Quotes about Liturgy

Above all, enter into the Church's liturgy and make the liturgical cycle part of your life—let its rhythm work its way into your body and soul.

The liturgy is at one and the same time a daily discipline as "do-able" as walking to the corner or eating our lunch, and the entry into the highest mysteries of heaven.

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, but thought through and relished, planned and prepared -- an ultimately better way for the relationship to grow and at the same time a way of demonstrating what the relationship is all about.

And place the Bread of the Presence on the table before Me at all times.

Offer them with their drink offerings in addition to the regular burnt offering and its grain offering. The animals must be unblemished.

He shall slaughter it on the north side of the altar before the LORD, and Aaron’s sons the priests are to sprinkle its blood against the altar on all sides.

I've practiced centering prayer. I've contemplatively prayed. I've prayed liturgically... I've benefited from each, and I still do. In ways you'll see, elements of each style are still with me.

I like a prayer book and liturgy to guide me in my faith rather than falling back into my comfort zone of controlling reality with my learned and carefully chosen words, and without leaving it up to me to come up with what to say here and now when I just may not feel like it.

Laundry, liturgy and women's work all serve to ground us in the world, and they need not grind us down. Our daily tasks, whether we perceive them as drudgery or essential, life-supporting work, do not define who we are as women or as human beings.

Though we sing with the tongues of men and of angels, if we are not truly worshipping the living God, we are noisy gongs and clanging cymbals. Though we organize the liturgy most beautifully, if it does not enable us to worship the living God, we are mere ballet-dancers. Though we repave the floor and reface the stonework, though we balance our budgets and attract all the tourists, if we are not worshipping God, we are nothing.

So the Eucharist -- in its sumptuous liturgical setting, surrounded by music, art, the word of God, and the prayer of the community -- does more than sustain the divine life in us. It delights us, as a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.

The Christian liturgy draws us deeper and deeper into the innermost recesses of mystery, but then lands us back out on the street. We are not allowed to stay at the altar. We have to go back out to committee meetings, traffic jams, laundry, dirty diapers—where we will be enacting what we have encountered in the liturgy.