Sometimes at staff meetings at the Cathedral we talk about liturgy and how to help people enter traditional worship. Click here for some of our favorite websites we use to help ourselves. Perhaps they will help you enjoy Advent—the four weeks of the liturgical calendar leading to the birth of Christ.
“Liturgy" means "work for the people” in Greek. Liturgies used by the first centuries of Christians still sound familiar to us who use The Book of Common Prayer. A collection of prayers edited and written by Thomas Cranmer during the English Reformation, the Book is still mostly scripture and has undergone many revisions.
Liturgical worship, especially the Anglo-Catholic variety found at The Cathedral of All Saints, involves all the senses. A new season sweeps into the eyes on changes of cloth on the altars and over arms making the sign of the cross. Boy’s voices descend from above the organ as it groans prayers too deep for words. Faces emerge through clouds of incense. As you come closer to it, it seems there is no end to the work…….
While liturgy often comforts, its practice is not necessarily comfortable. Kneeling, standing, crossing ourselves and being confused about what to do when is good exercise for our brains as well as our bodies. As we speak, smell, listen and move through liturgy it seeps into memory and bone. As St. Claire of Assisi said, “We become what we love.”
Like good art, liturgy brings hope in times of darkness. A tradition of prayer allows us to practice being with God when we are not sure how to be with God. It is my personal experience that submitting myself to common worship gives me a sense of unmerited belonging otherwise known as “grace.”
When wondering how to convey liturgy’s benefits, I think of my life before liturgy entered it. Faith in Christ as a teenager led me to a “Bible church.” The service had little structure. One Sunday, the congregation was surprised when the pastor wanted us to read the Lord’s Prayer. It was in the Bible and therefore we could, he said. We were taught to approach the Bible only as it appeared between its flaps of simulated leather.
My faith did not convert me from being a post-Enlightenment person who can only know things through observation. I drew and painted from nature and trusted God only in what I could observe about God from reading the Bible. While reading it was good for me, the human hands and voices involved in its emergence and preservation were things I eventually also needed to know. My voice and hands itched to engage what I read. I could not see how my church would bear this.
With the birth of our son, my husband and I started attending an Episcopal church. Over the next ten years I gave birth to our daughter, raised our babies, became deeply ill and began to heal. In gratitude I decided to be confirmed in the Church. I reread the stories of Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor. A priest-friend showed me how visual imagery and faith align in her stories and asked if this had to do with my decision to be confirmed.
When Jesus enters our lives through faith, the kingdom that is to come arrives on our doorstep. Light filters in, dark corners are illumined and we see what we can bear until the day comes when we can bear more. The night after I walked through the doors of the Cathedral to be confirmed I wrote that I had “abandoned my lonely creed.” I knew that choosing to walk through the door of tradition meant committing to others who would bear me.
The season of Advent, the first season of the liturgical year, leads us to find Jesus and to bear him. The first Sunday of Advent reminds us that, however we shut him out, Jesus will enter again. This year’s gospel reading is Matthew 24:36-44.
After I was confirmed, I was asked to make a series of black and white drawings for Advent. This was my drawing for the first Sunday, for the above reading…..
The drawing was made to be liturgy—literally—it was work for the people meant to be viewed with the gospel reading in hand. The drawing is more suited to visio divina, a form of meditation with art, than to be a Bible lesson. It worked for me, at least. As one often experiences in ministry, my work for others healed something in me.
Recovering from illness had illuminated my fear of intimacy with God. Matthew 24 shone greater light on that fear. I dealt with it by drawing Christ tucking people into his beard and gingerly taking a sleeper from his home.
Christ has laid keys on the table because he entered what already belonged to him. Multitasking, he reaches through the window with his free hand to take a farmer from his field. The farmer will join the others on the beard as the floods come. The lovers seem as though they will never notice.
I had not yet heard of the concept of “now, and not yet” to describe Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of heaven, but I gleaned it from reading Matthew and represented time by repeating the contours of the sleeper and of Jesus’ hand under him. The visual effect recalls Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase.”
I chose to bring my whole modern self with all of its education to my liturgical drawing. I did not do this consciously but by this prayer to bear intimacy with Jesus made with my hands. I had just gone to see an exhibit of ukiyo-e woodblock prints with a friend. Christ emerged in my drawing as a samurai, fearsome and protective like the warrior of a favorite canticle in the Book of Common Prayer.
A kingdom that is “now and not yet” is not easy to represent in art and the only way to represent it might be through art. Two examples that mirror each other are liturgical worship and John’s vision of worship in heaven in his Book of Revelation. Two thousand years after the vision’s writing our liturgy still has us say, “Holy, holy, holy…..” The imagery of The Cathedral of All Saint’s high altar and east window is taken from Revelation.
Is there art of any kind that has helped you come closer to God, such as Simone Weil’s mystical experience through repeating George Herbert’s poem “Love Three,” which was written as private prayer never intended for publication? Is there a part you play, visible or hidden, in the worship of others?
Would like to write about it? We welcome your thoughts. And we hope you will be a part of our worship this Advent or Christmastide by gifting us with your presence.
In the coming weeks may you enjoy the presence of Jesus that shines through the darkness.