to a God who is there in the midst of human powerlessness and meaninglessness…. What form will liturgy take if memory and anticipatory symbol are taken seriously, so as to facilitate the conversion demanded by the crisis brought about by the twofold holocaust?"

In describing the religious practice of his boyhood, Johann Baptist Metz writes: "With our back toward Auschwitz we prayed and celebrated our liturgy. Only later I began to ask myself what kind of religion it is that can be practised unmoved by such a catastrophe."¹ Acknowledging the singular importance of the Holocaust for contemporary Christian life and theology, Metz holds that "everything has to be measured by Auschwitz."² He maintains:

There is no truth for me which I could defend with my back turned toward Auschwitz. There is no sense for me which I could save with my back turned toward Auschwitz. And for me there is no God to whom I could pray with my back turned toward Auschwitz.³

What we find in the writings of J.B. Metz is a recognition of the fact of the Holocaust, an acknowledgment of the Christian's complicity in this event, and a determination to engage in Christian life, prayer, and theological-reflection in memory of its victims.

In light of the Holocaust, a question must be put: Can we pray at all in the wake of the Holocaust? Metz asserts that Christians can pray after Auschwitz only because there were prayers in Auschwitz.⁴ I basically

Michael Downey is Assistant Professor of Theology at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California, where he teaches sacramental theology. A recipient of the Ph.D. in theology from the Catholic University of America, he has been primarily interested in the history of Christian spirituality with particular focus on the theology of weakness and vulnerability. His articles have appeared in The Living Light, The Journal of the National Apostolate with Mentally Retarded Persons, and publications of the United States Catholic Conference.
¹ Johann Baptist Metz, "Facing the Jews: Christian Theology after Auschwitz," in The Holocaust as Interruption, Concilium 175 (1984), p. 28.
² J. B. Metz, The Emergent Church (New York: Crossroad, 198 1), p. 2 1
³ Metz, "Facing the Jews," p. 28.
⁴ Ibid., p. 29. 75

76 - Worship Between the Holocausts

agree, but I would nuance this a bit. Christian prayer after the Holocaust must be informed and shaped by the prayers at Auschwitz. And it must make room for the memory of its victims. I would also say that Christian worship must take place in full view of the imminence of a second holocaust-the threat of nuclear annihilation.

My purpose here is to reflect upon the Holocaust of the Jews and an imminent nuclear holocaust, while being attentive to their significance for Christian worship. I begin with the assumption that liturgy can, in principle, recognize and be open to alteration by contemporary events. Ruled out is any theory which holds that liturgy remains unaffected by contemporary event or fact, but also any which maintains that it could remain unaffected. The question I am concerned with here may be simply put: What shape or form will liturgy take if the reality of a two-fold holocaust is taken seriously? My hope is to advance the discussion of those whose concern is liturgy after the Holocaust of the Jews by pressing the question as to whether or not Christians have taken the Holocaust seriously.⁵ But I would also like to take the discussion in a different direction by raising the issue of the imminent nuclear holocaust as anticipatory symbol, and by attempting to determine what impact the two holocausts might have upon our understanding of prayer and worship.

I

Yaffa Eliach's anthology offers a sampling of the way in which Jews prayed during the Holocaust. In "The First Hanukkah Light in Bergen Belsen,"⁶ she recounts how the victims construct a makeshift hanukkiah from a wooden clog, strings, and shoe polish to serve as oil. Not far from the heaps of bodies, the living skeletons assemble to participate in the kindling of Hanukkah lights. Aware of the heap of the dead and the assembly of living skeletons, the rabbi hesitates and then proceeds with the third blessing-in which God, addressed as Lord and King of the Universe, is blessed for keeping, preserving, and enabling the people of the covenant to reach this season. When questioned as to why (under the circumstances) he would address God in such terms, the rabbi explains that the large crowd of living Jews, their faces expressing faith, devotion, and concentration as they listen to the rite, provides the justification for this kind of prayer. According to the rabbi, if God has a nation such as this, that in times like these, when during the lighting of the Hanukkah lights they see in front of them the heaps of bodies of their beloved fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters, and death is looking from every corner, then the rabbi has grounds for reciting the third blessing in praise of God's goodness and providence.

⁵ See John T. Pawlikowski, "Worship after the Holocaust," Worship 58 (1984), pp. 315-329; see also, Lawrence A. Hoffmann, "Response: Holocaust as Holocaust, Holocaust as Symbol," Worship 58 (1984), pp. 333-341.
⁶ Yaffa Eliach, "The First Hanukkah Light in Bergen Belsen," in Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust (New York: Avon, 1982), pp. 14-16.

77 - Worship Between the Holocausts

The recognition of the "orienting event"⁷ of the Holocaust in its own historical particularity brings with it an awareness of our own experience and situation, the fact of what we are living with and confronting meaninglessness and powerlessness. In what sense can meaning, hope, and promise be found in light of such massive evil and suffering inflicted upon humanity by humanity? Being confronted by the Holocaust, the primordial symbol of evil in our age, brings with it a crisis of vision and a crisis of hope. The churches must deal with the question of how faith in Jesus Christ can be proclaimed and celebrated in worship in light of this event.

As a Christian people, the fate of the Jews, the people of the covenant and the kingdom, has everything to do with our understanding and language of the kingdom. A Christian sense of meaning, hope, and promise derives from and is dependent upon this covenant people. Christians recognize this in the import accorded to the Exodus and the Mosaic covenant in Christian faith, theology, and worship. But, if we have allowed the originating event of Jewish faith, the Exodus, to shape our religious consciousness, have we also allowed the orienting event of the Holocaust to do so? The Jewish people's experience of abandonment by God, abandonment by the rest of the world, and the purposeful attempt by the Nazis to dehumanize and exterminate them has everything to do with our understanding of hope, promise, future, and ultimate meaning, precisely because they are the people of the covenant and it is upon them that ours depends!⁸

For the Jew, the Holocaust is the paradigmatic example of evil. As symbol, it is evocative of conversion to a God who is there on the other side of this evil, this meaninglessness, this senselessness, this powerlessness. Moreover, it is conversion to a God who stands with the chosen precisely in the midst of all this. If Christian faith takes seriously this event, the same sort of recognition of meaninglessness and powerlessness, and conversion undergone in its light, is demanded. Liturgy is to facilitate this. Yet, it seems that contemporary Christian liturgy continues to be celebrated with its back to Auschwitz, much like the liturgies of Metz' boyhood years.

The imminent nuclear holocaust threatens the existence of everything as we know it. Whether or not it is accepted and appropriated as possibility or probability, the imminent nuclear holocaust serves today as the anticipatory symbol of futurelessness. Even if persons and groups do not accept that the world will end in nuclear destruction, the fruits of the anticipatory symbol of the apocalyptic end play deeply upon the

⁷ John Pawlikowski, "The Holocaust and Contemporary Christology," in The Holocaust as Interruption, Concilium 175 (1984), p. 43.
⁸ Arthur Cohen puts it succinctly in the question: "If the first People of God, the inheritors of the ancient covenant, the ethnic descendants of the first Christians-if the history of this People has no relevance for the Christian Church in its fullness then what history at all speaks to Christians?" "In our Terrible Age: the Tremendum of the Jews," in The Holocaust as Interruption, Concilium 175 (1984), pp. 13-14.

78 - Worship Between the Holocausts

contemporary psyche. Examples of this may be seen in movements among the young which are built upon and thrive on images and expressions of violence and self-destruction (punk and new wave among others), and in the little concern among the young in many countries when faced with the prospect of long-term unemployment. This is to say nothing of the growing fascination with what has come to be called "Armageddon theology."

To speak of the nuclear holocaust as a symbol which is anticipatory is not to attempt to tame the threat by holding it at bay as something yet to be realized. Rather, it is to suggest that what is anticipated in the nuclear holocaust is already coming to pass in our own day. Nagasaki and Hiroshima anticipate, in this sense, what the nuclear holocaust will be. The fundamental question here, when we are confronted with the anticipatory symbol of the apocalyptic end, is the following: When the world is coming to an end, which means the end of everything as we have ever known it, is God still there? Precisely because the nuclear holocaust signals the end of everything, the question is one of whether or not we can still hope. Is God on the other side of the apocalyptic end?

II

The two holocausts, one fact, the other possibility (or probability), bespeak the reality of powerlessness, meaninglessness, and futurelessness. Here memory and anticipatory symbol converge. As symbols, the two holocausts are evocative of conversion to a God who is there in the midst of human powerlessness and meaninglessness - a God who is ahead of us, before us, on the other side of extermination or complete destruction of humanity and everything as we know it.

While conversion is not liturgy's only function, liturgy is to be formative in the ongoing conversion of the Christian community. What is expressed is impressed. What form will liturgy take if memory and anticipatory symbol are taken seriously, so as to facilitate the conversion demanded by the crisis brought about by the two-fold holocaust? The introduction of prayers of petition that God grant us protection from (or for) nuclear war, or that we recognize the Jews as forebears of Christians hardly tackles the issue. Such gestures further the impression of "situation normal." The trouble with normal is that it always gets worse. Liturgy, if it is to respond adequately to contemporary modes of perceiving and being, and to contemporary fact, must allow itself to be impacted by the memory and anticipatory symbol of meaninglessness and futurelessness signaled in the two-fold holocaust.

Such impact may be made as Christian assemblies begin in earnest to work toward integrating into worship a more profound appreciation for authentic apocalyptic as well as a remembrance of the dead Christ and the descent into hell. A recovery of the remembrance of the dead Christ and the descent into hell, and of authentic apocalyptic, would address Christian communities in light of their experience of meaninglessness

79 - Worship Between the Holocausts

and hopelessness brought about by the two-fold holocaust, while summoning Christians to trust and hope in the midst of their adversity.

Apocalyptic rhetorics gain force when continuities are shattered. A distinguishing characteristic of authentic apocalyptic rhetoric is that it emerges from and speaks to a situation in which everything is at stake.⁹ Common to all true apocalyptic is a situation characterized by instability, disorientation, anxiety, and isolation. The apocalyptic emerges where there is a loss of cohesion and an erosion of psychic and cultural structures. Everything is on the line. The motif of panic dominates, due to the "all-or-nothing" nature of a situation involving opposing forces of light and darkness, life and death, order and chaos. It is not merely a matter of the individual in isolation. The matter is one of the survival of the whole of existence, the viability of all life.

Much contemporary fascination with the apocalyptic, especially, though not exclusively, where this is joined to speculation about the nuclear holocaust, focuses rather narrowly on its negative or catastrophic dimension. A recovery of authentic apocalyptic would draw attention to the stage of miraculous renovation and world affirmation, the stage which has passed through the phase of world negation. The hierophany central to the apocalyptic entails both Nay-saying and Yea-saying.¹⁰ The catastrophic imagination alone is, therefore, not genuinely apocalyptic. Apocalyptic in the true sense includes salvation as well as judgment, restoration as well as destruction, the eucatastrophic as well as the catastrophic.

Ancient apocalyptic, replete with revelations, dramas of cosmic warfare, symbols and motifs which strike us as fantastic, spoke effectively to the consciousness and perception of many. Perhaps only its recovery can speak to our threatening sense of the catastrophic and destructive when faced with nuclear annihilation, while holding out a vision and a possibility for the new age to come which evil cannot overcome.

In the rhetorics of the apocalyptic, hope and future play a central role. Since everything is in jeopardy and since all trusted securities are unreliable, the only future that is possible must be thought of in terms of the provident and the miraculous. The hierophany central to the apocalyptic is characterized by enormity and paradox. The language of the apocalyptic is a sort of non-language, as it were. It is a language which breaks continuity with accepted patterns of speech and perception, because all is forfeit to chaos. Yet, it is a speaking of meaning out of meaninglessness. The rhetorics of apocalyptic are peculiar in that they dramatize a group's vision in a situation of hopelessness, broken promises, and disappointment. Into this situation, forfeited to chaos, the

⁹ Amos N. Wilder, Jesus' Parables and the War of Myths, ed. with preface by 1. Breech (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), p. 156.
¹⁰ Ibid., p. 167.

80 - Worship Between the Holocausts

apocalyptist rings out in yea-saying. The apocalyptist says that, in the midst of dire adversity, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and futurelessness, God is coming against all odds and will be victorious.

A note of caution is in order here. Since the nuclear holocaust signals the end of everything as we have ever known it, there is no "other side" or future to imagine. In this, the present crisis stands in radical discontinuity with all others before it. The future can only be on this side of the holocaust. The providential act of God, the miraculous, lies in prevention. The preservation of life through co-creational responsibility, rather than a cosmic playground on the other side of catastrophe, is the future to which we look and to which contemporary apocalyptic rhetorics must speak.

III

Gordon Lathrop offers the reminder that the agenda for liturgical work is not that of "dabbling with superficial poetry,"¹¹ but of allowing words, images, and symbols to stand forth which are expressive of present needs and which allow us honestly to stand before God with the remembrance of the two-fold holocaust.

It is a biblical, liturgical objective to let lament into the heart of our worshiping communities. Nothing less is adequate for worship in this century. With Lathrop and David Power, I maintain that biblical images of lamentation best serve to give voice to the experience of absence as a distinct mode of God's presence. Disappointment, need, lament all bespeak an experience of a God whose presence is no longer present, yet needed and hoped for. To lament God's absence is to name a longing for what once was and what needs to be.

Here again, Christian prayer needs to be informed and shaped by the prayer of the Jews during the Holocaust.¹² In such prayer, thanksgiving spills over into lamentation. The deeds of the Lord recounted are held up only to draw attention to their absence and to ask for their presence once again. The prayers of Auschwitz are profoundly full of need, of lament, of frustration, of disappointment. Further, they are shot through with imprecation and cries for vengeance. Jews continue to cry to God for vengeance in their memory of the Holocaust. Imprecation and call for vengeance have a profound meaning in their way of praying. Christians generally omit such imprecations from their prayers. Why this is so cannot be answered here, but suffice it to say that imprecation and cries for vengeance would find a more central place in Christian prayer if such prayer were to take seriously the horrors of our age. Between the holocausts, lamentation must be given room in our assemblies as an

¹¹ Gordon Lathrop, "A Rebirth of Images: On the Use of the Bible in Liturgy," Worship 58 (1984), p. 300.
¹² See Eliach, op. cit., especially part one.

81 - Worship Between the Holocausts

expression of the communities' experience, if such communities honestly wrestle with fact and future.

Perhaps there is no image in the Christian tradition which is more suited to lament, more evocative of God's absence, than that of the forsaken servant of God, the dead Christ. The notion of deliverance, central to the tradition of Judaism, is here interfaced with one of non-deliverance. Can one praise and thank a God who has delivered, but is not delivering?

The image of the dead Christ must be distinguished from that of the crucified. The image of the dead Christ is not of one who is rejected, persecuted, tortured, and despised, but of one who is dead, finished, obliterated, gone, no longer there or here. To keep memory of the dead Christ is to embrace, so as to integrate, the negative. With this image to the fore, the vitality of the negative can come into play in the liturgy. Without denying anything that has happened or that could happen, the inclusion of the image of the dead Christ, evocative of God's absence and of non-deliverance, gives shape to a form of liturgy which is a lamentation.

With the reforms initiated since the time of the Second Vatican Council, much of the liturgical renewal has focused upon the pivotal notion of joyful celebration. Systematic theology, as well as liturgical theology, has rather consistently stressed the resurrection as originating event of Christian faith and worship.¹³ In a community whose song is alleluia, the vitality of the negative is easily forgotten. Only through the efforts of feminist, liberation, and political theologians have the churches been faced with the "struggle for remembrance"¹⁴ which uncovers the original testimony: "The crucified one lives." Yet, the testimony remains semantically empty if it is overlooked that those who claimed him alive did so having first known and profoundly experienced his death, his absence.

Memory is the heart of liturgy. If contemporary liturgy is to project a world-view pertinent to fact and adequate to common ways of being and perceiving, the vitality of negativity must be given room. The dead Christ is with the dead sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, past, present, and future. He shares their experience of abandonment, of non-deliverance, of death, of being forgotten and he is God. Is it too strong to suggest that our liturgy will remain inadequate, will continue to turn its back on fact, as long as it is conducted in such a way that gestures, verbal images, vestments, and other liturgical accoutrements bespeak Christ in his glory and majesty, while, if the truth be faced, the Christian community is living right-smack-dab in the middle of Holy Saturday.

¹³ Notable exceptions to this are J. Moltmann's The Crucified God and Matthew Lamb's Solidarity With Victims, as well as the works of the theologians of liberation.
¹⁴ J.B. Metz, "Facing the Jews," p. 28.

82 - Worship Between the Holocausts

IV

But in what sense is a recovery of the image of the dead Christ useful or appropriate for worship in our age? What purpose does it serve to recover the image of the dead Christ, evocative of negativity, absence, and non-deliverance? Does this image, in fact, serve the purposes of bringing to expression the hope and faith of a people in the midst of crisis and confirm them in that faith?

In itself, it does not. Here the image of the dead Christ must be coupled with that of the descent into hell. The images of the dead Christ and the descent into hell must be understood in light of some contemporary christological insights which draw attention to Jesus as God's compassion.¹⁵ Since Jesus entered so completely in compassion into human suffering, vulnerability, and death, and since God remained faithful to him in his abandonment, the church has an image that provides the basis for its own involvement in the human community and for Christian worship. It is not a question of seeing in the death and descent a propaedeutic for the verification of Jesus' lordship in the resurrection. Nor is it a question of viewing the death of Jesus and the descent as something undergone for us or on our behalf, Jesus being understood here as one who suffers because of and for us. Rather, it is a question of seeing in Jesus the compassion of God entering into solidarity with the suffering victims of all ages, unto death and into hell. This provides the basis for hope in our age. Because Jesus entered so completely into human suffering and death, we as Christians can look to the future in hope and trust that nothing can separate us from the love of God made manifest in Jesus Christ.

It is the memory of this trust and this hope in the midst of abandonment, negativity, and absence that compels Christians to give praise and thanksgiving, and allows them to raise up voices in lamentation.

In treating the question of the possibility for an authentic Christian response to the horrors of Auschwitz "which avoids the temptation both of Christian appropriationism and Christian complacency,"¹⁶ Mary Knutsen alerts us to the dangers posed when well-meaning Christians and others attempt to instruct the Jews about the Holocaust. The Holocaust stands in its own historical particularity. The warning against Christian appropriationism is helpful.

Knutsen speaks of the importance of three factors: solidarity, double alterity, and expectation. The first points to the need for fundamental moral sensibility and principle before the suffering of others, especially victims. The second, double alterity, suggests that within the context of

¹⁵ Examples are Monika Hellwig, Jesus: The Compassion of God (Wilmington, Del.: Glazier, 1983), Leonardo Boff, Jesus Christ, Liberator (New York: Orbis, 1978), and Jon Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads (New York: Orbis, 1978).
¹⁶ Mary Knutsen, "The Holocaust in Theology and Philosophy," in The Holocaust as Interruption, Concilium 175 (1984), p. 72.

83 - Worship Between the Holocausts

compassion for and solidarity with victims, there is the need for recognizing a two-fold otherness: the otherness of the victim, whose suffering can never be appropriated or fully comprehended by another, and the otherness of suffering and death from what should be. This response, when seen in light of what is often the complacency of Christians, is one of outrage, a sense of horror and disappointment in the face of such unbelievable suffering, a passionate awareness that this should not be. At the same time, however, this response includes the third factor: recognition of a promise of the redemption of suffering and death and, along with it, an attentiveness to the apocalyptic, the radically not-yet, of Christian faith.

Worship between the holocausts, if it is to be an authentic Christian response, needs to recover and make room for a rebirth of the central image of the dead Christ and the descent into hell, as well as an authentic sense of the apocalyptic. Liturgical forms must emerge which give expression to a deepened sense of lament, solidarity, otherness, profound hope, and expectation. To allow the two-fold holocaust to shape contemporary liturgy is to give full voice to the experience of the absence of God, yet of a God who is needed and whose coming is hoped for. To face the fact and the future, Christians must voice the groan that while God did establish the covenant through deliverance of the Jews in the Exodus, God did not deliver them during the Holocaust. As people of the covenant and kingdom, their fate is ours. Their prayer must inform and shape ours. Our prayer must be their prayer. Together we await in adversity a God who is to come. Nothing else is adequate in the twentieth century, for it is only through acknowledgment of the fact of the Holocaust of the Jews and the possiblility of nuclear holocaust that we can place ourselves in honesty before God's face.

V

At this point, I would like to give hints as to how the churches might use the images of the dead Christ and the descent into bell, and the apocalyptic, recognizing the great diversity of expressions and forms of liturgical practice in the churches.

The Christian year provides occasion for the implementation of remembrance of the dead Christ and the descent into hell. But the singling out of one or a few days which would then become focal for such implementation runs the risk of losing the sense in which the mystery of Christ's death and descent into hell are at the heart of the mystery celebrated in each liturgy. It is precisely my purpose to recover the images of the dead Christ and descent which have often been forgotten as an important element of Christian worship.

That having been said, a look at the Byzantine rite for Good Friday, and the procession of the dead Christ, a popular practice in the Philippines, may be useful.

In churches of the Byzantine rite, the Good Friday liturgy includes the vespers of the descent from the cross and a service of the entomb

84 - Worship Between the Holocausts

ment of Christ. In the evening, this is followed, in such churches as the Greek Orthodox, the Melkite-Greek Catholic, and Antiochene Orthodox, by a matins service for Holy Saturday. Particular details of practice may vary. During this service, an ikon of the burial of the dead Christ, or the Epitaphion, a tomb containing a likeness of the dead Christ, is taken from the church building. With the ikon or Epitaphion at the head, the congregation processes around the church three times. Upon entering the church, all those in procession pass under the image of the dead,, buried Christ which is elevated in bridge-like fashion by its carriers. The significance here is that of going down with the dead Christ, passing under the yoke of the dead Christ and taking it on.¹⁷

A good example of how popular narratives portray the Christ may be seen in the poems of the Passion read on Good Friday in the Philippines.¹⁸ Such poems are associated with the procession of the dead Christ. In that country, the lives of the people are scarred by suffering, tragedy, and the never-ending threat of death. They believe in a Christ who is close to them in their struggle, who has entered into solidarity with their misery even to the point of descending into hell. Their belief in this Christ is expressed in, among other ways, the procession of the dead Christ. Instead of trying to make people move painlessly from Good Friday to the Vigil, Christian assemblies might profit from the struggle with the issue of how the celebration of the memory of the dead Christ might become, for the disoriented, anxious, hopeless, and oppressed, a cry of hope, a memory of a death that is itself the promise of liberation.

Here we can learn from liturgical history. In the earliest liturgical forms we know, the Paschal Vigil was the arena for the reading of the Passion. Good Friday did not have its own liturgy. Though later history has given rise to a telling of the Christ story on Good Friday rather than during the Vigil, there remains the task and the possibility of integrating the images of the death and descent into Christian worship in such a way that its integrity and significance are not befuddled in the vain attempt to wean people from Good Friday to the Paschal Vigil.

The two previous examples taken from different liturgical traditions might serve to instruct others in the ways which the images of the dead Christ and descent into hell might be recovered in the liturgical activities of the churches. The task, of course, is not one of imposing such practices upon the local churches in ways that are inappropriate to their own proper liturgical practices. It is rather a question of allowing for appropriate, yet sometimes unprecedented, liturgical forms which give

¹⁷ The rite for matins for Holy Saturday is found in The Lenten Triodion, translated from original Greek by Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), pp. 622-655.
¹⁸ For the insights on the role of the dead Christ in the Philippines, I am indebted to David Power, "Liturgy and Culture," East Asian Pastoral Review [Manila] (1984), p. 353.

85 - Worship Between the Holocausts

better expression to a people's experience of a sense of loss and the absence or hiddenness of God.

VI

Let us turn now to the question of how this implementation might occur in the various liturgical prayers of the churches, and in the Eucharistic prayer in particular. In speaking of liturgical prayers, I have in mind the patterned, predictable, and public prayers, both formal and informal, written and unwritten, spontaneous and prescribed, by which Christians meet and are met by God in the intentional, corporate coming together of the church. Liturgical prayers of petition, intercession, benediction, and thanksgiving need to take account of the churches' experience of being part of a humanity which lives in a time of disintegration and destruction, a humanity continually compelled to consider whether there are any hopes by which it is possible to face the future. Liturgical prayer must name this experience of crisis of vision and of hope, and address God who is often experienced as absent or hidden. Hence, liturgical prayer takes on the character of lamentation, of a cry that God, once near, has withdrawn or disappeared. Prayer becomes a protest that those who keep the covenant are, for all that, seemingly forsaken by the God who has promised to be with them. The Psalms and wisdom literature are shot through with such sentiments.¹⁹ It is simply a question of retrieving what has often been forgotten or been deemed inappropriate in liturgical prayer, and allowing such expression to come to the center of our assemblies.

In this vein, no other focus is so central to this experience in the Christian context than that of the dead Christ, the forsaken servant, and his descent. This is what provides the basis for hope in our age. No other image is more adequate to name the mystery of God's absence as well as God's self-emptying and complete identification with suffering, negativity, and death. It is in this mystery that we look to the future in hope and trust that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ.

In the Eucharistic liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church, the Eucharistic prayer itself needs to be seen as the locus for this type of prayer. Themes of loss, longing, desire, and lament akin to the Jewish prayers for the dead must be integrated in the prayer of thanksgiving. At present, one often finds among liturgical practitioners great hesitation in diverting from approved texts. But as approved text becomes understood as paradigm, not rigid prescription, greater possibilities may emerge for the expression and impression of what is communicated in the images of the dead Christ and descent into hell and the apocalyptic in this central prayer of the church. Where this liberty is not found, a very practical and, I daresay, realizable goal would be to place before official liturgical and episcopal conferences some Eucharistic prayers of the type I am

¹⁹ See, for example, Psalms 44 and 137; see also the Book of Job.

86 - Worship Between the Holocausts

suggesting, composed by competent liturgists and/or liturgical theologians, in the hope that one or more might be approved for general use. Such a Eucharistic prayer would recount what God has not done, together with what God has done. Expression would be given to a profound sense of lament and protest in the face of the evils and suffering of our age, together with thanksgiving for what God has given. Attention to the themes of deliverance and non-deliverance would be given alongside a firm affirmation that God's victory is brought about through entry into solidarity with suffering victims of all ages, unto death and into hell.

Proclamation of the Word is a response to God's presence and action. In sermonizing, attention must be drawn to the central mystery of the resurrection. But this can and should be done in particular ways which affirm the resurrection as victory and triumph over suffering, evil, and death. It is victory through and in negativity, and triumph through death. Resurrection is not passing over or around these. Evil, suffering, and death exist. Proclamation of the resurrection must take seriously the depth of evil and suffering which persons in the churches experience in our terrible age. Not taking seriously the realities of evil, suffering, and death as negative human experience bespeaks a lack of trust that God will be victorious even in them. Proclamation and sermonizing must draw attention to the lack of cohesion, vision, and hope characteristic of our age, and hold out a vision of God's future wherein the suffering, the weak, the forgotten, and the nameless who have been trampled underfoot will hold pride of place.

VII

What I have attempted to provide here is nothing more than a hint as to how the images of the dead Christ and the descent, and a sense of the apocalyptic, might be implemented in liturgical activity in general, liturgical and eucharistic prayers in particular, and in the sermon or homily.

Between the holocausts, the eschatological "not-yet" is the true characteristic of Christian prayer and worship.²⁰ A deepened sense of the apocalytic, and a remembrance of the dead Christ and Christ's descent into hell, best express and impress our experience of anomie and chaos, crisis and loss of vision brought about by the two-fold holocaust. Such images are strong images, sober and shot through with hope and profound expectation for the manifestation of God's coming. They need room in our assemblies so as to move from the edges to the center.

Central to Christian worship is gathering, reading, praying, sitting, and breaking bread in memory of Christ in the church through the Spirit. Maybe it is the bread of affliction and lament that is to be broken between the holocausts. Maybe there is (or will be) no bread at all, as at

²⁰ Lathrop, op. cit., p. 300.

87 - Worship Between the Holocausts

Auschwitz. But as we have learned from the voices of its victims, and the voices of the inheritors of the ancient covenant, the ethnic descendants of the first Christians: memory is the heart of liturgy. In our terrible age, we the living stand together with the dead and those yet to come, awaiting the immortality of the flesh and the glorious coming of the Lord Jesus when the power of God's love prevails over evil.