Lessons in Liturgy from Dancing

  
At the end of the previous blog entry, I offered a question – how can a bona fide unity during worship happen for us unless corporate worship is something very like marching, or dancing? The answer, of course, is that something very like marching, or dancing, is required if one is to experience that kind of unity with others, whether in worship or any other enterprise where such unity is sought.

This is no mystery. People have been marching and dancing for millennia, individually and in groups. It is the latter kind of marching or dancing that interests us, for people can march individually (e.g. what you see soldiers doing at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington DC, or at a changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace), and people can dance individually, even if they are in the midst of a dancing crowd when doing so. In fact, the kind of dancing you’re most apt to see in a night club these days is that kind of dancing – the dancing which has all the unity of the pile of raked leaves. Yes, everyone’s out there on the floor, writhing, jerking, twisting, or quivering in some vague synchronization to a heavy beat blaring from megawatt speakers in the ceiling. But no one is doing the same dance, exactly the same dance, or their part in an orchestrated dance where each member has a part determined by the whole dance which unifies the dancers.

It is this latter kind of dancing that is comparable to the liturgy of worship. And, the first person to point this out to me was C. S. Lewis in his Letters to Malcom: Chiefly on Prayer. In the very first chapter of that little book, Lewis writes this:

It looks as if [Anglican clergymen] believed people can be lured to go to church by incessant brightenings, lightenings, lengthenings, abridgements, simplifications, and complications of the service. And it is probably true that a new, keen vicar will usually be able to form within his parish a minority who are in favor of his innovations. The majority, I believe, never are. Those who remain -many give up church going altogether-merely endure.

Is this simply because the majority are hidebound? I think not. They have a good reason for their conservatism. Novelty, simply as such, can have only entertainment value. And they don't go to church to be entertained. They go to use the service, or, if you prefer, to enact it. Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament or repent or supplicate or adore. And it enables us to do these things best - if you like, it 'works' best - when, through long familiarity, we don't have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don't notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of, our attention would have been on God.

There is much that could be unpacked in these comments, and I will no doubt return to them in later blogging (Malcom is the best simple primer on the liturgical mindset I’ve yet run across for popular readers). For now, I’ll merely point to the ways in which worship liturgy and dancing are alike.

Like dancing, liturgy subordinates our individuality to something greater than ourselves. This ought to be a no-brainer, but I mention it first to make a couple of points.

First, liturgy demands a subordination of the individual to the aims and actions of the group if the individual is to participate in the liturgy. Of course, you may attend a liturgy and not subordinate yourself to it. This was true for me the first time I entered an Episcopal church Rite One liturgy. You may attend a Viennese Ball and also not participate in that. Your presence is required for the liturgy (or the Viennese Ball), but your presence guarantees nothing about your participation.

To say that the liturgy “demands” your subordination does not signal coercion. No one is going to compel me to tread on the dance floor when I show up at the Plumber’s Ball in Vienna during Ball Season. In fact, I had better not go out onto the dance floor if I am not there to join the dance. Church liturgies are more gracious in this respect. It is perfectly acceptable to remain in your pew as a spectator while the others are joined in the liturgy.

Like dancing, liturgy does not obliterate the need for individual action. Said another way, liturgy (and dancing) are participatory – you must do something to participate in either. You can’t just sit (or stand) there. Even when the participants are simply sitting there (as, for example, during a sermon), their participation amounts to attending to the sermon. A dull sermonizer may cause you some difficulty, to be sure. It may be difficult to follow someone’s thought when it is wandering and incoherent (same for a woman following a clumsy male partner in a waltz). Or, the preacher may actually commit the equivalent to a dancer’s stepping on his partner’s toes, or guiding her into a passing table or chair.

Doing something with someone (or a whole lot of someones) always entails the potential for discombobulation when one of the someones does not deliver his part in a timely or competent manner. The point: everyone has some part to play, and if anyone’s part is not played well the net result will be a diminishing of the joint effort (whether it be worship, or dancing).

Like dancing, liturgy requires active and constant engagement by the worshipper. Not only must you do something in liturgy (or dancing, or marching), you must pay attention to what you are doing. You cannot sleep; you cannot let yourself multi-task on a psychological level, unless you want to embarrass not only yourself, but also many others. I mention this because some who don’t know what they’re talking about will criticize liturgy as dull and boring, as if it were done by robots. “Dead, dull liturgy” is the nasty name given to those who are worshipping liturgically by those who do not know how to worship at all. It’s like a man with no feet mocking the complex patterns of a marching band, or the elaborate intricacies of a Baroque minuet.

Like dancing, liturgy creates something greater than the sum of its parts. This is, perhaps, hard to appreciate unless you’ve participated in a dance that unites its members in something bigger than themselves. It doesn’t take a membership in a Metropolitan Ballet Company production to experience this. Square dancing, done well, shows the same dynamic. Even something so simple (and often so silly) as line dancing at a Country and Western Saloon will give you a hint of what I’m talking about here. Or, precise close-order drill on a military parade ground. Or, marching in the high school or college band during a half-time show. Watching these things will never substitute for being one of the marchers, or dancers, or worshippers.

Like dancing, liturgy enhances one’s own private experience. This principle of liturgy “works” only for those who know the liturgy so well that their attention is not wholly occupied with keeping themselves engaged. As Lewis put it, if you need to think every second where to put your foot next, you are not yet dancing – you are, instead, learning to dance, or practicing the dance you’ve learned. But, once the steps are known, known so well that your body fairly flows from one step to the next, then one may focus on one’s dancing partner. Or, on God (in the case of worshipping through a liturgy).

This principle (known by all good dancers, and all good worshippers) explodes the anti-liturgical myth that liturgy suffocates individual experience. Liturgy can be fun for exactly the same reasons dancing can be fun. Or, liturgy can stir your soul and reduce you to tears of grief (at your sins), or gratitude (for God’s grace), or joy (at the communion with God Himself). “Cold, dead worship” is another one of the canards bandied by those who do not know how to worship when speaking of those who worship liturgically.

I served as a chalice bearer for many years in Episcopal Eucharists. These occasions allowed me to survey the faces and deduce the demeanor of literally thousands of worshippers as they approach the Lord’s Table. I cannot recall ever seeing anyone I thought to be bored. A sizeable minority seemed genuinely shaken, or burdened by a weight of something which showed clearly in their faces, what old-time Baptist evangelists might have deduced as evidence that the man or woman was “under conviction.” Many more looked to be quietly joyous. Tears were not uncommon at all.

Speaking of tears, when my wife and I first began attending an Episcopal Church, we soon began to rate the services in terms of the number of tissues we used to wipe our eyes and to blow our noses. A three-hankie Sunday was pretty intense, and we experienced a few four and five hankie Sundays at the beginning. Why? My wife and I are not known to be emotional people in public. We’re not “criers” when we feel something strongly.

The best explanation I can offer is to compare ourselves at the beginning of our participation in liturgical worship to someone out-of-shape who joins an aerobics and calisthenics class at the YMCA. Nothing you do in that class is extraordinarily athletic; but, if you are out of shape, doing these unremarkable things gives you aches and pains in places where you didn’t know you had places. In general, strong emotion will make you cry when your spirit is too weak to sustain the emotional impact of some event. Tears are a kind of safety valve, a way to bleed off a dangerous excess of emotional response – and, any emotion can produce such tears. We may cry at excessive joy as well as from excessive fear, or anxiety, or grief, or gratitude, or (paradoxically) from excessive relief. Lift a crushing weight of guilt from a sinner and he will likely cry – not because it “hurts” to be forgiven, but because he is unaccustomed to the welter of emotions that attend a certain pardon from things lying on his conscience, things which he fears may sometime see the light of day.

Liturgy does not suppress emotion. Rather, liturgy generates emotion by the way it focuses the worshipper’s attention on any number of divinely sanctioned truths, and applies those truths to the worshipper’s own soul and situation. The result is frequently emotional, sometimes massively so.

Like dancing, liturgy creates the occasion for truly individual expression. Again, good dancers will know this, and even those who merely observe dancing will see that this is true. The best dancer is the one who never misses a single step or beat, and whose movement through the dance is festooned with small details idiosyncratic to the dancer himself.

C. S. Lewis, in fact, used the word “festoon” to describe how set prayers – those things which the cramped anti-liturgical soul thinks to be confining – are actually powerful generators of individual expression in prayer. In the fifth chapter of Letters to Malcom, Lewis introduces a discussion of these festoonings:

I don’t very much like the job of telling you “more about my festoonings” – the private overtones I give to certain petitions. … I call them “festoons,” by the way, because they don’t (I trust) obliterate the plain, public sense of the petitions but are merely hung on it.

Lewis then goes on to expound the festoons he attaches to phrases of the Lord’s Prayer. As we read Lewis’ discussion, we find discover that the Lord’s Prayer – prayed repeatedly in worship service after worship service over the years of his Christian pilgrimage – has occasioned a complex development of Lewis’ own spiritual maturity. Consider, for example, Lewis’ comments on “Thy will be done:”

My festoons on this have been added gradually. At first I took it exclusively as an act of submission, attempting to do with it what Our Lord did in Gethsemane. I thought of God’s will purely as something that would come upon me, something of which I should be the patient. And I also thought of it as a will which would be embodied in pains and disappointments. … This interpretation is, I expect, the commonest. And so it must be. And such are the miseries of human life that it must often fill our whole mind. But at other times other meanings can be added. So I added one more.

The petition, then, is not merely that I may patiently suffer God’s will but also that I may vigorously do it. I must be an agent as well as a patient. I am asking that I may be enabled to do it. In the long run I am asking to be given “the same mind which was also in Christ.”

… But more than that, I am at this very moment contemplating a new festoon. Tell me if you think it a vain subtlety. I am beginning to feel that we need a preliminary act of submission not only towards possible future afflictions but also towards possible future blessings. I know it sounds fantastic; but think it over. It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good. Do you know what I mean?

Are these the thoughts of someone whose repeated praying of exactly the same words hundreds and hundreds of times has put him in a rut? Quite the contrary.

What we see in Lewis’ experience with praying the Lord’s prayer – and this will be true of one’s use of any part of the liturgy, not just the prayers – is a paradox which only liturgy possesses: the more complex and “set” the liturgy, the greater the room for individual embellishment by the participant in the liturgy. Lewis’ festoons are like small improvisations in a dance, improvisations which demand for their context the stability of the liturgy they festoon. An accomplished artist knows that improvisation has the greatest effect when the strictures of art are slavishly followed. The most thorough-going compliance to standards affords the greatest freedom for novelty. The liturgy-impoverished soul will never understand this. It is like asking a blind man to appreciate how three colors – and only three colors – afford the possibility of zillions of colors.

Like dancing, liturgy only gets better the more you do it. On April 15, 1751, Peter Manigault in London wrote to his mother back home in Charleston, South Carolina. He was learning the minuet, and this is what he wrote:

I have learned to dance almost six Months, & as I have a great Inclination to be a good Dancer, am resolved to continue learning a few Months longer, I am to go pretty often this Summer to an assembly at Chelsea, in Order to compleat myself in that genteel Science. I have been three or four times this Winter, at an Assembly at Mileud: the first time I danced a Minuet in public, my Knees trembled in such a Manner, that I thought, I should not have been able to have gone through with it, however by taking all Opportunities of dancing in Public, I have got over that foolish Bashfulness. [see endnote 1 below].

I certainly felt that way the first time I attended a thoroughly liturgical service. First, I watched attentively for several weeks. The “dance steps” of Anglican worship were easy from the pew (stand to praise, sit for instruction, kneel to pray). And, the other “steps” were not difficult to execute: genuflecting, bowing, making the sign of the cross in two different ways, depending on where in the liturgy one was. Timing seemed tricky at first. I could not anticipate where the next occasion for bowing or crossing oneself would occur; but, it was no big deal to simply copy what others were doing around me a second or so after they did it. It was very much like learning to waltz by mimicking walzers, though easier. And, of course, the Prayer Book was a huge help. There were the words we all used for our prayers, for our praises, for out adoration, for confessing our sins, for receiving absolution, and so on.

Still, it all felt so weird to someone reared in Southern Baptist Spartan spirituality. It made me feel very self-conscious at first. But what worked for Peter Manigault worked for me. Taking every opportunity to worship with others who were comfortable with liturgical worship soon had me “over that foolish Bashfulness.” It simply took me a while to get my eyes off myself (no one else around me cared two figs, which was another lump for me to digest).

And, now it all feels as comfortable as a well-broken in pair of shoes. And, all the blessings described above (and many more to be described later) are mine, routinely.

[1] http://www.colonialmusic.org/Resource/howtoMIN.htm, from Mabel Webber, “Peter Manigault’s Letters” [to his mother in Charleston, SC] The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 31/3 (July, 1930), 277.

The Unity of Raked Leaves& A Marching Platoon

 

When I was a young pastor, fresh out of seminary and merrily engaged in the care of my first flock, I ran smack into a problem which eventually brought me to the flock I am now beginning to shepherd 25 years later. After a 25-year long false start, I’m starting over again.

The reason is very simple, and I think I can expound it in the next 26 paragraphs. That it should take a quarter century for me to write these few hundred words is telling – you decide what it tells. I’m going to explain what I wish I had known back then. It would have saved me a lot of time, and at this time of life, I feel cheated that those 25 years are long spent and unrecoverable.

About half-way through that first pastorate (it lasted four years), I was sitting at a table with the congregation’s elders, analyzing a problem – or at least what I perceived to be a problem. While our congregation was not wracked with dissension or party spirits or schism, neither were we united. The elders didn’t agree with my assessment (mostly because they didn’t understand what I was trying to explain), so I resorted to an image.

“Men, when we assemble on Sunday mornings, we have all the unity of a pile of raked leaves. We are together in one place, and so are the leaves. And, it’s usually the same thing or things have brought us or the leaves to one place. But, that’s just about it. We are connected, for a little while, by place and not by much else. Even when we’re all doing the same thing (like singing a hymn), I think a good number of us are still acting as lone rangers, along with all the other lone rangers in the room around us.”

Their uncomprehending stares frustrated me, for I knew I had gone just about as far as I was able to go in explaining what we lacked during our Sunday morning worship together. And, trying to describe what is not there is about as difficult a task as you could choose. I needed some other analogy, a positive one, positive in the sense of setting forth a genuine exemplar of what I wished we could achieve as Christians gathered to worship the Triune God of the Bible.

I actually had such an analogy, but I didn’t use it. It wasn’t a religious one (well, okay; neither is the pile of raked leaves), but worse, it was a kind of mystical experience I would be pointing to, one I feared they might not appreciate, one I feared they had never experienced themselves, and (worst of all) one which I feared they might scoff at.

Let me share it here, however, because you are not one of my elders and if you think I’m cracked, I’ll survive that just fine.

I reported for boot camp in San Diego California, at the United States Marine Corps Recruit Depot on October 12, 1968. Placed into a platoon of 72 skin-headed, confused, and terrified slimeballs, we quickly found our psyches being systematically dismantled by the Drill Instructor, before he endeavored to re-assemble us into something useful for the Marine Corps and its missions overseas. Among the few, foundational ideas he strove to pound into our thick skulls was this one: our identity derives from the team to which we belong (in this case, the training platoon). We must never think of ourselves individually, but only in terms of the team, in terms of the unit, a unit to which we made a contribution (obviously), but nevertheless a team which gave us far more in terms of identity than the other way round.

Training us in this idea had utterly ignored our intellect – rather, it proceeded via gutsy, frequently painful, deliberately painful trials. We ate together, we slept together (yes, separate bunks, but into our bunks the same instant, and out them the same way). We showered and shaved together, we laundered our clothes together, we defecated and urinated together, as a group, never individually. We attended class together, got our shots together, received and read mail together, polished shoes together, cleaned our rifles together. I cannot remember doing anything, ever, which was not also being done by all 72 of us at the same time.

When we failed, we were punished together. No, that’s not right – when one of us failed, we all were punished together. And, there was no praise, no reward, unless it was earned by everyone together – which meant we went many, many weeks without praise, or reward.

Now, a momentary digression – the unity we seek with one another in worship does not need to be achieved through the tools available to the drill sergeant in the Marine Corps, although I will note in passing that shared suffering produces much unity, among both Marines and the saints. I am resorting to my boot camp memories for three reasons: (1) it was expressly designed to forge a unity of identity and action among us thoroughly individualistic recruits; (2) this goal was pursued by constant and never-relenting focus on unity of action; and (3) our abiding failure to be unified produced a hungering and a thirsting for unity that became voracious.

A crisis arrived one evening at about the two-thirds mark in our 16 week training. By this time we had learned enough of the basic “steps” and movements of marching to stagger through a miserable parody of parade drill, a parody because our bumbling lack of precision was highlighted at each and every step, miserable because every time 72 heels struck the pavement we could 72 thuds, compacted together in time but still distinguishable from one another.

We had marched and marched and marched, night after night after supper, while our drill instructor sang a gravelly cadence, richly interspersed with long, blisteringly profane denunciations of our marching as a mob instead of marching as a single man. It was mid-November and the parade ground was dark. There was no moon, and the distant lights emphasized the murkiness through which we plodded, 72 sputtering heels, accompanied by the acrid scorn of the DI’s cadence.

We were all near to drowning in despair when a miracle happened. Like a rifle shot, all 72 right heels struck the darkened parade ground the same instant. It was followed by an anguished mushy muffle of 72 left heels hitting the same asphalt in 72 different slivers of time. But 72 hearts had leapt out 72 chests to hear that single sole slap the pavement. The hair on our ears prickled. And, then it happened again. Just once. But we heard it, and it was a noise we had made. A single unmuffled crack. Seventy-two hearts were near to bursting with longing.

Again. Crack.
And again. Crack.
And again. Crack.
And again. Crack.

The drill instructor’s voice was silent. We were in the darkest part of the parade ground, heading into the inky blackness of a thick stand of trees that shaded any light from the distant horizon. We didn’t care. We weren’t watching. We were listening as if our lives depended on whether or not the next sound was a Crack. Crack. Crack. We hoped it would never stop.

And, then we heard a sound that truly pierced our hearts with a joy so strong it scalded us. Low, from the rear of the platoon, the Drill Instructor’s low, lilting voice began to sing cadence over the sound of the blows drumming on the pavement. Softly at first, as if anxious to disturb something so fragile as the sound of 72 heels striking the ground in a single, sharp cracking slap. But we had it. At long last it was ours, and there was no way we would turn loose of it.

And so his voice grew stronger, fuller; long, insistent phrases flowing, skipping above the confident crack, crack, crack. Until he was in full song, a powerful, coursing current of gorgeous, manly syllables with no meaning other than to crown the metronomic crack, crack, crack of 72 heels marching as one.

We made a duet in the dark. And we marched like that, and he sang like that for an hour or more. We’d have joyfully marched all night. The next day we learned that all of us had lain awake in our bunks long after taps had faded, savoring the solitary booming beat we no longer heard with our ears, relishing the unity we no longer felt in our feet.

So, …

That’s what I didn’t tell my elders twelve years later. I wasn’t sure they’d understand. The unity of a pile of raked leaves – surely that was accessible. And whether they concurred with the light esteem I gave such unity, they probably understood what I was pointing to.

But, the unity of a marching platoon – that marching platoon – well, I could not have borne their scoffing or jesting about the most electric engagement of unity that I had, up to that point, ever experienced. If I thought I could have gotten away with it, I’d have related to them what I have just finished describing. I remember it as if it had happened last night, instead of 25 years ago. And, to aspire to something at least that wonderful when gathered with the saints in their union with Jesus and their worship of the Father with Him in the unity of His Spirit – well, that may be asking a lot, but surely it is not asking for anything out of the ordinary for Christians.

How do 30 or 50 or 150 or 500 souls pray as one, praise as one, confess as one the faith once given to them, and not to them only but to all the saints? Whatever else the communion of saints means, might it also point to a unity that not only transcends a multitude of souls gathered in one place, but also transcends the multitude that cannot be numbered, that mighty army, terrible with banners, marching down the centuries of time?

How does that happen for us? How can it happen, unless there is something more among us than the unity of a pile of raked leaves? Something which happens very like a marching platoon? Or a multitude dancing?

Liturgy as Poison

  
Finally, I’ve gotten this finished! Its delay had nothing to do with the difficulty of the subject matter, which is as plain as the miter on a bishop.

So, here’s a lesson on liturgy from a car wreck …

As a teenager, my aunt was traveling across the Mojave Desert with other family members one evening 50 years ago. In those days, the traffic across the desert at night was pretty thin. Rare even. In the middle of nowhere, a blowout at a most inopportune spot sent the car careening off the road into a desert wash.

No one was killed. All but my aunt were banged up and unconscious. My aunt, however, was merely pinned in the wreckage. The car did not burn, fortunately, but that also meant it was totally dark. And, the horn was blowing. It kept blowing until the battery was exhausted. That probably took over an hour, maybe longer. No one knows, for no one but my aunt was able to hear it.

And, she doesn’t want to remember it. When everyone was rescued, my aunt was relatively uninjured in body, but pretty well brutalized in her mind (by the car horn). For months thereafter, the sound of a car horn blowing would provoke her to uncontrollable crying. For years, she experienced what today are called anxiety attacks, always prompted by the blowing of a car horn, especially a long, steady blow on a car horn.

No one needs a Ph.D. in psychology to understand why car horns (in themselves, innocent things) provoked such powerful negative emotions in my aunt. For her, for the reasons described, car horns became a kind of poison, a toxic trigger, a sensate experience welded to a horrible situation. We have all heard about such things, and perhaps you have your own equivalent.

I know Christians with this kind of problem, except it’s not a car horn, but religious liturgy which provokes all the negative emotions. For them, liturgy is poison.

Of course, liturgy cannot be poisonous, any more than a car horn. But, (as my aunt’s experience demonstrates) it can sure facilitate the effects of something poisonous. Exactly how it does so takes a bit more explaining, more than I intend to go into in this blog entry (more about that when I talk about sacramental dynamics later). For now, however, I simply want to make this point: whether for good or ill, liturgy leaves a brand on us, and that brand is very difficult (perhaps, in some cases, impossible) to remove.

“Branding” is a harsh term, and so it’s not useful to denote the ways that all of us are “branded” by things in our lives which amount to liturgy, and which we would call liturgy, except that these “liturgical” occasions in our lives are not really religious in nature, and do not have the worship of God as their purpose. Consider Thanksgiving Day dinner, for example. Or birthday observances, or national holidays (the Fourth of July in America will do for an example). The observance of these holidays marks us every bit as much as a branding iron would, and the effects are there for us to see, even if others cannot.

My wife, born on December 26, never feels like it is her birthday unless she gets a present to mark that particular day. It makes no difference that Christmas was an occasion for gift giving – that was to honor (even if only mistily) God’s gift of Jesus to the world. To mark her birthday, it takes a gift for her, for that day.

Or consider the birthday cake. Like me, my wife’s birthday is “off” if there is no cake to mark the occasion. One holiday when she was a teenager, she was in the home of a matron whose Christmas celebration included the making of cakes. My wife relates that this matron baked 11 cakes – each one of them a different kind. As family and friends circulated through her home, the cakes were offered to her guests. Here’s the interesting thing – amidst the abundance of cakes, my wife felt her birthday was diminished, because not a single one of those cakes was ever designated as “hers,” the cake to mark her birthday.

We can multiply these kinds of examples all day. Unless our childhoods were utterly chaotic, they possessed a variety of rhythms, connected to festal occasions. And the repeated observance of those occasions, in the company of other family members (often, with neighbors thrown in for extra fun), helped to shape our identities, our expectations of the future, our social equilibrium, our sense of home, our sense of place, our perspective on everything from ants to angels. We are social creatures, and the rituals by which social life proceeds – birthdays, other anniversaries, seasonal experiences, weddings, funerals, baptisms, annual outings to the mountains, or the beach, or to family reunions (the possibilities go on and on and on) – all these “cultural liturgies” form a matrix that creates, shapes, and sustains our identities as human beings.

Now, against this background, let’s narrow our focus to things religious, things that might more obviously be called “Christian liturgy.” And let us consider a certain kind of Christian (I know several personally) …

Benjamin was reared in a Roman Catholic family. His parents faithfully took him to mass every Sunday. It was a pre-Vatican II mass, so it didn’t have the features which make traditional Catholics today groan and mutter curses under their breath. Benjamin was not rebellious as a boy, or a teenager. However, he also was not engaged at any spiritual level with the masses he attended. There were forms aplenty (genuflecting at the pew before entering, signing oneself with the cross at certain points in the liturgy, receiving the host from the priest), but they were by and large empty of meaning.

In college, Benjamin met a campus minister from Campus Crusade for Christ. He was vibrantly enthusiastic about his faith, he exuded confidence in Christ and the gospel, he fearlessly witnessed to his faith to unbelievers (including Benjamin), and Benjamin’s heart was captured. He made a profession of faith in Christ at a rally held in a large private dorm next to the campus. The Crusade staff member took Benjamin as his own disciple, tutored him in the rudiments of the Christian faith, trained him to share his faith with others, and brought Benjamin along with him as he ministered to others and shared the gospel with unbelieving students. Benjamin grew in his faith; he kept growing after he departed the campus. Benjamin is, today, a committed Christian husband, father, and church leader.

And, Benjamin hates liturgy.

When Benjamin visits his mother’s Catholic church he gets the willies. When Benjamin visits a high-church Anglican service, he gets the willies. When Benjamin visits a nondenominational church that sprinkles a bit of liturgy into its worship service (say, for example, the antiphonal reading of a psalm), Benjamin gets the willies. Benjamin avoids liturgical services if he has a chance to do so.

For Benjamin, liturgy is poison. Why?

I knew people like Benjamin before I ever understood why. Almost all of them were former Roman Catholics. Or, former Orthodox. Or, former Episcopalians. Or, former Lutherans. They were all from Christian traditions that have a pronounced commitment to liturgy as a form of worship. Another common feature is this: they all came to a saving, living faith in Jesus outside their cradle Christian communions. And, finally, they all judged the liturgical forms of their cradle communions to be the reason why they never came to faith in Christ. The murky liturgy – murky because it was never explained, never expounded – is often viewed by these kinds of Christians as a positive hindrance to understanding the gospel.

Sometimes, it is another factor which sets one against these traditional forms of Christian piety and worship. Consider, for example, the following statement by a choral director that appears in a blog where the subject is the role of the choir master to the pastor of a congregation:

Church polity, especially that of the Anglicans and Romans, is, for some narcissistic types, an open invitation to abuse the staff. Many a musician has been summarily fired for no good reason, to feed the inflated ego of “Herr Pastor”. I personally do not intend ever again to work in the Anglican church — the church of my childhood — because of their polity, which is very much like “the Divine Right of Kings”. Yes, the pastor does and should have the final word, but that does NOT give him the right to abuse the musicians — passive-aggressive games, etc.

Now, a question: what do experiences like this tell us about Christian liturgy? Before I give an answer, here are some illegitimate answers:

Liturgy is bad for you. I reject this out of hand, because liturgy is the creature of God Himself. Whatever else you say about the Old Testament system of worship, it is robustly liturgical. To suppose that God mandated a method of worship that was intrinsically toxic to one’s spirit is simply wrong-headed.

Liturgy is meaningless mumbo jumbo. I wonder about this. Certainly, an unexplained liturgy might reduce to meaningless mumbo jumbo. And, I have no doubt that a chronic avoidance of explanation lies behind many cases of “toxic” liturgy.

But, suppose you are an alien from Planet Zorg, equipped with an invisibility shield and a little thingy in your ear that automatically translates any alien language into something you can understand. You teleport to earth, materializing (invisibly, remember) beside a man leading a goat by a leash to another man, robed in white, who stands with a large knife beside a pile of wood. The man with the goat puts his hands on the goat’s head and begins to say things like “I have lied to my boss, I have stolen from my brother, I cursed God and man when I ought to have given thanks.” He steps back, and the man with a knife slits the animal’s throat. Its blood pours onto the ground. He heaves the carcass onto the pile of wood, and the whole thing is ignited. The goat-bringer and the goat-slayer stand and watch until nothing but ashes remain. Then the goat-slayer turns and says “Go in peace, my son. The Lord has forgiven you.”

Strange to your alien ears and experience? Let’s suppose so.

Beyond comprehension? Not at all, especially after meditation on what you have seen and heard. Especially after you have seen this enacted over and over. Your understanding may never be complete without a teacher; but, it is poppycock to suppose you cannot puzzle out something authentic about the meaning of the ritual you have observed.

And this very ritual, or several of them fundamentally similar to it, is a staple of Old Testament spirituality. The point: even without instruction, the meaning of the liturgy is not impossible to see, at least in its outlines. And, of course, God made provision for instruction by scattering the Levites throughout all the cities of Israel, rather than giving them a territory to themselves.

If the liturgy of one’s cradle communion is opaque, it is no fault of the liturgy. And, it is not the fault of liturgy that its observers abide in ignorance of its meaning. My children were always asking me, “Daddy, why do we kneel before entering the pew? Why do we bow when the cross passes down the aisle? Why does the priest say ‘The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation’?”

Blaming liturgy for your ignorance of the meaning of liturgy is like blaming your scurvy on oranges because no one ever explained the nutritional value of Vitamin C.

Liturgy hides the truth of the gospel. Liturgy confuses the truth of the gospel. These are the same or different criticisms, depending on whether the critic thinks there is any shred of the gospel buried in the liturgy he criticizes. But, both are contradicted by the simple fact that liturgy, when it is informed and shaped by the Biblical revelation, is the surest way to lodge the gospel firmly in the heart of the Christian. Christian life begins with a liturgy – baptism. Christian life is sustained by a liturgy – the Eucharist. And, if it is a liturgy that follows the shape of the Christian worship in all places through all the ages (excepting certain backwaters of the Reformation), the Christian liturgy of worship will exercise the Christian spirit in a wide array of spiritually wholesome, spiritually edifying, spiritually maturing behaviors – prayer, confession of sin, confession of faith, praise, sacrifice, thanksgiving, intercession for others, receiving the Word of God, learning doctrine, finding correction, being equipped for the work of ministry. All these things are done, and done best, when done with, in, and through liturgy. The particulars I will expound in later blog entries.

What, then, do we learn about liturgy from those who are allergic to it? Just this: liturgy is incredibly powerful to shape the faith of the soul who encounters it. From those for whom liturgy is a poison, we learn that this power can work for ill as well as for good. And, paradoxically, for some unfortunate Christians (and, of course, I judge them to be very unfortunate indeed), their very aversion to liturgy is a pungent testimony to liturgy’s power to fix belief into a matrix that is very stable, and probably unalterable (except, perhaps, through very severe trauma). In their case, their encounter with liturgy has inoculated them against liturgy. Their lot is like the man who saw so little of value with his eyes that he poked them out with a stick, and then judged that those with eyes were seeing only deceitful mirages.

Can one live without eyes? Of course. I have a friend who is blind from birth. He understands on one level that he is handicapped; but, he does not mourn for having never seen a rose. He and I know that one day he will see a rose, and much more than a rose. And, by God’s grace, he is patient to await that restored vision.

I have friends who have eyes that, nevertheless, do not see. They do not see the things liturgy would show them, they do not receive what liturgy could impart. Where others see grace, and beauty, and heavenly glory, they see only confused mumbo jumbo. I know that one day they will see the grace and beauty and glory, for they will join the Church Triumphant in those luxuriantly liturgical courts of heaven and its worship around the Throne of the Lamb.

Can I help them enjoy a foretaste of the world to come? I honestly do not know.

Unworking the mysterious works of liturgy on the Christian soul is a puzzle I do not know how to solve. But, the intractability of this puzzle convinces me that liturgy is not a game, nor a dilettante’s pastime.