Can the technical and the religious intersect? In this blog I want to explore what happens when we look at liturgy (the order of Christian rituals) as technology. What kind of new insights can this perspective provide?
A Personal Struggle
For a few years now, my family has struggled to plug into a church. Part of that is the phase of our lives with small children. Getting three kids ready make any outings an elaborate event! Yet, I know there is more to it. This external struggle only reflects what is happening internally with me and my wife. After growing up as active members in Christian communities we find ourselves struggling to find a spiritual home (in the way we traditionally understood it). Church is no longer an anchoring community but instead a trigger for painful memories. Going to church does not give meaning to our lives as it used to even as we still hold on to the faith it preaches.
This perception is also spilling over to our kids. Any time I mention to my two older girls (8 and 6) about going to church, protest follows. I guess they learned early to be Protestants!
When I probe further, they say that that they do not get much out of it. They don’t see the point dressing up in a Sunday morning to sit with other kids they barely know to hear stories they already know. As a father, my knee-jerk reaction is to contest these impressions, trying to affirm the slow work of grace that happens in the continual exposure to Christian rituals. Yet, the message is not getting through. Often time, I find myself being the only one at home who sees value in going to church on a Sunday morning.
This situation grieves my heart. For all its failures, I still believe in the institutional church. I also see the regular gathering of believers as an essential part of spiritual formation. Therefore, my children’s aversion to church makes me feel like I failed. I know that ultimately they will have to choose the path they need to follow. This is not under my control. Yet, I hope that by then they would have at least as much exposure as I had to the faith. Doing that without regularly participating in a Christian community is very difficult.
A Shift in Perspective
Pondering on this predicament, I wanted to understand why my view of church was so different from that of my kids. There are many differences between our upbringings in culture, language, age and technology. What I realized, however, is that through practice and study, I was encouraged and trained to see the grandeur of God in the life of the church. This has come to me through many avenues. One of them was music and the experience of worship. Another was through listening to preachers and Sunday School teachers. Additionally, I have had multiple personal mystical experiences, deeply personal and emotionally rich, that affirmed the realities being spoken in church. Through study, my vision of the body of Christ expanded beyond a group of a few hundred whom I join on a weekly basis to an unbroken communion of people affirming this faith over time in all continents of the earth. The latter, is one of the main reasons why I still believe in the institution.
The problem is that I expected my young children to simply get all that by simply dropping them off in a nursery or Sunday school class on a weekly basis. This becomes even more complicated when they are bombarded from multiple influences throughout the week that claim their attention. They are not growing up in the same world I was. A new context require different measures.
In view of this realization, I decided to take upon myself the responsibility to pass on the faith, in the best way I can, directly to my children. Relying on others to do is not working. Maybe then, they will come to yearn for gathering with other Christians on a weekly basis. That theological degree may finally come in handy after all!
Liturgy as Technology
As I considered ways to pass on the Christian faith to my children, I wondered whether I could see liturgy as technology.
To level set, liturgy means the order and content of how Christian services are conducted. It it encompasses prayers, music, reading, taking communion (or the Eucharist), baptism, etc. Liturgy is what people do when they come together for worship, hence, the “work of the people.” When ministers prepare for a Sunday service, they consider what the experience communicates. It goes beyond words but can include sounds, aromas and visuals. All these elements shape, direct and communicate through the worship experience. Over time, good liturgy changes those who regularly participate in it. There is not such thing as a liturgical church because every congregation follows a liturgy. Some are implied rather than explicitly stated.
What is the connection with technology? If technology is applied science to solve a problem, liturgy is applied theology to form character. In other words, it is a means, albeit important, to foster divine encounters. These encounters, re-order desires, transform souls and develop faith. When working properly, they have the power to make us better people.
If we are willing to accept this analogy, I wonder if the problem that my kids see no relevance in church is a technical rather than a spiritual one. I wonder if the liturgy is inadequate to do the work at their level of understanding. By that, I don’t mean that they need to experience church through more advanced technological means. The idea is not to create children’s VR church! It is much deeper than that. It is examining the elements that are not working properly and test alternatives that work better.
Can I pass on a faith that will stick over time? Will the liturgy, like a technology, work properly towards that goal? How effective are our liturgies in the goal of spiritual formation?
What do you think?
