Monthly Archives: May 2007

Why liturgy?

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Why liturgy?

So that I can learn how to speak; and pray; and praise.

So that I can be taught the truth.

So that I can be shaped by the church; so that I can be made into a disciple.

“When you pray, do this….”

“Do this, in remembrance…”

So that the centre of gravity does not lie in my own feelings and vocabulary but in the expression of the church.

It is not important how I feel when I say ‘Glory be to the Father…’; nor is it important how wholeheartedly I believe what I say. It is a question of obedience – feelings and thought will ebb and flow in my life, but the persistence of discipleship is primarily manifested through obedience.

There are times of walking in the desert. There are also times of entry into the promised land. The point is to maintain the faith and trust in the pillar of fire and pillar of cloud, whether it is day or night within me.

Liturgy assumes a) that I don’t yet know all that I need to know about Christianity, and b) that the church has learnt some of what it needs to know about Christianity. Liturgy is how that learning is passed on, and developed.

Liturgy is properly pluriform, fluid, and evolutionary.

Liturgy is a whole body activity; when done correctly, liturgy is also an ecstatic, out-of-body activity.

There is no greater tyranny than the tyranny of choice. I need to fall in with something that is more important than my own perspectives, within which I can find myself. Anything that I feel competent to choose is automatically diminished by that assessment.

Liturgy is the spacious room in which the Lord has set my feet.

Liturgy is mystery.

Tiredness and judgement

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I’m in the process of uploading an audio recording of my Learning Church talk on Saturday, which is the first in a planned sequence of four on Holy Communion. However, one of the things that I am feeling rather strongly is that I’m going to need to spend the first ten minutes or so of the next one unpicking part of what I said, in that I think it’s a mistake to use the language of ‘literal’ when talking about the bread being the body etc. (More on which next week!)

This is just one example of a number over the last few days where I feel my judgement has been slightly off. The most comical one came when taking the family off to a birthday party in the woods, and I went in completely the wrong direction, which caused various delays and mild panics. More serious is that I might have caused offence in certain quarters by writing something in preparation for an important meeting that got sent out in less-than-usually edited form, and that might have consequences.

The explanation is that the journey back from Wales normally takes 8 or 9 hours, most of which is driving at high speed on the motorway. We normally come back a day early from the holiday so that I have a day or so to recover and re-acclimatise. The trouble this time was that I was so wired about this meeting (which I hadn’t planned to take place so soon after my return from holiday, and which was highly ‘political’) that I woke up at 5am on the first morning back and spent a few hours writing up the paper; and then had a fairly full day doing all the mundane jobs of getting back into the saddle, like mowing the back lawn.

All of which means that after only a few days back I am once more feeling absolutely shattered! I’m sure it’s nothing that a few good nights sleep won’t sort out, but even so – it’s a bit worrying. I think I need to take these bodily limits more seriously when I’m planning things. I don’t want the misjudgements to escalate.