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Comparative Liturgical Studies

Posted Oct 2013by Madison Perry

A friend of yours stands at the end of college and has little idea what to do next.She is qualified to do many things, but in the end accepts an associateship with

an investment bank. She moves and begins work. Then she works. Then sheworks some more. She becomes friends with coworkers and mentors. She workshard, but thats OK the present is the time you make investments for the future.She is having to master a whole new set of jargon, but it is helping her makesense of spreadsheets. Along the way, she comes to value the way she canmake things happen for people who need to start companies or transition them todo new things. She is a creator and recreator.

Finally, three years after college graduation you get time for a good chat. Youspeak about the future, and she predicts with great specificity what the rest of hercareer and life will resemble. If you had asked after one year of work, she wouldhave listed this future as an option. If you had asked before college graduation, it

would have been an unlikely option. So at what exact point had she made thisdecision?

Of course, it isnt likely that there was a conversion moment when this optionbecame a goal, when possibilities became preferences that becamepassions. The life and priorities of investment banking are now the water sheswims in its what she looks forward to and the language she has learned tospeak. By doing it, it became what she is meant to do.

One of our highest callings is to choose and shape the routines that shape us.These routines that encourage us to seek some good are liturgies. Liturgies areintimately related to love,vocabulary, and time. Liturgies are activities of repetition

that aim at some good something desirable that leaves its imprint on us. Asthat good becomes clearer, it focuses our words so that we can better describewhat we are seeking. As we speak with greater specificity, we come closer towhat we seek. And as we move forward in this pursuit, time passes differentlythrough our fingers it rushes toward new hopes and pauses at new joys. Welive liturgically.

Feeding

Not long ago, I became a father. Professionally, I was in graduate schoolssummer doldrums, in between fairly intense semesters. With my sweet workingwife out four days a week, the duties of bottle-administering & diaper changingfell to me. Each morning greeted me with a similar request heat up that bottleyoung man! After I had mastered it, bottle administration was perfectly pleasant,my daughter pausing to smile, my fingers on her nearly-bald head. I inventeddozens of songs to punctuate these acts, already hoping to smuggle an SATvocabulary into that miraculous brain. And after twenty minutes!there. Perfectlyhappy. I was making another human being perfectly happy. And what anadorable human being she was. However, the idyll was soon interrupted by amessy burp, a thud against a diaper, or my daughters sudden primal urge to see

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whether my clavicle contained milk. This outraged infant had shattered myequilibrium! How could it be regained? Quick, heat the milk back up!

And so the mornings passed into afternoons, the afternoons into evenings. And itwas evening, and it was morning, another day.

And so I was being disciplined to keep a certain schedule and love a certainyoung creature. I was also being kept from performing other acts. My range ofactivities had narrowed nearly completely to this schedule. I was becoming thefather to the infant. Months later, I had a friend ask me, Where have you been?I happily answered, I dont know.

Evolutionary psychologists have described mammal infancy as natures way ofmaking sure that parents and children bond the children are so cute and needythat the parents form intense connections with their young, thereby insuring thesurvival of the children. I would say that my daughters infancy was a time when Igot to choose to live in a new time a time that never ended and repeated and

just as suddenly was over, a time within which I felt a sheet of frost around my

heart (that I didnt even know existed!) melting.Work

Have you ever noticed what work does to your sense of time? Occupationsoccupy us, and teach us to be productive by dividing time up into what can beachieved during those periods. For many attorneys, there is the billable hour. Forthe salesman, there is number of sales that needs to be made. For the student,there are the pages to read and papers to write.

Rather than painstakingly lay out how work is a predatory liturgy that seeks todevour all others, it could be better to consider the flip side. Perhaps work is aplace where we can be trained to be speak better and to give our limited time its

proper value and to love worthy objects with a greater intensity. A day with myfather, a long-term attorney in a small town, is a lesson to this end. The days arefilled with clients to advise personally and professionally to love. There is aspecialized vocabulary about contracts and evidence that my dad masters inorder to tell his clients stories with integrity. In his jam-packed days, time isprecious because there is too little time to give himself away to so many people.

And so our occupations can intensify our vocabularies and loves in a directionthat is good.

Here is a place to be careful: when it comes to working, we have the duty tosafeguard our occupations vocabularies to resist and innovate. At one point, a

dear friend of mine had been encouraged to over-treat a client (to renderunnecessary services in order to generate revenue) she explained to me herrefusal to do so in an outraged tone: But he wasnt a client, he was a person!My friends moral resistance hinged on a simple word choice client or person.

We can also innovate when it comes the words we use at work I am thinkingabout several ingenious attempts to convince companies to set their sights on amore holistic understanding of success. Steve Garber has long been insisting ona triple bottom line: People, Planet, and Profits.

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Comparative Liturgical Studies

Liturgies are not necessarily competitive I can bill my clients by the hour duringthe week and feed my babies from the bottle every night but liturgies cultivateloves that spill over their boundaries and push other loves aside. When you enlistyourself in a trade that actually makes you get stuff done, you are being trained

to orient your time around an object of affection with an especially intenseenergy, and it leaves a mark on your soul.

There is a great tradition of ordering our loves, and ordering our loves requiringordering our liturgies. In Ecclesiastes there is a time for every activity underheaven God has made every thing beautiful in his time. If each of our activitiesis like a song, our lives can be a sweeping performance that incorporates each inits own proper place.

One final thing to think about, then, is whether our lives makes sense liturgically.What kinds of people are our lives making us? Do we have a time to work? Dowe have times to play? And is there an overall structure that holds these things in

place?My grandfather died at the age of 78. Like my father, he was a small townattorney. After being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he went to work the nextday. He deer hunted that winter. He played golf with the dog and pony show (hisname for his group of friends who played together once a week). He recitedpoetry after meals. He prayed with his wife. A month before his death, he helpeda widow with her will. These were just things that he did and would choose to doregardless of how much time he had left or how much money he had in the bank.

His life had developed a coherent order the structure didnt really have a nameuntil he pulled it off for a lifetime. Now his picture hangs in my dads office and

my family talks about my granddads good life in our own ways we hope toinnovate on it and practice liturgy in this great school of life, each thing in itsproper place, where God makes each thing beautiful in his time.