Teresa BERGER, ed. Full of Your Glory: Liturgy, Cosmos, Creation. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2019. pp. 432. $44.95 pb. ISBN 9780814664568. Reviewed by Kathleen BORRES, Retired from Saint Vincent Seminary, Latrobe, PA 15650.
Full of Your Glory: Liturgy, Cosmos, Creation is a collection of papers first presented at the fifth Institute of Sacred Music Liturgy Conference in 2018. In the introduction to the book, Teresa Berger, the editor, explains the overall aim of the conference and recent developments relative to the conference’s aim. The purpose of the conference “was to bring insights from within the Christian tradition of liturgical practices, past and present, to the ongoing conversations around ecology, cosmology, and Christian faith” (16). Also in the introduction, Berger briefly discusses the collected works and authors, acknowledging that it “will readily be apparent from the brief overview of the essays, [that] this volume contains a wide-ranging collection of heterogeneous insights into the vast terrain that is ‘Liturgy, Cosmos, Creation.’ There is no intent here to claim a coherent, overarching view for this collection of essays” (19). I concur with Berger’s judgment and agree that “what the volume as a whole does claim, however, is that attention to this vast terrain is of utmost importance and urgency today” and that “the conference gestured toward a vision of liturgy that encompasses so much more than human beings at worship, namely, a vision of the redemption of the created universe at the heart of Christian worship (19).
Following Berger’s well-constructed and informative introduction is the keynote address given by Rowan Williams (and highlights from the question and answer session that followed the address). Rowan Williams’s Naming the World, Liturgy and the Transformation of Time and Matter opens with a reflection on Genesis 2:19, “the act of naming,” and the importance of rightly naming—with sensitivity to others’ words, ultimately to God’s spoken word (the spoken world)—in “mapping” the world and our very lives with integrity and truth. I greatly appreciate what he has to say about the transformation of time “to bring about the divine purpose” (32) and matter, the “stuff of the world” as significant in its own right. Humanity has an obligation to live with other creatures “without the arrogance of human exceptionalism” (32). I also appreciate what he has to say about Revelation 2:17, that is, “we wait to hear at the end of time a name that we do not know” (34). In other words, while in one sense humanity names the world, in another sense, the spoken world as created and redeemed by God names us; hence is realized the ultimate mapping and act of naming.
Sixteen papers arranged under three parts follow the keynote address. Part One: Biblical and Historical Aspects is the longest part by far, containing eight papers. Part Two: Theological-Liturgical Perspectives includes four papers and Part Three: Reflections on Contemporary Practices the same. Altogether, with a couple of exceptions, I found the collection’s aim as pronounced by Berger fulfilled. For the most part, I find the papers appropriately focused, with each paper in its own way serving to expand readers’ horizons relative to liturgy and its relationship to the cosmos and creation. Altogether, the authors discuss important theological, sociological, ecological, psychological and cosmological themes that truly are—or ought to be—matters of liturgy. Without being exhaustive, they touch on such political, socio-economic, and ecological matters of justice as world hunger, troubled waters, death, and dust matter, and they explore the value of secular imaginings and expressions of longing in the arts. They do so creatively, with passion, and with an aim to awaken their readers to what they understand to be the very breadth and depth of the liturgical act. They do so in thanks and in the spirit of Bryan D. Spinks, the dedicatee of the book. Bryan Spinks is the Bishop F. Percy Goddard Professor of Liturgical Studies and Pastoral Theology at Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. As Berger notes in her introduction, the title of the collection “invokes the Sanctus” and Spinks “decisively shaped the research surrounding the Sanctus’s entry into eucharistic praying” (21).
Like Spinks, as well as the other essayists in this volume who in their own way invoke the Sanctus, Berger also invokes the Sanctus in opening her piece and the collection as a whole.
Pleni sunt caeli et terra Gloria tua.
Without a doubt, this is an appropriate opening for the collection as a whole, which, given the sponsorship (Yale Institute of Sacred Music), scope and interdisciplinary nature of the works, would certainly be appropriate for graduate studies in theology, liturgical studies, and the sacred arts. In particular, it might serve as a wonderful text in a seminar course.