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Liturgy: A Site of StruggleIn the twentieth century a fundamental shift took place in the complex relationship between liturgy and women's lives, so that today liturgy has become one of the most politicized ecclesial sites. The roots of this transformation can be traced back at least to the early-twentieth-century liturgical renewal (and women's engagement with it). But the shift gained specific momentum in the second half of the twentieth century, owing to cultural and ecclesial developments, especially the second wave of the women's movement and the liturgical reforms sweeping through the churches. For the most part, official liturgical reforms were implemented just before churches found themselves confronted with sustained feminist critique. For many women, therefore, dissatisfaction with existing worship patterns grew despite all the liturgical reforms now put in motion. Some women have responded by developing alternatives to existing worship practices. At the turn of the twenty-first century, women-identified liturgies and rituals are celebrated across the globe. There are also regular women's worship services in parishes, women-identified celebrations among large gatherings of women, and lively networking between many of these women at worship. These new liturgical traditions are supported by an unparalleled explosion of religious material by and for women: there are hundreds of new women-identified hymns and songs, meditations and creeds, and a host of new prayer books and lectionaries specifically for women. Liturgy indeed has become one of the most politicized ecclesial sites in our time. The importance of liturgy as a site of struggle over symbolic resources that shape women's religious lives cannot be emphasized enough. For the Christian tradition, the fact that women themselves now actively claim ritual authority, by constructing and interpreting their liturgical lives, is a primary mode of claiming power.10 To put it differently, women have moved from liturgical consumption and reproduction to liturgical production, grasping liturgy as a crucial site for the negotiation of faith and women's lives. To review my argument, my analysis so far has focused on several problems in the complex relationship between liturgy and women's lives: the labor of being woman, the material realities of women's lives, a Christian tradition and historiography that occlude women's agency, and a theorizing of the meaning of liturgy that bypasses material realities and markers of difference. Given this list, a site one might assume to be "safe" from the asymmetries inscribed into our gendered particularities is the Christian story itself, which is present in our liturgies, above all, in the proclamation of Scripture. Let us, then, take a look at this element in relation to women's lives. |
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