The Resurrection of Liturgy

liturgy: (n) a form or formulary according to which public religious worship is conducted; from the Greek “leitourgia,” meaning public service

The mass might have been in Latin for all my classmates knew.

I peeked to the right and to the left. It was Wednesday. Our whole row appeared monotonous, wearing one school uniform, having the same ponytail hairstyle, and chanting the same words.

The liturgy seemed to be that part of the mass that was most repetitious, that I can still say while thinking of something else, and that was most different from my Protestant church.

This week, as I picked up Jonathan Gibson’s be thou my vision: A Liturgy for Daily Worship, I was somewhat surprised by the same chanted prayers. The Glory Be, the Our Father, the catechismic rhythms that had allowed my mind to wander around St. Anastasia’s Catholic parish, all made me wonder why there’s been this sudden resurgence of liturgy. 

Doug McKelvey and Rabbit Room Press have sold over 300,000 copies of their volumes of Every Moment Holy: New Liturgies for Daily Life in an effort to eliminate the spiritless chanting and reclaim the sacred purpose of moments like sharing a meal with friends, lighting the first hearthfire of the season, or even changing a diaper. Why is this generation hungry for the liturgical? 

Gibson claims that liturgy helped him to refocus his personal devotions in the chaos of covid. McKelvey and co. reclaim the purpose behind the monotony, helping readers think past their own busy-ness to the substance of life, focusing readers’ minds on the eternal even in the midst of the temporal.

Perhaps for the rest of us, liturgy silences the chaotic feel of the evening news. It gives structure and resonance when we’ve been scattered by doomscrolling. It resurrects a devotion that was dead and cold by bringing order and attention to the word of God and the Word of God.

Like a favorite pair of sweatpants, the comfort of the familiar calms us when we incorporate any sort of form or liturgy into our worship- personal or public. Every church I’ve attended, no matter the denomination, has an order of service because God is a God of order, not chaos. 

Paul told the church in Corinth, “All things should be done decently and in order.”

It isn’t wrong to have structure to our worship.

However, we know that the liturgy itself shouldn’t be the source of our comfort. Jesus told the religious folks of His day: “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition.”

Perhaps the wild chaos around us pushes us to be in such a rage to establish our liturgical practices that we neglect the substance and source of our comfort: Christ.

Only He never changes. Only He is the fountain of all comfort.  Only He offers a refuge in times of trouble. 

Perhaps liturgy has been resurrected because of these troubled times, but Christ was resurrected for all time. 

We never tune out His comfort, no matter how familiar, because of the depths of our need. His resurrection brought eternally more life than our liturgies ever could. Let us join together to worship the One who is deserving of all our worship, no matter what form our liturgy takes.