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Note: these excerpt threads are subject to continual revision and updating as opportunity and priority permits Patricia Wilson-Kastner: "What is liturgy? The English word comes from the work of the people in Greek. What kind of work? Who are the people? Originally in Greek the phrase did not mean a work done by lots of people, but some work undertaken for the community's good ... Building a bridge, doing military service, or putting on a public play was liturgy. The Septuagint translators used liturgy to describe the Temple worship. In the New Testament, liturgy identified Temple worship, but also received a uniquely Christian meaning - Jesus' life and obedient death for us, and his risen life for our redemption ... Thus the Christian life lived in the spirit of Jesus is also a liturgy. Therefore the theological and spiritual origin of Christian liturgy is the life of Christ and our sharing in his life as members of the body of Christ. That is the root of the Christian meaning of liturgy... For the community that gathers to reflect, pray to God, share with one another, and be changed in and through the Spirit of God, it is important to hold both profoundly interrelated meanings in mind: liturgy is Christ's and our life together, and liturgy is public worship... All of life - past, present, and to come - is drawn together for the Christian through this ritual action. Christian liturgy is always focused, overtly or less directly, through Jesus Christ and the church of Christ. The connection between the two verbal meanings of liturgy can be made, because the 'church is manifesting, creating, and fulfilling herself as the Body of Christ' The liturgy as the church's worship is the action through which it receives its nature from God through Christ's gracious self-giving... In the liturgy, the community expresses its most profound identity, that of God's people. In this community, each member is given an identity as one of God's people and also learns to shape her or his identity within this community in the world... Because each person is unique, with particular gifts, challenges, and contributions to make in particular times and places, the shared identity will always be realized by each person in a different way..." [7-8] Sacred Drama: A Spirituality of Christian Liturgy "When we have seen a great play, we come out feeling that we have experienced a catharsis (a cleansing) through seeing some aspect of human life presented to us in its greatness and its potential for disaster. We also experience a sigh of recognition, acknowledging that the play may have been about someone else, but it is also about us. If a play is good, something in me identifies myself with all the characters. I remain myself, a member of the audience, but I see myself in the characters, their feelings, and their actions. Thus I bring something to the play and also receive something from it - deeper feelings and understandings, a clearer and more compassionate vision of the human condition. What I receive, through my participation, changes my awareness and therefore my whole self. Drama is mimesis. Such imitation is not simply a repetition of patterns or actions, but a strategy for coping with the disparity we humans feel between our humanity as it is, in its fragility and brokeness, and the good for which we believe we were made. Mimesis in good drama changes and transforms us by exposing disparities between what we are and what we might become, and by showing how creative change can occur. Dramatic mimesis is not didactic, telling people how to change, but rather an expressive art form that shows the human condition in all its tensions, uncertainties, and potential for good and evil, and evokes response from us. The liturgy is always formed as mimetic drama. In the Eucharist, we bring the whole human condition before God - our history, our temptations, the good we do, our needs, our hopes, our fears. Each time we participate, the drama is a bit different, the focus is slightly changed - different liturgical seasons, different readings, new people, individual experiences, community changes - and all these elements add new dimensions to the greatest drama of all. In the Eucharist, we remember God's creation of the world, our alienation, and our restoration in Christ through the Spirit. Even apparent chaos or absurdity is given place in the drama. Liturgy incorporates, expresses, and gives shape to the perceived chaos and meaninglesses of life, so that we can see its true character, acknowledge its reality in our lives, and interact in a more reflective way with powers we do not understand. We want to discover and share in some form of meaning in our world, even when it is not immediately obvious..." [12-13] Sacred Drama: A Spirituality of Christian Liturgy "In its actual observance, the pattern of the liturgical year is more like a spiral than like the familiar repetitive pattern of seasonally based calendars. Each year the festivals were observed, not only had the worshiping community observing the seasons grown and changed, but the calendar itself had changed, honoring new saints as a reminder of the ongoing development of the body of Christ, the community of believers. The figure of a spiral, rather than simply a progressive line or an endlessly repetitive circle, reminds us that the Christian vision can bear a great deal of reality. The observance of the liturgical year assures us that God does not simply shoot us forward through history in uninterrupted progress, nor are we simply stuck in human history where we were two thousand years agod. We have in some ways progressed, in other ways just been moved forward, in others perhaps regressed. Nevertheless, in grace as a people we move forward, because we are drawing closer to God's fulfillment of time. History moves toward an omega point... Through our worship in liturgical time we return again and again to the roots of our life, those key events of Jesus' revealing of God to us, and we are nourished and move forward as God's people. We press on, responding to God's call to us toward the heavenly city, the fulfillment of time. Tripping, falling, rising, and responding, through our participation in liturgy, we move in our human history, from, with, and to God. Individuals and communities also have their own ways of sharing in the Christian year, carrying on traditional observances and making efforts to find new meaning in such familiar festivals as Christmas. For each person, the calendar bears its own mix of communal event and individual adaptation. Liturgical communities and families invest the feasts with personal meaning, resonating with the depths of the human psyche. On Christmas and Easter, lights proclaim the victory of God from darkness and despair but also remind us of our own vulnerability and dependence on God. The warmth of the celebration in congregations, with hymns, familiar liturgy, and heightened community participation, strengthens the human ties as well as the often unarticulated sense of belonging to the church as the bearer of the divine to our world..." [37-38] Sacred Drama: A Spirituality of Christian Liturgy "Human beings crave identity. We all want to belong to a greater group or power than our own selves. We want a name, we wish to be part of a family, and we will seek a substitute if our own is inadequate. We wrestle with those who exclude us from sharing a desirable identity to which we believe we have a right. At the same time, especially in contemporary industrialized societies, we want our own identity, and freedom and self-determination are vitally important ideas for people. The rapidly changing political scene and shifting national borders of recent times have radically shaken people's sense of secure identity. These events have intensified the already existing human desires for personal autonomy and self-determination as a part of a community. This complex search for identity, which can take many different forms, is one of the key themes of contemporary culture. It is also a crucial dimension of people's expectations and needs from liturgy, especially of our gathering and greeting each other as Christians in Christ's name. As we gather for Eucharist, we want ... to profess our unity in Christ, a communion of the most diverse and heterogeneous folk imaginable, joined in love of God through Christ, interconnected by bonds of love, mutual respect and service, and a ministry of preaching and living the Good News in the world, laboring for God's reign on earth ... we hold as precious our diversity and personal value before God, as individuals and as cultures. With distress we contemplate the past and present efforts to equate unity with uniformity, assumptions that to become Christian was to assume a specific set of European cultural ideals and practices. With equal anxiety we fear an excess valuing of individuality and difference, which features common life and values and absolutizes uniqueness as a value in and for itself. This struggle is central to our time; thus we ought not to be surprised that our worship reflects our concerns... The liturgy does not simply reflect human diversity, it creates communion out of our diversity. Christian community is a gather of not only like-minded but also diverse people, joined by an exalted purpose. We are God's people, the body of Christ..." [53-54] Sacred Drama: A Spirituality of Christian Liturgy "Because the sacrifice of Jesus is transformative, Eucharist is the food for the journey, the sacrificial communion meal in which Jesus is understood in the Christian community as both remembered and present... Through the sacrifice of Jesus and our sharing in it through Baptism and Eucharist in the Church, we belong to God just as Jesus does. Ritual and ethical life are integrally connected because of the communion between Jesus and the believer. Thus the baptized person can be spoken of as a sacrifice or sacrificing in Jesus, and the actions of one's life as acceptable offering in and through Jesus... Thus everything the baptized person does is intended to be an expression of God's justice and compassionate love, because the believer is accepted totally and completely by God, just as Jesus was. For the early church, Paul's cry ... is not an emotive exclamation but a vivid expression of fundamental belief. The consequences of such life in God is that all of one's thoughts and deeds are to be expressions of God's life, just as Jesus was and is such an expression... Belonging to God means in practice that everything one is and has must be used for God's purposes. One's self in communion with God through Jesus, with one's worship and one's goods, is sacrifice to God and no longer one's own. That is because through Baptism and Eucharist, one is no longer simply one's own person, but God's in Christ. Thus every action from the most rarefied spiritual ecstasy to washing dishes to giving money are all essential parts of the life of the believer, who is God's and who thus lives God's life in and to the world..." [97-98] Sacred Drama: A Spirituality of Christian Liturgy |