In The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, my wife and I found ourselves assisting at the liturgy from week to week. “Assisting at”: that is the phrase that must be used, recalling the notion among the early Christians that everyone present at Christian worship was a full participant. Bishops, priests, deacons, and laity were the four orders in the Church that we glimpse in the New Testament and in the writings of the men taught by the apostles. There were no spectators.

The idea is kept alive in the French verb assister a, which we translate too weakly “to be present at.” But the worship of the Church, specifically its Eucharistic liturgy, is not a meeting or a program to which we come only to receive something. It is an act, to which we come as participants, indeed as celebrants, if the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers means anything.

The word liturgy, which unfortunately dropped out of use long ago in Protestantism, spells out what Christian worship actually is. “The work of the people” is what the word means, and the early Christians used this word to refer to what they did when they came together week by week on the first day to worship God. It was not a generalized and diffuse worship that they offered up, such as we might find among highminded pagans, deists, and transcendentalists. Christian worship meant one thing: the Eucharistic liturgy. It is a measure of how much was jettisoned at the Reformation that both of these words are unfamiliar to millions of Christians, even devout Christians. The liturgy was understood by the early Christians to be their special work, and that work was the offering up of worship to God as Eucharist, that is, as thanksgiving.

Once again, it was not a merely generalized thanksgiving, appropriate as that might be as an offering for Christians to make. Rather, it was the Christians’ particular offering to God of themselves, their lives, and their intercessions, thanksgivings, and adoration, in union with the only offering acceptable to Him, namely, the self-offering of the Lamb of God at the cross.

All the Old Testament offerings had anticipated this, and Old Testament worship followed the pattern given by God, a pattern which, it turned out in the fullness of time, perfectly prepared the way for the one sacrifice. In the New Testament all those old types and foreshadowings were fulfilled and hence done away with, and Christian worship took on a new form, following the pattern laid down by Christ the Lamb at the Last Supper just before His Immolation. In an act that must have bemused the disciples, He took bread and blessed it and broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body.” The wine He blessed and gave to them was likewise His blood, He said.

If this were all there was to it—just that brief scene from the Gospel account—we might well leave it at the margin of worship, as many churches decided to do after the sixteenth century. But we find that the early Church almost immediately took up this strange act of Christ’s, and these strange words, and found in them the diagram of its worship.

In the earliest glimpses that we can get of what these Christians did, we find them doing this. Saint Luke mentions in Acts the apostles’ fellowship, teaching, prayer, and the breaking of bread. We hear of singing, preaching, and praying in other New Testament allusions. But we never come upon an actual description of what Christian worship consisted of until we read of it in the writings of the men who followed the apostles some whom had been taught by them. Here we find the Eucharistic liturgy already in place.

Any Christian believer looking into these matters will find himself moved. The time of liturgy was a time of great joy. Ignatius of Antioch, who was contemporary with all of the apostles, speaks of the Eucharist, as do Justin and Irenaeus and other writers. A hymn, written perhaps while some of the apostles themselves were still alive, expresses how the Christians saw the Eucharist and saw themselves as having been made one with Christ’s Eucharistic self-offering.

As grain, once scattered on the hillsides,

Was in this broken bread made one,

So from all lands thy Church be gathered

Into thy kingdom by thy Son.14

It is as though the Church, like the loaf that Christ took and broke, has been made one from many scattered seeds and, like bread, has no other purpose than to be broken for the life of the world. In this picture we see something of the compression that is present in the Eucharist; the whole mystery of the gospel inheres in this simple act. Christ, the Son of God, is also the Bread of God, giving Himself for the life of the world and in so doing revealing to us what had hitherto only been intimated by the Law and the Prophets, that the Most High is Love. (There, somehow, lies the mystery that we call the Trinity.)

This divine love is such that not only does God give Himself to us and for us but, unimaginably, takes us into this very mystery of self-giving and makes us one with His Son, calling us the very Body of this Son who offers Himself to the Father for the life of the world.

Here we find the gospel mystery, in almost impenetrable density: The bread of the Eucharist is the Body of Christ, and the Church is the Body of Christ; and that Body—both Christ’s personal body conceived and nourished in the womb of the Virgin, and his Body the Church—like bread, has only one reason for being: to be broken and given. “Lo I come (in the volume of the book it is written of me) to do thy will, O God,”15 says the writer of Hebrews, putting words into Christ’s mouth, “a body hast thou prepared me,” to be the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. This is what this body was for; this is what bread is for; this is what the Church His Body is for. All is offering; all is sacrifice; all is oblation.

Suddenly we find ourselves back in Eden, where things went awry when we refused the oblation of all things to God and, in the attempt to wrest them for our own, ruined everything. The Fall is the refusal of oblation; Redemption is the renewing of oblation. Put another way, the refusal of oblation lost everything; the renewing of oblation redeemed everything. What the first Adam, that is to say we ourselves, refused, the second Adam offered to the Father, namely, everything: Himself, His obedience, His thanksgiving, and His adoration. At the first Eucharist Jesus Christ gave thanks: the very moment of His Immolation was the moment of Eucharist.

No wonder the Church took up this name and gave it to its worship. What other name would suffice for this act? For worship without oblation is no worship. Worship that vaunts itself or that holds anything back is no worship. To worship the Most High is to give all to Him: blessing and honor and glory and power, and “our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee,” as the great Eucharistic prayer phrases it.

Since the liturgy both recalls these great mysteries for us and also makes them vividly present to us, it has always been a ceremonial act. A mere meeting for “the preaching of the Word” does not quite exhaust, or even answer to, the solemnity of what Christian worship actually is.

The rite that Jesus recalled at the Last Supper was the ritual Berakoth, the set of Jewish prayers for which the Greek translation was the word Eucharist.16 He was not improvising. It was not an impromptu or extempore meal that He ate with His disciples there in the upper room. In His mind there was no conflict between ritual and “the liberty of the Spirit,” in which He Himself lived in perfect freedom.

For Christians who think of ceremony and ritual as standing over against the liberty of the Spirit, the liturgy suggests a grid, or pall. Those who feel this way, and who have never actually participated in the ancient liturgy of the Church, may be helped at least to understand something of what is at work here by pondering the following remarks from C. S. Lewis.

Lewis has been speaking of the formal language that we find in epic poetry and has pointed out that it combines “specialness” with predictability and easy accessibility.

A parallel, from a different sphere, would be turkey and plum pudding on Christmas day; no one is surprised at the menu, but every one recognizes that it is not ordinary fare. Another parallel would be the language of a liturgy. Regular church-goers are not surprised by the service—indeed, they know a good deal of it by rote; but it is a language apart. Epic diction, Christmas fare, and the liturgy, are all examples of ritual—that is, of something set deliberately apart from daily usage, but wholly familiar within its own sphere. . . . Those who dislike ritual in general—ritual in any and every department of life—may be asked most earnestly to reconsider the question. It is a pattern imposed on the mere flux of our feelings by reason and will, which renders pleasures less fugitive and griefs more endurable, which hands over to the power of wise custom the task (to which the individual and his moods are so inadequate) of being festive or sober, gay or reverent, when we choose to be, and not at the bidding of chance.17

Lewis touches here on something profound, which does not always present itself easily to people like us who are keen on expressing themselves and who have been taught that freedom lies in getting rid of structures. It is an idea especially difficult for people whose religion has taught them that structures are deadening. That ritual might actually be a relief, and even a release, is almost incomprehensible to them. That the extempore and impromptu are eventually shallow, enervating, and exhausting seems a contradiction to these people, who so earnestly believe that nothing that does not spring from the authenticity of the moment is actually fruitful.

As Lewis points out in this same context: “The unexpected tires us; it also takes us longer to understand and enjoy than the expected. A line which gives the listener pause is a disaster . . . because it makes him lose the next line.”[18] Any Christian who has tried to stay abreast of impromptu public prayers will testify to the truth of this observation.

The liturgy of the Church is made up of two elements, ritual and ceremony. Ritual refers to the words, ceremony to the actions.

The same difficulties arise over ceremony that arise over ritual. Great numbers of people suppose that ceremony is deadening and, perhaps worse, is really a matter of mere folderol, or high-jinks. They look on the liturgy of the Church as a “show.” They make a very great mistake.

What is lost in this view is the nature of ceremony itself. Of course ceremony may be mere folderol. Many ceremonies are a waste of time; others are organized merely as entertainment. To point this out is hardly to have approached the topic. Ceremony lies at the taproot of what we are. We are ceremonial creatures.

To see this we need only recall a very simple thing. The more important an event or experience is for us mortals, the more we ceremonialize it. We may take the three most basic experiences of human life as illustrations: birth, mating, and death. We, like dogs, pass through all of these, but unlike dogs, we are not content merely to pass through them; we must also do something about them. This seems to be the mark of our humaness, and the thing which we do about these experiences is to ceremonialize them. All of them are routine, but we, being human and not merely bestial, see something in them. We see significance, and the thing that we do about significance is to reach for ceremony.

Take birth, for example. It is a merely obstetric event and has been going on in all tribes and civilizations since the beginning. Nothing could be more routine; yet we recognize that birth is something more than a mere function or routine, and we mark the event with some ceremony. When the Lamaze exercises and the dieting and the midwives and doctors have done all they can do, and the child is born; then come the ceremonies. Cigars are passed out—surely not an activity that contributes anything practical to the matter. Champagne is uncorked. Even before the event, the way has been laid out with pink, blue, and yellow, and with little ruffles stitched for the bassinet. Year after year, there are cake and candles and gifts in pretty paper to commemorate the event.

Folderol certainly, and completely nonfunctional; but nevertheless absolutely central to what we are.

Again, mating is a mere component of our animal natures, which we share with dogs. Unlike them, we recognize the physical phenomenon as vastly significant, and we set it about with ceremony. Some cultures have elaborate puberty rites; virtually all cultures have elaborate wedding rites. The coming together of the male and the female is routine and natural, but it is unique in each case; and the way we mark this uniqueness is with ceremony. Not one single one of the ceremonies that attend marriage is necessary biologically, but only the beasts suppose that the marriage is complete without them. They, and the people who attempt to make human life as close to the bestial as possible, merely copulate, but Hindus, Moslems, Jews, animists, and Christians, and everyone else except modern people know that this is a travesty and a sacrilege.

Ceremony accompanies death, as well. Long palls, drawn hearses, music, slow processions, hushed crowds, flowers, obsequies—there are a hundred ceremonies that we reach for when the pills and the X-rays and the tubes and respirators and scanners have done all they can. Of all human events, death is the most intractably physical. It is almost vegetable; we go back to the loam to decompose. But we will not leave death at that. We ceremonialize the event. We must ceremonialize the event.

Folderol? The dogs might think so, but human beings do not.

Those who suppose that ceremony is simply something extra, like frosting on the cake that has little to do with the substance of things, may be asked to ponder the odd fact that every time we resort to ceremony, we do so not to escape the stark reality of the event, or to veil it, much less merely to decorate it, but to give shape to the full reality and significance of what has happened.

Ceremony assists us to cope with the otherwise unmanageable. Far from erecting a barrier between us and the truth, it ushers us closer in to the truth. It dramatizes the truth for us. Ceremony does what words alone can never do. It carries us beyond the merely explicit, the expository, the verbal, the propositional, the cerebral, to the center where the Dance goes on.

If this idea seems suddenly to have taken flight and to have retreated from the clear and practical world of mature and reasonable experience into metaphor and fancy, we may consider another observation that C. S. Lewis makes, this time concerning ceremony. He is speaking of the old word solempne.

Like solemn it implies the opposite of what is familiar, free and easy, or ordinary. But unlike solemn it does not suggest gloom, oppression, or austerity. The ball in the first act of Romeo and Juliet was a ‘solemnity*. The feast at the beginning of Gawain and the Green Knight is very much of a solemnity. A great mass by Mozart or Beethoven is as much a solemnity in its hilarious gloria as in its poignant crucifixus est. Feasts are, in this sense, more solemn than fasts. Easter is solempne, Good Friday is not. The Solempne is the festal which is also the stately and the ceremonial, the proper occasion for pomp—and the very fact that pompous is now used only in a bad sense measures the degree to which we have lost the old idea of ‘solemnity’. To recover it you must think of a court ball, or a coronation, or a victory march, as these things appear to people who enjoy them; in an age when every one puts on his oldest clothes to be happy in, you must re-awake the simpler state of mind in which people put on gold and scarlet to be happy in. Above all, you must be rid of the hideous idea, fruit of a widespread inferiority complex, that pomp, on the proper occasions, has any connexion with vanity or self-conceit. A celebrant approaching the altar, a princess led out by a king to dance a minuet, a general officer on a ceremonial parade, a major-domo preceding the boar’s head at a Christmas feast-all these wear unusual clothes and move with calculated dignity. This does not mean that they are vain, but that they are obedient; they are obeying the hoc age which presides over every solemnity. The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender’s inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual. . . . You are to expect pomp. You are to ‘assist’, as the French say, at a great festal action.[19]

For Protestant Christians whose discipline, piety, spirituality, and doctrine have all been primarily verbal and interior, and, hence, whose public worship has taken the form of a meeting, these observations may help clear away some of the misgiving they have felt with respect to highly ceremonial worship. Ceremony belongs to the essential fabric of what we are. We do not need verses from the Bible to validate ceremony for us any more than we need verses to tell us to eat our meals or to have sex. The Bible is not a handbook of everything. It opens up the vision of God for us mortals, and this vision comes upon our mortal life and redeems it and transfigures it and glorifies it, so that all that we are springs into new vigor. Far from quelling our human potentialities and yearnings and capacities, it redeems them and sets them free. The question, then, is not so much “Where did all this ceremony come from?” as “How can it possibly have come about that when some Christians come to the very center of everything, they prohibit ceremony?”

To prohibit ceremony, or even to distrust it, and to reduce the worship of God Himself to the meager resources available to verbalism, is surely to have dealt Christendom a dolorous blow. To have substituted a meeting, no matter how formal it might be, with robed clergy and ministerial tones, for the ancient liturgy of the Church, is like having removed all of a man’s viscera because he was covered with sores and putrescence. The surgery is too drastic.

The liturgy, then, which rises from the very first years of the Church’s life as it moved from the flush of Pentecost into its long, slow pilgrimage through history, combines ritual and ceremony. In so doing, it touches us deeply and exquisitely. Nay, we may say more: it calls to all that is in us and summons us not only to hear about the gospel, or to think about it, but to enact it. For that is what the liturgy is: the ceremonial enactment of the whole drama of the gospel.

The idea of enactment itself gives pause to many Christians. Is it not a charade? Mummery? Trumpery? Is it not to transport pretense and mime into sacred regions that ought not to be thus trivialized? All this bowing and sprinkling and turning this way and that: surely this is to have left the simple gospel and to have returned to heathendom?

The answer to this entirely worthy line of questions lies close at hand. Everything depends on what is being enacted. Enactment itself, since it is almost synonymous with ceremony, is, as we have seen, part of the very fabric of our human life. We do enact things. We will enact things. No one can stop us from enacting things. The most gaunt anti-ceremonialist may refuse to take off his hat in a shrine, whereupon he has given the whole game away. He agrees with the priests at the shrine that hats on or hats off are significant, and to register his dissociation from their cult, he keeps his on. It is a ceremonial enactment of what he believes. A church wishes to stress the table aspect of the Eucharist, so it instructs its people to remain seated as they eat the bread and drink the cup. This is a ceremonial enactment of something important to them. They agree with the Christians who kneel that posture is immensely significant. The external act matters; stay seated.

There is still, however, the possible objection that too much ceremony is a bad thing and, more serious than this, that certain acts do, in fact, look heathen. Bowing, for example: don’t Buddhists and Taoists do a lot of bowing? Christians do not want to be found aping heathendom.

Again, the answer lies close at hand. Christians gathered to enact the Eucharist are no more aping the heathen when they bow at the mention of the Holy Name than any Christian is when he bows his head to say grace. Moslems bow; animists bow; we all bow. The question is only “To Whom am I making my obeisance?” If it is Baal or Ashtaroth, then the objection is not that I have bowed, but only that I have bowed to the wrong deity.

When it comes to the question of too much ceremony, we are on ground where no one is entirely steady. How much or how little ceremony shall we have at the birthday party? Shall we dim the dining room lights and process in from the kitchen with the cake, cueing everyone to sing as the procession arrives? Or shall we just finish the main course and reach for the cake from the sideboard, lighting the candles at the table if someone can come up with some matches? Who can answer these questions? It all depends on how much we wish our actions to answer to our sense of the joy and dignity of the occasion. Informality and randomness strike one kind of note; the procession with the dimmed lights strikes another.

The “best” ceremony, if we may put it that way, is the one that most completely unites meaning and action, the one in which what occurs on the surface answers most fully to all that is meant.

Returning to the example of a wedding, we see that many ceremonial acts occur, any of which a couple might omit and still be legally married. No bride needs bridesmaids, much less bridesmaids in fancy dresses. No bride needs a wedding dress. The slow procession takes time that might be used for other, more important things. The groom might just as easily bring her down the aisle, or they might just as easily straggle in with the congregation and then, at a given signal, leave their pews and go to the front for their vows. Rings might be dispensed with. Nothing at all, it turns out, is necessary. After all, a marriage is a spiritual thing. All they need do is think prayerfully about what they are doing, perhaps read some Scripture, and consider themselves married.

The only difficulty with that sparse and practical approach is that it treats us as though we were disembodied intellects. Our bodies and our imaginations, and indeed our intellects and our hearts, all want to enact the thing. Insofar as we believe, for example, that there is an exquisite mystery called femininity and that virginity itself is a most noble and pure thing, then we want to bespeak it all, not just in our thoughts, nor just in propositions and preaching, but with a white and beautiful dress that cries out to heaven, earth, and hell, “Behold! Behold! Here is the bride!” No elaboration is felt to be too rich for the mysteries that lie in just that one small aspect of what is happening at a wedding. The procession itself: why so slow? Is it a dirge? Is the bride reluctant? No. Rather, this stately pace says, “Here is a great and joyous solemnity. Let us not frolic through it.” The tempo and the posture answer to what we discern to be going on. They give a visible shape to the meaning. Words alone will not do the trick.

All of this touches on the old topic of form and matter: what is the relation between what a thing looks like and what it is? The philosophers have made assaults on the question for centuries, and it seems to lie somehow very near the center of things. In our ordinary experiences we come across it all the time in very workaday situations. An ugly face, for example, seems to be the very diagram of an evil soul, full of lust or egoism or cruelty while another ugly face has somehow been transfigured with the light of charity and radiates beauty. We see a beautiful face from which vanity, petulance, and surfeit glimmer, or a beautiful face aglow with generosity, innocence, and humor. In all of these things, at the back of our sense of how appropriate or how contradictory the relationship seems to be between the surface and what is beneath, there lies the notion that in some perfect realm the outward and the inward are perfectly harmonious. And we are right. Such was the Creation itself, and such will be the redeemed Creation. Meanwhile we can only live with the ambiguities and apparent discrepancies, conscious that the division between the outward and the inward is a division which we brought upon ourselves at the Fall.

In the liturgy of the Church we approach that perfect harmony between the outward and the inward. We celebrate Redemption, which has begun to knit things back together. We anticipate the final Redemption of all things when that restoration will be completed. We recall the Incarnation, in which we find the perfect uniting of form and matter, that is, of perfect wholeness and purity with human flesh. We see in the Second Adam the perfection that was to have been exhibited in the first.

The ceremonies of the liturgy answer to all of this. For in the liturgy we step into redemption, in faith, and bespeak the perfect uniting of the outer and the inner that will be unfurled in the new heavens and the new earth. We renounce the divided world where body wars against heart and where gesture struggles with thought. By enacting what is true, we learn what is true. By bowing with our heads as well as our hearts, we testify to the restored seamlessness of outer and inner. By bowing with the knee we teach our reluctant hearts to bow. By making the sign of the cross with our hands we signal to heaven, earth, hell, and to our own innermost beings that we are indeed under this sign—that we are crucified with Christ. No longer do we refuse the outer gesture in the name of the inner faith. Buddhism, Platonism, and Manichaeanism may do so, but Christian faith cries out to be shaped.

By this time we have come very close to the word, nay the reality, that lies at the center of the liturgy, namely, the Sacrament.

At the center of the liturgy, then, stands the Sacrament, the mystery. We have come a step further than mere metaphor by this time, towards the center of all things. Metaphor, with all of its variations—simile, symbol, sign, and indeed art itself—says, Let X stand for Y. Let this hexagonal road sign mean “stop.” Let this death’s head mean “poison.” Let this pattern of pigment on canvas stand for Aristotle’s contemplating the bust of Homer. Let this shaped piece of marble stand for Venus. Let this kiss stand for loving feelings.

The whole business of taking one thing and pressing it into service so that it will suggest another seems to lie close to the center of things.

The eye of faith would see Sacrament as taking up this “natural” tendency and carrying it across the frontier that divides the seen from the unseen (or the form from the meaning). Here, in the Sacrament, we have not merely metaphor, bread and wine suggesting something else. We have the very thing that all metaphor strains at. We have metaphor set free, as it were, to be the thing that it bespeaks. Sacrament is metaphor lifted by redemption from the mortal world, locked as that world is into mere “nature.” It is set free, as we will all be at the Resurrection, into the undivided world that was created by God to begin with, divided at the Fall and restored in the Incarnation, to be unfurled finally at the Parousia.

In this sense, Sacrament, recalling and presenting the Incarnation itself, is not so much supernatural as quintessentially natural, because it restores to nature its true function of being full of God. “Pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua” sings the Church, not in a pantheistic hymn that blurs the distinction between Creator and creation but in testimony that indeed heaven and earth are full of His glory. Nature is the God-bearer, so to speak, not the god, nor God and nature merged.

In this sense also, then, what we modern, scientifically minded men commonly refer to as “natural” turns out to be unnatural, since we usually use the term “natural” to refer strictly to the scheme of things that is locked into mortality. Since nothing in the creation was made to be thus locked, it may be said that insofar as things seem to follow a mere cycle of birth, death, and decay, or that abstract “law” governs everything; then the situation is unnatural; some death-blow has been dealt to things. Christians, like Saint Paul, see nature groaning and struggling under its unnatural burden of mortality, waiting to be set free once more into its native liberty.

In the Sacrament, the eye of faith sees the pledge of this glorious redemption of things. In the merely natural world, all bread presents us with a wonderful metaphor. It is a case in point of the seed’s felling into the ground and dying so that it might spring to life again, only to be taken, ground, baked, broken, and given for the life of others. All of this is enacted for us in the natural world. In the Sacrament, bread, which is already a metaphor, is taken and raised to a dignity beyond mere metaphor. It now becomes the very mode under which we may feed, not on mere mortal lite, as the Jews did on manna, but on undying life. Like the humble body of the virgin which, from being “only” natural, was raised at the Annunciation to the dignity of being the God-bearer, so the humble stuff of bread at the Eucharist is raised to a similar dignity. Both events scandalize our senses. Virgin birth does not occur. Bread is not flesh.