Liturgy, derived from the Latin Leitourgas, means literally “the people working.” But working for what? I was once at a wedding rehearsal and the mother of the bride didn’t like the way we were doing a certain thing in the marriage rite and was vocal about it. My response was that my job and every one’s job when we gather here is to make the liturgy beautiful. That is the sole end of all worship: to enact and embody beauty. We don’t gather here chiefly to propound doctrine and dogma, though it is important to say in a ritualized way, outwardly and visibly, what we believe (and that is in itself speculative); but we gather chiefly to celebrate the beauty of being loved, the beauty of being called on to love, and the beauty of what it means to be human; the beauty of living amid the beauty of our planet in its remaking. Beauty is transformative. We are changed in the perceiving of it and in the making of it….and the world is changed too. The world is changed by beauty made outward and visible. To experience the beautiful changes everything.
As the people working for beauty, we, liturgists extraordinaire, the people of faith and conscience, are world changers, world makers..that is our sole vocation:… enacting, embodying beauty in its infinite unfolding…music and art and nature, outward and visible signs of how we are made, how the world is made…the truth of the matter… the presence of evil notwithstanding. Our Church Liturgy at its best should celebrate and point to how the created order is rightly made; that it is imagination that turns the spheres, the creation dancing into being to a song….and the song’s lyrics include something about a meal graciously served; something about taking care of the least of us; something about kindness and mercy and justice and sacrifice and dignity, standing in the face of the not-rightness in our world…and the whole of it still, all beautiful, dynamic, unfolding ever as we speak… a sacred entanglement in the labors of new birth.
In the beginning God looked at all of what God had made and called it beautiful; and as God continues God’s own liturgical vocation of singing the world into being, bearing beauty from the source, beauty that is the source, we dear people of the Work of the Way are implied profoundly, and that is a beautiful thing.
