Dancing with God

Without further ado, please welcome our newest member, the illustrious Kevin Boddecker, to Everyday Liturgy:

The liturgy is a school where through sign and symbol, word and music, our minds and hearts are formed to be in union with the movement of God, with God Himself.-Fr. M. Basil Pennington, O.C.S.O.

To some, liturgy is a burdensome, binding order that tends to get in the way of the charisma of prayer and worship, like scripting a date for a young man, instead of allowing his affections and personality determine the way he relates to his beloved, the latter option being obviously favoured. But, I think it is really only our romantic pretensions concerning spontaneity that cause us to perceive the liturgy as such.

The liturgy is not a law, it is life, it is the life of the Church as it has been practiced over the centuries since it was instituted by Christ. It gives form to the Churches message and essence, given to Her as the Creator Lord placed the greater and lesser lights to govern days, weeks, months, seasons and years. In it, every day is broken into the hours of prayer: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline. A journey-path is laid out before us each in the daily office: we raise early to new life, asking God to open our lips, that, in the showing forth of His praise, we might break the silence of the new day with hymns and psalms; we dedicate our day and ourselves to our God and ask Him to preserve us in the same; we sanctify the day by stopping at its third, sixth, and ninth hours, to turn out thoughts to Him and His mission; we bless the candle lights that push back the darkness and welcome the coming of night; we complete our day and, having seen the salvation of God in the person of Christ, bid the Lord grant us a perfect death and retire in hope of the resurrection that comes with the advent of the new day’s sun.

The week is broken up as well, as we celebrate anew, every Lord’s Day, his glorious resurrection, we lament his betrayal by the mid-week fasts of Wednesday, we turn our thoughts to His death on Friday, and keep the office of our Lady on the Sabbath, before starting anew again on Sunday.

Throughout the year, we relive those crucial events that marked the life of our Lord and the earliest triumphs of the Christian faithful by the observance of the various seasons of the year. Beginning in late autumn, we turn our minds to the Advent, joining those Jewish folk of the so-called Second Temple period who awaited the coming Messiah, while presently anticipating, with all Christian faithful, His immanent return. After celebrating his birth, we are ushered through his baptism and other events of his life in Epiphany-tide. In Lent we join Him in the wilderness of His testing, as well as joining those wandering, stony-hearted Israelites in the desert (who we tend to look more like), culminating in his death and burial. But with Easter, we let our alleluias resound at the news of His glorious resurrection. After the Ascension, we celebrate the coming of the Spirit and the birth of Christ’s mystical body the Church. We are caught up into the great cloud of witnesses by the various feasts we keep throughout the years, bound up with the holy men and women of old who intercede for us and model for us the life into which God calls us.

Liturgy is an invitation, to enter into this great cosmic drama, of days, seasons, and years, to see the movement of God in the world, in time and space, and to learn how to move with Him, the Blessed Bridegroom, as His bride, bedecked in grace, hope, and mercy. He welcomes us, always, to join in the dance with Him and all those who have already become His partner. Sure, you trip a few times at first, with both your left feet caught together, but after a while, the burden of liturgy becomes the order of life. The days are sanctified, the seasons are sanctified, the years are sanctified, and as the celestial bodies move in their harmonious revolutions encircling the sun, so also is the life of the individual and of the Church brought into harmony with the divinely ordered cosmos, instead of being tossed to and fro by the tohu wabohu of human emotions and sinfulness.

The sign and the symbol, the word and the sacrament, the prayer and the music, speak to our hearts, enlighten our minds, and teach us the steps, the turns, and the strides so that we can dance with God, so we can dance with saints, so we can enter the great drama of worship, in perfect order, in perfect truth, in perfect beauty.

Would you care to dance?

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