The worship of God
It carried within it an energy not its own
From time-to-time we’ll do a reprint. It will be an article from an earlier blog “Means of Grace, Hope of Glory” or possibly a section from one of our books. This piece comes from An Energy Not its Own: Three Cycles of Parish Life and the Purposes of the Parish Church, Michelle Heyne, OA & Robert Gallagher, OA, Ascension Press, 2023. Here we are sharing a section from the first chapter on the worship of God, a purpose of the parish church. It expresses our viewpoint. Please, if you wish, offer your own in the comments.
The Church (it was early decided) was not an organization of sinless men but of sinful, not a union of adepts but of less than neophytes, not illuminati but of those that sat in darkness. Nevertheless, it carried within it an energy not its own, and it knew what it believed about that energy. -Charles Williams, He Came Down from Heaven
The Purposes of the Parish Church
There are three intrinsic purposes of any parish church. We see them as:
1. The worship of God
2. The formation of the People of God for the sake of the world
3. Being a sanctifying presence in the broader community
These purposes aren’t something we create ourselves. They are the innate, natural functions of the local microcosm of the Body of Christ, the parish church. We may engage them effectively or not. We may adequately understand the issues and dynamics within them or not. The parish may have a high level of commitment and competence in regard to them or not. They are our underlying reasons to exist, regardless of whether we are effective, comprehending, and committed. Accepting them as our life and work changes a parish.
The parish that faithfully takes on the purposes does so as an extension of the Incarnation. The mission of God is our mission—holy unity, reconciliation. The ends of God are our ends—the Kingdom, “a commonwealth of free, responsible beings united in love.”[8] The parish’s attention to the three purposes is about advancing that mission and those ends.
The worship of God
We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become. – Clare of Assisi
Worship is what human beings do. It comes naturally to us. We are wired for adoration, awe, and reverence. Even our resistance to it illustrates its significance and attraction. Consider the related words—honor, adore, praise, devotion, thanksgiving, love. Also consider another related word—idolatry. That’s a word that invites caution. We can worship something that is destructive, and we can worship in a manner that is obsessive or blind. Everyone worships. Everyone. What and how we worship “shapes what we become.”
The worship of God is for its own sake. It’s not about there being some benefit for ourselves or for the world, though there is a benefit. We enter into adoration and awe and in doing that we engage what we were created for—our “chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”[9] The payoff is intrinsic and apostolic. It is what makes sense of contemplative communities. Yet, for most people, contemplative communities are difficult to understand. Worship is hard to grasp because our transactional thinking takes us into another pathway. There is in us a hunger to be in communion with God. To know unity and harmony. To lose our life so we might find our life. It’s the other pathway.
Episcopalians, and all Anglicans, have a particular approach to worship in the Prayer Book Pattern or Threefold Rule of Prayer. In A Wonderful and Sacred Mystery: A Practical Theology of the Parish Church we wrote:
“ Threefold Rule of Prayer of Eucharist, Daily Office and Personal Devotions is one way of expressing the core of Prayer Book spirituality. It has been a significant understanding for many Anglican spiritual guides, including Thornton … Martin Thornton saw the threefold Rule as forming “one whole balanced organic life.” He asserted the basic logic behind “common prayer” in seeing that “private prayer is absolutely dependent on the Office and the Eucharist.” In Christian Proficiency, Thornton suggested that the Eucharist was “the living heart of the Body of Christ,” the Office was “its continual beat or pulse,” and personal devotions were the “circulation of the blood which gives life and strength to its several members.” Evelyn Underhill writes of the Eucharist as life “laid on His altar as a sacrifice of love, and consecrated, transformed by His inpouring life, to be used to give life and food to other souls.” She describes the significance of the Office by noting that in “its recitation the individual or group enters the ancient cycle of prayer.” She sees personal devotions as being about the uniqueness of each person’s relationship with God.”
There are three elements we’d urge clergy to pay attention to as they arrange the parish’s worship life: The Threefold Rule of Prayer, living the Church Year, and awe and adoration.
The Threefold Rule of Prayer
This pattern of Eucharist, Daily Office, and personal devotions, especially reflection, is a place to begin. It easily forms the basis of a Rule of Life and offers a balanced life of prayer nurturing both what is most comfortable and what will usefully stretch us. And while the pattern is that of the whole Church, the living of it depends on the baptized person making responsible decisions in regard to their own spiritual life. The priest needs to bring the pattern to the attention of members. We do that primarily as the parish lives the Threefold Rule in its corporate life. It’s not enough to provide links to the Office online. If people are to take the life of prayer seriously, the parish needs to have a public offering of the Office on most days of the week. In groups and with individuals, the priest can offer training and guidance that helps them live the pattern in a manner that fits their personality, gifts, and circumstances.
Living the Church Year
This is the tangible way in which the parish, and each person of the parish, are helped to live in relationship to the larger Christian life of worship. The starting place is in looking at the Book of Common Prayer. Notice that most of the book is devoted to the Holy Eucharist and the Daily Office, the services themselves, as well as the psalms, collects, and lectionaries that support the liturgies. So, first, regularly offer the Eucharist and public Offices.
Then take note of the calendar of the Church Year and fold into parish life the Eucharist on all Sundays and Principal Feasts (observed on the actual day or the eve of the day, not transferred to Sunday or another “preferred” time). Then observe our two Fast days and Days of Special Devotion. Finally, add in the appointed Holy Days to celebrate with the Eucharist or Office.
As is true in any effective pastoral and ascetical strategy, the parish needs to provide the fullness of the pattern, and individuals need to accept responsibility for understanding the pattern and living it in their own lives. Too many parish clergy have been seduced into a very partial expression of the Church year by a mix of multitudinism[10] and personal convenience. So, learn to be joyful even if only one or two arrive to join you on the Feast of the Ascension. Have that talk with your family that you’ve avoided about the need for a slight change in the household routine so the parish might more fully worship.
Awe and adoration
Awe and adoration are the ground that nurtures faithful Christian action. We have long been convinced of Evelyn Underhill’s assertion that our service must be grounded in awe and adoration.
Awe is a gift. God gives the gift. We don’t order up awe at the checkout window. Adoration is different. We can decide to adore. We can engage in adoration in our common prayers and in our personal devotions. We may not be able to decide how much passion we offer in those acts, but we can decide to do the acts.
Awe and adoration are “partly about focusing on the world outside of your head and rediscovering that it is filled with marvelous things that are not you.”[11] That’s a definition from a medical practitioner. It’s an acknowledgment that the experience is common in humanity. For the Christian it is a necessity for our journey into the pathways of grace, into the Divine. With respect to our immediate concern, it suggests the need for the worship of the gathered assembly, and the daily practices of the faithful, to have woven into them experiences that will evoke awe and adoration in some of us, on occasion. There are so many ways—beauty, rhythm, light and darkness, silence, music, sacred words, icons and crosses, processions, incense, well-delivered homilies. In all that, we are not trying to produce a particular feeling or state of being. We are instead opening the door. What the Holy Spirit uses to draw the person outside themselves for a time will vary from one person to another and one time to another. On occasion there will be moments when almost the entire congregation will share the experience.
It may be paradoxical for those of us who get tired of the familiar, but another practice that will help with adoration and awe is simply using the words and phrases of our prayer book. The rhythms and sounds of common prayer, said day by day and week by week, settle into our hearts and ready us for the times of wonder and devotion.
There are two aspects of this we’d like to give special attention to.
First, the parish can help its members recognize awe and adoration as it happens in their lives. Asking them to identify and reflect on previous experiences of awe is possibly the best way to do this. Here are three questions that may assist such reflection:[12] “When have you felt intense wonder or amazement, truly in awe of your surroundings?” “When have you felt overwhelmed by greatness, or by beauty on a grand scale?” and “When have you been stopped in your tracks, transfixed by grandeur?”
Second, entering into awe and adoration will change us. It will change the parish. It will change individuals. Teilhard de Chardin saw that “to adore is to pray toward … It is to go out of oneself, to commune with a Reality larger, deeper, purer than one’s own being. Adoration is an enhancement of one’s being, though paradoxically this comes about through going out of oneself.” It is an enhancement of one’s being.
This abides,
Sister Michelle & Brother Robert
On the Feast of G.K. Chesterton, Writer
Endnotes
[8] John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, 2nd ed, Pearson Publishing, p. 360.
[9] From The Westminster Shorter Catechism written in 1646 and 1647 by the Westminster Assembly, a synod of English and Scottish theologians and laymen intended to bring the Church of England into greater conformity with the Church of Scotland.
[10] Multitudinism is Martin Thornton’s term for when the church focuses on numbers. He thought it was a common pattern of thinking among clergy that failed to face the fact of a parish being made up of people at different places in their spiritual life and ended up pretending that the parish is a uniform mass. Thornton wrote, “Multitudinism has reduced Christianity to a conventional mediocrity, in which the hard things, and consequently the inspiring things, have no place.” His three strata approach of Remnant, Incarnational and Natural Religion was a way to account for a diversity within the parish that allowed for the proficient Christian to be at prayer with the immature or tentative Christian. The Shape of the Parish Model is a similar approach. A video on the model.
[11] Virginia Sturm, “An ‘Awe Walk’ Might Do Wonders for Your Well-Being,” The New York Times, October 6, 2020.
[12] Andrew Tix, “Overwhelmed by Greatness: The Psychological Significance of Awe in Christian Experience and Formation,” Biola University Center for Christian Thought/The Table, October 26, 2015, cct.biola.edu/overwhelmed-greatness-psychological-significance-awe-christian-experience-and-formation.