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In my seminary time I didn't have the opportunity to do any extra liturgical studies. My working in liturgy and talking about liturgy comes from my experience, and also from being a liturgical person to my bones. As a child, I was shaped by the secular "liturgical year," those major feasts of Back to School and Halloween and Thanksgiving, with all their symbols and attendant rites: new pencils and notebooks and a fresh pack of paper and maybe a haircut and shopping for new shoes (saddle-shoes!); pumpkin-carving and making a costume and trick-or-treating; turkey with all the trimmings and a school play about the pilgrims and football on TV—and so on. When I encountered the church's liturgical year I felt immediately at home in that rhythm of moving through the ordinary and marking extraordinary times within it, having something new told to you about your life in the course of moving through those repeated seasons and feasts. I'm not a musician; I think I have a useful musical sensibility and perhaps some teachability. Most of the music I enjoy (just to confess) is contemporary interpretation of the eras in which I grew up and have lived, so I listen to Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Alison Krause, Guy Clark, Tom Waits, Paul Simon, Compay Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrar, Billie Holiday, Keith Jarrett. I listen to rock, to jazz, to bluegrass, and now to organ and choral music, which I discovered once I came into the church. I also hope I've learned something from knowing Christ a little bit, as he makes himself known to me in my own prayer and in the wrestling of my daily living, and also as he reveals himself in the liturgy. So that's what I bring to this ministry, along with a deep sense, probably coming from my experience of emptiness and conversion, that liturgy really matters. That liturgy is our approach to God at God's invitation and God's urging, a venturing, a daring to venture toward the Holy, who is utterly unknowable and unreachable but who draws near to us and is as intimately present within us as our own breath. That liturgy is making us church and forming us as the body of Christ, shaping us in God's image, the image in which we were made and the image into which we need to be transformed. Liturgy is inward and outward engagement. In a high Anglo-Catholic liturgy you sink to your knees, and if you're aware of anyone else it may only be because they are singing next to you. My first experience of liturgy was as individual piety in a group context, but I've come to understand liturgy as a corporate endeavor. God calls people into community; liturgy is our communal engagement with God as a hoping and yearning and sinful and forgiven and celebrating and creating and life-journeying people. Liturgy reveals God—it is a place of God's self-disclosure and self-giving; it reveals the church (us!) and who we are; it reveals the kingdom (or not, depending on what's going on in the liturgy and in us)—but, liturgy is truly revealing of whatever is really going on. Liturgy speaks a word of truth, engages us in being and doing God's truth. Liturgy is God's justice making over the world. In our doing of worship, the people of God are being transformed for the sake of the transformation of the world. In eucharistic terms, just as the bread is taken and blessed and broken and given in the liturgy for our life, what we are enacting in the liturgy is our own being taken and blessed and broken and given for the life of the world. So liturgy really matters. It really, really matters. |
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