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Dear Parish Faithful,
Today, I am offering a "guest meditation" from our catechumen, Jennifer Harkins. Jenny read the essay by Archbishop Kallistos Ware, "The Theology of Worship," that I shared a small passage from a couple of days ago. There are some very fine observations and insights into Orthodox worship in what you will read below. Hope you will enjoy reading this as much as I did:
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Reading this essay felt like sitting with a great physician who could describe my own condition better to me than I could express on my own! Archbishop Ware articulated so clearly and comprehensively what I have felt and known on an instinctive level, but hardly been able to communicate. As he opens with the posture in which we stand before God with our “double attitude... of hope and fear, of confidence and awe,” it’s as if he opens my fists before me to reveal that these paradoxical feelings I’ve been holding are each true and right. There has been this unspoken attraction but also tension in my spirit upon entering more fully into Orthodox worship, where my “nous” tries to apprehend at once the God who “dwells in light unapproachable,” with the “God of personal love, uniquely close, around us and within us.” The latter perspective is more familiar but I have been hungry and strongly pulled towards the transcendent, holy, “the Wholly Other” aspect of our God.
When we fell prostrate, head to the floor as a whole congregation so many times during Lent and Holy Week, I realized in that movement how starved I was to see and reverence the immense holiness of our Lord. My spirit has felt like a dry sponge soaking up the apophatic mindset in attempting to describe and worship such a One. I am thankful for coming to know Jesus as my friend in Protestantism, but the friendship takes on even deeper meaning when the glorious fullness and transcendence of the Holy Trinity is acknowledged appropriately with awe and trembling. Though foreign in a sense, nothing feels more natural than to lie prostrate and cry “Lord have mercy!”
The next section of the essay so insightfully worded what feels almost indescribable in nature, the “total act of worship.” “We are to stand before God with the entire person: with the conscious mind, certainly, but also with the aspects of our inner self that reach out into the unconscious; with our instinctive feelings, with our aesthetic sense, and likewise with that faculty of intuitive understanding and of direct spiritual awareness which, as we have noted, far surpasses the discursive reason.” His description of the facets of Orthodox worship which usher in these many layers of total worship makes so much sense and is heartily affirmed in my personal experience of them. From making “use of the primary realities of human existence, such as bread and water, light and fire,” to the beautiful and poetic texts, music, splendor of the priestly vestments, color and lines of the holy icons, design of the sacred space, and symbolic gestures such as the sign of the cross and offering of incense... These all resonate with and reflect upon the many-faceted diamond of a human’s worship- this human at least!
I adore Fr. Schmemann’s description of the Divine Liturgy, it is “before everything else, the joyous gathering of those who are to meet the risen Lord and to enter with Him into the bridal chamber. And it is this joy of expectation and this expectation of joy that are expressed in singing in and ritual, in vestments and in ceasing, in that whole ‘beauty’ of the liturgy...”
Archbishop Ware’s third point of praying without ceasing was a beautiful challenge to me. This concept seems to be my Mt. Everest, how to move beyond specific times and places and let prayer “be an all-inclusive attitude, embracing every object and every moment; that my whole being would be a “continuing act of worship, an uninterrupted doxology.” In my prayer for St. Mary of Bethany’s intercession, I ask her to let the living torch burn strong and steady long into the night, because it kindles so brightly in prayer times, various solo activities, and at church and then I struggle to “maintain the flame” of love and worship in mundane life around the house and work with the family. I’m praying towards a deeper internalization of communion with the Lord so that prayer isn’t just “something we do or say or think, but something that we are!” So that as Paul Evdokimov said, I can be the priest of my whole life and “take all that is human, and turn it into an offering and a hymn of glory!”
