Longing for the Liturgical Life

My name is Dave Friedrich, husband to Anna, and I have a hankering for the monastic life.  

A monk knows what’s coming.  He doesn’t have to guess or figure out what his day will entail. Times to gather and be alone, times to worship and work have already been arranged.  Prayers for morning, noon and night have been provided.  He merely enters the flow- the flow that directs him to God.  

While I don’t live in a monastery, and I haven’t taken a vow of celibacy, I have found life in such monastic rhythms.  When we come together at our little Anglican church, there is a recognizable movement to our worship:   a Gathering, the Word of God Proclaimed, Responses to the Word, Preparations for Communion, Celebrating Communion, and finally a Sending Back into the World.

For many, including myself, this movement is like the East Australian Current that helped Marlin get to his son in Finding Nemo.  When we jump into this intensive liturgy, “it is like suddenly discovering that a vibrant, powerful stream of worship and praise to God has been going on for centuries upon centuries.  We are at first swept off our feet, perhaps a bit confused and uncertain.  But soon we catch the rhythm; we begin to understand what is happening … we discover we are not alone, and this liturgical current of worship, prayer, and praise will indeed take us where we want to go--union with the God we seek to love” (Welcome to the Book of Common Prayer by Vicki K. Black).

The Book of Common Prayer (BCP) is the place to find this intensive Anglican liturgy, a real gift to the Church.  The album monasticFolkspeak participates in that gift, offering musical sense to some of those Anglican prayers.  It also extends that liturgy into the ordinary time of the week.  A Collect for Grace (morning prayer) has been a helpful way to orient myself to God and His purposes as I sing it on my way to work.  O Gracious Light (evening prayer) has been a family favourite to bring calm closure to the day.

Anglican churches, of course, are not the only churches that have liturgies.  Catholic, Charismatic and Non-denominational churches all have a recognizable order and flow in their movement towards God.  There are also other communities that have liturgies (although they might not call them by that name).  When we joined the community of L’Abri over a decade ago, (see www.labri.org) we quickly learned the rhythm:  half a day of work, half a day of study; Monday is given to prayer, Wednesdays and Fridays host lectures, one meal a day for intense discussion; Thursdays are your time; Sunday is Chapel and High Tea.  

Some find this kind of structure suffocating.  Yet many discover the “brief solace” of Wordsworth's famous Prefatory Sonnet:  “Nuns fret not at their Convent's narrow room / And Hermits are contented with their Cells / and Students with their pensive Citadels.”  They fret not because they know the apparent “prison, into which we doom ourselves, no prison is.”  These structures and parameters are not a prison.  They actually free us from “the weight of too much liberty.”  

Is an American allowed to say that?  

The liturgies I have come to love offer me that much needed solace, and pull me into this Godward current.

Three books that sparked some of the ideas in this post are  Liturgy as a Way of Life:  Embodying the Arts in Christian Worship by Bruce Ellis Benson, Welcome to the Book of Common Prayer by Vicki K. Black and How to Write A Sentence and How To Read One by Stanley Fish.