Shaw on the Great Thanksgiving

What follows is excerpted from Bread for the Bones, an upcoming book by author Luci Shaw. Her prose is adjectival, but coarse; she is speaking from the heart. It makes her experience of worship worshipful. I’ve had it tacked up in my cube for weeks now, and discover that it weekly becomes less and less hers and more and more mine. She takes me less and less to her church and more and more to my own community of Saint Francis. Shaw writes:

“The Episcopal way of worship—with its sacramental interpretation of life and its richness of sign and symbol—speaks to my imagination and awakens a fresh, inner reaction. At first it was just one unexpected epiphany after another, but now it has become second nature: the vocal responses; the easy movement from knees to pew to standing to altar; the Peace; the genuflection; and the crossing of oneself to signal the blessings of grace from Father, Son, and Spirit—to me, beauty.

The Episcopal church provides sign and symbol—even incense, which may Protestants might find excessively ecclesiastical, but which is to me such a beautiful visual image of faith. The pungent aroma instantly speaks to my spirit of “prayer rising to God.” I love the progression from the Liturgy of the Word, with its tying together of Scripture from the Old and New Testaments, the Psalms, and the Gospels, to the Liturgy of the Table, with the bread and wine pressing a tender consciousness of Christ’s enfleshment into my heart. These moments, in the intimacy of the body of Christ, are what hold me in faith and in beauty. They call me to mystery and Godhead.

The show-and-tell of the liturgical service is not just talking about something—about God or his attributes or about truth from Scripture—it is actually enacting the mystery. Along with priests and deacons and lay-ministers, the whole congregation is involved in the worship service through congregational responses made of prayer and Scripture. The whole is antiphonal; a dialogue is going on.

There is beauty in the forward movement within the traditional service, the communion service. It begins with the Liturgy of the Word, where we read Scripture, we hear it expounded, and we pray for forgiveness and cleansing as we are confronted with the truth of Scripture. Then we move into the Liturgy of the Table, where we worship God in receiving the sacrament of communion, the bread and the wine, the body and blood of Christ. This is the high point of my week. My sense of God’s presence there rises to a peak that is sometimes too strong and too poignant to describe.”