Transcendence and Immanence in Eucharist Prayers by Huub Oosterhuis

BETTINE SIERTSEMA TRANSCENDENCE AND IMMANENCE IN EUCHARIST PRAYERS BY HUUB OOSTERHUIS

SUMMARY — Huub Oosterhuis is one of the leading Dutch poets of new liturgical texts. After the initial Roman Catholic appreciation he is now often criticized and even censored because of his ‘horizontal’ theology. The dimensions of transcendence and immanence, in the traditional theology, come together in the Eucharist. This article explores how Oosterhuis deals with these dimensions and the relationship between the two in his Eucha- rist Prayer and some of his other liturgical texts.

In the new hymnal for the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, to appear in 2012, one of the best represented poets will be Huub Oosterhuis. In 1966, shortly after the Second Vatican Council, this Dutch priest and poet published Bid om vrede (literally: ‘Pray for Peace’, translated in 1969 as Your Word is Near). It was an answer to the Council’s pursuit of ‘aggiornamento’. The prayers presented a new liturgical language that instantly found its way to the hearts of Dutch worshippers, both protestants and catholics. It was reprinted many times and translated into English, German, Italian, Finnish and other languages. In the following years several collections of prayers and hymns were published in translation (among others At Times I See, Open your Hearts and Times of Life), as well as a contemporary adaptation of Fifty Psalms (written together with another poet, Michel van der Plas). In the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century the ‘Basisbeweging Neder- land’ (Dutch Basic Movement) came into being, a group of oecumenical, heterodox and left wing congregations and parishes. In this scene the texts by Oosterhuis were very popular, because of their non-dogmatic, refreshingly modern tone and implicit criticism on social-economic structures. From there the texts gained footing in the official churches, because most individual members of the ‘Basic Movement’ belonged to one of the official churches as well. The Hymnal for the Protestant Churches of 1973 (Liedboek voor de Kerken) contains fifteen hymns (of the 491) by Oosterhuis. In the Roman Catholic hymnal Gezangen voor Liturgie (Hymns for Liturgy) of 1996 one fifth of the more than 500 hymns were written by Oosterhuis. In recent years however, the situation has shifted. The Council of Churches in the Netherlands awarded Oosterhuis in 2000 the Flame of the Spirit in recognition of his contribution to the oecumenical hymnal practice, and the Faculty of Theology of the originally reformed VU University in Amsterdam awarded him an honorary degree in 2002, whereas the more conservative dioceses in the Neth- erlands censor many of his well known and frequently sung hymns, like ‘The desert shall bloom’ and ‘Light, gently touching in the morning’. A new hymnal of

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one of these dioceses, Laus Deo of 2000, doesn’t contain a single text by Ooster- huis. This is not so much due to the fact that the author was dismissed as a priest (in a conflict concerning married priesthood) and left the Jesuit Order in the early seventies, as to his theologically liberal (and perhaps also his politically left wing) viewpoints, such as his rejection of the doctrine of transubstantiation. This made one of the Dutch bishops declare that he considers Oosterhuis a heretic, because he contests the core of the Catholic faith. For his part the poet will dispute that transubstantiation is the core of Catholicism, but he won’t deny that his thinking is not in accordance with the official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

The way the Eucharist Prayers by Oosterhuis connect with, and diverge from, the Roman Canon has already been discussed elsewhere. Kees Kok devoted a chapter to the Table Prayers in his book on the liturgical poetry by Huub Oost- erhuis. He focuses on the relation with the Canon and on their reception by the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the Netherlands, especially of the text ‘Gij die weet’ (Thou who Knowest).1 Twelve Table Prayers are discussed in 1976 by Herman Wegman and several other liturgists.2 Most of them are judged favorably, although some of the critics have a problem with the division of roles when it is the assembly that sings the institution narrative. Four more texts of a slightly later date are discussed by H.J. auf der Maur.3 Only one, Liturgische Gezangen I (Liturgical Hymns) nr. 205, is not favorably thought of. In the seventies some work by Oosterhuis was translated into English. In an article from that periode John Barry Ryan pays much attention to the fact that the Oosterhuis texts are written for a particular community in Amsterdam. This community consists of men and women who have difficulty to connect the inher- ited religious language with their everyday experience. Therefore traditional dogmatic language is not appropriate for this community. On the one hand Ooster- huis insists against those who seem to have God in their pockets on God transcending our concepts and understanding, his ‘otherness’, on the other hand against those who assume God is absent, Oosterhuis stresses his nearness, his presence with the poor of this world. His poetic language makes the ambiguity possible that many contemporary believers recognize as their own. Jesus is the man who gave himself to fulfill God’s Thora, to show how God wants man to be. Participation in the ritual of bread and wine is commitment to what Jesus, the revelation of God, proclaimed in his lifetime, seen in terms of social justice.4

1 K. Kok, De vleugels van een lied: Over de poëtische liturgie van Huub Oosterhuis, Baarn: Ambo, 1990, 122-136. 2 H. Wegman (Ed.), Goed of niet goed? Het eucharistisch gebed in Nederland I, Hilversum: Gooi en Sticht, 1976. 3 H.-J. auf der Maur, ‘Vier tafelgebeden van Huub Oosterhuis’, in: H. Wegman (Ed.), Goed of niet goed? Het eucharistisch gebed in Nederland II, Hilversum: Gooi en Sticht, 1978, 11-37. 4 J.B. Ryan, ‘Eucharistic prayers for contemporary men and women’ in: Studia Liturgica 11 (1976), 186-206.

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My focus in this paper is to find out how Oosterhuis in these texts presents the divine engagement with man and human reality, and where in the range from transcendence to immanence his image of God could be positioned. Is God the absolute, the wholly other, sharply distinguished from our mundane reality, or do God (or the absolute) and our reality completely converge, and are heaven and earth, the ‘beyond’ and the ‘here’ one and the same?5 However, the Oosterhuis texts are rather poetry than dogma. By its very nature poetic language is open for multiple interpretations, and it is therefore, as Ryan so aptly pointed out, particularly fit for expressing the ambiguity and complexity of religious convictions and emotions that is characteristic for contemporary believers (and for that matter the complexity of life itself). It is clear that it is not one single position that will be found, but rather a mixture of transcendence and immanence, yet with shifting accents, from which at least a certain tendency can be gathered. For the sake of accessibility I will concentrate on the Eucharistic Prayers that are translated into English, which are the earlier ones. In various essays Oosterhuis reflected on the Eucharist, and in a brief comparison between these thoughts and the liturgical texts discussed, I will conclude that the essays tend to stress an immanent interpretation, but, in the end, without letting go of the transcendent dimension altogether. Like in the liturgical poetry, the complexity of the relation between transcendence and immanence is maintained. At the end I will outline the tendencies in the more recent texts, and some well-known hymns that are translated into English.

TEN TABLE PRAYERS6

The first four Table Prayers in Open your Hearts7 stay close to ‘the canons of the mass’, with traditional elements like Sursum Corda, Preface, Sanctus and Benedictus, consecration,8 anamnesis, epiclesis in which the operation of the

5 My use of these distinctions is based on an as yet unpublished article by Wessel Stoker, ‘Cul- ture and transcendence: Shifting religion and spirituality in philosophy, theology, art and politics’, which is to appear as the keynote chapter in W. Stoker & W. van der Merwe (Eds.), Looking beyond? Shifting views of transcendence in philosophy, theology, the arts, and politics, Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi. 6 This term, Table Prayer, is the literal translation of the Dutch ‘Tafelgebed’, which is com- monly used for Eucharistic Prayer. It is typical for his theology that Oosterhuis prefers this down to earth phrasing. 7 Huub Oosterhuis, Open your hearts (transl. David Smith), New York: Herder and Herder, 1971. Original edition: In het voorbijgaan, Utrecht: Ambo, 1968. I want to thank the Sticht- ing Leerhuis en Liturgie in Amsterdam, especially Klazien Kruisheer, for providing me with the English texts. Information about Huub Oosterhuis and this foundation is to be found at www.huuboosterhuis.nl. 8 This may be the correct technical term, in view of Oosterhuis’ theology it would be more appropriate to call this part the ‘words (or narrative) of the institution’.

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Holy Spirit is invoked, the Lord’s Prayer, and phrases that can be seen as sign- aling the consecration (‘This is the forgiveness of our sins. This is the body broken for you’). In one text they are formulated as a rhetorical question, and in two texts, put to music by Bernard Huijbers, there is an important shift, in the form more than in the text itself: the words of the institution are sung by the assembly, a role that is traditionally reserved for the priest or minister. In the wordings God is mostly depicted as transcendent: You called us and broke through our deafness, you appeared in our darkness, you opened our eyes with your light, you ordered everything for the best of us and brought us to life.

Jesus Christ is called ‘this unforgettable man’, and ‘the first-born’. The name often used for him, Jesus of Nazareth, can be considered as a token to signal his human nature. In a reference to Paul’s words the community is presented as the body of Christ. The celebration is interpreted as ‘this sign of faith’. It is proclaimed that God sent his Spirit ‘so that we might do what he has done’, that is ‘be your peace in this world, justice, light of your light, a new beginning of love’. In the movement between transcendence and immanence, it is as if man moves towards participating in the divine transcendence, as if he is raised to the level of Christ, if not in reality, than at least as a possibility.

In the fifth and sixth Table Prayers the tone notably differs. The conventional formulas and addresses of God are gone. God is depicted both in his distance and his nearness, and addressed in images and biblical allusions, in which majestic greatness and close intimacy alternate: You know and call the beaches of the earth, the banks of heaven, the sun, the seed in the womb, the heart that falters, the mourner who grieves, (…)

Jesus is presented as the one who made God known to us and because of whom we love God. ‘We’ are depicted, in all our differences, as ‘your people’. God is asked to rescue the world from death, and to arouse in us the power and dispo- sition that was in Jesus, or, as the sixth prayer puts it, that ‘through Jesus, with him and in him, we shall become your sons’.9

9 In more recent years Oosterhuis is more careful to use inclusive or gender-neutral phrasings.

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The seventh Prayer, with music by Bernard Huijbers, is preceded by the explicit instruction that it can only be sung, and not said. It is still widely used in critical, oecumenic congregations and parishes. The text shows a breach with the earlier prayers: there are no traditional formulas, not even the words of the institution. Some traditional elements, however, can still be recognized in adapted phrasings. The most striking characteristic of the text is the uncer- tainty. Five stanzas are structured as ‘If… then…’ sentences. Here there are no indisputable, timeless certitudes. It is for (and about) doubtful people who don’t know exactly what to believe of the eternal truths, but who fervently want to find hope and solace against despair and guilt, and search God and expect liberation from Him. Bread and wine are the tokens that remind us of the readiness of Jesus to give himself up, and that empower us with his strength to do the same. The text begins with the question who God is and where He can be found: Whom shall we worship and believe and who is worth our words and greater than our hearts? If there is a God who loves men, what is his name? In the features that are attributed to God, his ‘otherness’ and unknowability are matched by his nearness and knowledge of us: You, who know what is in us and understand what never can be said, (…) You with your name unnamable, God, word, incalculable, dream folly power freedom, you who go your way unseen God of strangers no one, God of people running fire you unheard of in this world – (…) Our reactions are a mix of belief and doubt, of which it remains undecided if it is our own doubt or the skepticism of the unbelieving world, e.g. in the words ‘dream folly’, hinting at Paul’s words in 1 Cor. 1:23 (‘but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles’ in the translation of the English Standard version, 2001), and ‘you unheard of in this world’. This unknowable, knowing God is begged to open the doors of his light, and to open the doors of our hearts. It is a double movement, and the one is pointless without the other. This prayer is taken up in the very last sentences:

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…open that door that no one can close. If you are the God who loves men, open us then to you. But first there are four other ‘if… then…’ stanzas, expressing a tentative faith: If it is not a dream, a lie what has been told us – that there will be good land (…) let us then go there (…) The anamnesis and epiclesis are also in this form, with an echo of the question of John the Baptist: If it [i.e. ‘a way to you’] is he, Jesus of Nazareth, if there is no one else to expect than he who gave his whole soul, was poured out like water, a lamb slaughtered, piece of bread broken, cup of wine drunk, If, then, that is life for this world, give us, around this bread and this cup, the strength to be him, and that, through us, in us, your name may be lived, made holy, your kingdom of peace will come, [etc. with other references of the Lord’s Prayer] Note that the traditional formula at the end of prayers, ‘through Jesus, with him and in him’ here is replaced by ‘through us, in us’. Clearly in this Table Prayer immanence is predominant, but without transcendent help this immanence will not be realized. God and man, transcendence and immanence are interdependent, they are each other’s prerequisites, because God can only be ‘the God who loves men’ when we ourselves make this love come true in the care for our neighbours, for this world.

The eighth text is more attuned to the tradition. In the images for Jesus the ‘I am’-words in John’s Gospel resound. God is evoked in his distant features, ‘different, unknown and calling, eternal distance’, but becoming our Father ‘in Jesus, this son of men’. In receiving the bread the congregation expresses the hope ‘that the day will come / when we speak to you / as man to man’.10

10 In the original Dutch the not sexually differentiated ‘mens’ (human being) is used.

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The ninth Table Prayer ends in a sort of ‘horizontal’ version of the Lord’s Prayer, in which the fulfillment of the various pleas is put into our own hands. Then Jesus is remembered as the one who did exactly that, in a phrasing that on the one hand stays even closer to the original Lord’s Prayer, and on the other hand makes the link to the Eucharist: (…) Jesus of Nazareth, who made your name holy, accomplished your will, became bread and wine for us, food and joy and the forgiveness of sins. The text ends with six stanzas of four lines, that are often used independently as a sung Eucharistic Prayer. 11 Jesus is called ‘son of men’, but also word and form of your glory, image and likeness of your faithfulness. After the past also the future is mentioned: He will come into this world. He will give us a new name. He is our way through death. The last of these ten prayers is the most unusual. It is in the first person singular,12 and addressed to a ‘you’, for which the Dutch text employs the intimate form, used for one’s equals (‘jij’ or ‘je’). In part it plays with the tradition of negative theology, declaring what God, or to be more precise what the ‘you’ is not, and what he cannot or does not do. The prayer clearly has done with the omnipo- tence of God. The phrasing is in colloquial language, and full of questions and hesitation. In the first stanza ‘this universe’ is characterized as a place of both darkness and brief happiness; it is in this place that ‘I’ pronounce ‘you’,13

11 These six stanzas are put to music by both Bernard Huijbers (Liturgische gezangen, Hilversum: Gooi en Sticht, 1979, nr. 133) and Tom Löwenthal (Liturgische gezangen II, Hilversum: Gooi en Sticht, 1985, nr. 34). The version by Löwenthal is the one included in the collected hymns by Oosterhuis (Huub Oosterhuis, Verzameld liedboek, Kampen: Kok, 2004, 670) and is most often used nowadays. 12 The second line in the translation, ‘we who are people…’ is not in accordance with the original, which reads: ‘Hier ter plaatse / in dit heelal / van honger en dorst / van nacht en wolken (…) spreek ik je uit (…)’. 13 The English has: ‘I speak you’, the word used in Dutch means to declare or to pronounce.

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although no words are ordinary enough to name you, small and invisible. In the second stanza it is denied that the ‘you’, being ‘no god, no spirit, no power’, can do anything noticeable in our lives. The central question, ‘who are you and where’ is immediately answered, but in doubtful tones: I suppose you are right here among us or everywhere. Just name them then, countries and towns where life is not worth living.14 The third stanza identifies the ‘you’ – ‘if you exist’ – as ‘all, the living, the dying, (…) refugee, stranger’, and ‘your life’ ‘like that of that man Jesus of Nazareth’, but without taking death from our shoulders, and without making anyone better. In the next stanza the ‘you’ is likened to people with ‘no defense against things that just happen’. The last stanza expects that there will be no answer, because ‘you have no voice that joins in in our language’. Then the attention shifts to the ‘I’, who sometimes ‘hear you / in people people / and in myself’. It is clear that in this text God is predominantly, or even wholly immanent. With its very minimal reference to bread, ‘this little piece of bread that does not appease our hunger’ (the translation skipped a reference to a sip of water that cannot quench our thirst), it is not easily recognized as a Eucharistic Prayer. The idea in the other texts, that bread and wine are an appeal to share with and care for others, is missing here. Probably for this lack of positive commitment, this text has not been not put to music and has fallen out of use altogether, as far as I know.15

THREE TABLE PRAYERS FOR SPECIAL OCCASIONS

Prayers, Poems & Songs is the translation of the first half of In het Voorbijgaan.16 This book contains another three Table Prayers, one for Christmas, one for a wedding day and one for a funeral service. In the Christmas Table Prayer God is transcendent and immanent at the same time: ‘in us and above us, eternal and unseen’. After a prayer for our repentance,

14 In the Dutch the second sentence is not set apart, but an apposition to ‘everywhere’. 15 In his own oecumenic community, the Amsterdamse Studentenekklesia, only the texts VII, VIII en the latter part of IX are more or less frequently used. 16 H. Oosterhuis, Prayers, poems & songs (transl. D. Smith), New York: Herder and Herder, 1976 (translation of In het voorbijgaan, Baarn: Ambo, 1968).

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God is asked to show ‘that the impossible is possible, (…) peace on earth, fear allayed, hunger appeased, justice done, bread broken and joy shared between men’. The traditional words of the institution are followed by a hymn, taken from the Didache and ending in the Lord’s Prayer. Blessed are you, for the sake of David, the holy vine, in which you have let us share through Jesus your servant. The phrasings of this Didache-text are taken up in several Eucharistic Prayers by Oosterhuis from much later, especially the sentences in which Jesus is mentioned as the one through whom we gain access to the knowledge of God, and the living word of Moses and the prophets.17 The Didache-text becomes more important with the increasing significance of the Jewish tradition in Oosterhuis’s theology. In the first part of the Table Prayer for a wedding day God is pictured in his eternity and transcendence: ‘you, there in your inaccessible light’. He is asked to complete and bless the bridal couple, and to let them experience in their bodies that they are called to be as good as God to each other, that they may become more and more like him who is your image, your Son, Jesus of Nazareth, the new man; In the Table Prayer in ‘A Liturgy for a Dead Person’ God is represented as the one who saved Jesus from death and to whom Jesus then went, ahead of us. He shared our life and our death, and we, thus is prayed, shall see God and find those who have gone ahead of us near to Him and speak with Him ‘as one person speaks with another’. The bread is presented as ‘the bread of the resurrection’ and the wine as ‘the cup of God’s faithfulness’. In these three texts the trend towards immanence is bent in the direction of more emphasis on God’s transcendence, with Jesus as intermediary and forerunner.

EUCHARISTIC PRAYERS, NOT YET TRANSLATED

In Verzameld Liedboek, the most recent – but by no means definite – collection of hymns by Huub Oosterhuis, the section of the Eucharistic Prayers contains 26 items (of the above discussed only the fourth, seventh, eighth and part of

17 E.g. ‘Kom over ons met uw geest’ [Come over us with your spirit], Verzameld liedboek, 638, and ‘Gezegend Gij Eeuwige’ [Blessed Thou Eternal], Verzameld liedboek, 646, and ‘Nu zend uw geest’ [Now send your spirit], Verzameld liedboek, 653.

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the ninth are included, but it should be noted that in this collection only texts that are put to music are published). In the later Eucharistic Prayers de struc- ture of the Roman Catholic canon is left aside more and more. A detailed dis- cussion of the texts is not possible within the boundaries of this article. I only point at some striking elements that are important in view of my central question. In the much used, but somewhat controversial prayer ‘Thou who knows’, God is addressed as the one who knows our innermost life, but who at the same time can not be seen or heard by man. We only know Him through Jesus, ‘a man full of your power’, ‘in him your grace would have appeared, (…) in him would have come to light for good how Thou exist: defenseless and selfless, servant of men’.18 The Epiclesis interprets the ritual of breaking and sharing bread in a particular sense: we participate in it ‘to fully know what is awaiting us, if we follow in his footsteps’. This rather gloomy interpretation is balanced with a cautiously positive counterpoint in the appeal to God to save us from death, like Jesus, since he, ‘dead an buried, still lives with Thee’. In the last line this appeal to God is surprisingly substantiated by the rhetorical question: ‘For why him and why not us – aren’t we men as well?’ Jesus is then represented as human, exclusively human, but exactly therefore worth saving from death. Bib- lically in this audacious exclamation the words of Paul can be recognized: ‘When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ – if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may be glori- fied with him’ (Rom 8:15-17). Herman Wegman has pointed at the minor attention for Christ’s resurrection.19 Here that attention can be perceived, but indeed, it presents itself in a rather concealed way and not at all exultantly. The Eucharistic Prayer ‘Who in Human Fashion…’, likewise well known and widely used, is in its form entirely an anamnesis, in which Jesus is characterized in his human appearance. It contains for instance a condensed geneal- ogy, ending in a hesitant, ‘who is also called son of God’. Following a reference to the word of Jesus about the corn grain that has to die to be fruitful (Jn 12:24), his immanent power is put into words: ‘to become man in mankind, who, hid- den in his God, has become our peace, our soul come to rest’. The hymn ends with the ambivalent paraphrase of Jesus ‘as the man who is next to you’. For some time now the ritual of sharing bread and wine in the Studentenek- klesia Amsterdam, Oosterhuis’ liturgical homeground is in recent years accom- panied with the words ‘May the sharing of this bread and this cup strengthen

18 It is the counterfactual verb that raised the disapproval of the Dutch bishops. They read it as a denial of an article of faith instead of a cautious approach of that faith. 19 H. Wegman, ‘De liederen van Huub Oosterhuis over Jezus van Nazareth’ in: Tijdschrift voor Theologie 19 (1979), 124-146.

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us in the hope that a new world will come, where there is bread and love for all your people’. Recently this formula is altered. In the new phrasing it is made clear that the new world is not something that will be given to us by God as a ready-made present, but that we ourselves have to help realize it. Moreover, salvation is not earmarked for mankind only, but it is something in which all living creation will participate: ‘May the sharing of this bread and this cup strengthen our hearts, that full of hope, we shall contribute to a new world, where there will be bread, and justice and dignity and love for every living being’.20 A recent, short hymnic introduction, that can be used in combination with a spoken Eucharistic prayer, is a free adaptation of Thomas of Aquino’s ‘O sacrum Convivium’,21 literally translated: Communion to sanctify that one day the messiah will appear to us bread of tears for this world heartening wine foretaste of happiness to come that the power of hope will not fail us.22 It is not a Holy Communion, but a communion to sanctify; the object of this sanc- tifying is left out, but it seems natural to assume the object is the people who participate in the communion. The present tense in the Latin, in which we receive Christ, is put not only in the future tense here, but also in the subjunctive mood. The bread becomes symbol of the confession of guilt, but it can also be read as some sort of a kyrie. The wine is read as an anticipation of the welfare to come, which is in accordance to the last line of the Latin original. The last line of the Oosterhuis- version connect both with this (hope for ‘happiness to come’) and with the second line, the hope for the coming of the Messiah. Through the phrasing of lines 2 and 4 the coming of the transcendent Messiah in our reality is predominant (although by not using a capital the messiah is strongly related to our everyday reality). The notion of the congregation as the body of the Messiah does not present itself here.

ESSAYS

Huub Oosterhuis expressed his views on the Eucharist not only in liturgical texts, but also in essays and sermons. In In het Voorbijgaan he declares that the

20 In my view the more extensive enumeration of positive characteristics brings about a poetic weakening, because it can never be exhaustive and complete. By naming only bread and love, the metaphoric, representative quality of these terms makes a stronger statement. 21 The original Latin is: O sacrum convivium! / in quo Christus sumitur: / recolitur memoria pas- sionis ejus: / mens impletur gratia: / et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur. / Alleluia. 22 ‘Avondmaal ter heiliging / dat ons ooit verschijnen zal de messias / brood van tranen om de wereld / hartversterking wijn voorsmaak van geluk dat komt / dat de kracht der hoop ons niet begeeft’ (Verzameld liedboek, 633).

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sharing of the bread perhaps is demonstrating ‘our consent to the gospel that has been announced to us, by presenting a sign, joining in, believing with our hands’.23 Breaking bread and sharing it with each other, holding out your open hand: these little, defenseless gestures, always the same, are gestures towards him. And they might mean that we want to remember him, keep him in mind, imitate him in our lives, go out to meet him in hope, that we see salvation in the man he was, and in the God he called his Father, that we believe in giving and receiving, in belonging together, in the mystery of our lives. It is a desperate gesture as well, with which we confess that we don’t know how to do it, on global scale, breaking bread and sharing it. A confession of collective guilt. We act it out and realize it is no reality. But at the same time we commit ourselves to that vision of the future, of a world in justice, where we don’t devour one another, but perform the unthinkable and impossible, what as yet cannot be: people in peace.24 The ritual is interpreted almost entirely immanently; it is about our willingness to share and to live in the spirit of Jesus. Transcendence is present at the most in the fact that we, in spite of the recognition of our inability, still hold on to that vision, because it is announced to us. H. Manders notes the important role the word (not only the Word) plays and the little attention Oosterhuis pays to ritual and symbol.25 He sees a relationship between these and the absence of the notion that something is done to us. ‘In the symbol it can be expressed that there is not only questions and searching, but also answer and promise’.26 In a more recent essay Oosterhuis claims that on the one hand immanent interpretation is maintained and strengthened, on the other hand the notion of transcendence is emphasized more.27 Oosterhuis again makes a stand against the doctrine of the transubstantiation, and puts in its place the appeal to us or our intention: ‘Make yourself into bread for the hungry, be impassioned with the longing for a world where there is bread and justice for all’. With this interpretation goes a new adaptation of the Agnus Dei, that ends with the appeal/ summons: ‘like a lamb, carry away the burden of sin out of the world’. The transcendent notion turns up in the end of this text where the sharing of bread and wine is seen as the participation in, or the becoming of ‘the body of Jesus Messiah’, which is called an ‘essential’ change (interpreted in an immanent way as choosing for the poor, caring for the stranger, respecting every human being,

23 H. Oosterhuis, Open your hearts (trans. David Smith), New York: Herder and Herder, 1971, 1. 24 Ibid., 4. 25 H. Manders, ‘Het gevecht met de engel. Een beschouwing over In het voorbijgaan van H. Ooster- huis’, in: Theologie en pastoraat 65 (1969), 122-130. 26 Ibid., 123-124. The translation is mine. The original text says: ‘In het symbool kan ook tot uitdrukking komen dat er niet alleen vragen en zoeken maar ook antwoord en belofte is’. 27 Huub Oosterhuis, ‘Een dienstknechtleven’, in: Maandbrief voor Leerhuis & Liturgie 15 (2010) no. 1/2, 4-5.

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carrying away the burden of sin). ‘We shall become his real presence, his realis praesentia. His gentle power. His loving energy in this world. Animated coher- ence and messianic counterforce against death in all its shapes’.28

HYMNS

The musical compositions of Bernard Huijbers, Antoine Oomen and Tom Löwenthal are not to be underestimated as factors in the popularity of the Oosterhuis-hymns among the church going public. Because the language struc- ture of English is so different from Dutch, it is not easy to translate the hymns into English. Two CDs have been published (with choral and instruments books), Wake Your Power in 1994 and Turn Your Heart To Me in 1997.29 Tony Barr, the main translator, wrote a comment on each text. There are several songs that show the same tendency as is to be seen in the Eucharistic Prayers. The song ‘Turn your heart to me’ is written alongside the darkest of the psalms, 88, as a sort of free adaptation. God is depicted as transcendent, living in light, while we are in dark night. His presence amidst our dark, deathlike wilderness is begged for in a fourfold refrain, ‘Turn Your Heart To Me’. In the last stanza ‘streaks of morning light’ seem to pierce the darkness, and the last refrain is different from the first four: ‘Turn my heart in me’. It is as if the poet concludes that God cannot reach out to us, if we don’t turn our hearts to Him (which means with Oosterhuis inevitably also to our fellow-men). Or maybe even that the turning of our hearts to Him is the same thing as His turning His heart to us. As Tony Barr puts it: ‘Conversion has already taken place simply through the singing of this austere piece’. In ‘The Song of God Among Us’ the theme of Jesus as wholly divine and wholly human is worked out. In Him transcendence becomes immanent, con- sonant with the traditional teachings of the Church. God from God and Light from Light, guarding all creation, one with us in flesh and blood, (…) In Jesus God comes near us in our human existence, He ‘brushes by us every day’. The refrain, however, suggests that we are not able to recognize Him: ‘There among you is one you do not know’. This refrain gives the song a sort

28 Ibid., 5, my translation. The original reads: ‘Wij zullen wezenlijk veranderen: (…) Wij zullen zijn werkelijke tegenwoordigheid, zijn realis praesentia worden. Zijn zachte kracht. Zijn liefdesenergie in deze wereld. Bezield verband en messiaanse tegenkracht tegen de dood in al zijn gedaanten’. 29 Oregon Catholic Press Publications, Portland, Or.

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of open end, and it puts the solid truth of tradition into perspective by stressing both the incomprehensibility of this truth and our inability to live by it. In ‘Song to Light’ the light is addressed as the most characteristic gift of God. In some sentences it even seems to coincide with God himself (e.g. when it is asked: ‘Keep me from falling’, and addressed as ‘Dear caring light and steadfast shoulder, / bear me, your watchful child secure’), in other places it seems to coincide with Jesus (‘Dearest of people, you the first-born’, although ‘first-born’ in the first place refers to the Creation in Genesis 1 of course). The conclusion is clear: light is ‘the Living One’s last word’, as the last sentence reads, and this suggests a transcendent origin of the light. There is, however, also a phrase that expresses an immanent character: ‘Light, child in me, see through my eyes…’. The object of this seeing is the dawning of a world ‘where justice reigns and peace is born’. The light within us enables us to see the beginning of the light outside, the dawn upon a world as is aimed for in the Scriptures. Because the Scriptures made us sensitive for that world, we are able to discern the signs of its coming, and therefore also to help its coming. This song is one of the most well known and widely sung hymns from the Oosterhuis-repertoire. That can also be said of ‘The Desert Shall Bloom’, like ‘Song to Light’ a hymn with three stanzas, composed by Antoine Oomen. Although ‘Song to Light’ is in a four-voiced arrangement, both songs can very well be performed in unison. It is a very joyous song based on the prophecies by Isaiah, about the return from exile. The first stanza sings about the water that shall spring up in the desert, the second stanza about the exiles who return rejoicing and bearing sheaves that were once sown in sadness, and the last stanza about the dead who will rise upon hearing a voice that will call them and seeing a beckoning hand. It is only this voice and this hand that introduces a notion of transcendence into the song. It may not be very emphatic, but this transcendent presence is crucial: it sets in motion not only what happens in this last stanza, but can be interpreted, with hindsight as it were, as the power that made everything in the first two stanzas possible as well. It is, by the way, typical for Oosterhuis that the tone of joyous, even triumphal hope, does not ignore the darker side of human existence. On the contrary, it is rooted in the knowledge of sorrow and pain, trusting that they will finally be overcome. In ‘Wake Your Power’ this same trust is to be found in the form of a prayer, an appeal. But here the active role of man is more prominent. ‘God here among us’ is identified as ‘Word freely given’, and in the antiphon it is asked ‘that we may hear you with heart and soul’. In the third stanza this line is resumed and amplified with ‘that we may live you’. In the ‘Song of the Holy Spirit’ it is not the ‘word’ but the Holy Spirit that is credited with this role. It is capable of reviving us, of thawing hearts of stone and restoring our shattered world. But to do so, it must find a home ‘in every human breast’.

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These short notes and few citations from some of the songs by Oosterhuis show the same movement that can be seen in the Eucharistic Prayers: a power with a transcendent source (God, the word, the Holy Spirit) can live inside us, enabling us to make this world a better one and to make the visions of a healed humanity come true. However, that even death may not be final then suggests that the effects of this power transcend reality as we know it.

CONCLUSION

I certainly do not mean to pinpoint the Oosterhuis texts on a single, unequivocal, cut-and-dried position somewhere in the range from radical transcendence to radical immanence. Ambiguity is a powerful prerogative of poetic language, and this liturgical poetry indeed renders the possibility of several interpretations simul- taneously. Yet the dominant trend of these texts as a whole could be mapped out as follows. God is transcendent: we can’t see Him, nor directly hear Him, He is eternal and beyond our comprehension. But He has made himself fully known to us in the man Jesus, who showed with his life and being how God is, and what our calling is: selfless love, justice, care for the defenseless. Although the hope that one day we will be able to be human in this sense is belied by everyday reality, the ritual of bread and wine nevertheless expresses that hope. By participating in the sharing of bread and wine the congregation pronounces its intention to act in such a way that it will become the body of Christ, thus bringing nearer, or even realizing, the new earth. Therefore it is a double movement, coming together in the person of Jesus: from God to man, and from man to God. The latter movement is a necessary condition for salvation, and it is here that this view deviates from the tradition of the church, which considers salvation as transcendently coming to us (and having already come to us in Christ). Oosterhuis thinks of salvation as something immanent: it is brought about by man and comes into being in this reality. But again it is this same reality that causes us to recognize that salvation will not be possible without a certain transcendent activity. Ele- ments that put this notion into words are unmistakably present in the Eucharistic Prayers and other liturgical texts by Huub Oosterhuis, but the emphasis clearly is on the human, therefore immanent, intentions and possibilities.

LITERATURE

Auf der Maur, H.-J., ‘Vier tafelgebeden van Huub Oosterhuis’, in: Goed of niet goed? Het eucharistisch gebed in Nederland II, Hilversum: Gooi en Sticht, 1978, 11-37. Davies, J.G. (Ed.), A new dictionary of liturgy and worship, London: SCM Press, 1986.

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Heusden, A. van, K. Kok & C. van der Ven (Eds.), Liedje dat ik niet kan laten: Ver- zamelde opstellen over de liederen van Huub Oosterhuis, Kampen: Gooi en Sticht, 2002. Kok, K., De vleugels van een lied: Over de poëtische liturgie van Huub Oosterhuis, Baarn: Ambo, 1990. Manders, H., ‘Het gevecht met de engel: Een beschouwing over In het voorbijgaan van Huub Oosterhuis’, in: Theologie en pastoraat 65 (1969), 122-130. Manders, H., ‘Jezus of Christus in het “hooggebed”? Een steekproef naar de christolo- gie in eucharistische gebeden’, in: Tijdschrift voor Theologie 13 (1973), 288-309. Oosterhuis, H., Open your hearts (transl. D. Smith), New York: Herder and Herder, 1971 (translation of In het voorbijgaan II, Baarn: Ambo, 1968). Oosterhuis, H., At times I see (transl. R. McGoldrick), New York: Seabury Press, 1974 (translation of Zien soms even, Baarn: Ambo, 1972). Oosterhuis, H., Prayers, poems & songs (transl. D. Smith), New York: Herder and Herder, 1976 (translation of In het voorbijgaan I, Baarn: Ambo, 1968). Oosterhuis, H., Liturgische gezangen I, Hilversum: Gooi en Sticht, 1979. Oosterhuis, H., Wake your power, Portland, OR: OCP Publications, 1994. Oosterhuis, H., Turn your heart to me, Portland, OR: OCP Publications, 1998. Oosterhuis, H., Verzameld liedboek, Kampen: Kok, 2004. Oosterhuis, H., ‘Een dienstknechtleven’, in: Maandbrief voor Leerhuis & Liturgie 15 (2010) no. 1/2, 4-5. Peelen, G.J., B. Siertsema & C. Stark (Eds.), Vechten en vieren: De spanning in het werk van Huub Oosterhuis, Zoetermeer: Meinema, 2003. Ryan, J.B., ‘Eucharistic prayers for contemporary men and women’, in: Studia Liturgica 11 (1976), 186-206. Stoker, W., ‘Culture and transcendence: Shifting religion and spirituality in philosophy, theology, art and politics’, in: W. Stoker & W. van der Merwe (Eds.), Looking beyond? Shifting views of transcendence in philosophy, theology, the arts, and politics, Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi (to appear in 2012). Wegman, H. (Ed.), Goed of niet goed? Het eucharistisch gebed in Nederland (2 vols.), Hilversum: Gooi en Sticht, 1976-1978. Wegman, H., ‘De liederen van Huub Oosterhuis over Jezus van Nazareth’, in: Tijd- schrift voor Theologie 19 (1979), 124-146.

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