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)

Mark Buchanan on Liturgy

(From the Introduction to The Rest of God:  Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath)

Liturgy.  I chose that word with care.

I was converted within a Low Church tradition, where the building's walls are stark, the music simple, the prayers clumsy and direct, made up as you pray them.  I have only ever belonged to that tradition.  And so early on I picked up the tradition's historic suspicion of High Church, where God is approached through a sometimes elaborate system of symbol and ritual--robes and candles and prayer books and lectionaries--and almost everything is scripted.

That scripting is liturgy.

Yet over time I began to realize that the Low Church is just as bound by liturgy as any church, and maybe more so because we think we're not.  The Low Church enshrines--makes a liturgy of--austerity, spontaneity, informality.  And we have our unwritten but nonetheless rigorously observed codes and protocols.  We love our traditions, even our rigmarole, every bit as much as the next guy, only ours is earthy, rustic, folksy.

So I changed my mind about liturgy.  It certainly can become dull and rote, but so can anything--water polo, rose gardening, kite flying, even lovemaking.  Even fly-fishing.  Just as often, though, maybe more so, liturgy can enrich these things.  At its best, liturgy comprises the gestures by which we honor transcendent reality.  It helps us give concrete expression to deepest convictions.  It gives us choreography for things unseen and allows us to brush heaven among the shades of earth.

The Eminently Quotable Samuel Johnson

A couple weeks ago, Semicolon celebrated the birthday of Samuel Johnson with quotes that I enjoyed so thoroughly that I want to reprint some of them here! And I'm adding a few others from this quotations page which she linked to.

Samuel Johnson, in case you don't know (I was hazy, myself), lived in the 1700's and "made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, novelist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer." (That's from the Wikipedia article.) He was an Anglican, and an early sign of his superior intelligence was how easily he memorized sections of the Book of Common Prayer when he was four years old. He was quick-witted, timeless and endlessly quotable.

Good advice for bloggers:

“I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.”

"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure."

“Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”

"Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed."

And for blog readers:

“I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.”

(I don't know if I share the first part of that sentiment, but I do like comments! :)

A nod to unschoolers:

“A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.”

Advice for wives:

"A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek."

And his suggestions for chefs in general:

“A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.”

(Dad, that one was for you!)

(We share a passionate dislike of this annoying vegetable.)

How to stop whining and speak boldly:

“I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.”

A lesson in humility:

A lady once asked him how he came to define 'pastern' as 'the knee of a horse': instead of making an elaborate defence, as she expected, he at once answered, “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.”

Food for thought for Blondechick and her ilk:

"Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention, or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together. They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations, and charge nature with cruelty." (emphasis mine)

For those traveling at a hen's pace:

"Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks."

"The world is not yet exhausted: let me see something to-morrow which I never saw before."

And on quotations:

"Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language."

A good guy, Samuel Johnson. I'm not sure if I would have liked him in real life, but he's lots of fun, nailed safely to a page....

Thoughts on Failure, Perfection and the Attempt

I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
~Michael Jordan

The composer Stravinsky had written a new piece with a difficult violin passage. After it had been in rehearsal for several weeks, the solo violinist came to Stravinsky and said he was sorry, he had tried his best, the passage was too difficult, no violinist could play it. Stravinsky said, "I understand that. What I am after is the sound of someone trying to play it."
~Thomas Powers, quoted in the book Sunbeams

I wouldn't have even known they were mistakes if my mom hadn't told me. But she did. And then she said those mistakes didn't matter because it was Horowitz [a famous pianist]. And Horowitz was not about perfection. He was about joy and art and music and life. And those things have mistakes in them.
~A Crooked Kind of Perfect by Linda Urban

Striving for perfection is a good thing. Just don't be about perfection. Be about joy and art and music and life. Be the sound of someone trying.
~Miss Erin, Backstage Musings

Therefore...let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus...who for the joy set before him endured the cross...so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.
~from Hebrews 12

"My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."
~2 Corinthians 12:9

Getting the Question Right

From this article--

On the evening of Easter Sunday in 1988...Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, the Romanian pastor who was imprisoned and tortured for 14 years by the communists...was speaking to our newly planted church when it was meeting in our home. He finished what he wanted to say to us and opened the floor for questions. My wife Beverly was first to speak and asked him what we could do as a new church to grow, be healthy, and advance the kingdom. His response took us off guard – he said, “I do not have the answer to that question. Who has the next question?” He then took a question from a young man, a political activist, who wanted to know what we could do in America to prevent the same kind of persecution the church endured in Romania. In response, Pastor Wurmbrand said, “I cannot answer this question either. And now I want to tell you why. I cannot answer your questions because they are the wrong questions. To ask, ‘What must I do...?’ is like asking ‘What is the melody of a prune?’ A prune has no melody. As Christians we cannot ask ‘What must I do...?’ We must ask ‘What must I be...?