Liturgical Worship: Opera! Poetry!

A couple of weeks ago as we left church for our Sunday coffee and breakfast, my wife commented that the liturgy, the worship of the Orthodox Church, is like an opera.  It tells a story with song, movement and image moving the participants from a start to a finish.  Unlike an opera, participants are not just observers, a passive audience watching the story play out on a stage, but participants in the drama itself.

I am reading a book, The Cloister Walk, by Kathleen Norris, an author and a poet.  Once again, I am finding how much I like prose written by poets.  It is a treat to read.  In a chapter called, “Exile, Homeland, and Negative Capability” that could stand alone as an essay, she writes:

The liturgical scholar Gail Ramshaw makes a valuable distinction between theology and liturgy: theology is prose, she says, but liturgy is poetry.  ‘If faith is about facts,’ she writes, ‘then we line up the children and make them memorize questions and answers…But if we are dealing with poetry instead of prose…then we do not teach answers to questions.  We memorize not answers but the chants of the ordinary; we explain liturgical action…we immerse people in worship so that they, too, become part of the metaphoric exchange.’ (p 61)

I was reminded of this recognition, this reality, during Vespers on the day after the Feast of the Elevation of the Precious and Lifegiving Cross.  This Feast is all about the centrality, the power, the effectiveness of the cross in Christian life and worship.  The songs, the readings, the movement of liturgy on Friday and in the week or so afterwards all have this focal point.

Here is one of the hymns sung during this feast.  Notice (and enjoy) its use of metaphor (deceived by a tree) and the wordplay (wood healed by wood, a fall brought down by another fall).  These last two are practically puns.

Come, O you people
Let us venerate the blessed wood
Through which eternal justice has come to pass.
For he who deceived our forefather Adam by a tree
Is himself deceived by the Cross.
And he who gained possession of the creature endowed by God with royal dignity
Is overthrown in an amazing fall.
By the blood of God the poison of the serpent is washed away,
For it was fitting that wood should be healed by wood,
And that, through the passion of One Who knew not passion,
All the sufferings of us who were condemned through wood should be remitted.
Glory to You, Christ our King, for Your dispensation towards us,
In which You have saved us all,
For You are good and the lover of man!

About literarylee

I sling words for a living. Always have, always will. Some have been interesting and fun; most not. These days, I write the fun words early in the morning before the adults are up and make me eat my Cream of Wheat.
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