Saturday, January 15, 2011

More Buchanan on Liturgy

Our most significant relationships and events have a liturgical shape to them.  They have rites of passage.  Birthdays and homecoming, graduations and goodbyes, Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter, birth and death and marriage:  all are marked by words and actions, songs and symbols, customs and traditions that enact them and complete them.  And all those things also provide us with a means of entering them.  What is a birthday without a cake, at least one candle on it, and a huddle of well-wishers, wearing clownish hats, singing in their ragged, hoary voices?

What is a birthday without liturgy?

What liturgy accomplishes is nothing short of astonishing:  It breaks open the transcendent within the ordinary and the everyday.  It lets us glimpse a deeper reality--the timeless things, the universal ones, the things above--within the particular instance of it. (emphasis mine)

~Mark Buchanan
(from the Introduction to The Rest of God:  Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath)

1 comment:

Yolanda said...

This is so true and your blog is lovely and you have such a lovely family.