Life, Liturgy and Lethargical Dancing
By Lisa Dye

I’m not sure of the entire history of liturgical dancing, but it’s irrelevant to my point other than to illustrate my first and erroneous thoughts of the meaning behind liturgy.

To get there I have to tell you a little about my dad. He has lived most of his life unedited. Think … Archie Bunker. Think … Donald Trump. Now stop thinking of all the specific things Archie and Donald have said that offend you or you’ll get distracted. Think only of the bluster with which they’ve said it. You’ll get a picture of Dad. Unlike most of us who try to keep a lid on it, at least in our younger years, he didn’t wait to turn 80 to let loose. His lid has always been off. You know what you’re getting with Dad.

So when my parents split in the late 60s, they both made their attempts at mitigating the disaster of our family blow up. Something they read led them to pick me up at Girl Scout camp, take me to a theater where Gone With the Wind was playing, feed me popcorn and Hershey Bars and tell me during intermission that they were getting a divorce. (I’m pretty sure there was something Freudian in their choice of flicks, though I know they were trying to show me love.) I spent the second half of the movie in and out of the bathroom throwing up. As a result, I have blanked out every historical fact of the Civil War. I am dumb about it and I detest the era. I read no books concerning it, nor do I watch mini series or documentaries. You will not find me curiously exploring one of its historical sites.

Anyway, my mom referred to Dr. Spock for wisdom and advice in navigating the post-split psyches of my siblings and me. She also took us to Presbyterian Church with her family at times and we visited Catholic Mass with her best friend at others. Not to be outdone in the religion department, my dad took us on a Grand Tour of any church where he might hear stellar music. He was a jazz drummer, and a very good one, when he wasn’t selling insurance. During most of these church visits, we kids were painfully aware of our whiteness and our dad’s animated body movements as he played his air drums in the pew (usually front and center) next to us.

Once when one of Dad’s Sunday morning expeditions didn’t pan out as expected due to the fact the music was bad and the preacher boring, he said (as we left in the middle of the service), “That place oughta be called The Church of Blissful Sedation.” Another time, about which I tell this whole story, was my first encounter with liturgical dancing. Dancing in church? Okay with me. It was new. It was different. It was interesting. Being a budding ballerina, I was enthralled. But Dad rolled his eyes and stomped all over my enthusiasm. The rest of the day and for a while after that, he referred to it as The Church of Lethargical Dancing.

Liturgical … lethargical. The words melded in my mind. It has taken me decades to pry them apart from each other. Cemented into my eight-year-old brain was the equation that liturgy was boring and slow and something worth fleeing.

It wasn’t until a few years ago, in the throes of homesickness for something elusive in my faith practice, that I realized I missed the rhythm and ritual of liturgy I’d seen at times during my childhood. I don’t know why it hit me so. Maybe it was turning the corner into my 50’s. Maybe it was the longing for a worship experience that, unlike everything else in my life, was neither shrill nor interrupted. Maybe it was experiencing the beauty and centering rhythm of participating in the Liturgy of the Hours while on retreat at a monastery. In any case, I was realizing that one way that God seemed to speak repeatedly to me so I could understand was in acting things out as if on a stage.

I began to see liturgy in a whole new light. My Greek class prompted me to meditate on liturgy and related words. The word liturgy comes from two words. “Lit” comes from “laos” and means people. “Urg” is from “ergon” and means work. Literally translated, “liturgy” is the work of the people … a far cry from lethargy … or at least it should be.

That the liturgy utilizes every sense makes perfect sense. By sight, by sound, by touch, by smell, by taste, by every means, God communes and communicates with us, his children around his table. Fingers dipped in fonts of holy water recall to us our baptism. Burning incense raises our united prayers to God and commemorates Christ’s sacrifice as a fragrant offering (Ephesians 5:2) … and also reminds us that practical, sometimes painful sacrifice in human life diffuses the fragrance of Christ to our hurting world (Philippians 4:18). Reverent kneeling reminds us of God’s perfect holiness (Philippians 2:10) and in the sign of the cross we recognize Him in three persons with one nature (Matthew 28:19). Cantors lead us in psalms, hymns and spiritual songs and we respond, singing to God and to each other (Ephesians 5:19). We watch as the Word is raised up and enthroned before its reading, the proclamation of the Gospel and the homily. We thank God that Christ is the Word made flesh and glorify him. We offer him gifts and each other the sign of peace. We remember the Passover and it’s fulfillment in the Lord’s Supper by receiving Christ’s body and blood (Luke 22:14-20), the essence of his abundant and eternal life imparted to us in supreme sacrifice. By it, Christ is in us, and God in Christ (John 17:23). We are completed in unity with him and with each other, blessed by the priest and sent forth in peace and in the power of the Holy Spirit. Our mission: to live the liturgy and be his presence in the world (Acts 1:8).

Like a divine play, the Father acts, Christ acts and the Holy Spirit acts to explain the riches lying just beyond the glass we see through so dimly … things no eye can perceive, no ear can hear and no heart can fully know. Yet, in response we do try. We, with our priests, “serve a copy and a shadow of the heavenly things (Hebrews 8:5).” It is, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1075), a “proceeding from the visible to the invisible, from the sign to the thing signified, from the “sacraments” to the mysteries …”

And speaking of mysteries, I have not begun to grasp the whole picture, being, at this point part observer/part participant in the liturgy for the first time in decades. Yet, some aspects of my faith have emerged from murk into light as I’ve stood quietly and just watched for a time. So physical and sensate, the liturgy paints a picture of the work of worship. Life itself is physical and sensate and the mystery is what happens as the Church is sent into the world as the Mass is ended. In a way, that is when the true “work of the people” begins.

Filled with the lifeblood of Christ and breathed up on by his Spirit, we live and serve, each in our little part of the world … in families, in communities in workplaces. As sons and daughters, we offer the Father our bodies and our lives in Christ for his use in this world in response to his mercy (Romans 12:1, 2). Our spiritual service of worship is to present ourselves as living sacrifices. It is what we do in our daily lives, in forsaking selfishness and in being the keepers of brothers and sisters, which brings the shadow of heavenly things to earth and becomes a personal and living liturgy.

Liturgy is also a picture of the redemptive work of Christ in us and upon us. His liturgy has not ceased since he came to earth. He reveals and glorifies the Father, gives us eternal life, prays for our protection, gives us a full measure of joy, gives us God’s word, sanctifies us with truth, unifies and completes us, makes us one … God in Christ and Christ in us according to John 17. Christ’s great priestly prayer details his ongoing work in building his Father’s house. In liturgy, we give our assent to this work. We agree to be the house he is building. George MacDonald wrote, “The Truth of a thing, then, is the blossom of it, the thing it is made for.” Jesus said, “My house shall be called a house of prayer (Matthew 21:13).” We are made to be his house, praying and becoming the blossom and fruitful outworking of the Son. We are, first his mission and then his missionaries, first welcomed to his house, then sent to gather others into our house.

Another mystery is illuminated in Christ’s house being a house of prayer. Paul’s directive to the Thessalonians to “pray continually” or “pray without ceasing” depending on the translation used has always stumped me. How can one person do this? Trust me, I’ve tried. Prayer is not a chore for me. It’s something I like. I would gladly be Mary and spend many hours a day in concentrated prayer if I was not obliged to be Martha, to go to work and be in conversations with other people or otherwise do things that keep me from consciously praying. It’s an impossible assignment. Then there is the six hours a night that I’m sleeping. Fine … maybe it’s not a literal command. Maybe we are to be in an attitude of prayer. Yes, I do believe that and generally I think my spirit is continually conversing with the Father.

Yet, one morning at Mass, it struck me. The Church in its liturgies is praying around the world and around the clock. It prays without ceasing. This realization lifted a burden of anxiety off my shoulders. It didn’t make me breathe a sigh of relief and say, “Well, now I don’t need to pray.” No, it made me breath a sigh of relief and to pray more joyfully and confidently because I pray in the Body of Christ, sometimes carrying burdens and sometimes having my burdens carried, but always the burdens are carried. “My house shall be called a house of prayer.”

Another mystery is that liturgy facilitates diversity even though liturgy is regular, repeated and predictable. How can this be? I don’t know other than to say that as people give God their bodies as living sacrifices in worship, he imparts facets of the infinite Christ a little differently in each one to be living sacrifices in the world uniquely. The mystery of Christ is “celebrated through particular expressions” and manifested in “various forms of holiness” (CCC 1202). We see this in the millions of ways people find to serve him … and sadly in all the ways that get left undone. We humans need a plethora of expressions of Christ to discern and to taste one drop of the vast, eternal ocean of him.

Shamefully, we do not always recognize various forms of holiness if they are forms that are unfamiliar. But just as travel acquaints us with the lovely things of other cultures and cuisines and gives us an appreciation and taste for them, the communion of saints is to do that very thing for us spiritually. When we take hold of the idea that Christ is much higher and wider and deeper than his particular expression in us, and the people we are used to, then we can accept his various forms with revelation and a sweet embrace.

Holiness, in its most pure form, originates in God. It is hagios in the Greek and means, “different, unlike, other.” He is altogether apart and other in being and purity. We revere this in him and we accept that it makes him mysterious and impossible to fully know, though we long to know him. Yet strangely, when God by his grace and by the surrendered acceptance of one of his children pours out a bit of his otherness into them, we with our own and more familiar forms of holiness, often react with suspicion, with condemnation and sometimes persecution. We bind up the diversity that should result from liturgy. We are capable by the grace and the power of God in his Church of being “integrated in unity” (CCC1202), but often we will have none of it.

This subject prompts me to think about St. Mary of Paris. She was not your typical saint. Married twice, she then became a nun. Given to smoking and drinking publicly, even while wearing her habit, she was the kind of woman that some churches I have worshipped in would have run out on a rail. Yet … she was radical in her love and service to the poor. In this was her otherness, her holiness. In this was her liturgy.

This is what I am talking about here … the liturgy of our lives. Richard Rohr writes, “In the beginning, you tend to think God really cares about your exact posture, the exact day of the week for public prayer, the authorship and wording of your prayers, and other such things. Once your life has become a constant communion, you know that all the techniques, formulas, sacraments, and practices were just a dress rehearsal for the real thing – life itself …”

I confess to you, my brothers and sisters that I have greatly sinned, in what I have done. But mostly it’s in what I fail to do. I fail often to worship God with the work of my life. I am guilty of dancing away, quite lethargically, much of the time, tempted to neglect what truly important things are before me because I am blind to their significance or because I am lazy and loveless. Sometimes, I fail to see my unique liturgy because I think it should look like so and so’s over there. Theirs always seems so much better or more important than mine. But it is only in serving God in the particular people, the particular work and the particular sacrifices he chooses for me that I can reflect what otherness he means for me to have. And together, with you in your otherness, we accomplish the work of the people.