Cally Hammond > Quotes

“This is an era in the life of both Church and society which values individual choice over corporate identities; and which is inclined to depreciate the value of symbolic actions in worship, in contrast with the transmission of semantic content – in other words, preferring factual or propositional information to value-added (or ‘encoded’) physical actions such as rituals or sacraments.”
― Cally Hammond, The Sound of the Liturgy: How Words Work In Worship

“The power of the liturgy to ingrain in the worshipper the texts she or he hears week in week out is a crucial part of Christian formation;”
― Cally Hammond, The Sound of the Liturgy: How Words Work In Worship

“Human beings learn how to ‘do’ prayer by watching, and then imitating, others. If the cycle of imitation is broken, if a generation of children grows up unable to say the Lord’s Prayer from memory, or to join in a hymn comfortably, or to feel safe and ‘at home’ in a church building when worship is going on, something crucial to Christianity’s very survival is in danger of being eroded.”
― Cally Hammond, The Sound of the Liturgy: How Words Work In Worship

“In every case, this duality is the key: whatever else worship may be, it is not something that makes sense, or comes to life, on its own. Worship demands dialogue – between minister and people, between the people themselves, between people and/or priest (on their behalf) and God.”
― Cally Hammond, The Sound of the Liturgy: How Words Work In Worship

“This shows how liturgical repetition, sometimes echoing anaphoras19 from its scriptural origins, is fundamental to authentic Christian praxis from the beginning. If the twenty-first-century Church invests energy in using novelty and variety to counter boredom and over-familiarity among worshippers, its focus is askew; there has to be a place, and a positive value, for repetition too.”
― Cally Hammond, The Sound of the Liturgy: How Words Work In Worship

“What this means in terms of church worshippers is that, in learning to acknowledge and prioritize them in their individuality, too much has been lost of that group identity which Paul recognized as the body of Christ – the ultimate image of individuality-in-plurality. Church worship is not about – or at least not only about – individual Christians and their spontaneous overflows of powerful spiritual feeling. It has an indissolubly corporate aspect; and there have to be physical ways of expressing that in-corporation (or ‘em-bodyment’) not only in corporate singing, but in corporate action, speaking and listening too. And that kind of corporate action depends absolutely on repetition.”
― Cally Hammond, The Sound of the Liturgy: How Words Work In Worship

“Many preachers go wrong not because they read their sermon from a script (which is fine) but because they write it in continuous prose, and are thus obliged to read it (as the shape of the text forces them to) as continuous prose. The essential formality of the text and the complexity of its periodic sentences cannot be disguised, however much eye contact, gesture and vocal modulation are employed. Thus, such preachers quickly lose their grip on the attention of their listeners. To preach successfully from a script, that script should be written with the closest possible attention to making it sound like natural English”
― Cally Hammond, The Sound of the Liturgy: How Words Work In Worship

“repetition’ anxiety is positivist rather than apologetic. It is the approach endorsed here: to argue that repeated words, like repeated postures, have an essential capacity to ‘imprint’ which works in harmony with natural human reflexes and capacities. The term ‘imprint’ is used as a shorthand for a complex of human reactions to iteration: memorization; conditioned response (‘let us pray’ → kneel); even muscle memory, which can trigger speech, postures and movements, associating them with particular prayers and stages within worship, and then linking both with associations, emotions, inspirations. There is a good reason why some Christians have a fear and mistrust of repetition: it is self-evidently powerful in directing Christian belief and behaviour.”
― Cally Hammond, The Sound of the Liturgy: How Words Work In Worship

“the fixed and formal rhythms of the liturgy can be a liberating factor in worship, as they set the worshippers free from the terrorism of ‘what next?’ which dominates too many church services as part of a fruitless quest for novelty, and worship as entertainment. The rhythms of the liturgy are also a tool for giving to each worshipper that sublime permission to submerge the particularism of their individual self into the deeper identity of the body of Christ.”
― Cally Hammond, The Sound of the Liturgy: How Words Work In Worship

“that repetition is, and always has been, at the heart of Christian worship, both within each act of worship and in the entire temporal progress of the year. Without it the process of embedding or ingraining truth cannot take place. Nor can the memory be liberated from always addressing the unfamiliar to absorb repeated sounds and words in a way which aids worship and renders the boredom that generally attaches to repetition creative, rather than tedious. Some of this, of course, requires practice, patience and technique to achieve. And good-quality teaching for worshippers on how to manage their emotional feelings and spiritual experiences (or lack of them) during worship, and how to use the liturgies which unfold around them, is pitifully rare.”
― Cally Hammond, The Sound of the Liturgy: How Words Work In Worship

“It should be noted here that the most basic difficulty with the modern liturgy of the Church of England is simply this: that it is so utterly dependent on complex written texts. It demands a fairly high level of literacy to cope with the language involved; not to mention the theological complexities underlying both the mysterious technical words like ‘incarnation’ and the apparently simple and familiar ones like ‘flesh’, ‘light’ and ‘word’ – which turn out, within a liturgical context, to carry a heavy load of encoded meaning.”
― Cally Hammond, The Sound of the Liturgy: How Words Work In Worship

“We can no more experience the reality of an act of worship by reading such texts than we can enter into the emotional reality of a musical concert or a football match by reading the reviews or reports in the next day’s newspaper. For some kinds of human experience, it is essential to be there.”
― Cally Hammond, The Sound of the Liturgy: How Words Work In Worship

“Congregations of Christian worshippers are not used to looking at what they do from the outside, from an external point of view. They are not usually struck, because within the group context it is normal, by the rarity with which, in everyday life, they are in the situation of saying words together publicly and corporately.84 As a mode of human behaviour it is rare and distinctive, as well as powerful in its impact both within and without.”
― Cally Hammond, The Sound of the Liturgy: How Words Work In Worship

“Individual worshippers may be well aware that one may reach the heights of spiritual fervour and intensity of devotion as much through set forms of liturgy and worship as through self-consciously ‘spontaneous’ ones.”
― Cally Hammond, The Sound of the Liturgy: How Words Work In Worship

“In church, it has become commonplace to associate fixed and traditional text with insincerity, parroting by rote, and disengagement. Conversely, spontaneous (and often pseudo-spontaneous), freely composed words have come to be associated with simplicity and veracity. This is a fallacy, and a dangerous, damaging one.”
― Cally Hammond, The Sound of the Liturgy: How Words Work In Worship