by Ben Garren
I have friends who pay absolutely no attention to what they eat, at all. I also have friends who have the most complicated self imposed dietary restrictions imaginable. Most of us cannot maintain decent health if we pay no attention to what we eat. At the same time, we have no major interest in having our entire eating habits dictated by an all imposing diet plan. Instead we maintain a basic set of rules that work for us, know when we break them, and know when it is time to step things up a notch and really adhere to a healthy diet plan.
Liturgical Rubrics work along the same lines as eating habits. It is really difficult to have healthy worship life if we pay absolutely no attention to them. It is also really frustrating to have to constantly adhere to every iota of a specific customary. What works is figuring out a basic set of rules for a community, knowing that at points we are going to break them, and knowing that at other moments it will be necessary to check everything we do against a really stringent set of rubrics.
When we think about what might make a yummy meal at the moment (bacon, ice cream, cheese fries, and beer), we might forget what makes a good meal for our overall day (salad, chicken, cheese fries, and beer), and completely not consider what may be a super healthy option (salad, tofu, carrots, and water). In the same way it is very easy to look at worship and wonder why do we not simply take up what might be fun worship at the moment, forget that there might be a method of worship that would be good for our overall day, and not consider that strict rubrics around liturgy exists for the spiritual health of the individual and community.
So we get the basic concept: healthy worship comes from a good relationship with the rubrics like healthy living comes from a good relationship with nutrition plans. In the same way that there can be a lot of variety in how an individual goes about eating a healthy diet there can be a lot of variety in how communities go about having a healthy worship life. This is not a low church vs. high church thing, just an awareness of what works and what is healthy.
The next thing to look at is health trends and diet fads, noting that telling the difference might often be difficult. Consider “raw” and “paleo” diets. The idea is that we will be healthier by just eating raw fruits and vegetables with the occasional braised piece of meat. Now this plan is a lot healthier then what many people eat but it is also very oriented towards spring and summer crops. There is stuff that is in cheese, sweet potatoes, bitter greens, and whole grains that simply do not exist in other places. These things are good for us. We simply get too much of some of them with our current diet plans. We have to bring our diets into balance.
We also get liturgical trends and worship fads. A major trend over the past several decades has been inclusive language. The idea is to create liturgies where we do not reference God with any gendered language. Now just like “raw” and “paleo” diets are a lot healthier than what many people eat, inclusive language liturgies are a lot healthier than liturgies that represent God as solely male and the female as inherently subordinate. At the same time, however, there are essential ways that humans enter into relationship that are dependent upon gender. Our liturgies and prayer life have to bring about transformation in all the ways we relate to each other, to ourselves, and to God. To do this we have to include gendered relationships so that we can heal the broken pathways within ourselves and our communities. We have to bring our liturgical life into balance.
To that end we have to pay attention to trends and fads, recognize how they bring us to a healthier state from the one we are in, but not allow them to draw us simply into another unhealthy state. We cannot jump from fad diet to fad diet. We cannot jump from hip liturgy to hip liturgy. We must have, and maintain, a healthy set of rules by which to maintain our lives. A set of rules that work for us, that we can break when we need to, and that we can adhere to strenuously when necessary. For our spiritual and physical health these things are essential.