ii.The power of liturgy

During my time at theological college (now thirty years ago) I contentedly embraced the pattern of daily liturgy provided, but did not fully appreciated its sustaining power. I saw it as essentially a duty, a performance, and as such what seemed like its ‘dead’ predictability concerned me. For, irrespective of what might happen in the world, or in one’s life, the lectionary and the shape of the liturgy for a particular future day could already be known years in advance.

It has only been through the practice of ministry that I have come to understand the wisdom of liturgical commitment, not now as performance, but as invitatory gift. For prayer is not so much about the construction and creation of something, as it is about relaxing into and consciously participating in the eternal, pulsating activity of God as Trinity, an activity that exists before us, beyond us, and apart from us. It is this way that it refreshes and sustains whatever is going on in one’s life or in the world around us.

Prayer, we might say, is primarily not something we do; it is the rhythm of the intra-trinitarian life of God, the exchange of love between Father and Son through the Holy Spirit. In and through the liturgy we come to take our place in this divine conversation, sharing in the Son’s response to the generative love of the Father through the grace of the Spirit. It is as if in liturgy we are set floating upon the sea of God’s life, bobbing and responding to the ripples and waves of the dynamic of that Life. There is a gift of renewing buoyancy that comes from beyond us. The word of God finds us and captures us and takes us up into the rhythm of his origin. As such, liturgy is rightfully a form of realised eschatology.

As Rowan Williams (2012) affirms, the Eucharist is not a matter of affirming a set of propositions with the aid of audio-visuals. It is about relocating oneself in the space occupied and made available by Jesus in his relation to the Father, a space made possible through his life, death, resurrection and ascension (p.92). And in this space I am made aware that (Ibid., p.93):

• I am the object of divine commitment and attention
• I am freely created and never abandoned
• I am invited to review the pattern of my own living
• I enter a new and transfiguring environment in which human beings can be radically changed.

In the Eucharist we also come up against the only assessment and appraisal that finally matters. For here the church shows itself not just the source of its life, but thereby the criterion of judgement of all that it is and of all that it does (Higton, 2004, p.72). It is essential that we have opportunity to sit regularly with our plans and intentions, visions and dreams, along with our fears and anxieties, in this gracious court of judgement.

There is, of course, work to be done in seeking to make the liturgy as accessible as possible without compromising its gracious given-ness. Reflections on my own youth, with which I began, reminds me that what appears as formal prayer can look like an exacting discipline which is somewhat counter-cultural to the present and pervasive expectation of entertainment on demand. For each new generation there is the challenge of faithfully making inherited and often ancient traditions live afresh. Yet there is also the balance to be struck between creating liturgical opportunities that meet the needs of others while not ignoring what it is you need to sustain yourself.

Chaplaincy comprises many aspects. But participating in and sustaining the opportunity for daily public worship in our universities must be an excellent candidate for ‘the one thing necessary’. For here we remind ourselves and others of the priority of the loving initiative of God without which we have no place and no vocation. And for those who worry about such things, we also enact a key marker of our Anglican identity!