Quotes About Liturgy

The Bernardo-Benedictines... get up in their first sleep, from one to three A.M., in order to read their breviary and chant matins...

It is uncomfortable to be reminded that the Catholic church only removed the reference to 'perfidious Jews' from the Good Friday liturgy in 1960.

Don't even get me started on James Baldwin!" Esteban wailed. "The man . . . the prophet . . . the poet laureate who wrote the liturgy of his entire race, and his people won't celebrate his queer spirit!

In the creeds common to East and West, references to the Spirit are brief and occasional, at times sounding even perfunctory. In liturgy, one will find many lines praising Father and Son, followed by a phrase "with the Holy Spirit" as a kind of afterthought. Our language is often revealing—the Spirit is a third person in a third place. At times the Spirit can even sound like an appendage to the doctrine of God and a shadowy, ghostly, poor relation of the Trinity.

Sure, sometimes it is great when, in prayer, we can express to God just what we feel; but better still when, in the act of praying, our feelings change. Liturgy is not, in the end, open to our emotional whims. It repoints the person praying, taking him somewhere else.

But if roteness is a danger, it is also the way liturgy works. When you don't have to think all the time about what words you are going to say next, you are free to fully enter into the act of praying; you are free to participate in the life of God.

This is not about religion, but about identity, tradition: Proudly, [the Orthodox Church] points to a 1,005-year-old tradition of faith, liturgy, music, saints and iconology. While that does not necessarily make it a state church, many within Orthodoxy see themselves as the state religion. They argue that Russia can only be Orthodox and that historically it has been a state church.

Indeed, the Catholic Church insisted on maintaining Latin as the sole liturgical language until the twentieth century—even though the New Testament had originally been written in Greek.)

For he dreamed of shadowed volumes that preached no earthly catechisms but delineated only a tenebrous liturgy of the spectral and rites of salvation by way of meticulous derangement. His absolute: to dwell among the ruins of reality.

theology, for Maximus, is Cosmic Liturgy.

Our liturgy has beauties, which not even a careless, slovenly style of reading can destroy; but it has also redundancies and repetitions, which require good reading not to be felt.

Our Children no longer learn how to read the great book of Nature from their own direct experience, or how to interact creatively with the seasonal transformations of the planet. They seldom learn where their water come from or where it goes. We no longer coordinate our human celebration with the great liturgy of the heavens.

If there are any among us who are at their wit's end, they ought to try for once to put aside all their grievances and perhaps even all their petitions and simply praise God, in order to turn their hearts to the end of the ways of God, where the eternal liturgy resounds in heaven. Nothing so changes us—precisely in the darkest moments of life—as the praise of God.

You have the women sitting on the left and the men sitting on the right. Everything is to keep your mind focused on God... To me the most beautiful thing anyone on earth can experience, other than maybe marriage and child-bearing, would be the Orthodox Liturgy.

Literature in the West arose from liturgy.

El «Et nunc et semper et in secula seculorum» de la liturgia es la divisa de estos sublimes poetas desconocidos, cuyas obras constituyen magníficas epopeyas creadas y perdidas entre dos corazones.

The Gospels, treated so solemnly in later Christian life and liturgy, are the distillation of traditions about Jesus, and as such were also naturally highly regarded and copied for subsequent generations, but they were not seen by the first Christians as verbally exact: there was no tradition, as there was in Judaism, of precise copying of the text Ã¢â'¬â€œ with the consequence that New Testament manuscripts vary greatly, and none is authoritative.

It is important to be in the 'we' of the Church, in the 'we' of the life of the Liturgy.

I wonder that among all the evils deprecated in the Liturgy, no one thought of inserting flitting. Is there any worse thing? Oh no, no!

Lighten up" (don't) turn prayer into a work but listen for God and let oneself be surprised. Overly rigid adherence to a spiritual direction built around formal liturgical adherence and highly structured prayer time can work against the sanctification of the ordinary. Christ is effectively imprisoned, to be visited at stated times and otherwise ignored".

If anyone that Sunday suggested that there was an element of the sacred to her ritual, she likely would have disagreed. There was no open Bible. No sanctified cloth. No preacher or even professors substituting for a divinely inspired voice. Not even a candlestick before her. This ceremony was liturgy of a different order. If her desk were indeed an altar, it was a shrine not to God, but to words.

The Eucharistic mystery stands at the heart and center of the liturgy since it is the fount of life by which we are cleansed and strengthened to live not for ourselves but for God and to be united in love among ourselves.

might not this "something else" be the living address of the Word of God spoken and responded to in faith, which is indeed present in, experienced by, and celebrated in the liturgical act, but in no way bound to that act but bound instead to the Spirit of God?

Good Christian liturgy is friendship in action, love taking thought, the covenant relationship between God and his people not simply discovered and celebrated like the sudden meeting of friends, exciting and worthwhile though that is, but thought through and relished, planned and prepared -- an ultimately better way for the relationship to grow and at the same time a way of demonstrating what the relationship is all about.