Liturgy

Awww…I get it! I just had one of those moments – you know the ones where all of the sudden all of the tumblers fall into place, the lock clicks, and the key turns. I’ve been hearing lately that our generation is becoming increasingly fond of liturgy (liturgy is like doing worship by way of ritual, that is to say you have to get up and do something). For awhile now I’ve been really perplexed by this. When I think of liturgy I think of ritual and when I think of ritual I think of all sorts of bad things.

In fact, here’s some free association for you on the term liturgy from my own gray matter; boring, Catholic, Orthodox, repetitive, slow, gray haired people, orthopedic shoes, stand, kneel, stand, kneel, sit, stand, kneel…

Ok. Anyway back to my revelation. I realized that liturgical worship is actually really well suited to our modern (or should I say postmodern) generation. I mean we’re all clinically ADHD, right? We’ve got so much multi-sensory stimulation that we can’t sit still. Kindergartens and grade schools are drastically reorganizing their teaching methods to deal with the fact that we now have our brains hooked up to a metaphorical Ethernet cable as opposed to the previous generations that were plugged in to a 56k modem, so to speak.

You see we can’t just sit down and do any single thing for very long. Our legs get fidgety, our eyes begin to wonder, and we start thinking about food or geopolitics or cartoons. So we pull out a PSP, an iPod, or a text-message enabled cellphone to keep us occupied for a bit.

So there’s this thing called a labyrinth, which is sort of like a maze except there’s just one way into the center (no dead-ends) and you take the same way out. The idea is you walk at your own pace and pray as you go. That’s it, just walk, reflect, pray.

Well what if all of the sudden this middle-school kid (or 26 year old) who can’t pray more than 2 consecutive minutes without his mind wondering or drifting off to sleep (after all, prayer is done alone and in silence with your eyes closed and head bowed), maybe all the sudden they can do this labyrinth thing and pray for 30 minutes.

Question: Is this so different from a “prayer walk”? What makes one liturgical (read: boring) and one nonliturgical? There are all sorts of other liturgical things besides the labyrinth but the question still stands for our example. And I don't have an answer.

I don’t really know all of the implications of this epiphany yet, but I wonder what it could mean for how we do our “personal relationship with God.” I mean, maybe the 20 minutes of Bible study and 10 minutes of prayer time in a silent room (think “Quiet Time”) worked great for those who came before us. But maybe instead of trying to force that same old method (and failing miserably and feeling guilty for it) we can try something new (or should I say really old). Maybe this opens some interesting possibilities.