Liturgy and the Low Church
Kim Fabricius has posted another set of his fabulous propositions, this one on worship. I particularly liked number five:
How should worship begin? But worship never begins, or, rather, it has always already begun. You could say that we are always late for worship, because we always enter worship in medias res, the praise unceasing of the communio sanctorum…
I have only recently discovered this wonderful truth, stumbling into mass day after day to see and hear and feel the prayers that are always being offered and being offered everywhere. Last fall, struggling to make sense of private prayer in a church constituted by communion, von Balthasar made the wonderful point that prayer is never isolated but rather always an extension and continuation of the prayer of the whole church. The church, then, by its nature sustains the prayerful lives of its members. That seemed right, but I couldn’t quite understand—until I learned the Catholic liturgy, re-enacted since time immemorial. Here, within the liturgy, my prayers have a place in the church’s life. Here, within the liturgy, Paul’s exhortation to pray without ceasing is actually taken to heart—because all of life is within the liturgy. “For when the liturgy is over,” Kim says, “the service (leitourgia) begins.” It’s humbling, no longer creating worship but only participating in an offering much larger than myself. Yet it gives a humility full of awe, like I’m joining a giant march through the centuries, singing and rejoicing and sometimes falling silent, heading towards the mountain of God.
This seems, however, a damning word on the low church. Can we even speak of a worship always underway in a church whose worship lasts only an hour and a half on Sunday mornings, in a body of churches whose worship bears little resemblance to one another? But I’m not ready to give up the painstakingly simple Mennonite church that knows nothing of liturgical finesse but knows each other so intimately as to die for each other, and to live for them. The low and free church makes room for a holy creativity, for the practice of dramatic re-presentation of the gospel that heeds the needs of the people it meets. I’ve seen sanctuaries, painted white, adorned with one handmade cross and a vase of reeds that can rival cathedrals in beauty.* I’ve heard congregations sing four-part harmony that’s a liturgy unto itself. And these churches better than many churches seem to understand that “when the liturgy is over, the service begins.” Without ever hearing it, they seem to obey the command that closes every mass, “Go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.” Low church ‘liturgy’ is not so obviously rooted in communal prayer, perhaps, as it should be, nor is there real reason to eschew regular practices in worship that keep our sights and memories set on God. Yet there is something in this ad-hoc worship—sustained just by the gathering of true disciples, singing and praying and eating and living together—that has brought these churches faithfully through history. Gathering, after all, is also a central category for Christian worship: “for where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matt. 18:20).
* Indeed, that sanctuary deserves its own post. Fellowship of Hope Mennonite Church, the congregation I belong to in Indiana, knows a holy creativity unlike I’ve ever seen.
4 January 2007 |
tags: Fellowship of Hope, Liturgy, Mennonite
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Thanks for this moving post, Brian.
Even in a so-called “low” church ecclesiology, those gathered are gracefully empowered throughout the whole of their lives to discipleship, itself an act of worship, even when they are not “gathered” in a particular way. The whole of life is active doxology. (Marpeck, I think, makes this point in his articulation of many sacraments, including love of neighbor.) So the prayer begins before the gathering and takes new shape in the gathering, but is nevertheless a part of the church’s ongoing worship. The beauty of ad-hoc worship indeed! Normal life pauses, giving way to 4-part harmonies.
Still, I suppose the “gathered” are never late…
Yes, yes, ‘active doxology’ is exactly the way to say it. I think that Marpeck has the potential to help me enormously here, connecting everything as he does to the actual sacraments, since what I struggle with in Mennonite practice is how ‘active doxology’ turns into ‘active, etc.’—that is, how day-to-day discipleship displaces (rather than parallels) the sacramental and prayerful life of the church. What I want is to refer every act of discipleship back to God, to reflect discipleship’s dependence on the Spirit which inspires it. If worship hasn’t always already begun, and I mean worship as prayer and praise and sacrament and confession, then we’ve lost the only footing that matters in becoming disciples. ‘Divinization’ actually seems like an important category here, by tying ethics directly to prayer, that deserves a bit more attention.
Also, just a thought, perhaps part of my struggle is over the distinction between church local and church universal. I don’t know how to speak of this difference, but going to mass feels to me like participating in something geographically and temporally immense—that’s the sense of always already having begun—where low churches tend to stress concrete locality. There’s some serious good in that, but also something lost by the lack of shared worship practices across congregations.