Dear People of Christ Church,
There are times for me, as I’m sure there are for you, when we just sort of go through the motions. I was meeting with some newcomers yesterday whose church backgrounds are more, shall we say, lively, than our historic, rather staid worship. I asked one of them what they thought of it and he said, “Well, it can be boring sometimes.” As his wife protested he assured us both—“It’s not like she doesn’t know that already!” Indeed. I do know that our worship is not what anyone would call a raucous party. We say the same prayers, the hymns can start to sound the same, and we sit, stand, kneel in all the same places from week to week. If you’re looking for spontaneity or novelty, the Episcopal church is not for you.
Still, enough of us are here, week after week, trying to come near God—beyond language, beyond vision, just, generally beyond. One of the spiritual writer Annies (I’ve heard it attributed both to Annie Lamott and Annie Dillard) says that if we really understood what we were doing in church we’d wear crash helmets; it’s that big. We are trying to squeeze eternity into a silver cup and the ultimate nourishment of our souls onto a little plate. Just what do we think we are doing?
This is where--modern and progressive tattooed lady that I am—I look way, way backward. The poet WH Auden’s response notwithstanding (he inquired of the rector of St Mark’s in the Bowery whether he had “gone stark raving mad” at the changes that came about with
Church doesn’t happen in the words, it happens in us.
Here the mystery is
Are the Words of the Liturgy Worn Out?
not an enigma to be solved; it is reality that makes us live
the more we live from it, the more we experience its inexhaustible and surprising nature..
liturgy summons forth more than reason: it calls forth desire or the heart
Nonetheless, it is not first of all to the intellect that the liturgy is addressed
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