leaves + branches, Lincoln Park, IL.
It's pretty simple, really. I love liturgy because I'm human.
Which is to say, I'm not a disembodied spirit.
I breathe, I sweat, I touch, I smell, I hear, I laugh. I eat. I cry. I am a real person.
For many years, my faith practice was limited to verbal and internal expression. I practiced my faith as if I were a disembodied spirit.
As radical fundamentalists, we shunned anything that smacked of ceremony or ritual. Or at least, we tried.
Our meeting house was intentionally spare, unadorned. No candles, no stained glass windows, not even pews. We took simplicity to the extreme because we believed that anything that appealed to our physical senses was suspect. Pagan.
No incense. No ritual. No ceremony. No recited prayers.
Great emphasis was placed on extemporaneous expressions of faith. This was good in that it encouraged active participation. It was flawed in that it excluded people who, like myself, could never pray great, flowery public prayers.
In fact, I did not learn the Lord's Prayer until I was 27 and outside our fundamentalist church. My ignorance strikes me as hilarious since we believed in a literal interpretation of Scripture and yet, we ignored the actual prayer Jesus taught His disciples to pray.
For me, there was always something lacking in my childhood church. Try as I might, I was no spiritual transcendentalist. I had profound difficulty concentrating during public, spontaneous prayer. Spiritual spontaneity exhausted me.
Liturgy has aided me in knitting together my physical and spiritual selves.
I was led to liturgy through the gift of written prayer. You cannot imagine the sheer relief I experienced when, after having the twins, a kind crossing guard (yes! A crossing guard!) gave me a small book of written prayers.
It was a revelation. I was stunned to discover that I could commune with God in a lovely, beautiful way without having to invent the words myself.
I had been raised to believe that ritual, ceremony and "vain repetition" were dead, empty expressions of faith. However, it was also true that those spontaneous expressions of faith relied too heavily on individualism.
My spiritual health was often judged by my ability to produce original, authentic, divinely inspired, in-the-moment, Scripture-rich prayers. Honestly, I'm just not that original.
Thus, I often remained silent. My worship was mostly internal. But oh, how I longed for some external expression of my faith.
Liturgy has given that to me.
Better yet, liturgy is not personality-centric. It does not rely on the eloquent sermons of a gifted public speaker. It does not emphasize the words of a preacher. It emphasizes the Word.
One of my most jarring discoveries was that liturgical churches do more Scripture reading (in actual minutes) than most any other church I attended.
I had grown up believing that "faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God," but I always associated that with listening to preaching. For a Biblical literalist, it was something of a surprise to realize that my faith was growing as a simple result of listening to Scripture being read aloud. Period.
Liturgy is predictable and yet deeply profound.
It feels like home.
