Earlier in the year I shared that I adopted "Be Still" as a sort of motto for the year in lieu of any more concrete new year's resolution. I took "Be still and know that I am God" as an imperative to renew my relationship with God, meeting again for the first time, so to speak. To this end I started following the Lectionary and reading the Bible daily. I had been reading the Lectionary on and off since sometime last year, but approached the practice with new vigor with the new year and now at the end of March I'm still going strong.
I could write all sorts about how the constant flow of scripture in my life has affected me, and perhaps I will, but now I want to address something different. I've experienced since the new year, and in this last week in particular, a change of perspective in my spiritual life, and in my conception of worship in particular. This change of perspective started with adopting the discipline of reading the Lectionary.
I've always had a thing for spiritual disciplines, or rather, always wanted to. Throughout my life I've tried one thing after another. Fasting, praying like this, praying like that, writing songs, studying theology, playing music in the church, whatever. I've always wanted to figure out the thing to do to make myself a more spiritual person. I wanted to figure out how to make my contribution to my relationship with God, how to hold up my end of the bargain. I pictured God sitting there, waiting for me to get things figured out so I could be a good Christian and he could...um...give me a gold star or something, I guess. Listen, I don't really know why I felt like I had to do all this, I just knew that I should, so get off my back about the details, ok?
As you can imagine, this approach didn't work out too well for me. With no clue where I was going and less of an idea how to get there, I often found myself anxious, depressed, and hopeless about my spiritual life. For some reason, along with the call to Be Still came the call to read scripture daily. Nothing else. No study, no prayer, just reading, just listening. And so I did. I stopped praying and felt ok about it. It was time for me to stop trying to bring anything to the table other than myself.
I shared this with a friend of mine last week, about how I've set aside prayer while reading the Lectionary, and that while I was ok with that right now, I hoped that someday I'd figure out how to pray. He and his wife recommended using the Book of Common Prayer, the Anglican liturgical handbook, since it gave a structure for prayer and also incorporated Lectionary readings. I came home and poked around on the internet a bit and found a copy of the BCP in pdf form that I put on my iPod, along with my Lectionary pdfs, and started using it in my daily devotions the next day.
The only way I've managed to keep up daily reading as long as I have, aside from the grace of God, is by reading everyday at the same time, right as Hosea goes down for his nap at 11 in the morning. This week I used the Morning Prayer, Rite 1 liturgy from the 1979 U.S. Book of Common Prayer. I don't really know what I'm doing and so far don't have any guidance other than what is written in the book, so I just followed along, reading the parts of both the officiant and the people, plugging in the Lectionary readings where they're indicated, reading a randomly plucked canticle after each and praying at the end of the office, before The Great Thanksgiving. I started a prayer list several weeks ago on the iPod, even though I wasn't praying, and now seemed like the right time to start putting it to use. Now like I say, I have no idea if I'm doing this right, but I'm doing it anyway.
Using this outline for morning prayer this week has given me a new concept of devotion. This is different from "solo time" or personal Bible study, which to this point have been what I thought devotions should look like. Both put a lot of emphasis on the self, the one doing the devotions. Solo time puts emphasis on the self being alone. Bible study puts emphasis on the individual wrestling with scripture and coming up with something for their own benefit. Using the Book of Common Prayer in devotion was the first time I encountered personal devotion that isn't about me personally.
The seemingly more legalistic structure of the liturgy actually has the effect of freeing me from trying to tying the value of my devotional time to what I do in it. I know I'm going to do basically the same thing every time. I don't need to feel the pressure to find that powerfully hitting nugget of wisdom hidden in today's scripture verses and feel guilty when I don't. Ironically, compared to Bible study as a devotion, liturgy is less work.
I know the word liturgy means the work of the people, but I wonder if it's not more apt to think of liturgy as a framework rather than the work itself. Maybe liturgy is the system within which work is done. The liturgy itself isn't the important part, the important part is what happens as we work through the liturgy. The important work being done is not my work alone, but primarily the work of Christ in which I take part through the Spirit.
The liturgy doesn't do anything itself, as opposed to the idea that diligent study does. Too often studying can degrade into self-congratulation and reinforcement of our preexisting notions. And even if we escape that tendency, and are truly stretched and challenged through study, that doesn't change the fact that studying is at its heart a selfish endeavor. I actually don't think there's anything wrong with that, in its place. We should be able to make our intellectual pursuit an act of worship, but if it is our sole act of worship I fear we put the self to close to the center.
I recently read Worship, Community, and the Triune God of Grace by James B. Torrance. The central idea in this book is that Jesus is our worship leader. More than that, Jesus is the one who worships for us and our worship is a response to his. We join in his worship by the Spirit, not by our own work, not by the quality of our music or study or prayer. Our worship is taken up into Christ's eternal worship in the Trinity.
Taking myself out of the center, envisioning myself joining into the Trinity's eternal worship rather than doing the worship myself, is freeing to me. It is far better for my worship to be rooted in the worship of Christ than to be rooted on my own work. When I stopped trying to pray and started reading the Lectionary that was the first step towards taking myself out of the center. I didn't realize then that that's what I was trying to do, but now that I've stepped back I've discovered a new perspective on worship that I didn't have before.
