The Liturgy: Our Old Friend
I was reading the latest issue of Touchstone and ran into a striking observation quote in the opening editorial. The author was writing about Christmas Carols, but said this, and I’ve inserted a couple words to drive the point home:
Like the oldest and best liturgies, these songs are no one’s personal property, time and usage have wiped away nearly all distracting fingerprints of authorship and "originality." Instead, they belong to all of us. They are old friends to us, and like the best old friends, they are comfortable and reassuring, and yet also full of mysteries and surprises and strange, hidden delights. Our Christmas Carols [our historic liturgies] are among the most precious shared possession of our fragmenting, fraying culture [Synod/Church], and for all that we abuse them and demean them, they seem to remain imperishable.
Source:
Touchstone
December 2006
"God Rest Ye Merry: On Celebrating the Darker Meaning of Christmas"
by Wilfred McClay
I am thoughtfully planning a paper that I will title, “Innovative Liturgy: Manifestation of Individualism.” It seems to me that what we call “Contemporary Liturgy” is more accurately tagged “Innovative Liturgy.” All historic liturgy is contemporary in the truest sense, namely, that it expresses the faith and longing of the contemporary generation even as it did those generations that preceded us. What is being done by those who do their own thing in their own way at their own time is more correctly “Innovative Liturgy.” It is a manifestation of individualism in that those who do it separate themselves from those who seek to maintain consistent connectedness with others in the Church … NOT lock-step as some would wrongly accuse. Rather, they are marching in the same direction, in the same formation, wearing the same uniform.