The church I go to is in the midst of a search for a new Rector (Priest in charge), and as part of the process we were all asked to complete a survey whose results will be collated into a Parish Profile. This gets shared with priests who are looking for a new parish, and then we work on selection until we find a good match.
One of the questions was about the Liturgy. I take this to be a blanket term covering the way we do Church - the choices we make from the official prayer book for the order of services, what is said when, what the readings are for that Sunday (there's a Lectionary with a full set for a three year cycle), whether we say the Mass or sing it and whether we use a contemporary version, or more traditional, or Latin, or a mix of all of them.
If you were brought up Lutheran, you might wonder what I'm talking about, because my understanding is that Lutheran churches are given much less discretion and are instructed to be much more standardized. But Episcopalian parishes, while sticking pretty strictly to traditional forms, do have some latitude about how various parts of the service are performed. For example, at my church, the Prayers of the People (those are the prayers in which we remember all who have asked for our prayers, the sick and the troubled, and also those who have recently died, and "all whose lives are closely linked with ours") are read out of the Book of Common Prayer, the only part that changes week to week is the specific names that are read out. But at my Mom's church, the Prayers of the People were written by the people, the members of that particular congregation, and so they include some prayers for the natural environment and that kind of thing that are more top of mind for people in Colorado. So, latitude like that is an example of what's possible.
I can't remember the exact wording of the survey question that asked about the Liturgy, but it was about how important it is to keep the Liturgy the same as it is in our church now, that is pretty traditional.
There was a space for comments, and what I wrote there was that keeping to a traditional Liturgy, keeping to an unchanging formal structure, was essential to Episcopalianism, because the essence of our denomination is that the formal structure is there are stays the same, and then every person is free to make whatever meaning of it that they do. The formal structure is fixed and the same, and the meaning made is individual and specific. And not just specific to the person, it is specific to what's going on with that person right on that day. Because the tradition is so rich, and deep and broad and connected to so much else in Western Culture, not to mention to many of our own lives and families and childhoods, that every week you can connect with something different in it, or understand something in a different way. It enables a vast and rich journey, in and through. So even in the one person, the meaning you make of the Liturgy can be individual and specific to that particular day and time of your life.
If the outward expression, the Liturgy, were to change, and morph and be updated and rewritten designed to reflect our ideas and our place and time, I'm sure that it would end up a shallower experience. Because what do we know? How could we write something better than what we have, out of what we happen to think right now?
This tradition, in which I participate every Sunday, especially when Choir is in session because then you're right up the front, robed and in the midst of all of it, was not invented but it was wrought, over centuries and centuries. What we do is the same as what the Early Christians did, in each other's houses, and it's the same as what Archbishops have been doing in Cathedrals in English for centuries and centuries, and it's the same as my Grandma and my Mom and Aunts have done all their lives, and it's the same as my Godfather and Godmothers (I have two), and the man who baptised me, all of whom were the best, best friends of my parents during their young marriage, it's the same as what was done that very day of my Baptism, when I was welcomed into the body of the Church, and everyone who was there read out that they would help my parents and my Godparents raise me and protect me and make sure I grew in my spiritual life. (All of those people are still doing that, and now I have stood and promised to do that for ten or eleven others.)
I've had times in my life where the service felt confronting, or bizarrely ritualistic, or insulting, or boring, or cynical and hypocritical, or meaningless, or too meaningful. But as I have participated, in the church year that rolls around and around, each time around the circle I find myself going deeper, and finding more to it.
You can't do this mystical spiral-style development if the Liturgy changes all the time. It has to stay the same, to allow my own individual and specific meaning-making of it to progress and grow.
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