On Liturgy: Liturgy and Experience
There is a resurgence in attraction to liturgy. This is, in part, a reaction against the subjectivity of contemporary worship. The latest new thing in worship can diminish in attraction over the years. It can come to feel like the latest attempt to manipulate the emotions—like most communication in the marketing and consumer culture.
It is hard for people not to bring the same consumer sensibilities to liturgy that our culture trains us to have in all other areas of life. This leads people to experience and assess the liturgy on the basis of how they “feel” about it. This is one reason contemporary Anglican liturgy has moved away from common prayer and towards diverse prayer. It satisfies a greater range of consumer demand and personal opinion.
However, how I feel about the liturgy or — better — how I experience the liturgy is a nuanced consideration. Our experience of liturgy is important. Here we encounter the tension between objective truth/reality and subjective emotion/experience. Some Christians focus on objective truth and discount the emotional experience of the truth. The therapeutic orientation of our culture tends to focus on our feelings at the expense of the truth. This is often met by elements in the church that insist we must focus on the truth and that emotions should be discounted or ignored.
It is not true that our subjective experience is unimportant and should always be discounted. The liturgy draws us into an experience of union with the Father in Christ through the Spirit. This is not merely a cognitive truth—an idea in the mind. It is an experience of reality that engages our whole being. When mortal, sinful humans encounter the eternal, holy God, mortal humans experience awe, humility, conviction, forgiveness, and grace. See Isaiah’s vision of God (Is. 6:1-8) and Peter’s new awareness of Jesus in the miraculous catch (Lk. 5:1-11). These are distinctly emotional experiences.
However, there are also false emotional experiences. Emotions can be manipulated to produce good subjective feelings that are not the result of a genuine encounter with God. The good feelings in such cases are rooted in neither the truth about God nor the truth about ourselves. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, “I have always known a bottle of port to be quicker pathway to good feelings than prayer.”
This is the reason the church should not revise the liturgy for the purpose of making people feel better about it. That just makes the liturgy less of an encounter with reality and more of an encounter with an idol of our own making. A genuine encounter with God as he really is confronts us with ourselves as we really are. This is the starting point for God’s redemptive work and the genuine experience of redemption. The question we should ask is not, “What is my opinion of the liturgy?” The question we should ask, “How is God revealing himself to me?” The first question results from pride, from seating ourselves as the judge. The second question results from humility and the gifts of sight and hearing.
The experience of liturgical worship takes time to cultivate. We are not used to being in God’s presence. The words and actions of the liturgy will be unfamiliar and even awkward at first. We grow in our ability to experience God’s presence in the liturgy over time as we acclimate to the liturgical experience of reality in the midst of a world that constantly confronts us with unreality. The liturgy gradually heals our spiritual blindness and opens our deaf ears.
St. Luke describes the Eucharistic gift of sight given to two disciples on Easter Day. He writes, “It came to pass, as [Jesus] sat at the table with them, that He took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they knew Him; and He vanished from their sight” (Lk. 24:30-31). We experience this same miracle in a progressive manner as we continue to encounter the reality of God (and ourselves) in the liturgy.
For this miracle to occur it must be reality that we are looking at, and not merely something designed to make us feel good or show us what we want to see.