Episcopal Church Foundation Vital Practices - Blogs

October 1, 2012

R U a Rule Keeper or Breaker?

How can something change if we don't occasionally bend the rules?

I have friends who are quite passionate about grammar. I was reminded of this last week, when I was copyediting an essay and, in a moment of frustration, I posted something about the emdash on Facebook. I received an immediate response from a flurry of grammar-loving friends. I care about sentence construction and can diagram a sentence pretty well, but I know people who take pleasure in knowing the ins and outs of the Chicago Manual of style. I am not one of those people, but I am glad they exist.

In some ways, these grammar-advocate friends of mine reminded me of my friends who are liturgists, who know the rubrics in the prayer book by heart and can name all the linens. These rubrics and the canons are a little like punctuation, helping us make sense of the liturgy, giving us guidelines for doing it well. We should trust them, and we should think hard before we break them.

I am also grateful for those who break the rules: poets, for example, and those who like to experiment with new liturgies. It seems to me that grammar is not unlike the church in this way. There are those who feel strongly about the guidelines and those who ignore them, and they are both necessary.

How can something (our language, or our church) change and grow if we don’t occasionally bend the rules? Conversely, what would happen if no one cared about the rules? Before long we’d become disconnected from our past and all the work those before us had done.

Theologically, we also need the keepers of the faith and the heretics: People who strive for a systematic and consistent theology, and those who care more about experience than consistency.

This works best if both groups are acting thoughtfully. I have friends who seem to have rejected the idea of punctuation altogether, but in reality they just don’t think about the fact that if you don’t use a period to separate sentences no one can understand you. Thoughtlessness is not the same as experimentation.

Most of us, of course, live somewhere in between, knowing most of the rules, breaking many accidentally. Those who are not particularly passionate about the rules (whether they be grammatical or liturgical or theological) should respect and appreciate those who have a gift them. Those who are sticklers should try and understand that not everyone feels as strongly (or has a mind for that sort of thing), and some people even enjoy disregarding the guidelines now and then, and that’s sometimes a good thing.

We don’t all have to care deeply about the rules, and we don’t all have to transgress them, but we should be grateful for the liturgists and systematic theologiansthose who do to keep us mindful of our history and help us communicate clearly and for those who experiment and break the rules and help us grow.