Ancient, continuous, and meaningful
why traditional, liturgical church practices draw me
Editors’ note: This is the second article of a series The Messenger is commissioning on “the appeal of ... .” To learn more about the what and the why behind this series, see the “editors’ note” here.
Communion has consistently evoked a sense of anxiety for me. Communion Sundays served as a reminder of what a poor Christian I was, not holy enough, not committed enough, not humble enough, not good enough, and so on—and I would need at least another year of preparation to get there. One such Sunday, as I listened to the sermon and these familiar feelings started to emerge, my eyes were drawn away from the pastor to the cross on the pulpit. As I focused on the symbol of the cross, the pastor’s voice faded away, my anxieties faded away, and my fear of judgment faded away. Instead, I was reminded of God’s infinite love and grace that covered all my failings; and, instead of anxiety, I felt peace.
This was a small moment in my spiritual journey, but it is one of several experiences that drew me toward tradition and traditional liturgies.
To give some background, I struggled to form a connection to my own church for two reasons. One was the difficulty of forming good social connections. Those who seemed to thrive in church were socially competent; they made friends easily, were confident, and outgoing. Strong social connections seemed to be significant when tethering people to their church and even to their faith.
A second, and for me more significant, reason was the onset of considerable doubt in my teen and young adult years. I could not practically connect the world of scientific discovery with the God of the ancient past. One world seemed solid and factual, the other fantastical and unreal. This struggle was not aided by the palpable discomfort I felt the church had around science, or the fear that if I voiced my doubts, someone would try to convince me to believe instead of taking the difficulties seriously. If I can quote Peter Enns, who explains it well, “Making sense of this God creates challenges for me, and when I bring the universe into it... I have a hard time connecting the God of back there and then with my world here and now… No one should underestimate the force of this dilemma or the stress and pain it creates for people trying to believe.”
I do not think this struggle alone would have alienated me from church if I had felt it was a safe space to talk about doubt and fear openly and honestly but, at the time, I did not feel it was.
Traditional/liturgical style churches have an appeal to me because, even with limited exposure, facets of their worship, practices, and structure have helped me to both find a place of belonging and settle my intellectual struggles, and it did it in a way I wouldn’t have expected.
Forgive me as I now go on a tangent, and if you don’t know anything about Star Wars, I apologize.
A couple of years ago, I played a video game, Jedi Fallen Order. Superficially, it’s just another Star Wars story, but it had an unusually profound impact on me. The plot is as follows: a young Jedi’s master is killed in a Jedi purge. As a child of ten or so, our protagonist goes into hiding alone until he is found out about a decade or so later by our villain, who wants to kill him, and by an ex-Jedi who wants to save him. Now we embark on our hero’s journey.
The thing that made this story unique to me is that it isn’t just about how this lost and isolated young man fights an evil oppressor; it’s about whether he will and why he will. Who is he, who did he used to be ten years ago when tragedy struck, who is he now as an isolated and endangered refugee, and who is he going to be going forward?
His journey is spent largely in isolation; your adventures are solo adventures, you are guided by memories and recordings of dead masters, most of the planets you visit are deserted, and your visions are of a long-extinct species. Of course, we know what our hero will do—this is a fairly typical hero story after all.
What struck me as unique is how our hero makes his choices. His choices are made not by weighing good vs evil (though that factors in), or whether he’s the most capable (he’s not), but by learning who he is, an identity discovered through a personal and collective remembrance. He is both alone and not alone. He embraces that identity and does as those who came before him did.
I am probably being too romantic about a fairly generic Star Wars story, but I found that I wanted what our hero had, to know who I was and what I was a part of, to have an identity informed by a connection to ancestry and to the past.
One of the reasons I am drawn to traditional/liturgical practices is that the structure and practices they provide act as a source of connection to a “lineage of belief” or “chain of memory” (as Danielle Hervieu-Leger calls it). From their prayers, songs, dress, service structure, and even the style of building, all provide a sense of connection to their history.
It’s not the specifics of these choices in, say, a Catholic church that draw me, and I’m not sure I would agree with the theological reasoning behind their specifics. What draws me is a tangible connection to the believers who came before us in a way that is resistant to the reality of constant change that is our modern world. That connection helps ground a sense of belonging and identity that, to me, seems elusive.
Part of the draw for me with this connection to the past goes beyond finding a place of belonging; it also provides a positive connection to the theological work in our two-thousand-year history.
As I struggled intellectually with belief in God, I came to equate that with personal failure. Thinking critically about God and the world was the equivalent of doubt, which was the opposite of faith, and so I had failed. But in learning and connecting to Christian history, you learn that believers have always worked through faith within the reality of their time. There is a long history of believers with differing opinions on theology and doctrine, scientific questions, moral questions, and deliberate threats, and this has birthed deeper theological understanding.
Personally, when I was struggling with ideas around the fall, evolution, and why we believe the world is broken because of us, I found comfort in reading the theology of Irenaeus, who believed that though the world was good, it had never been perfect. It has been an encouragement to me to realize the church has a long history of working to understand faith and the world. Despite all the mistakes of our past, I feel that traditional church liturgies connect their participants to more of our Christian ancestry, and that awareness and connection can have a positive impact on the modern believer.
Apart from building a connection with the past, for me, there is value in the sensory experiences of worship that traditional churches pay attention to. While I am no expert on the theology behind all these choices, I cannot deny that they have been beneficial for me.
When I sit in a building that is clearly designed to turn my mind to the things of God, that’s where my mind goes. If people touch holy water before entering a church, I know instinctively that we are entering a space to dedicate our time to a holy God. When I see a depiction of Jesus suffering, I experience it as a reality in a different way than if I only hear it spoken of. When I visit a church that has a statue of a saint in the corner, a plaque commemorating dead soldiers, and another one to the boys and girls brigade from the fifties, I feel surrounded by a cloud of witnesses. Something about the tangible presence of these reminders informs my reality and the world of faith becomes more real to me.
When I have this kind of experience, I find that the work of drawing close to God, learning the things of God, and experiencing God, to a certain extent, is done for me. My mind and my thoughts (which are not always my friend) are quieter, my doubts are quieter, my anxieties are quieter, and God seems more present.
The spiritual world is hard for me to grasp, but these physical reminders act like a bridge for the spiritual world to enter my mundane one. I am not advocating for grandeur or dedicating our wealth toward art or structures. For a simple example, there was quite a large cross dominating the chapel at Providence Seminary; it seemed out of proportion to the size of the chapel, and you could not ignore it. Yet every Tuesday, it was important for me to see it there, behind and above the speakers. I find it a bit of a loss to see that this year it has been pushed to the corner.
The sacraments (or ordinances in our tradition) are the best example of this connection point between the sacred and the mundane, and Jesus is never more real to me than on communion Sunday. Even now I can’t quite shake the feeling that I am not Christian enough to take it, but I do it anyway because the act of taking it has become a formative exercise of faith that draws me closer to God.
