Doing the World Rightly
On Liturgical Theology and Parenting
To consecrate the world is to reestablish it in its proper relationship to God, along with every single thing in it.
-David W. Fagerberg, Consecrating the World: On Mundane Liturgical Theology
The drive home from Divine Liturgy nearly each Sunday is a trip—both literally and figuratively.
All five kids are typically unleashing their pent up energy reserves in the back of the van (although the youngest two fall asleep on occasion), having finally erupted like the good geysers of childhood energy that they are. This is, of course, also after having a few proto-eruptions quelled by either (inclusive disjunct btw) their mother or I at various points of the service.
Thus it was, a few weeks ago, that after what felt like the 10,000x requesting (demanding?) that they “use their inside voices” inside the van, I let out a rather defeated sigh. It was mostly meant for myself.
However, my wife—who was similarly exhausted from a morning of trying to teach and train our children to pray and worship—heard the exhalation and bluntly asked a really good question: Why do we bother?
Why do we spend so much energy week after week after week after week…working to teach our children to reverence, to pray the Liturgy, to stand when the Gospels are read, to prostrate themselves, to not play tag, to just sit still for 15 seconds?
Why not let the kids be kids? I mean, didn’t Christ teach us that unless we “became like children” that we wouldn’t enter the kingdom of God (Matt. 18.3)?
“Because the temple is sacred,” I found myself answering.
Some places are just different. And they ought to be treated differently as a result.
Josef Pieper begins his short collection of essays, In Search of the Sacred, with a collection of vignettes in which the distinction of appropriate and inappropriate behavior in a particular local. They’re great and they were helpful in introducing Pieper’s deeper point that we have likely lost an appropriate understanding of the “sacred” because we have lost a correct understanding of the “profane”.
“Sacred” just means to be set apart, circumscribed, fenced off. And “profane” means just not set apart.
I think it is a common tendency to mistake the designation of “sacred” as being a human cordoning off of the Divine; as though we have managed, somehow, to restrict God’s presence and activity to only certain locations and rituals.
This line of thought brought me back to a wonderful book by David W. Fagerberg and a conversation he had about it with Ken Myers on the Mars Hill Audio Journal back in 2018.
In his work Consecrating the World: On Mundane Liturgical Theology David. W. Fagerberg argues that we need to cultivate an understanding that the Liturgy that extends past the threshold of the narthex and invites us “to do the world as the world was meant to be done.” But as a part of that he helps to set the record straight on our understandings of both “sacred” and “profane”.
As Fagerberg put it in his conversation with Myers,
The definition of sacred is set apart or fenced off or circumscribed. Of course, God is everywhere. But human beings need a fenced off place; a place where we don't do ordinary things but extraordinary things, exceptional things. So it's like the word profane has two meanings and we suffer the problem of confusing those two meanings. In the first case, it simply means not sacred—outside the sacred ... In the second, we've taken profane to mean bad or dark or wicked. To confuse those two meanings of “profane” leaves you in a quandary about how to properly think about liturgy. So somehow the Liturgy done in the church ritually, sacramentally, corporately, and the Liturgy we live in our lives could be connected in a way that this discussion about sacred and profane connect.
That is, human beings need places in which we are expected to do extraordinary things, where we can be expected to meet to encounter God.
This is why Moses was instructed to take off his sandals. This is why only the priest went into the Holy of Holies. This is why the Ark was build. This is why the blueprint for the Tabernacle was carefully and meticulously given to the Israelites.
Yes God is everywhere.
We, however, have a hard time grasping that truth.
As so we need dedicated space in which to learn this truth. To practice living this truth.
This was my answer to my wife in the car. Nevertheless, the answer felt inadequate. It was—is—correct, yet it felt like only half the story.
And I think I’ve found the other half of the coin.
In thinking more on the question over the last week I found myself thinking back to Yoshi Matsumoto’s recent post “Killing Walt Whitman” and the point he makes about learning to “live” the truth of the faith through rites and rules and rituals.
The essay is observant and entertaining in turns and so I had shared it with my wife in the week prior to the frontrow-of-the-van conversation. And while we hadn’t yet talked about it specifically, it dawned on me that at the heart of her question was likely a concern about where and how to strike the balance between the structure that genuine formation requires and the structure that suffocates and kills.
As Matsumoto rightly observes,
Religions likewise only become oppressive when we forget this same point. That all the rules and the dogma and the traditions are not the end goal in themselves, but only useful to the degree that they point us to something higher. Something, eventually, that we can actually attain. Sadly though, the world is full of people who mistakenly think that the purpose of learning and following religious rules is… simply to get better and better at following religious rules.
It’s like the pianist, writes Matsumoto, who comes to think that the point of learning their scales, arpegios, finger exercises…is just to get better at their scales, arpegios, and finger exercises.
But of course that’s not the case. Obviously those musicians
never got the message that all the scales and music theory and such were constrains meant to eventually free them… Meant to develop their skills to the point that, one day, they could forget all those things and just play.
[…]
After you’ve learned the rules… after you’ve submitted yourself for years to the disciplines of music, to the discipleship of music…
You can forget all that and just go.
And that’s when you’re capable of manifesting Beauty. Of being free. That’s when you see that the constraints you labored under for so long have fallen off and now you can fly.
This is exactly right. Practice in the disciplines of music…of athletics…of the traditions of the faith is meant to enable us to be truly free.1
And this got me thinking that what the training that the Liturgy offers is actually a training in how to be truly free.
In how to live in the reality of the inauguration of the Kingdom of God, not just from 9am-noon on Sundays, but through the rest of the the hours of the rest of the week as well.
In consecrating the world, we're not imposing an unnatural aura of improper sanctity. We are doing the world right. We're simply regarding creation as what it really is.
-Ken Myers, Interview with David Fagerberg, MHAJ Vol. 139
So I came back again in my thinking to Fagerberg, but with a different eye. In addition to a corrective to the sacred/profane demarcation which Fagerberg seeks to offer in his Consecrating the World, he also argues that we need to cultivate an understanding that the Liturgy that extends past the threshold of the narthex and invites us “to do the world as the world was meant to be done.”
That we ought to understand the form of the formal liturgy of the Church and the liturgy of our lives as composings one seamless garment, and that recognizing this requires a development of a “mundane” liturgical theology which takes seriously cultivating a liturgical posture towards the ins-and-outs of our everyday lives.
As Ken Myers put it during his conversation with Fagerberg,
In its liturgical life, the church initiates a recovery of the dispositions and practices that restore the world to its proper place as a mediator of love and gratitude.
Through the liturgy, humanity learns how to consecrate, to sanctify the world so that it we are able to see it and, thus, be in it as we are meant to be in the world.
Fr. Alexander Schmemann is helpful on this point. As he has argued in For the Life of the World,
The natural dependence of man upon the world was intended to be transformed constantly into communion with God in whom is all life. Man was to be the priest of a eucharist, offering the world to God, and in this offering he was to receive the gift of life.
The fallenness of the world has altered our natural capacities to offer the world back unto God in an act of gratitude and worship. The Liturgy, rather than being some esoteric, stuffy, bygone set of rituals and formulas, is in fact a training in seeing the world for how it truly is: given as a gift.
Thus it is, as Robert Taft has put it, that
The purpose of all Christian liturgy is to express in a ritual moment that which should be the basic stance of every moment of our lives.
It is Holy Week in the Orthodox Church as I finish writing this post. The week is full to the brim with services of various kinds which will culminate in the great Paschal Liturgy this upcoming weekend. And what a Liturgy it will be!
However, if Taft is right, and I think he is, rather than viewing this week’s various Liturgies as sui generis, as a breaking into the mundane and as an interruption our “daily” lives with the profundity of the Passion of Christ, what I ought to be doing is viewing the week as a week of training to see, training to live the 24/7 reality of the Passion and the Resurrection of Christ; as a training in how to live my mundane existence.
Again, Fagerberg is helpful. As he writing in Consecrating the World,
Liturgy is not a hobby, not an escape, not an alternative to life. Liturgy is a rehearsal on a sacred stage for our performance of the mystery in the profane world. By standing upright before God at the altar, we discover our upright posture in the world. We step across the threshold of the narthex into a sacred realm so that when we return across that narthex border, we might bring light with us into the valley of the shadow of death.
Through the liturgy I am being trained to stand upright, to do the world rightly. And learning to do the world rightly, as Myers put it in the conversation with Fagerberg, “is not imposing something extrinsic to the world but rather a recognition of the world for what it really is.”
In expounding on this insight, Fagerberg pulls out an old quip from his Doktorvater who use to frequently remind his students that
There’s nothing wrong with money sex, or beer. The problem is avarice, lust, and gluttony.
It’s a funny quip. However, it is not shallow. It conveys a deep truth about how we exist in this world which is at once fallen and yet also being restored through the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God.
God never rescinded his evaluations of the material world as being “good”. It might be marred, but it is still capable of revealing the glory of God (Ps. 19). Accordingly, we ought to take care to remember that, as Fagerberg put it,
The problem doesn’t lie in the world, the problem lies in us. In our passions. […] One can’t do the world correctly unless one has first struggled with the ascetic disciplines under grace to straighten out the passions, to straighten out the faculties. First the cataracts of sin have to be removed from our eyes. Then we can see the world. Seeing the world, we can do the world.
In Liturgy we practice how to do the world right; how to do the world right on Monday morning after the 9am-noon of Sunday has passed.
The world can only be consecrated, be sacred, be available to us for use in worship if we have cooperated with grace so as to have ears that can hear and eyes that can see. And this is not something that we can work ourselves into having. No, we need to cooperate with the work of Christ and his Church in doing so. Thus, Fagerberg is helpful in reminding us that
the world can only be sacramental for fallen man and woman if Christ makes it so. Fallen man and woman can only participate in the world sacramentality if they are first delivered from sin by the power of Grace that flows from Christ's pierced side to pool up in the church's sacraments. Mundane liturgical theology does not suppose that we can do without ecclesial sacraments...but if we acknowledge the ascetical cost of conversion then we will find that the cultic Liturgy animates our lived liturgy, and the latter is what mundane liturgical theology wishes to describe. Liturgy will involve doing the world the way the world was meant to be done.
That is, once we both acknowledge and learn to cooperated with the training that the Church offers us in the Liturgy, we can come to truly see that it is through the pools of Grace that gather in the Liturgy of the church that every individual believer can come to drink their fill and learn to live the world as it actually is. And, thus, learn to allow pools of Grace to gather in their own daily lives as well.
This is why we bother to train our children.
Both because the temple is sacred, but also because it is through the Liturgy that we can come to learn to do the world rightly. And in doing the world rightly come to learn to give the world back to God in worship.
AMDG
This point has also been well made to me by D.C. Schindler in his monographs Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty (2017) and Retrieving Freedom: The Christian Appropriation of Classical Tradition (2022).