Torn Notebook: Liturgy and Memory

This brief reflection from Wei Hsien is well worth your time.

The liturgy, it seems to me, is a living organ of ecclesial memory holding within itself the legacy of the Fathers, those pioneers of the Way who shaped Christianity definitively by what Cardinal Ratzinger calls their “primordial response” to the Word of God. Not everyone has the ability, time or the means to read and study the writings of the Fathers, but every Christian who worships in and with the Church steps into and, in a very real way, lives in the spiritual home which they’ve built for us by their devotion to Living God.

Sunday after Sunday, season after season, year after year, one sings hymns and prays prayers broken in by use, stretched and worn to comfort by generations upon generations of holy men and women and not-so-holy men and women. In the liturgy one finds the familiar stories of Scripture, the broken heart of St. Ephrem, the textured (and verbose!) eloquence of St. Basil, the grandeur of the Jerusalem Temple, the songs carried on the lips of kings and peasants. The whole thing has the feel of a ragged prayer book, its tattered and dog-earred pages stained sometimes by sweat, sometimes by tears, sometimes by blood.

The liturgy, I think, is a house that is the way it is because it is “lived in”. If there are parts of the liturgy that seem outmoded, messy or awkward in their place, perhaps they reflect the outmodedness, messiness and awkwardness of a home that’s housed peoples of different times, shapes and sizes, who each in the course of discipleship thought to leave behind some furniture—or in some cases, entire rooms—for the heirs they knew would follow them. Any impulse toward its renovation and renewal, it seems to me, must always be nurtured with this in mind.

So I think.

And so do I.