Liturgy and Worship and Childlike Faith
Monday, January 17, 2011 at 9:04PM | by Otter 
Well, yeah. So who has more belief than the child...?A reflection or two on having gone to church for the first time in four years (barring weddings and funerals):
I really hate church.
If there's anything more depressing than the bloodletting that is parish life, I don't know what it is.
If there's anything less well-designed to make people into better people than the constant repetition of scripture, I have yet to see it.
If there's anything more outrageously hypocritical than a religion that advances the faith of a child as the ideal but latches it to the understanding of an adult, it should probably be forbidden by law.
But having said that, there's something awesome about liturgy in that it depersonalizes the whole thing in just the right way. So you don't believe: big deal. You believed enough to show up. That's enough. The thing goes on without your belief, so just hang on if you want. Or don't, no big deal.
It's a wonderful release for people who have been taught all their lives that heaven and hell hang in the balance on the strength of their conviction: could anything be less like the faith of a child than being told that you will be punished for Crimes X and Y, but delivered from punishment by Behavior Z? That's rationality. That's justice. It's not faith.
Faith is turning up with your dancing feet on and your mind totally undisturbed by boundaries.
It's wandering into the baptismal font and having to be fished out because you did it wrongly.
It's taking the Eucharist and shoving it in your ear to see if it will fit.
It's hearing a lot of twaddle about what We Believe and making a song out of it until you can't think of anything that rhymes with "Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church."
It's feeling something a little Christmasy about bread and wine, and being greedy for it.
It's tugging on the great trouser-clad trees of your father's leg and getting picked up, quite in spite of the fact that you don't really have a formal belief in "father" or even "picked up," and that if somebody had tried to articulate one, it would have come out nonsense. "Father can best be defined as..." "Picked up is the action of a Father towards His children..." How perfectly preposterous to say that this is the faith of a child.
And yet it's the substance of worship as Christians have made it, really.
But in liturgy of all sorts, a child might play. Salvation might even lie in repetition, the things so sacred that they can go on quite undisturbed by your lack of belief in them, and quite unabashed at the screaming of infants or the boredom of loathsome adults, spinning color and smoke and incense and music and movement.
Suffer the little ones.
Reader Comments (1)
Liturgy makes the worshipers less important than what is worshiped and that is why I love it....