Whose Service is Perfect Freedom

At 8:00 a.m. this morning I stood in Goodson Chapel at Duke Divinity School and read from my pocket-sized Book of Common Prayer as a group of students (graduate students—I was the oddball) went through the daily rite of morning prayer. I went twice to morning prayer last week and every day so far this week; I'm hoping to make it a permanent fixture in my daily routine. As I prayed the Venite, the Nunc Dimitis, and the Psalms, I realized just how odd I am among my peers for actually enjoying—and even desperately needing—such a practice. Where for me a discipline like morning prayer is centering, formative, and vital to my spiritual life, to many Christians today it seems...well, boring. Where is the break? What has the church done to make formal worship "boring"?

I suppose I'm a bit of a weirdo when it comes to worship. I read liturgical theology for fun, for crying out loud. Nobody does that. But even though I know that I occupy a different spiritual and intellectual landscape regarding worship than most other people, I still feel a deep sadness anytime someone tells me that such-and-such a church is too boring or too formal. Has worship really become that dull? Or is our culture forming us with expectations that simply do not fit with what worship is all about? (There's another post hidden in here somewhere about habit, which I will address in full later on.)

Some churches really are boring. Eddie Izzard, a fabulous comedian (he's a British transvestite and is wickedly smart), makes a point in one of his routines about how oftentimes Christian worship sounds just plain painful. "There's something phenomenally dreary about Christian singing," he says as he goes on to provide a particularly dreary rendition of "Oh God Our Help in Ages Past." "They're the only people who can sing 'Hallelujah' without feeling." I've certainly been in churches like that (white churches...Izzard makes the distinction clear and revels in the raucousness of the worship of people of African descent), and it hurts, it really does. But somehow that image of dreariness has been projected onto all formal (or even mildly structured!) worship. People feel restrained, as if they are not free to "really" worship (whatever that means).

I thought about this concept of being "free" to worship during one of the collects we prayed from the BCP this morning. It says, "Oh God...whose service is perfect freedom." In serving God, in being bound to him, we are truly free. The notion of being unrestrained and able to do as you please just doesn't jive with the whole concept of forming one's desires to God's will. Maybe this is a problem uniquely my own, but I struggle with prayer and with focusing on worship, so to have a liturgy sanctioned by hundreds of years of practice is not limiting but rather freeing, and deeply so. I love praying the Psalms because through them I am able to make the supplications, lamentations, thanksgivings, and confessions that sit in my heart with no words to set them free. Sometimes I wonder if people even read the Psalms properly anymore. The Psalms make up a prayer book and, to paraphrase Bonhoeffer, when you pray the Psalms you are praying with the whole church and with Christ himself.

I wonder if some people are so averse to ordered, formal worship because individualism and uniqueness are so stressed in today's culture that the thought of being brought into a unified, disciplined practice with others seems undesirable. We all want to do our own thing. The thought of engaging in practices that put you in communion not only with other Christians today but also with Christians who lived and died hundreds of years before now doesn't invoke the kind of awe it once did (and still does for some of us). Christ in the Desert Monastery in New Mexico is one of my favorite places in the world. What overwhelms me in watching the monks perform the daily office, praying seven times a day, chanting the psalms and taking Mass each morning, is that, aside from incorporating things like running water, solar power, and even internet (the monks have an online gift shop and post the daily martyrology on their webpage), their way of life has remained essentially the same for 1500 years. The monks in the desert outside Abiquiu, NM are walking with Saint Benedict himself, a millennium and a half dead. I wonder if there is a way in our post-Enlightenment world to recapture the minds of Christians today in such a way that the thought of being a part of something bigger than themselves is not oppressive or marginalizing but rather liberating and empowering.