A Foretaste of Our Heavenly Banquet
The liturgical season of Lent is rapidly approaching. Along with it, Christians experience a time ripe for self-examination and discernment. Lent is a particularly appropriate time to explore those ways through which God makes himself known to his people — also known as divine revelation. While divine revelation certainly includes the study of sacred scripture, it also takes place by various other means. After all, placing a limit upon the powers and abilities of God is indeed heretical. God continually makes revelation to his people through creation, through our encounters with one another, and through our day-to-day human experiences. Christianity’s incarnational theology teaches that God loved his people so dearly that he wanted us to feel a particular closeness to him, so Jesus Christ came and pitched his tent among us and experienced the entire spectrum of human emotion. For the past 2000 years, the love story between God and his people has been expressed through the liturgy. Within the liturgy, the human person can experience truly intimate beauty, including real and tangible encounters with Jesus Christ himself.
Christian traditions in history have expressed their love for God, and experienced the love of God, through the liturgies dating back to the days of the apostles. Without the unfortunate fractures within the Christian Church over the centuries, Anglicans, Lutherans, Orthodox Christians, and Catholics (among others) would still be in full communion with one another. Our similarities in worship and our shared faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior keep us in dialogue. Perhaps one day, Jesus’s prayer “that they may all be one” (Jn. 17:21), will become fulfilled. In the meantime, Christians in liturgical denominations share worship that can rightly be described as beautiful. Truth be told, nothing in liturgy came from a vacuum. Much of what we do across denominations comes from the same place.
Liturgical worship is multi-sensory. Christians embrace the smells of the burning beeswax candles, or perhaps a swinging thurible of incense. They listen and sing the beautiful music together in one voice. They taste the consecrated bread and wine, the Body and Blood of Jesus himself. They touch the weathered wood of the pew in front of them or the firm handshake of a peer during the exchange of the peace. They see the sunlight shine through the colors of the stained glass. Sometimes a sunbeam catches the wafting smoke from the forementioned thurible. Each of our senses inform our worship experience. When we listen; when we truly listen with our whole being, we can have transformational experiences with God.
My own experience with Christian liturgy led to my eventual ordination as a priest. I am an Episcopal priest, but I have studied at Catholic institutions including Santa Clara University, the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, and the University of Notre Dame. I have studied at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America’s California Lutheran University. I have studied with, and exchanged the holy meal, with Methodists, Presbyterians, members of the United Church of Christ. To me, the beauty of revelation in the liturgy is most visible in the eyes and hearts of the people gathered together, hungry for that foretaste of our heavenly banquet. When we come together to celebrate the liturgy, the people of God are actively participating in what Roberto Goizueta refers to as an “act of solidarity with the wounded other.” The human person is broken, yet we come together to be made whole. Eventually, our brokenness will be made whole. While still imperfect in itself, the Christian liturgy provides us with a snapshot of that day when our woundedness will be healed.
From my perspective as a priest, I seek the beauty in the hearts of the faithful. The hearts of those seeking to know God more. Those who participate in a posada. Those who celebrate the appearance of our Lady of Guadalupe with parades and processions. Those who process around European cities, carrying statues of patron saints. Those who don’t really know what they are seeking. Those who wander into a church building for the first time, knowing they need to connect but very unsure of when they’re “expected” to sit, stand, or kneel. From my vantage point at the altar, I see it all. And I have been trained to notice.
Lent reminds us of our brokenness. Even those of us who wear a façade of having our stuff together are broken. When we embrace our brokenness in a way that Lent encourages us to do, we can allow ourself to be more fully vulnerable. And only as we become perpetually more vulnerable, will we continually develop our abilities to recognize the beauty present in the many ways God makes revelation to us.
