I belong to a diverse people. I am surrounded by those who love the church. There are many that follow Jesus with excitement. There are also those that run far from all things religious. When they hear the word liturgy, they think HELL NO. I am not reading Lacy's blog for the next 100 days because liturgy means rules and weird traditions and a color chart and Confirmation class.
To all my people:
The word liturgy is derived from the technical term in ancient Greek ( λειτουργία), leitourgia, which literally means "work of the people." It is not a set of rules. It is not something that has to be done perfectly. It is not even confined to what happens (or doesn't happen) in the worship gatherings of certain types of churches. It is simply, in it's purest form, the collection of people focusing their hearts and lives on connecting to the Divine. The liturgical calendar is simply a tool that is used by Christians throughout the world to connect the work of the people to the work of God.
The liturgical calendar leads us through seasons and rhythms that emphasize the importance of designated times for penance and celebration and mourning and hope and community and intimacy, all with the goal of drawing us deeper into our connection with God. As I have re-explored this topic in recent time, I have been blessed to have the wisdom of Sr. Joan Chittister as a guide. In her book The Liturgical Year: The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life, Sr. Joan helped me to see more fully the personal implications of this corporate journey.
"The liturgical year is the process of coming back year after year to look at what we already know on one level, but are newly surprised by again and again. To live the liturgical year is to keep our lives riveted on one beam of light called the death and Resurrection of Jesus and its meaning for us here and now. One. Just one." - Sr. Joan
The format for my walk through the next 100 days will help us enter into each season with a day of contextual information. Before writing about my own experience of a season, I will write about the background of the season itself. For instance, Day 1 will help us form an understanding of Advent. What it is? Why and how is it celebrated? Why is it a crucial season in spiritual formation?
The subsequent days will include my own stories of the season. Rather than telling stories from many seasons of my life, I am telling my 42 years as one journey through the liturgical calendar. While our calling is to experience the calendar anew each year, I have found it helpful in process and revelation to place my own journey in the context of a bigger story - the one great story of God's rhythm of redemption.
Some seasons are single posts. Some seasons take 20 stories to express the complete experience. Some stories are hard. Because death is hard. Some stories are celebratory...hello, Pentecost! But all of my stories are significant because they vividly depict the journey from waiting to birth to celebration to turning. From running to dying to life to fullness. This is the story of faith. Over and over and over again.
Welcome to Liturgical Faith.
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