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{"id":17151,"date":"2015-04-07T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-04-07T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1972"},"modified":"2015-04-07T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-04-07T00:00:00","slug":"omnivorous-liturgy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2015\/04\/omnivorous-liturgy\/","title":{"rendered":"Omnivorous Liturgy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

By developing the habits that the liturgy impresses on us, we become \u201cagents whose bodies and words are conformed to the truth that [we] are simultaneously capable of receiving the divine gift, and utterly unworthy to receive it.\u201d This isn\u2019t the result of \u201ctrying or learning to feel unworthy-and-worthy\u201d nor do \u201cworshipers knowingly perform liturgically before a mirror lined with your own eyes.\u201d That<\/em> would be an accommodation to the modern obsession with the inner theater, the concept that the inner theater makes our actions sincere.<\/p>\n

Rather, we simply say what the liturgy teaches us to say. We do what the liturgy leads us to do. And by doing and saying over and over again, we develop habits. We become \u201cthe kind of person who does and says these things\u201d (233).\u00a0<\/p>\n

We are trained, Griffiths says, in \u201cradical gratitude.\u201d The liturgy trains us as recipients, as \u201cbeing one who who has received\u201d and received gratefully (234). The liturgy doesn\u2019t leave any corner of life untouched by its habituation. What Griffiths calls \u201cthe liturgy\u2019s imperialistic omnivorousness\u201d involves \u201ca complete embrace of those who undertake it.\u201d We die and rise n baptism, having received a \u201crenaming, reclothing, the gift of something radically new\u201d (234-5). Other liturgical acts \u201cdepict and endlessly repeat the subsumption of the individual into, first, the community, and then, second, the LORD.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Griffiths means this quite literally: \u201cThe individual\u2019s language is overtaken and framed by the language of the canon of Scripture: he is written into its margins as an ornament to the illustrated capitals of its pages. And the individual\u2019s very physical life is shown to him to be given its meaning by his membership in the communion of saints, a body of people extending far in time and space beyond what he can directly sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

The liturgy \u201cconstantly signals that there is nothing external to it, nothing belonging to the individual that cannot be taken p into it, and nothing anywhere that will not, finally, be embraced by it.\u201d Even the inner theater \u201cis gradually transformed by participation in the liturgy from a private spectacle into an iteration of a public drama. It becomes an instance of the liturgy that claims it\u201d (235).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"