We talk too much. We read too much. We hear too much. So much so, that we have lost the art of doing, of acting either as individuals or as a people. We no longer understand what it is to belong to a people who acts, who has “public action” of its own. We are no longer liturgical. For in our vernacularism and modernisation and reform, the very nature of the leiturgia – the nature of what is truly the work of the people – has been lost.
Today we seek to comprehend and explain and decide what we do in our churches but it is utterly questionable as to whether our people experience the liturgical revelation of Almighty God.
In fact, let’s drop the adjective “liturgical” and use Hemming’s words which assert that the liturgy is nothing less than “the ordinary and continual revealing of [God’s] truth”. If this is so, it cannot be a forum for our own self-expression. It cannot necessarily be within our immediate comprehension or subject to our didactic commentary. It must be experienced, indeed lived, as worship of Almighty God – as opposed to being “enjoyed” as a form of Christian activism – in order to begin to grasp something of what is being communicated in it: the very life of God Himself.
Alcuin Reid Divine Worship
