“I didn’t get anything out of this morning’s meeting . . . that song . . . her sermon” is not a refrain that I have heard often in the Orthodox context.
There is, of course, a just retort to such complaints: “The question is—what did you put into it?” The corrective is all very well and good. After all, one of the definitions of liturgy is that it refers to people’s (laos) work (ergon)—laosurgy. However, this counterresponse (“What did you put into the worship?”), though a helpful corrective, leaves us trapped in the same world of thought: worship, we assume, is something that people perform, and so it asks to be evaluated. We are to judge its success, according to aesthetics, or theology, or relevance, or utility, or arnestness, or effort. But there is something in our heart that yearns for more than this evaluative approach to worship. Prompted by God’s own Spirit, we long to be taken out of ourselves, even out of our role as judge. We long to inhabit worship instead of treating it as an object. We long to meet with the One who is the lover of each one of us and of the whole Church, his bride. We look to rejoice as God’s glory fills the temple. Such a meeting surely takes place only at God’s initiative, and not because of our creative, emotive, or practical interventions.
By Edith Humphrey, Grand Entrance: Worship on Earth as in Heaven,
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