Liturgy (Mid-week Reflection)

Liturgy

Many of you have heard that the Episcopal Church, like Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Lutheranism, is a liturgical church.  Many tend to think that this means simply that we use prepared scripts for our worship (in our case, texts primarily from the Book of Common Prayer), with congregational responses and set written prayers.  But the word liturgy itself means much more than working from a written script.   It comes from the Greek word leitourgia, which originally meant the duty or work one performed for the community at one’s own expense and then among Christians came to mean the duty or work of proper community worship.  It implies the worship through ritual (an established usage or form) and sacrament (an outward symbol that makes present inward realities).   

The great Benedictine liturgical scholar Aidan Kavanaugh was a key force in the New Liturgical Movement that brought about the renewal and updating of Roman Catholic and ecumenical worship forms in the mid- and late-20^th century.   Before his death in 2006, he compared good liturgy to a well-prepared and presented social function or meal with these words:   “The liturgy, like the feast, exists not to educate but to seduce people into participating in common [shared] activity of the highest order, where one is freed to learn things which cannot be taught.”   

Good liturgy should free our emotions, and trigger our imagination, and thereby produce insight.  The liturgical imagination is different from and in some ways broader than narrative or visual imagination.  It uses a broad variety of tools: the spoken word and story, repeated phrase, music, light, color, taste, movement and smell.  A simple part of all of this is posture.  The old rule for explaining all the ups and downs in Anglican worship runs this way:  we stand to praise (including singing), we sit to listen, and we kneel to pray.  And while old knees and constrained space may mean that at Trinity we stand at times when other Anglicans kneel, the rule generally holds true.  Through all these varied means, liturgy works on us, plays on our sense of identity and community, our reason and our emotions, and our sense of awe and beauty.  In so doing, it allows us to connect with the unseen world, and with those who have gone on before us. 

Liturgy is profoundly countercultural, and wonderfully transformative.  It is the reason, quite simply, that I love to “play Church.”     

--Father Tony+