I Don’t Like Cute Liturgies
I Don’t Like Cute Liturgies
A cute liturgy projects its cuteness onto God Himself; a cute God is easily trivialized, ignored, forgotten; and a forgotten God—since human beings by nature long to worship something—will soon have some sort of idol to take His place.
Lately we’ve been exploring topics related directly or indirectly to public religious worship: the true nature of a feast, the history of Christian feast days, feasting in medieval liturgy, and bells as liturgical instruments in the Old Covenant and the New. All these discussions point in one way or another to a fundamental quality of liturgy as it was understood and practiced for centuries in the western and eastern Church. This quality draws upon such concepts as beauty, solemnity, formality, transcendentality, sublimity—but it is not equivalent to any one of these things. Is there a single word by which we might express the quality I have in mind? I believe there is, though we must accept that it is imperfect unto its task, and we must also …
Children love things that are stimulating. This is just Bozo's Big Top aping a Mass.