Another View 9

What we “do” every Sunday at 3026 South Staples, and three times in a row, is make Eucharist. From the moment the choir sings the Gathering Music to the Dismissal, we call it Liturgy. The whole thing, from beginning to end -- liturgy. That’s a bit confusing, as some call it “the service,” others “the Mass, and some even “worship service.” All are right, but liturgy is what we are doing.

So -- what is liturgy? I like to think of the Orthodox tradition that says “the angels are present at the Sacred Liturgy.” Now that will awaken you, if angels are hanging out. According to a couple of the children in our parish, that is more than hyperbole. However you believe it, this belief corresponds to the deepest heart of the Christian message: that salvation is present for us in this very instant.

Think of it, though. To say that the angels are actually present at the liturgy is to say that the celebrants and people at the liturgy are in the divine Presence -- that liturgy represents the illumination of the temporal by the eternal. As one colleague said, “liturgy represents a rupture in time,” a restoration of the proper human relation to the Divine. To be truly present at the liturgy is to participate in it. This participation transcends the trammels of time and existence.

The liturgy is ultimately a spiritual practice. We Episcopalian’s come to the altar to grasp for the outpouring of God’s grace, and when we do that, we re-connect to our own divine origin and purpose. Here, at this altar, we glimpse again what we can be, what horizons are opened to us.

There we are, having carried around the needs and troubles all week of those who have desired us to be present as a sacrament to them. They have told us their troubles; we have attended to broken dreams and broken hearts; sometimes, we have even wept with them, worried for them long after they left, and offered our prayers for the mending of their lives. And on Sunday, we sing praises to God, we confess our own brokenness, get ourselves forgiven and walk to the altar to the holy aperture where we unlock our hands and offer all these sincere longings we have heard to God -- ready to go out and gather again the needs of those who are broken. That is the liturgy.

On Sunday’s, we come to behold our own humanity redeemed, and to offer others to that same redemption. It is called theosis -- the place we participate in our own divinization -- our humanity continues its long journey to holiness. It’s what we want, and we take this bread and drink this wine -- and we are so overjoyed, we wind up in the end “thanking God.” We cannot thank God enough.

Everything there on any given Sunday reminds us that we are the initiated -- the icons with their elongated features, the crosses, the vestments, the chants and songs -- all of these are there to bring us into a sense of timelessness. During the liturgy, the normal temporal bonds are broken; every action is different from everyday secular events. The icons, the music and rhythm around and within you, the iconography before you, the chalice and the paten loaded with bread -- these things are not mere ritual accretions -- rather, they all act to bring you into the holy Presence.

One of our Great Thanksgivings, Eucharistic Prayer A, is from St. John Chrysostom, who wrote of the Liturgy that “A fountain is opened up which sends forth spiritual rivers -- a fountain around which the Angels take their stand, looking into the beauty of its streams, since they more clearly see the power and sanctity of the things that lie open to view, and the insatiable splendors.”

Our present age is one of confusion, fragmentation, and the loss of traditional forms. Next time you come on Sunday, gather with angels and others who are near the angelic, you now being one of those. Study every form, every single aspect of the procession through the Grand Liturgy. Pay attention to the slightest nuance of candle or of bowing -- and wonder. Wonder why this form calls you, deep calling to deep.

And then when you are dismissed into the world, you are dismissed from one Liturgy to another -- you will leave to participate in the Cosmic Liturgy -- where your congregation awaits you. Wolfgang Goethe’s aphorism -- that each of us ought to be in daily life like a priest celebrating a liturgy with Nature as our altar -- reflects the Cosmic participation in the ongoing censing of this gifted world awaiting our sacramental life.

We leave liturgy on Sunday representing a kind of compensatory extension of this liturgical consciousness to daily life: an effort to consecrate anew the whole of life and one’s own life, to embody as much as possible the state of Christ himself, whose very presence is blessing, the appearance of the reign of heaven here and now, on this earth.

Join in this, yet Another View, transforming our lives into a liturgical celebration -- a foreshadowing of the illumination of paradise itself.