Evidently, I wasn't quite finished thinking about or talking about rhythm and liturgy after last Sunday. Here are a few more thoughts on the matter.
Liturgy: the Rhythm of Life
Some people who grew up in liturgical tradition have left,
finding them too confining, too rote, too dead to speak to a living faith. I traveled in the opposite direction: feeling confined by my "non-liturgical" Baptist upbringing (though every church has its liturgy, whether they admit it or not), I became Lutheran. For me, it
is in the patterns of the liturgy, the rhythm of the life of faith,
that I have discovered a God that keeps coming to me, continually, speaking the
Word: the good news that, in case I missed it last time, I have been saved in
spite of myself.
Perhaps it is because, in one of my former lives, I was a
musician. My instruments hang on the wall now, not so much as decorations, but
as reminders. I have visceral memories of the rhythms and tempos of the group.
Always having been terrible at keeping time for solo performances (I would
regularly disagree with my metronome), I was able to play in groups. I would
listen to all the parts coming together and discover where my part (let’s be
honest: it was usually 2nd violin) came in. As we came together, our
rhythms and melodies and harmonies created an event that reverberates in my
memory still. Sometimes, we would speed up, together, like a runaway train.
Sometimes, we would be caught up in the beauty of it that time itself paused a
moment to catch her breath.
But it is not only the musicians who become caught up in
rhythm. A crying child is rocked to soothe her, to bring order to her panic. A
child with autism responds to the pulsing squeezes to his head, hands, arms,
feet, the rhythms helping his brain reorganize and regroup.
It is the same with animals: dogs begin to howl in chorus on
the night of a full moon, the purring of a contented feline (is this possible?
Perhaps it is out of spite that they purr to appease our need to make such inconsolate
beasts happy); it is the sunrise chorus of songbirds, each in their turn,
calling back and forth to beckon the day. It is the same as the earth spins at
just the precise rate to keep us from falling off and – at the same time – to
prevent us from becoming dizzy. It is the motion of the ocean lulling the sand
to its resting place. The seasons, the days and the stars all have their
rhythms, as those who have gone before – generation after generation – have
marveled.
The rhythm of the liturgy is the buzz that reminds me of the
rhythm of all of creation, set to the tune of the creator’s continual approach.
This, for me, is freedom. It is freedom to sing kyrie eleison as I peel away the walls of self-preservation built over
the course of the week. It is the absolution that frees me from all the
definitions and designations that shackle me to my failures. It is in the Word that
I am freed from writing my own tragedy with myself cast as the hero. It is in
the Creed that I am freed from thinking God is too small, too impotent, to
affect the world in which I live. It is in the peace that I am freed by my
neighbor even as I free them from all that says something other than peace. It is
in the Meal that I am freed from believing I need to find a way to reach God as
I reach out my hand for the real presence of Christ. It is in the blessing and
sending that I am freed to dust off my knees and try again, facing the world
and her jarring cacophony of rhythms that attempt to offer a different
definition of who and whose I am. But I have been given the rhythm of freedom,
the rhythm of good news, the rhythm that set the earth spinning and the birds
singing and the stars whirring. It is the rhythm of a God who is always
creating, always redeeming, always sustaining.
This is not an artificial rhythm, repeated because we have
not found a better way to do – or be – church. This is not a “system” of
motions and actions mumbled under one’s breath. This is the rhythm of the life
of faith; it is the rhythm that, week after week, reminds me that I am free.
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