Does Liturgy Always Mean Being on a 'High'?

Overheard after Sunday worship, Something just clicked for me today at Mass. Perhaps a phrase in the homily, the Eucharistic Prayer, a hymn, or even a word from meeting someone on the church steps. After a special occasion with a packed church, we often come away feeling energised by the whole experience, in a way, lifted out of ourselves. We have a sense of being part of something much bigger. On the other hand, we can also feel Nothing much happened for me at Mass today. Occasionally we may go home carrying a reaction to an upsetting comment, for example, something the priest said in the homily.

Does liturgy presume we should always have a positive affective experience, even one that involves a sort of spiritual ‘high’? In other words, what can we ‘reasonably’ expect from our worship together? We can also ask the opposite question: what can we ‘unreasonably’ expect from the liturgy? These provide the guideposts for the thoughts in this article.

All God’s Work...

Firstly the Church’s worship is God’s work. It is not just about God but it is sharing in the life of God. St Paul points out that God in Jesus is reconciling the world to himself (2 Cor 5:19). The Letter to the Hebrews reminds us that Jesus is the perfect mediator between God and humanity (Heb 9:15). Jesus gathers together the whole of humanity and creation in his act of worship and self-giving love to the Father. In Jesus, we are caught up in what theologian Hans von Balthasar refers to as the ‘event’ of the Trinity – the endless energy of living and loving between Father, Son and Spirit.

We are then partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet 1:14). Our initial sharing through baptism must be gradually developed in our day-to-day existence. Our prayer, whether personal or communal and liturgical, allows the Holy Spirit to transform us slowly into the image of Jesus. The Spirit forms our head, heart and hands: our thinking, feeling and doing.

In Worship as Theology, Don Saliers describes liturgy as the divine ethos of God’s self-giving where grace and glory find human form and which draws into itself human pathos (human emotions, suffering and sinfulness). He explains beautifully that Christian liturgy transforms and empowers when the vulnerability of human pathos is met by the ethos of God’s vulnerability in word and sacrament (p. 22).

…But in Ordinary Life

Liturgy is God’s work, true, but God works in history, in events, in our daily lives. Since it is a process to do with life, it takes time to grow. It cannot be rushed. There is a divine respect for how we are made, how we function, how we develop.

In everyday life, we do not live constantly on a ‘high’ (could we, in fact?). It would exhaust us. There is a rhythm to life and nature: day and night, winter and summer, action and repose. If every day were a holiday, we would need a holiday from holidays! We would lose the special sense of the quality of leisure, breaks, relaxation.

In other words, routine and habits of regular action are part of and necessary for life. We are, as we say, ‘creatures of habit’, though not unthinking robots. We need patterned behaviour, for conscious concentration on every single thing we do would make life both burdensome and awkward. It is like thinking about every step we take when we walk. We would soon find ourselves tripping over our feet.

Think of family life, for example. Parents display an underlying committed love in the regular routine of meals, school, sport, and so on. There is a pattern of selfforgetfulness and sacrifice. Often these acts will not entail a sense of excitement or elation; it may at times be the opposite. But this behaviour brings an underlying contentment, a sense of being-there for the children out of love. There will of course be special moments of great joy and, at the end of the day, the special feeling of deep serenity at seeing a sleeping child.

The Steady Pattern of Worship

When we gather for worship, our liturgy is built on patterned forms of behaviour. It reflects the rhythms of nature and life: the seasons of the Church’s year, the alternating design of action and repose, the changes of pace characteristic of drama and theatre. It is neither a Town Hall meeting nor a Gospel Revivalist session. It blends the welcoming and the reverent. There are times for seeing and hearing, for speaking and for being silent. These will have varying levels of appeal, often depending on temperament and taste.

As in ordinary life, so in the liturgy, there will be times when we are truly uplifted. We go home carrying the reverberations of the experience throughout the day and the week. But for the most part, it is closer to the sense of contentment, a lingering sense of being in tune, at peace, with God and life. If I did not go, something would be missing.

So what we can ‘reasonably’ (and regularly) expect from liturgy is closer to the parent’s sense of committed love, something regularly repeated which reflects what is truly important to us. It is not elation that matters but devotion. It is the nourishing and deepening of enduring devotion and yearning for God that is central. Liturgy that embodies our participation in the divine life gradually transforms us in the well-worn, underground water courses of desire formed by and reflected in persevering practice. It is here that peak-experiences or liturgical ‘highs’ find their meaning. As George Herbert said, the Church’s prayer is God’s breath in man returning to his birth…Heaven in the ordinary.

Saliers notes the difficulty in today’s culture of distinguishing between immediacies of feeling and depth of emotion over time. Vital liturgy may produce ‘feeling states’ but that is not God’s criterion. Authentic liturgy needs time to deepen our disposition to perceive the world as God’s creation, to see and respond to the world through God’s eyes and with God’s heart. Gratitude, forgiveness, compassion, love and joy illuminate life with meaning in our head, heart and hands but they only unfold gradually over time as their patterns work their way into our lives. They are not so much felt or produced but elicited in season and out of season, as with joy in time of tribulation (p. 37).

The God of the Unreasonable…?

We rightly expect liturgy to be well-prepared and well-presented, especially by key ministers such as readers, presider and musicians. This cooperation with God offers many potential doorways for a nourishing experience of the divine ethos. Yet even the unplanned event has its place. For instance a wayward infant runs onto the sanctuary. It can offer a moment of domestic and spiritual warmth that is somehow ‘integrated’ into the Sunday Mass through the priest’s sensitive and tactful handling of the situation. Perhaps this small unexpected incident or gesture is what we take home from the liturgy that day.

However, if liturgy is all God’s work, we know God cannot be constrained by our human ways of doing things, however high the standard, however adaptable to the unforeseen. God is the God of Surprises. So we come to our second question: what can we ‘unreasonably’ expect of the liturgy?

While God may not be unreasonable in the sense of defying reason or opposing our good, God can act ‘beyond’ reason, for instance, by way of excess and generosity. As the Gospel reminds us, gifts can be pressed down, shaken together and running over (Lk 6:38). As far as we are concerned, just by bringing ourselves in prayer and liturgy, we can experience uncommon moments when we feel God’s lavish generosity and love. God’s unreasonable ways become evident. We remember Scripture’s metaphors of growth: the surprise of the seed that grows at night and no one knows how, or the seed that produces a hundredfold, by human calculation, a staggering outcome for any investment.

There is perhaps another sense to the God of the unreasonable. God is so far beyond us, exceeding and subverting our rational capacity to know and to love. This is the God of silence, who lives in unapproachable light. The closer we get to the sun’s light, the more we are blinded. So too with God. We reach a stage with God where we have to feel our way. Or rather, God has to take us by the hand. This experience of the spiritual life is also true of our common worship and liturgical prayer.

There comes a point, often described as ‘the dark night’ by spiritual masters, where our human capacities (to know, choose, desire, remember and imagine) hit the wall when it comes to God. It could just be part of life itself or it may be triggered by a life event or by a crisis whether personal or public. What happens is that our faith reaches a stage where we are in God’s territory. Truly God alone can do the work. Only God knows the terrain. It will often manifest itself in something like this: I can’t seem to pray like I used to. I don’t get what I used to out of going to Mass. This is a time to hand over and trust the Church’s ritual.

We may not be aware of offending God or of placing a wall between ourself and God, and yet we feel it is our fault and we do not know what to do. When this happens, Gerald May, in his book The Dark Night of the Soul, suggests the question: What is your deep-hearted desire? The first part of a person’s reply may be: If I think about my life and what matters to me, I don’t really understand what is happening and what to do. But the second part points to the way God is at work: What I really want is just to be with God, just to be in love with God.

Progress in the Christian life is directed towards deepening desire and devotion: the deer that yearns for running streams (Ps 42). It is to love God for God’s sake and not just for our own sake. This best encapsulates a response to our questions about what we can reasonably (and unreasonably) expect of the liturgy. Jesuit David Hassell in an article Norms of Prayerfulness expands on what Gerald May says above.

♦ Do I still desire to pray amid this prayerlessness? This desire is itself prayer.

♦ Do I still trust that God will rescue me eventually from prayerlessness? This trust is prayer.

♦ Am I willing to wait patiently for God’s so-called return? This waiting is prayer.

​♦ Deep within, am I at peace with God’s desires for me – even if I am not quite sure what they are? This peaceful Thy will be done is my prayer. In fact it is the Spirit’s prayer within me (Rom 8:26). 

This article was originally published in Liturgy News ​Vol 43(4) December 2013. Reprinted with permission.

‍