Thoughts on Worship
A continuation of yesterday’s post. Starting with a rather long, but extremely salient, quotation from C.S. Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer.
I think our business as laymen is to take what we are given and make the best of it. And I think we should find this a great deal easier if what we were given was always and everywhere the same.
To judge from their practice, very few … clergymen take this view. It looks as if they believed people can be lured to go to church by incessant brightenings, lightenings, lengthenings, abridgements, simplifications, and complications of the service. And it is probably true that a new, keen vicar will usually be able to form within his parish a minority who are in favour of his innovations. The majority, I believe, never are. Those who remain — many give up churchgoing altogether — merely endure.
Is this simply because the majority are hide-bound? I think not. They have a good reason for their conservatism. Novelty, simply as such, can have only an entertainment value. And they don’t go to church to be entertained. They go to use the service, or, if you prefer, to enact it. Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best — if you like, it “works” best — when, through long familiarity, we don’t have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. … The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.
But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing from worshiping. …
A still worse thing may happen. Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. … Try as one may to exclude it, the question “What on earth is he up to now?” will intrude. It lays one’s devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, “I wish they’d remember that the charge to Peter was ‘Feed my sheep’; not ‘Try experiments on my rats,’ or even, ‘Teach my performing dogs new tricks’.”
Thus my whole liturgiological position really boils down to an entreaty for permanence and uniformity. I can make do with almost any kind of service whatever, if only it will stay put. But if each form is snatched away just when I am beginning to feel at home in it, then I can never make any progress in the art of worship.
… And that brings me back to my starting point. The business of us laymen is simply to endure and make the best of it. Any tendency to a passionate preference for one type of service must be regarded simply as a temptation. … And if we avoid them, may we not possibly perform a very useful function? The shepherds go off, “everyone to his own way,” and vanish over diverse points of the horizon. If the sheep huddle patiently together and go on bleating, might they finally recall the shepherds?
I find much to agree with in this passage.
I DO agree that the main job of the laity is to make the best of whatever spiritual sustenance is on offer, even if the “menu” is not entirely palatable.
I also agree that it is much easier to FIND the good if you know what to expect when you sit down at table. Consistency is not necessarily stagnation. Sometimes consistency is the bedrock on which beauty is built. If you serve a different recipe every time you serve chocolate-chip cookies, no one will be able to characterize what YOUR cookies are like.
I think that we too often think we can boost our numbers with innovation and modernization. And we may see an increase in numbers. But is anyone counting the ones who leave, fed up with not being able to relax long enough to weed out the good from the dross?
As Lewis says, I don’t go to worship to be entertained. I go to worship to receive sacraments, to adore, to approach closer to God than I can alone. There is an enormous difference between me, on my own, singing a song of adoration to God, and the music of a large group offering their music corporately. Likewise, there is power in corporate prayer that solitary prayer lacks. Corporate prayer binds the will of all of the congregation and cements it to the will of God — increasing the power of the prayer exponentially. (Please understand that I do not, in any way, mean to denigrate the value of personal worship, prayer, or devotions.)
I DO find that when the standard form of worship is altered, I am more easily distracted and feel “on edge” — as if I am constantly wondering “what’s going to happen next?” When I don’t know what to expect, I feel very much as I do when my theatre ensemble first works with blocking — nervous, unsettled, apprehensive. I don’t want to make a mistake, so I can’t relax into my role. Once the blocking is set, I can begin to settle into my part. And once I settle into it, I can both give the most to it and get the most from it. As Lewis says, “As long as you notice the steps, you are not yet dancing….”
And so, like Lewis, I am left bleating at my shepherds: “Give me permanence. Give me predictable. Give me something comfortable.” I only hope that the shepherds will hear, and listen, and come back to where this frightened, bewildered sheep is huddled with her fellow sheep, waiting to be fed.