Our liturgy is at the heart of who we are. While teaching and preaching in the church inform our minds, liturgy informs our souls. One of the first things we say about the Episcopal church, and particularly All Saints, beyond being welcoming and inclusive, beyond being a “thinking” church, is that we are a church that values beautiful worship. We humans are creatures of imagination. When the imagination is engaged and enlivened we enter the liminal space of transformation and are moved to consider our deepest identity. We learn, we are ‘ informed’ through our liturgy from week to week, consciously and unconsciously. We gain muscle memory, as it were, through the outward and visible sign, the ‘sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving’ expressed as beautifully as we know how… that gratitude and community and the love and nurture of neighbor lie at the heart of our humanity… at the heart of God.
The pinnacle of our liturgical life begins in Holy Week. We begin on Palm Sunday with Jesus’ so-called triumphal entrance into Jerusalem…. bearing with his disciples the apocalyptic expectations of a movement for liberation and dignity in the face of the corrupt powers that be. We remember his arrest and his mock trial; his torture and execution… all for the cause of a world restored, a world set right, a world loved into a just and mutual community…. the Cause. The walk of Holy Week leads us to the cross so that we have no choice but to look the scandal of evil in the world in the face. There is no Easter without Good Friday. The rhythm of our mortal journey is forever a dance between good and evil, death and life; the old passing away, yielding the new. Our liturgy teaches us this rhythm whether we know it or not. Beauty, art, artifice are that way.
So, I invite you to participate fully this Holy Week. There will be services each day of Holy Week culminating at the Great Vigil of Easter, and Easter Day… but Easter only has resonance having come through the passion of the world’s darkness. Our liturgical life enables us to remind our souls, our collective psyche, in ways beyond our conscious knowing, that death is not the end, that new life and hope are worthy of our solidarity. It is not enough to simply tell each other of the truth. We are duty bound to act it out in the artifice of ritual.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge proclaimed that the human imagination was of the imagination of God… that the human imagination was the indwelling Spirit of God. Nurture your imagination this Holy Week in the artifice of liturgy… Let us bear this great story, our story, God’s story, outwardly and visibly… bear it as a witness to the truth…. the truth of who we are… the truth of who God is… and let the truth set us free.
