The Dance of the 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 seems a burdensome, binding, and deadening order of events in a worship service that tends to get in the way of the charisma of prayer in a way similar to the scripting of a romance would make the whole rehearsed affair between man and woman shallow and fake. But, as a Eastern Orthodox catechumen entering into and falling in love with the beauty of Christ’s Church, I have come to realize that it is only our romantic pretensions which tend to value spontaneity for its own sake that cause us to perceive the liturgy as such. The liturgy is not law, it is gospel, 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 life, given to Her as the Creator Lord placed the greater and lesser lights to govern days, weeks, months, seasons and years and offers us a bit of order that points towards and beyond that beautiful order that one prompted our Lord’s ”It is good; very good!” Instead of placing confines on our worship, it is really the means of creating sacred space and sacred time in the fallen realm of space and time in which we may become present to God and humbly enjoy a relationship with the all-consuming God, the Father unoriginate, His only-begotten Son and His all-holy and life-giving Spirit.

Each day is broken into the hours of prayer: the Midnight Office, Matins, the ”lesser” First, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Hours, 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 the day and ourselves to our God and ask Him to preserve us in the same; we sanctify the day by stopping at its first, third, sixth, and ninth hours (which correspond to 6am, 9am, noon, and 3pm, respectively), to turn out thoughts to Him and His mission in and for the world, by His death on the Cross, the sending of the Spirit, and the deaths of the martyrs and the lives of the saints; we bless the candle lights that push back the darkness of evening 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, retire to the tomb of sleep and await the resurrection to a new day and hope for living anew in synergism with the grace of God.

The week is also is broken up as days are drawn into the eternal history of our redemption. Every Wednesday and Friday the faithful observe a fast in memory of Christ betrayal by Judas and His crucifixion. But this sorrow is dispelled beginning with the Vespers on Saturday night in which the Church hymns and celebrates anew the glorious resurrection of her Lord and Bridegroom, sharing in the joy wonder and awe of the myrrh-bearing women which discovered the empty tomb and His disciples to whom they preached this good news.

We relive the life of our Lord through the various seasons of the year, beginning in late autumn, we turn our mind to the Nativity (Advent), joining those who awaited the Messiah, and anticipating His return. After celebrating his birth, we are quickly ushered through his baptism and other events of his life throughout Epiphany. 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 Pascha (Easter), we conquer the midnight darkness with the lighting of hundreds of candles and dispel the deathly silence with a victorious hymn to His resurrection: ”Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.”  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 which God offers us all. These days, like our lives, are mixed with joys and sorrows as they celebrate the lives of many great saints and yet remind us of the reality of the cross that all Christians must bear which has taken the form of the total abandonment of all things for the love of Christ—martyrdom.

Liturgy is an offer 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 to our bride, who welcomes us to join in the dance with Him and all those who have already become His dancing partners. Sure, you will 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, and as days turn into seasons and seasons into years, as the celestial bodies move in their harmony, so our personal lives and the communal life of the Church will be brought into harmony with the divinely ordered cosmos, instead of being tossed to and fro by the tohu wabohu of human emotions and sinfulness, and we are brought into true union with He who being beyond all knowing can only be known by the true means of knowledge, love.

The sign and the symbol, the ikons and the incense, the word and the mystery (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. This is the dance we were originally created to take our part in, the dance God has been inviting man into since he first stepped out of line, the dance for which His only-begotten took upon Himself our nature, that by becoming what we are, we might become united to Him and become through grace all that He is by nature.

So the question remains, ”Would you care to dance?”