The music, the prayers, the bowing and rising, the incense–all of it was breaking down my defenses. That’s what good liturgy does. It breaks your heart open and turns you toward God.

Mystical experience needs some form of dogma in order not to dissipate into moments of spiritual intensity that are merely personal, and dogma needs regular infusions of unknowingness to keep from calcifying into the predictable,...

Worship, then, needs to be characterized by hospitality; it needs to be inviting. But at the same time, it should be inviting seekers into the church and its unique story and language. Worship should be...

The liturgy is the place where we wait for Jesus to show up. We don’t have to do much. The liturgy is not an act of will. It is not a series of activities designed...

The most carefully crafted language in our culture tends to be poetry. And poetry at its finest moments subverts our best attempts at hiding from reality…The poetry of liturgy has just this power. The liturgy...

The author chuckles at the resistance to using a prepared, written liturgy in prayer. He compares it to being unwilling to dress in any clothing we did not make ourselves, or being unwilling to drive...

Good Christian liturgy is friendship in action, love taking thought, the covenant relationship between God and his people not simply discovered and celebrated like the sudden meeting of friends, exciting and worthwhile though that is,...

…how are you sacred to me? your lines are golden threads – your patter, my patten – I explore the liturgy of your words…

Beauty, then, is not mere decoration, but rather an essential element of the liturgical action, since it is an attribute of God himself and his revelation. These considerations should make us realize the care which...

There is however, one reason why the arts so rarely accept a mission that IS within the power of the Church to alter. In the past, the densest or richest location of baptised art has...