Liturgy: Praxis & Pistis

A record of the evolving understanding of Christian liturgy by an ordinary Christian who came to faith among the 20th Century great-grandsons of Ulrich Zwingli. Having left his cradle faith for more sacramental and liturgical climes (yet, still within classic Protestanism), Brother Quotidian seeks to understand the impact of liturgy on Christian spirituality and maturity, and to engage the critical comments, suggestions, and contributions to his quest from others he encounters on the same road.

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Location: North Texas, United States

A Christian since 1970, married since 1981, four-time father; vocational Christian minister; and, currently a priest in the United Anglican Church.

Thursday, May 27, 2004

Lessons on Liturgy from Baptists

First a few disclaimers, so no one misunderstands my attitude toward Baptists in this essay.

1. I came to saving faith in a Baptist context. It was the Baptists who taught me the simplest version of the gospel, who taught me who Jesus is, why he came into the world as a true human male, what he was doing on the cross, and how his sacrifice there atoned for my sins. They taught me how his work on the cross redeems me from all my sins, and that his resurrection is a pledge of the resurrection which awaits me at his return to the earth. They baptized me in water (by immersion, of course) in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

In all of this, the Baptists were (and, for the most part, continue to be) good catholics. And while we’re on the topic of catholics, you must never overlook the capitalization or lack thereof when I use this word. I know what I’m writing, and I know how to write it. You should take care to note what you’re reading.

2. I kept my Baptist treasures, for they are (as far as they go) the treasures of catholic Christianity. When I departed Baptist ecclesiastical culture for other climes, I was not running away from something evil or perverse; and – this is very important to keep in mind as you read what follows – I took most anything of spiritual value with me when I departed. I needed and sought something that was not found among my Baptist ancestors; but, that means nothing about the good things found among them then (and now as well).

Are Baptists Liturgical?

So, how do I come to point to my Baptist beginnings as containing the earliest roots of sacramental spirituality and liturgical worship which now characterize my Christian faith? Aren’t the Baptists known for eschewing these things? For repudiating these things? Aren’t Baptists as liturgical as Communists are capitalist?

Well, yes and no. Part of the problem here is that Baptists are actually as liturgical as acorns are oak trees. You’ll find as many bells and smells (in the high-church Anglican sense of that idea) in a Baptist church as you’ll find acorns in a lumber yard. But, if you puzzle anything out about the lumber, you might just find yourself backtracking its history all the way to a stand of trees shading a mass of grass which is thick with acorns, some destined to become trees themselves.

What is Liturgy?

Let’s drop the metaphors and get to one of the points here – the word “liturgy” and what it often connotes in these discussions. Dictionary.com gives the following definitions of the word:

1. A prescribed form or set of forms for public religious worship.
2. The sacrament of the Eucharist.

The second definition is pregnant with unmentioned details which could be elaborated – the kinds of things you’d see, hear, touch, smell, and taste if you participated in a routine Anglican, or Roman Catholic, or Orthodox Eucharistic celebration. And, none of this, certainly not in the forms you’d find in those communions, would ever appear in a standard Baptist worship service.

The first definition, however, “works” just as well for a high pontifical mass as it does for the closing service at a revival at First Baptist Church in Needles, California (where I saw a number of such services as a boy). In this sense, Baptists – or, at least, this or that Baptist congregation – have a liturgy. All liturgies, from pontifical high masses to Baptist Sunday morning services, will have some variation in minor details, but the “shape of the liturgy” will be standard, and some elements in the liturgy are almost mandatory. In my Baptist days, it was the invitation at the end of the preacher’s evangelistic sermon. In fact, the sermon itself, drawn from anywhere in the Bible, was eventually an evangelistic sermon, no matter how far from evangelism the Biblical text might be. This was one of those near-mandatory features of Baptist liturgy.

More Than Just A Schedule

But, liturgy in this elementary sense is more than just a schedule. A schedule has elements, and the elements have an order, a sequence, which is sometimes dictated by the internal logic of the liturgy, sometimes the result of custom. The offering, for example, could appear in many places in a Baptist liturgy. It is usually one of the preliminarys before the preaching of the sermon. Indeed, it “must” be before the sermon, because of the internal logic of a standard Baptist liturgy, which has the evangelization of the lost as its most fundamental purpose. For this reason, the whole service moves toward the climax of the sermon, the invitation. The denouement must be either the wistful prayer of the pastor for lasting conviction on those who did not come forward, or the joyful introduction of those who walked the aisle to profess faith in Christ, to rededicate their lives to Christ, or to move their letter of membership to this particular Baptist congregation. The final Big Bang of the service must be the invitation, and what follows it cannot be allowed to diminish it.

Interestingly, in services which follow the Baptist liturgy as to the elements and their scheduling in the service, but whose climactic moment is NOT an evangelistic invitation, I have sometimes seen the offering moved to the end of the service, after the sermon. The rationale for this, explained to me by those who feel a need to defend this seemingly “unorthodox” practice, is that it affords people an opportunity to “respond” to the preaching of God’s Word by making an offering (ostensibly, out of gratitude).

More Than a Service

What would happen if a Baptist Church decided to drop the gospel invitation? I’ve seen discussions about this, and heard about even more of them. It is not a pretty sight. Why?

Just this – to drop the gospel invitation from the end of the sermon in a Baptist Church would be tantamount to abandoning the identity of the Baptist worship service. “We’re Baptists, for crying out loud! We’re here to preach the gospel. Of course we’re going to keep the invitation after the sermon.”

Of, how about this – some intrepid soul in an old-line Church of Christ decides that the classic prohibition of musical instruments in that denomination should be modified to permit the use of a piano, or an organ. Howls of protest can be expected. Or, if a new Church of Christ congregation is founded on this very departure, you can be sure that other Churches of Christ leadership will roundly admonish, possibly condemn, this departure from Church of Christ identity.

What if Roman Catholics stopped saying the Hail Mary? What if Episcopals decided to practice immersion as the only form of baptism? What if Assemblies of God congregations decided it was better to stop speaking in tongues? In all these cases, the groups would diminish, if not utterly erase, their own distinctive identities. You can enter a Roman Catholic Church service and figure out pretty quickly where you are. So, also, with a Baptist service (though you might need to wait until the end of the sermon to be absolutely sure). So also with many of the old-line Pentecostal bodies; or Presbyterian congregations; or the Lutherans; or the Episcopals. All of these groups have liturgies, just as much as the Baptists, and whatever else these liturgies do, they establish and maintain the corporate identity.

This is the first Big Lesson in Liturgy which the Baptists taught me, though it was many, many years later before I could expound it. Nevertheless, in all the ways that Baptist churches do this, they impressed on me through every sense available to me distinctives which I still recognize as Baptist.

Liturgy as Identity

A separate essay could be composed for each of the points I will mention below. For now, I simply want to list the various elements which go to make up the Baptist liturgical identity.

1. Internal Church Space: Baptists will share their distinctives here with others, of course. But, the pre-eminence of the sermon in Baptist worship means that the gathering space is focused on a pulpit, which is placed central to the congregation’s corporate attention, usually raised high up on a dais. Along with the pulpit in importance is the baptismal tank, often embedded in the wall behind the pulpit, with the choir arrayed between the pulpit and the baptismal tank behind them.

2. Sight and Sound: I’ve mentioned sight in the previous point. The “iconography” if you will in a Baptist Church is plain for anyone to read. And, attending it is a sound drawn from the Baptist hymnody.

I know that “sound” in the sense of a standard Baptist hymnody is an element that is blurring today, with the controversy of “contemporary worship” crossing all sorts of denominational lines (even as the controversies in the area of “gender issues” is doing the same thing). But, in the old days, Baptist hymnals were distinctive. Yes, they sang some songs written by the Wesleys, but that didn’t make them Methodists. The thematic constants were salvation, conviction, invitation, and revival; and, if hymns carried those themes they were sung in Baptist churches. The harmonies, the hymn tunes, the way they were rendered by the pianists (or the organists in the bigger Baptist churches) – it is not too much to say that one could almost identify one’s venue in these places blindfolded.

Finally, there was the sight and sound of the baptisms themselves, the sloshing of the water in the tank, the rushing noise of water pouring off the bodies of those resurrected from their watery, symbolic burial with Christ, the comic sight of women’s hair rendered flat and clinging to their heads where seconds before they were airily curled and waving around their faces. If the robes were white, and therefore translucent when wet, one saw a startling vision of nude or near-nude bodies ascending from the ends of the tanks. Even if the robes were dark, or lined to opacity, the robes clung like saran wrap to the just-drenched bodies.

3. Taste, touch, and smell: This is an odd trio, but their combined effect is powerfully real. Baptist communion was a quarterly thing all through my boyhood, and it was marked (as much as anyone’s memory of such rituals can be marked) more by the sense of taste, touch, and smell than anything visual.

Touch – one’s fingers trying to pick up one of those teensie white pellets without grabbing too many or dropping any as you passed the plate containing them down the pew.

Smell – this was a surprise at my first Baptist communion, and every subsequent Baptist communion recovered for me the sense of surprise at that first one. Baptists (the ones I was always with, anyway) always used Welch's Grape Juice, poured into small thimble-sized glasses, arrayed in small sockets of a large circular tray which could easily contain 50 or more of these thimbles. The trays were covered with a lid until it was time to distribute them. And when the covers came off and the trays were carried by the deacons to the ends of pews, the odor of the grape juice quickly filled the auditorium with a heady, grapish perfume. It was the odor you never experienced anywhere else unless you were quaffing a tumbler of the stuff and had poked your own nose into the glass. Here, the entire space – sometimes a very large space – was inundated with the distinctive smell of grape juice.

Taste – again, the eating and drinking made their marks on memory. What highlighted the eating was the sharp difference in taste between the hard, flavorless pellet and the cloyingly sweet grape juice. One ate the bread first, in an atmosphere charged with the smell of the grape juice, which only served to accentuate the gluey, tastelessness of the pellet. And, on the backside of that odd sensation came the splash of grape juice itself.

Confused Liturgical Identity

The point I’m trying to make may seem so obvious as to be trivial; or so subtle as to be entirely missed by most people. The importance of these elements of liturgy (the very reductionist notion of liturgy I’ve been discussing) can be seen better when one monkeys with them in ways that confuse the interpreter of the elements. Consider, for example, the following excerpt from a recent blog by a fellow named Nate, who recounts a visit to First Baptist Church of Redlands, California:

This is an American Baptist Church. It’s interesting for a couple of reasons. First off, it has a beautiful building – it’s definitely no Protestant tilt-up. The church is built in a cruciform pattern and inside there are stained glass windows depicting the life of Christ. Also it has lectern and a pulpit (however both are never used). The baptismal in the back of the church is framed by carved Christian symbols and above the water is a great gold Latin cross with a hand of blessing molded into its center. If this sounds weird for a Baptist church there's more. The pastors dress up in vestments every Sunday with a cassock and stole. They also celebrate communion every Sunday...by intinction no less. Doesn't sound like the average Baptist church I know. If only more Baptist churches would follow suit I might be able to stick around with the Baptists.

For all of their pluses there are some problems. First, can't exactly figure out their order of worship. There is no confession, no absolution, no affirmation of faith, and no scripture readings. … But probably the bigger problem is that there is no clear theological confession that expresses this church’s life together. And beyond this, after talking with one of the pastors, it seems there are some questions with regard to the virgin birth. Now I don't think this is the church's official position but the fact that one of the leaders is agnostic about this issue is frightening.


What the Baptists Taught Me About Liturgy

Yeah, I know. It still grates in the ear to talk about Baptist liturgy, but for now I’m keeping the word liturgy confined to the things mentioned above – the stuff that is routine, regular, many times mandatory, the stuff you can count on for this or that Christian community to look like, smell like, feel like in all the ways one feels when one gathers with them for worship. With these constraints on the word “liturgy,” here’s what the Baptists taught me:

1. We are how we worship. The identity, the personality, the ethos of a Christian community arises naturally out of its worship. Indeed its identity in this sense is established by its worship, and it is maintained by its worship, far more than by its confession (though, obviously, that too is a critical factor).

2. Worship, identity, and confession are all mutually re-enforcing. Baptist beliefs are incarnated, if you will, in their worship, the shape of their meeting spaces, the things they do when gathered together, and the order in which they do them. And, all those “liturgy-like-things” have the effect of strengthening, re-enforcing, guarding, and sustaining the belief that is expressed in them.

3. Liturgy, in this sense and to this end, is a communal thing. The ritualistic character of liturgy is not the point at all. A single individual can perform a ritual, in utter isolation from all other persons. What makes liturgy (in the sense of this essay) powerful to establish, express, and maintain communal identity is the fact that it is the community which jointly participates in it.

Now, students of liturgy or sacramental theology will roll their eyes and mutter “lex orandi, lex credendi;” and, they will be correct to do so. “The law of prayer is the law of faith” is a true principal of communal religious identity. And the Baptists are no more immune from its working in their midst than anyone else. My only point in this essay (which may be laboring over the obvious, I know) is to point out that I learned this principle before I ever read it or heard it from a Lutheran or a Roman Catholic or an Episcopalian (groups who know this principle and know how important it is for the life of any religious community).

Baptists, therefore, taught me some of my earliest, and most important lessons in liturgy. God bless them for it.

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Te Deum: the Church and Music — A Notice

Believe it or not, I am working on "Lessons on Liturgy from Baptists." I began with them almost 50 years ago [My! Doesn't time fly when you're having fun!"], and only after I'd spent 15 years with the Episcopals did I realize how much the Baptists had taught me about how liturgy "works." But, while I'm distilling all that into something succinct, I'll offer a book notice here.

Te Deum: The Church and Music by Paul Westermeyer is an excellent resource for getting your head around the following:

1. History of singing, use of intruments (and their prohibition from time to time), and the development of a variety of musical styles, forms, and devices, from the Old Testament through modern times.

2. The way that theology has affected, even determined, all of the above.

3. Fascinating and encouraging information on the way that music impacts one's spirituality, from memorization of Scripture and doctrine, to the experience and/or the accomplishment of worship.

While Westermeyer does not explicitly analyze the spiritual/theological development of Christianity in America over the past 200 years, he provides concepts which, when applied to this subject matter, shed some very helpful light for analyzing not only what has happened to Protestantism in America over the past two centuries, but also helps to sort out and understand current trends among American Protestants, whether liberal, evangelical, or fundamentalist.

Amazon lists some used copies (it's a text for a course Westermeyer teaches). I got my copy via the search engine for books at addall.com. Check out the reviews at Amazon's page for this book.

Enjoy.

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

From the SBC to Canterbury

So, how does a young boy, evangelized at a Southern Baptist revival in the middle of the Mojave Desert, wander into the Episcopal Church USA, and from there seek Holy Orders within an Anglican group that went outside the camp the last time the main-line Episcopals drove themselves into a ditch? This story may have interest for any whose spiritual journey has followed similar paths (or is about to). But, for the purposes of this blog, it provides an historical frame for the kinds of questions I’ve been asking the last decade. There is lots of the scenery along this route which will be ignored in what follows, which focuses on the features of the journey dealing with matters relevant to my current interest in liturgy and Christian maturity.

FROM BOY TO BAPTIST AND BEYOND

My earliest contact with the Christian faith happened in Vacation Bible School, hosted by the local Southern Baptist congregation in a desiccated hamlet in the Southern California desert. A Baptist matron in the neighborhood routinely gathered up children for a couple of blocks around my home (company housing, provided by the railroad to my father who worked for them) and carted them off to whatever Baptist function was underway – VBS, the latest revival, whatever.

Consequently, church was a combination of fun things laced liberally with fundamentalist religion and techniques for what today I would call spiritual formation. I remember vividly the competitiveness among the boys over who could memorize the most verses of the Bible during VBS. I remember the agony of remaining still and silent during pastoral prayers which seemed to last for hours. I have clear and powerful memories of the lengthy invitations to accept Jesus as your Savior, embedded in never-ending iterations of salvation hymns: “Just as I Am,” “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood” (what boy would not find occasion for hours of meditation on that image?), “Only Trust Him,” “Softly and Tenderly,” “Almost Persuaded,” “My Faith Looks Up to Thee,” “Amazing Grace,” and many, many more. When I hear them sung today, they well up within me as I imagined the blood did that was drawn from Emmanuel’s veins. The lyrics of these hymns are quite literally engraved on my heart, and all I need are two or three measures of the melody and those lyrics glow in memory like the Ten Commandments as they were burned into the rock in Cecil B. de Mille’s rendering of that scene on Mt. Sinai.

All these images, scenes, sentiments, “environmental flavors” of church were replicated in other Southern Baptist congregations I encountered when we moved from the Southern California desert to the Texas Panhandle. What I did not know at the time is that my first lessons in the power of liturgy were taught to me by the Southern Baptists, who prided themselves as freed from dead rituals and religious mumbo jumbo.

As a junior in high school, I departed the Southern Baptists. In fact, I departed the Christian faith (there was no difference as far as I was concerned), because I had begun asking many questions which the good Baptist folk (Sunday School teachers, youth workers, my buddies) could not answer. Or, they gave unsatisfactory answers. Or, they chided me for asking. There were, I am sure, solidly orthodox SBC people who could have answered the questions, and had I run into them, I’d probably be a Southern Baptist today. But, I didn’t, and I’m not.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Mid-way through university, I ran into the sorts of people who could provide answers – other university students, well trained in apologetics, looking for some muddle-headed sap to practice on. They practiced on me, found that their apologetic skills were fruitful, and undertook to effect the next step of my spiritual formation: a vigorous immersion in evangelical (or, in many aspects, fundamentalist) instruction in Bible and theology. Happy as a pig in a wallow, I changed my major from the physical sciences (chemistry, then physics) to philosophy, so I could meet the entrance requirements of a premier evangelical, independent seminary (Dallas Theological Seminary). While doing that, I added a Greek minor to the German minor I’d already finished. After completing a 130 hour master of theology degree program, majoring in Hebrew and Old Testament, I embarked upon a vocational ministry as a pastor for the next decade.

As regards my understanding and experience of liturgy, the DTS years (along with the couple of years preparatory for them) made the following contributions:

Detachment from denominational distinctives: Several different streams of American main-line denominationalism converge at the founding of Dallas Seminary: Baptist, Presbyterian (Lewis Sperry Chafer, I’m told, used to argue strenuously for infant baptism when teaching his Anabaptist students), even Anglican (W. H. Griffith-Thomas). Insofar as DTS (and similar institutions) served to train men for pastoral ministry to the orthodox Protestant refugees of the liberalizing main-line denominations, it also implicitly fostered the kind of ecclesiology that produces Bible churches, interdenominational congregations, community churches, nondenominational assemblies, and the like. The ecclesial result is not so much “mere Christianity” as it is “generic Protestantism,” particularly the kind that initially defined itself as much by what it was not as anything else.

Zwinglian and Pietistic Protestantism: Two factors are significant for this discussion – (1) the Zwinglian anti-sacramental and anti-liturgical mindset, and (2) the primacy of pietism as the default mode of spiritual life. The latter was, of course, anti-sacramental and anti-liturgical, but more than that it pressed a positive program of cultivating the interior spiritual life of the Christian, cultivating the kinds of things that “strangely warm the heart,” to use Wesley’s phrase, things like revivalistic preaching, fervent group prayer, rousing hymn singing, personal devotions out of the Bible, and similar things which became staples of Christian spirituality among parachurch expressions of Christianity in America from the 1950s onward.

Sola Scriptura on Steroids: This was, of course, one of the main agendas of Dallas Seminary from the beginning. Because of the Bible’s nature as God’s inerrant Word, it was critical that future pastors trained at DTS be equipped to engage that Word in the original languages, as independent exegetes and expositors. Moreover, all doctrine worthy of the name was “Bible doctrine” – manifestly sprouting immediately from the soil of Scripture itself. While not exactly “suspect,” systematic theology held a lower place of honor to Biblical theology, which was understood (rightly or wrongly) to be “better” to the degree that its organic connection with the corpus of Holy Writ was more immediate.

The Old Testament as Frame and Context for New Testament Gospel: This aspect of my DTS years proved decisive in turning me toward liturgy and sacramental spirituality, and it would be unfair to say that this idea was commonly touted by the Seminary’s faculty. It was touted explicitly by my pastor prior to my entrance into seminary studies, and it was an idea expounded by several professors influential in forming my notions of spiritual life. These professors were mostly in the Old Testament Department (Waltke, Ross, Glenn), though one of the most influential was in the New Testament Department (S. Lewis Johnson). While none of these men (with the exception of Alan Ross) ever went full-tilt into sacramental/liturgical spirituality, they certainly opened a door for me, which I eventually walked through.

WALKING THROUGH THE DOOR

I walked through a door from pietistic, anti-sacramental, anti-liturgical Christian spirituality toward something more catholic (note the small “c”) for two reasons. I’ll mention both in turn, but only briefly as I’ll re-examine these reasons in detail in later articles.

The example of a Bob Jones graduate: Yup, that’s right. A graduate of Bob Jones University, who while he was pursuing graduate work there decided that the nonconformist churches of Great Britain were “too legalistic” for his tastes (the mind boggles, no?). Partly out of desperation, partly out of curiosity, partly out of sheer opportunity, he visited an Anglican parish service. Waiting for the service to begin, he leafed through the Book of Common Prayer, recognized it as orthodox and Reformed (reformed enough, at any rate), and discovered he had found a new ecclesiastical home. I heard this testimony some years after that epiphany, during a break in class while at DTS. And, though this did not propel me through the door, it was a testimony that lodged firmly in my memory and eventually reproduced itself in my own life.

The internal contradictions of my own spiritual journey: The inheritance I received from my pietistic, Zwinglian fathers in the faith, coupled with specific features of my DTS education, provoked tensions which matured into kinks and snarls so severe that passing through that door I just mentioned was the only reasonable way to resolve the stresses involved. While rightly esteeming the Bible’s teaching and example higher than any mere manmade tradition, I could not escape noticing that the spirituality of the Bible’s saints bore little resemblance to my cradle faith. Though living and worshipping and serving Christ in a tradition that dismissed tradition, particularly those Christian traditions whose most meager details were haunted by the holy, I was continually confronted in the Old Testament by a system of life, worship, and service designed by God Himself, which was enthusiastically, riotously sacramental and liturgical.

It took the better part of a decade to go through that door, a decade in which I pastored within the Christian communion that brought me a goodly measure of spiritual maturity and set me on a course of vocational ministry. The door itself was always there, though it took some years for me to perceive it. And, once I walked through it I could look back and see that the road I was on stretched all the way back to that those boyhood days among the Southern Baptists.

SETTLING IN

For the past 15 years (since 1990), I have lived, worshipped, and served within the Episcopal Church USA. Those days within ECUSA were cut off by the consecration of Gene Robinson, an act that was not only a violent repudiation of Biblical teaching, but also a monstrous perversion of sacramental spirituality. But, those years within ECUSA roundly confirmed all the fearful suppositions which prompted me to enter that community. At the time I did so, I knew enough to seek a Christian communion that was self-consciously sacramental in its spirituality and liturgical in its worship. Any number of Lutheran communions might have sufficed (the local LCMS congregation’s Eucharist was closed to me, absent being recathecized and confirmed); or, perhaps, a high-church Presbyterian fellowship (again, the local Presbyterians had a pastor far too theologically liberal for comfort). The Episcopalians could easily have been another disappointment, but in this case the parish priest was a man of sound spiritual instincts, fundamental orthodoxy, and generous enthusiasm for deploying me in the local parish ministry. When I departed ECUSA recently, there was nothing about that sad severance of fellowship which related to anyone or anything in the local parish ministry.

But, needing to break formal fellowship with ECUSA, I find myself also needing to remain within a Christian communion that plays with a complete deck of cards, as it were – committed to the authority of the Bible and the Apostolic ministry found within its pages, and exercised in the patterns of prayer and worship that flow from the Bible down through the prayers and worship of innumerable saints over the past 2,000 years. Again, several different Christian communions would suffice; in the providence of God, I’m settling into one of the “continuing jurisdictions” of Anglican Christianity that have departed ECUSA during the past three or four decades of its slide into apostasy.

REPAIRING THE FOUNDATIONS

This blog will, Lord willing, afford me the occasion to repair some foundations which the old Episcopalianism in America let go to ruin, and to expand some foundations on which the Zwinglian Christian culture of American Protestantism can extend its mission and life. Said another way, I’m past the place where I’m looking for ways to color in all those blank areas of my spiritual canvas, as I mentioned in the first entry to this blog. Instead, I’m wanting to figure out the whys and wherefores of worship so that I may teach others about the blessings I have found.

Monday, May 17, 2004

Beginning of this Blog

This blog was inspired (somewhat) by another blog. Writing to that blogger, I found myself encouraged to do as he was doing, and so here we are. The introduction I provided to him serves well to introduce this blog, so here 'tis ...

Dear Jonathan,

Thanks for the reply. Did I, perhaps, jog you into resuming the blog? I notice that you've made another entry.

As I said, I found your blog by searching around for blogs on liturgy and theology. So far, I haven't located exactly what I'm looking for, and so I may have to create such a thing myself. It could just be that I'm daffy on the angle I'm considering (it's been done before -- my being daffy, that is). But everything I've looked at so far is ... well, none of it is really on the mark.

I've delved into Gregory Dix's The Shape of the Liturgy, and several of Alexander Schmemann's works. But, both of these guys (and, I suspect, everyone else like them), because they are writing out of a communion that has long been sacramental/liturgical in its spirituality, they are very much like the fellow Chesteron describes in Orthodoxy:

It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced. He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up. Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, "Why do you prefer civilization to savagery?" he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, "Why, there is that bookcase . . . and the coals in the coal-scuttle . . . and pianos . . . and policemen." The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex. It has done so many things. But that very multiplicity of proof which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible.

I've cited this passage of Chesterton to correspondents with respect to a number of different notions, and it "fits" here with respect to the efficacy, the utility, the sheer wholesomeness of liturgy. People like Schmemann and Dix and so many others within the stream of sacramental/liturgical Christianity know this about liturgy. The problem is that they know it so well that they do not, evidently for the reasons Chesterton cites, really give an account of it.

So, along comes a Philistine like myself, called to faith in Christ within the anti-sacramental, anti-liturgical deserts inhabited by the 20th Century American spiritual great-grand-sons of Ulrich Zwingli. By the purest grace of God I figure out that my spiritual canvass has large areas where there seems to be room for color and shapes, which are nevertheless blank. I notice that those colors and shapes are not expounded in the "paint-your-spiritual-life-by-numbers" text I inherited from my Zwinglian fathers in the faith. Instead, they seem to say that my spiritual canvas will be all the better for these blank areas.

Curious, nevertheless, I look at Christians in other schools and find their canvases a riot of color and shapes just where mine are blank, and I suppose that their text in spiritual painting has some chapters that mine is missing. So, I switch schools; I enter the painting class where others' canvases are wildly and richly colored. I join the class without a text, but I'm eager to learn what may be learned by copying. We learn to speak this way, no? May we not also learn to paint this way?

Well, yes we can, after a fashion: slowly, and sometimes even with a certain flair. But, I want to know why it should be done just so; moreover, I want to know how the "just so" stuff came about, and why it "works" so well. But, when I borrow my new brother-painters' texts, I don't find any chapters in them explaining any of this.

Aarrrrgghhhh!

I suspect that if I "succeed" in finding what I seek, I'll be like that fellow Chesterton mentions, the one who is partially convinced of something because "he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it." I hope I can also reach the place where I will find that "everything proves it" -- that is, that everything demonstrates, supports, and validates the sacramental dynamics of spiritual life as one sees it in the lives of Biblical and extra-Biblical saints.

And, I hope I never reach the place where I can no longer expound, or teach, or explain what I am seeking right now.

Whether a blog will provide me a medium for working through some of this remains to be seen. I'll give it a go, and I hope I may find some happy chaps to spur me on with their criticism, questions, and contributions. I'm not eager to reinvent any wheels that are already running along quite nicely. Perhaps by attempting to invent one, I may be discovered by someone who will say, "Here, now, you blithering dolt! What you're doing is already done very well over there. Go take a look."

For the goal I seek, I'll take this latter option gladly should I ever encounter it.

Warm regards in Him,

Brother Quotidian