Tag: Liturgy

After the Reformation

\[After the Reformation,\] though sacraments remained important (at first), they were deeply suppressed in favor of “the word.” The Scriptures were emphasized but in a new manner. They were the treasure-trove of all information. Believers were to be instructed constantly and urged towards right choices. Christianity quickly morphed into a society of religious morality (information+decision). This arrangement and understanding are so commonplace today that many readers will wonder that it has ever been anything else.

However, liturgy itself was never meant to convey information in such a manner. It has a very different understanding of what it is to be human, what it means to worship, and what it means to liturgize in the Church. Human beings learn in a variety of ways. Young human beings do almost nothing but learn every waking moment of the day. But they primarily learn by doing (kinesthetic memory) and mimicry (play). It is possible to acquire some information in a lecture format but this remains perhaps the least effective human activity when it comes to learning. It has almost nothing to do with liturgy.

Christianity, prior to the Reformation, was largely acquired as a set of practices … The pattern of feasts and fasts, the rituals of prayer, the preparation for and receiving of communion, all of these, far too complex and layered to be described in a short article, formed a web of nurture that linked the whole of culture into a way of life that produced Christian discipleship …

…

We are not an audience in the Liturgy. We are not gathering information in order to make a decision. We are in the Liturgy to live, breathe, and give thanks, in the presence of God. There is often a quiet movement within an Orthodox congregation. Candles are lit and tended. Icons are venerated. Members cross themselves at certain words, but are just as likely to be seen doing so for some reason known only to them and God. It is a place of prayer, and not just the prayers sung by the priest and choir.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, An Audience of None.

I doubt that these excerpts suffice to summarize Fr. Stephen’s observations. Do read it all, because it’s all I have on offer today.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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Continue reading “What liturgy’s forming you?” →

… and nobody came?

What if they gave a Church service and nobody came?

To 10% of Protestant Churches, the answer is “preemptively cancel if you think that will happen.” That’s what’s happening this Sunday, as Christmas inconveniently falls on Sunday: Sunday yields to the commercial bacchanalia (“cherished domestic traditions” if you prefer sentimentalist delusion).

This is related to the tension between two Christmas calendars, the shopping mall calendar and the ecclesiastic calendar. The former officially starts on “Black Friday,” but may be creeping backward, the latter on December 25 (anticipated by Advent in the West, the Nativity Fast in the East).

… Washington Post scribe Hank Stuever, author of that snarky but fine book called “Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present[]” … told me that, while he was researching that book, he decided that big event is the day that the National Retail Federation releases it’s first official forecast of precisely how many billions of dollars Americans will be spend during any particular Holiday marketing season. Once that press release hits reporters’ email in-boxes, he said, “there’s no stopping it. Here comes Christmas, whether you’re ready or not.”

…

And what about the other Christmas, the supposedly religious one?

The problem on the religion side of this equation these days is that the overwhelming majority of American churches — especially the so-called megachurches of evangelicalism — are essentially doing Christmas according to the shopping-mall calendar, not the calendar of the church year.

Stuever thinks that’s the truth, and so does the dean of the School of Theology at the very, very conservative Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. Pause and roll that duo over in your mind for a moment.

Moore told me:

Many evangelicals fear the “cold formalism” that they associate with churches that follow the liturgical calendar and the end result, he said, is “no sense of what happens when in the Christian year, at all.” Thus, instead of celebrating ancient feasts such as Epiphany, Pentecost and the Transfiguration, far too many American church calendars are limited to Christmas and Easter, along with cultural festivities such as Mother’s Day, the Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving and the Super Bowl.

(Terry Mattingly, emphasis added.) If the shopping mall calendar says that the morning of December 25 is for gift giving and cookies, well how dare the Bride of Christ a mere church say otherwise?

I guess canceling church makes perfect sense once Church becomes theater. No audience, no show, right?

But what if Church isn’t theater? What if it’s Liturgy and Eucharist? What if there’s always a great cloud of witnesses waiting for us to join them? I reflected on this early in the life of this blog, and it seems like a good time to reprise it.

Merry Christmas. Hope your Church is open. If not, mine is.

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