Growing up, I went to a very large southern Baptist church. Because of this, my Sunday mornings were loud, exciting, and inspiring. I grew up thinking that all Christians’ spiritual practices were like this: passion gilded with spotlights, wisdom embroidered with rhetoric. It wasn’t until I left for Baylor that I really began to understand what religious life was like for Christians of other denominations.
After leaving home, I visited several different kinds of churches, trying to find the place that would grow me in my walk with Christ best. For a while I kept to the same tradition, attending a church very much like the one I attended growing up. It wasn’t until a friend of mine invited me to a much more traditional, structured service at a different church that I began to really understand what a centuries-long liturgical tradition looked like, and why it was worth engaging with.
What is liturgy? No doubt any discussion of the topic requires a good definition. Growing up I had understood liturgy to mean written words to be recited, in a similar manner to the pledge of allegiance, as a part of some religious activity. Certainly, this is how the word is often used, and for good reason. As Fr. Jonathan Kanary, a priest at Christ Church Waco, points out, liturgy, traced etymologically, means “the work of the people.” This is an important thing to note, because it is the first hint that liturgy is not merely words: it is a sort of “work.”
The nature of this work is something to be carefully considered. From a spiritual perspective, what is “the work of the people?” Certainly, there is not merely one answer. However, it might be said that the general spiritual work of the people is chiefly worship. Worship is a complex activity, a demonstration of the worth someone puts on something or someone else. Liturgy is the way that we accomplish this work, worshiping our creator well.
Liturgy is not merely words: it is a sort of “work.”
How does liturgy do this? In my mind, there are two ways of thinking about liturgy that answer this question. The first I will call “Practical Liturgy.” this understanding of liturgy conceives of its role in worship as essentially spiritually practices. Practical liturgy is a combination of both words and actions, things like praying out loud a thoughtfully written prayer, or bowing your head when Jesus’ name is spoken. Both should equally be considered liturgy.
These practices are designed to grow us in a specific way: they help us to be consistent in how we reorient our hearts towards God. Fr. Jonathan aptly described this using phrases like “turning toward God” and “being drawn to God.” He characterized much, if not all of the Christian life this way: as a fundamental turning of the heart; that is, changing the primary object of our love from ourselves to God instead. This change is something we are not naturally inclined to do. Instead, like an illness, our sinful tendencies draw our affections away from God and onto ourselves. This is why this “turning” of the heart is such an important part of Christian life: it directly fights these sinful tendencies.
It is because the Christian life is composed of such a consistent activity that spiritual health is composed of such a consistent practice. The consistent nature of practical liturgy is a fitting prescription for the illness: a habit to meet a habitual need.
However, many do not think of the consistent nature of liturgy in this way. In fact, many people believe that the repetitive nature of practical liturgy (repeating the same words and the same actions, day after day) is actually a detriment to our spiritual health, not a benefit.
This objection is based on the idea that habitual activities tend to become mindless muscle memory. For many habits, this is fine, but for practices like prayer, this can be a big problem. After all, a prayer isn’t really a prayer if you aren’t really thinking and meaning the words you’re saying. No doubt, repetitive words can be mindless if we let them be. Think about the last time you said the pledge of allegiance. Did you really think about all the words that are a part of that pledge? Did you mean all the words you said with full conviction?
While this is a real concern, there are two reasons why it shouldn’t keep Christians from practicing practical liturgy. First of all, mindless prayer is certainly possible, albeit in a different way, in both extemporaneous and pre-written prayers. This is because thinking about which words to say can actually distract you from the meaning of the words you say.
This is a dangerous trap especially in extemporaneous prayer, because often those prayers are spoken in front of other people, who are listening to you pray. I admit that it is often a strong temptation for me: to try to make my prayers “sound good.” In trying to pray eloquently, I find that I am not really praying at all. I am speaking to the people around me, not to God. And as surprising as it is, building a habit of this approach to prayer can cause you to make your prayers “sound good” even when no other people are present.
If liturgy is the work of the people, and the work of the people is to worship God, then liturgy is how we worship, it’s the countless ways that we glorify God with our thoughts, our words, our actions, and our lives.
With pre-written prayers, this is still a challenge, but a different one. Usually, you might get concerned with praying the correct words, while you are still learning the prayer. However, once you have learned it, you are no longer concerned with saying the wrong words, because you know them by heart.
This memorization need not be disingenuous, you can mean words just as much even if you didn’t come up with them. Fr. Jonathan reminded me that all language is this way in fact, because we all learn to speak by repetition. Because of that, it would be ridiculous to say that merely repeating someone else’s words makes them no longer genuine.
Fr. Jonathan also called to mind a poignant image from his knowledge of C.S. Lewis on the topic: comparing the practice of pre-written prayer to a well-known dance. The more you have done it, the better you can be. When you stop having to think about the steps, that’s when you can really have your mind in the dance. The principle is just as true with prayer as it is with dance, because after you’ve learned the steps (the words) you can really devote your mind to the meaning, focusing on a particular word or phrase, or even just an idea. This is why the repetitive nature of practical liturgy is not necessarily a flaw, it can be a great strength.
I mentioned at the beginning of this article that there are two kinds of liturgy. Here at the end, I’d like to introduce you to the second, broader conception of liturgy: “glorifying liturgy.” I’ve chosen to call it this because this conception of the meaning of liturgy takes the word much more seriously. If liturgy is the work of the people, and the work of the people is to worship God, then liturgy is how we worship, it’s the countless ways that we glorify God with our thoughts, our words, our actions, and our lives.
In this way liturgy is not merely a set of practices that helps us to set our minds on God when we need it, it is also a fundamental way of life. Glorifying liturgy is transformative: living every moment as an act of worship makes us into the people we were always meant to be; the people who were made, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism states, “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
