Conversation: Sweetness Moves Toward Liturgy

Conversation in new truth takes on formal voices.   The room feels hushed.
Formality, you see, is not the mode of distance, but of preciousness.   It is the courtliness of the lord and the lady on the hidden stairs. Formality is real when the gestures are stylized and the eyes are moist.

“Liturgist”. To some, this is a scholar of history and forms of worship. To others, it is the chief musician for a church, or even a charismatic office embracing prayer, song, dance, and other arts on a Christian podium.

But these are ghostly, fragmented remnants of the charism. “Liturgist” is one who sees and senses the roles in conversations with God. “Conversation” is also a tricky term: often, this is prayer, as traditionally and biblically understood. But more broadly, all that do is either random or in response to God’s acts and words. So our explicit prayer and our implicit acts are all liturgical movements, when seen with the liturgist’s eyes.
If that paragraph seems like word-salad, well, it kind of…is. The “ineffable” was the traditional term in mystical literature; it meant “hard to put into words”. Liturgy, when not just a discussion of rituals held in the church, is the right word for the entire body of descriptions of these ineffable moments, but described after the fact, at non-liturgical moments when enough half-lives of glory have died so that the analytical faculty has aroused and words can be used.

THE liturgy, of course, is the dance of Trinitarian Lord, first, then also the derived dance of God the Son and bride.

This is where it all gets ineffable, and where we should be careful to talk lest we commit a trinitarian error.
So, back to the beginning: Conversation, when it actually occurs, takes on the signs and symptoms of liturgy: formal, yet, tender, with an aura of courtly dance.