The Liturgy Explained. James W. Farwell

      

      THE

      LITURGY

      EXPLAINED

      THE

      LITURGY

      EXPLAINED

       James Farwell

      Copyright © 2013 by James Farwell

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

      Unless otherwise noted, the Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      A catalog record of this book is available from the Library of Congress.

      ISBN-13: 978-0-8192-2838-3 (pbk.)

      ISBN-13: 978-0-8192-2839-0 (ebook)

      CONTENTS

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

       The Sacred Geography of the Liturgy

       CHAPTER 2

       The Structure of the Liturgy

       CHAPTER 3

       What We Do in the Liturgy

       CHAPTER 4

       Bodies in Motion:Gesture, Movement, Ceremonial

       Conclusion

Introduction

      The Eucharist is the entrance of the Church

      into the joy of its Lord.

      And to enter into that joy, so as to be a witness

      to it in the world, is

      indeed the very calling of the Church,

      its essential leitourgia, the sacrament by which it “becomes what it is.”

      ALEXANDER SCHMEMANN¹

      

story is told of a young man, an unsavory type, who falls in love with a saintly young woman. Knowing that she will not so much as look in his direction, he slips into the vault of the town cathedral, dons one of the masks of the saints used in the annual town festival, takes on the demeanor and behavior of a saint, and begins to woo her. Surely enough, over time, she begins to fall in love with him. As the relationship flowers and deepens, the young man’s scoundrel friends finally become envious of his success with the saintly young woman and, one day, out of sheer spite, challenge him in the center of the town square, in the presence of his beloved, to take off the mask and reveal his true identity. Dejected, knowing that all is lost, he slowly removes the mask… only to reveal that his face has become the face of the saint.

      The origin of this story is uncertain, the present author no longer recalling where he first heard it. Its inspiration, however, is clearly medieval dramas, eighteenth-century stories of the masque, and even St. Augustine’s theological account of desire in our search for God. Whatever its source, it is an apt metaphor for the function of liturgy in the best possible case.

      The Liturgy is the shorthand term we use for the service of worship called, by various families of Christian faith and practice, The Holy Eucharist, the Mass, the Divine Liturgy, Qurbana, Communion, or the Lord’s Supper. In due course we will explore the meaning of the liturgy, consider the use of liturgy as a term for the Eucharist, and reflect on its structure and the practices. But first, our story.

      In the liturgy, the people who call themselves followers of God don a mask, as it were. In the liturgy, they enact in ritualized ways the actions and attitudes befitting those who are followers of the God of Jesus of Nazareth. In the liturgy, they praise the source of beauty and truth, listen to the proclamation of love and the laws of human flourishing in the kingdom of God, lament that which is broken in the world, focus their energy on help for those broken, acknowledge their failings and commit to begin again to seek God and the good, make peace with one another, and welcome one another to a shared table. Like the young man in the story, they seek the one they love, or try to love, or want to love more deeply, and they do so by behaving—again, in “ritual shorthand”—in ways that are congruent with the nature of the One they love. They bring their desires for God and for Life—sometimes focused and afire, though often enough halting, partial, and unfocused—and they direct their actions of worship, praise, lament, and prayer toward the object of their desire, the One from whom all good, mercy, and truth flow out into a broken but glorious creation of which they are a part. Ideally, over time, as they wear that mask of desire for God, ritually enacting peacemaking, welcome, intercession, and sociality, they become like that for which they long. They become more like the persons they aspire to be for the sake of the One they love.

      There is deep wisdom to this story. As old as Aristotle’s ethics and as new as modern moral and psychological theories is the understanding that we become the persons we want to be by first acting like the persons we want to be, even before we fully feel ourselves to be such persons. Too, the wisdom is there in the mask story that we become like what we desire, and so we do well to take care with our desire and place it, above all, in that which is most deeply worthy of being desired. Being clear about our highest, ultimate desire brings clarity and order to the many other desires we have.

      Of course, like all stories and metaphors, the mask story has its limits. Liturgical action, at its best, is indeed like the actions of the young man who seeks to be in a loving relationship with the one he desires and who becomes more like her over time, winning her over in the end. But unlike the young man in the story, in the case of the liturgy, Christians are always already taking the second step in an unfolding narrative of love’s emergence: it is, as St. Paul and St. John wrote, God who first loves, who IS love, and we whose love is first awakened and focused by the love we have received. Like Michelangelo’s painting, God’s hand reaches for Adam—for humanity, both women and men—and Adam reaches back, even if haltingly, responding to the divine initiative. Liturgy, as Robert Taft puts it, happens in the gap between the two hands reaching for one another: one in action, one in response.²

      If the ultimate purpose of liturgy is an action in which human beings “practice” who they are, or desire to be, in response to the One who loves them first, then perhaps we can understand who Christians are meant to be by exploring the meaning of the term liturgy, looking at the structure of the liturgy, and reflecting on the practices that make up the structure. That is the purpose of this book: to explain the liturgy and, in the course of doing so, to linger