"...sessions were simply wonderful, from many different perspectives: theological, pastoral, liturgical and performative. I have noted a change in the presidential style in all three students, and not just in the seminars, but in other liturgical contexts over the past month at the university, which (is) a direct consequence of your sessions.

...a gifted teacher, and you have taught us not just about how to pray the Eucharistic Prayer, but about the prayer, its deeper structure, meaning, sense and spirituality. I think also you imparted something of the mystery of presidential ministry, and hence, something of the meaning of priesthood."

- Professor John Gibaut,
Acting-Director, Anglican Studies Program, St. Paul University, Ottawa

A Principle:

"I was guided by the conviction that [opening the door to the liturgical world] was not to be attained by the process of explaining at what time or under what circumstances some custom or prayer came into use. Not by declaring the deep underlying dogmatic thought which is implied in some rite, where the connection does not arise from the living action itself.

The way to liturgical life does not go through mere teaching, but before all it goes through doing.

Introductory Remarks

• Clarity
• "Proximity" as means to manage liturgy
• Accounting for 120 event elements
• Theology of physical prayer: divine communication is logos/sarx not graphes/soma
• Multivalency of Text, even an iota can mean many things
• Doing and Seeing as exegetical work
• Theology of memory & of breath
• Approaching text according to Hippolytus and Justin et al
• The process of enfleshing word in your body: eyes, mouth, ears.
• The liturgical context: I-text-assembly

The coaching consists of presiders "praying" the text, e.g., a eucharistic prayer, aloud in an actual church-sized space, using an altar sized sacramentary on a table or altar. Participants attend this rehearsal. The coach listens, stops and starts, and comments on what is being said, on what is heard by the assembly. While this activity is not prayer for the assembly, it is prayer before participants. While not common prayer, per se, it is nonetheless prayerful.

This experience consists of the individual coaching of a participant, speaking aloud, before other participants. The goal is to allow the participants to hear themselves and to hear others. It is a seeing and doing of the text.

[from the introduction; Romano Guardini, Sacred Signs, Sheed & Ward, London, 1937.]

Rate: $150/hour (GST extra where applicable) plus travel expenses

Duration: Negotiable, but six hours minimum recommended.

• work with text alone (no alb, no gesture, no artifacts)
• initial focus on the book, not the assembly or God
• examine the actual space and see what kind of aural delay there is, e.g., 2.5 seconds of residual sound
• consider: where is your God
• rehearsal is prayerful because you are attentive to what the Holy Spirit is saying in text
• breath column and body cavities; how to remain open
• an enfleshed God means you as presider are the only way to communicate with the assembly - your body is important to God and to the assembly.
• presiders do Augustine's anthropology: tu excitas ut
• pause and silence even at the level of single word establishes pace and the assembly's ability to hear and digest text
• be constantly aware of text landing in the assembly
• we may run out of breath but, more likely, we run out of idea before the end of the text
• text can only make sense to the assembly when it makes sense to the presider
• only proceed to the next word when you have confidently agreed with, said "yes" to, the word uttered because your ability to say yes to a word determines the assembly's ability to say Amen
• working each word - saying yes!
• there are millions of right ways to do liturgical text, each determined by "you." There is only one wrong way - when the assembly is not "pleased to praise God," because it has been dsitracted from the text. What you will do will be distinct from what any other presider will do. God is a God of detail and of each person in the assembly.