“Why do we bother with the liturgical calendar or the daily office? Do they matter?” My professor asks. We are seminary students in a class on Anglican tradition and have just come from an early morning prayer service, so presumably we will arrive at the conclusion that yes, they do matter. Otherwise we are wildly wasting our time. But sleepy and drizzled in an autumn rain like vinaigrette, we poke the bear a bit. Can we defend our rituals beyond personal edification or enjoyment?
Our professor does not leaving us hanging long. The cyclical nature of lectionary, liturgy, and daily offices sanctify our time, he says. Our schedules and calendars are interrupted by eschatology; we are returned again and again to a divine rhythm.
At present, the liturgical year is waning, following the earth’s urging. In a few weeks we will crawl into the womb of the liturgical calendar, Advent, and begin anew in the dark. This rhythmic cycle of worship sanctifies our years, seasons, and days; it reorients us to time’s Creator. In observing these seasons of hope, joy, and lament we are awakened to nature’s revelation of brokenness and rebirth. The liturgies of time refuse to let us disconnect from ecology; they are intimately concerned with the narrative of day and night, winter and spring, life and death. Dust to dust from the mouth of nature is a not a dirge but a benediction, a reminder of what it is to be made and remade. The wild earth has been praying the daily office all this time, pouring forth speech day and night.
The simple truth that we must be returned and returned again to a sacred tempo admits that this does not come easily. It must be rehearsed. Centuries old monastic rhythms teach us that learning to set the metronome to a different speed works best when practiced communally, when we carry our stories together into a space and pause to lean in to a grander narrative.
When you attend a play, the litany of theatre cues midwifes you across the river from your life into the story. The house lights are on as you grip your program and find your seat, nestling coats into place and exhaling parking and traffic off your shoulders. Quiet thematic music plays and you murmur to each other at the lighting and the set in gentle anticipation.
House to half — the lights dim slightly and come back up. This is what we sometimes affectionately refer to in the industry as the “Sit Down Stupid” cue. You tie off the ends of your conversations while the music fades.
Curtain speech — any special notes about the production are made here. You are reminded as always to turn off your cell phones and advised of any exits. They will prepare you for the time ahead, noting the number of acts; whether it is a one-act or more traditional two-act, or even more. If it is a two-act, the first act will be longer and then you’ll pause for breath at the intermission before heading into a shorter, more intense second half.
House to half again — the lights darken and then go black. A little thrill hums in your ribs. The performance is beginning. Time now belongs to the story. Todd Johnson and Dale Savidge write that, “Even when performed at a crisp pace, [theatre] allows for reflection and contemplation... the ability to sit still and be quiet for theatre is militated against by a culture that rewards speed and volubility.”1 To listen and be still for this performance will be an exercise in succumbing to immediacy.
Live performance requires everyone in the space to live in the absolute present. The script may be taking us backwards or forwards in time, and the stage manager and other crew members will be carefully predicting cues, but the actual performance unfolds constantly in the present moment. It cannot be ever perfectly replicated again. Professional actors train to deliver the same performance to an opening night sold out crowd as to a sleepy afternoon matinee, but the truth is that performance forces you to submit to the imprecision of reality. No two performances will be exactly the same; they are gifts of a certain moment.
Much of whether you walk out deciding that it was a good play or not depends on time. When actors are instructed in rehearsal to pick up the pacing of a scene, they do not speak their lines faster but instead cut down on the spaces between lines to improve the flow. Good performers make time their twinkling foil, understanding the perfect amount of space to let the audience laugh so lines are not lost without letting the scene drag. “Oh, he had really good comedic timing,” you will say to your friend afterwards. Time dances like shimmering threads in the hands of an artist.
The liturgy of the audience member teaches a rhythm of collective imagination and empathetic presence. Time is spent embedding oneself in an embodied narrative that transforms every participant, whether it resists or uncovers oppression, envisions beauty, coaxes virtue, or makes sense of pain. Stanley Hauerwas writes, “being truly present to a performance is to enter fully into time... true performance engages and transfigures, rather than evades, time.”2 It is a practice both in abandonment and attunement; leaving behind what came with you to embrace the immediate together.
You finish clapping, the house lights come back up, and you turn to your friend with a stretch and a sheepish smile at how caught up in a story you’ve been together. You leave the space and find yourself back in noise and sunlight. “Wow, it’s like I’ve lost track of time,” you exclaim.
I can remember as a kid finishing a movie or performance and delightedly still mimicking the mannerisms and voices of the characters. Their stories clung to me like snowflakes in my eyelashes, melting down the sleeves of my coat. I carried them into the future with me, demanding that my siblings reenact a scene with me to keep that magic alive as long as possible.
Do we lose track of time in worship? I confessed to my husband a couple weeks ago on our drive to church that sometimes during the liturgy of the table, the Eucharistic liturgy, I catch myself thinking, “this is taking forever.”
He laughed. “It’s only like five minutes, too.”
Rather than losing myself in time, I become agitated by it, searching for other ways to mentally make use of the minutes where I am sitting still. The temporal tithe feels like too much when I already know how the story ends, you can’t teach me anything new. This is embarrassing considering what first drew me to liturgical worship was the performance of Eucharist. Everything I just wrote or quoted about live performance could be said of the sacrament: it is a live, communal rehearsal of true time; no two performances will be exactly the same because they occur in time and find us at different places in time; and it is a practice in collective imagination and presence. There’s a silk-thin veil between good performance and lived-out worship as is, and the Eucharist tears it in two. Quoth Hauerwas:
“In performance Christians are called upon to recognize time aright, to attune themselves to a time that is God’s time. The context in which this attunement occurs is properly called worship. Liturgical time, in other words, takes Christians out of what the world teaches them to think of as the standard or normative measurements of time and orients them to, sets them firmly within, God’s eschatological horizon. Worship marks the time of Christ that breaks into “our time”, the time that Christians are lulled into thinking is always here.”3
Somehow each week when the Eucharist ends and the service concludes, I am not thinking about time wasted. I have turned over my concerns to the Story, newly reconciled to heaven’s rhythms kept on earth. What comes after, Lord willing, is that same reenactment with my siblings of our favorite scenes. We pick up the language of the performance and quote it back to each other in impeccable inflections, we attune our bodies and minds to that perfect slice of time we just encountered. We go in peace, to love and serve.
Todd Johnson and Dale Savidge, Performing the Sacred: Theology and Theatre in Dialogue.
Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence.
Ibid.
Lovely and inspires me to delve back into such writers as Schmemann!
"Go in peace, to love and serve" always gets me. Thank you for this.