Full of Your Glory: Liturgy, Cosmos, Creation ed. by Teresa Berger

Abstract

Reviewed by: Full of Your Glory: Liturgy, Cosmos, Creation ed. by Teresa Berger Brendan Fitzgerald Teresa Berger, ed. Full of Your Glory: Liturgy, Cosmos, Creation. Papers from the 5th Yale ISM Liturgy Conference, June 18–21, 2018 Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press Academic, 2019 393 pages. Paperback. $44.95. The range of topics covered in Full of Your Glory: Liturgy, Cosmos, Creation follows from a stated concern for the welfare of a planet afflicted by environmental degradation coupled with the recognition that within the academy in recent years a new focus has arisen on matters ecological and cosmological. Christian scholarship, as editor Teresa Berger helpfully points out, has responded to these developments as well. Recent years have seen a number of theologians and religious leaders address the themes of ecology and Christianity. These collected papers from the 2018 Liturgy Conference of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music grapple with the realities of care for the environment and the Christian faith through the lens of the liturgy: "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). The papers presented at the conference are presented here in four parts. The first consists of the address offered by keynote speaker [End Page 144] Rowan Williams, combined with a transcript of the dialogue that followed his presentation ("Naming the World: Liturgy and the Transformation of Time and Matter," 23–41). Williams draws from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to present a theology of language and naming that entails certain liturgical/cosmological realities. Because "naming … is the forming of a set of shared 'policies' for interacting and relating between speakers" (24), the Christian liturgy—which is itself an interplay of names exchanged between God and those who worship—takes on a necessarily cosmic dimension. From the engagement with God that takes place in the liturgy, the Christian is sent out into the world to engage with the stuff of creation in a way that necessarily includes the act of naming: of forming that set of shared policies for interacting and relating. Williams' point is well taken, but as the dialogue that follows reveals, the curious absence of concrete implications in his address leaves the reader wondering how these ideas ought to impact his or her life. The second part of the collection addresses biblical and historical aspects of matters environmental, liturgical, and cosmological. Of keen interest for any Roman Catholic with interests liturgical and cosmological (and perhaps poetical, as well) is Peter Jeffery's "The Six Evenings of Creation in the Hymns of the Roman Breviary" (137–163), a wonderful account of the development of Ambrosian hymns—with their vivid focus on living in a created world—in the history of the Church. Far less successful is Anathea Portier-Young's "Bless the Lord, Fire and Heat: Reclaiming Daniel's Cosmic Liturgy for Contemporary Eco-Justice" (45–67). Though she opens the essay with an interesting claim—that in the Old Testament "liturgy is political and the cosmos is contested domain"—the style of the address is more polemical than academic, and therefore less instructive (45). Theological-liturgical perspectives comprise the third part of the collection. Within these pages, Kevin W. Irwin helpfully points toward certain implications for sacramental theology subsequent to the promulgation of Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si' in 2015 ("Sacramental Theology after Laudato Si'," 267–283). Irwin rightfully claims that with Laudato Si' Pope Francis hopes to recover a more sacramental view of creation, and that "the sacramentality of creation and the incarnation underscores the discoverability of God [End Page 145] in human life and explains why created things are used both as a motivation and a means to praise and worship God" (275). But the points of interest that Irwin identifies deserve far more attention and development than he is able to give them in these pages; as such, his address serves best to show the reader avenues for further investigation in regards to the sacramental theology of Laudato Si'. Of special note in this part of the collection is Joris Geldhof's examination of how the created order...