Excavating Truth in the Liturgy

*I started this post almost exactly one year ago, as Pentecost was this past Sunday.  Funny how that is--I've been turning idea over in my head for more than a year, a vertical spiral of excavation in itself!  

(2019)
I was standing in the choir this morning, and it was Pentecost, so all the music for the first half of the Liturgy was different than the familiar Antiphons of ordinary time.  I started thinking about repetition in the services and wondering (again) why we repeat everything so much.  I explored this a bit in my novel, but I keep coming back to it; there is a particular scene in the book that echoes in my mind a lot.  It occurred to me rather suddenly that the repetition allows us to excavate the Truth of the Liturgy, much in the same way doing a 12-week run of a play allows a theater actor to excavate the truth of the text in a play.

(2020)

Last month, I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in a book group discussion via Zoom on Eugene Vodolazkin's most excellent book, Laurus.  I read the book several years ago, and was completely floored by the brilliance of his text and the complexity and facets of the story.  It is one of those books that is hard to describe to others, because the depth of the spiritual meaning lends itself to interpretations on a lot of different levels. 

One theme that Vodolazkin revisits again and again is the malleability of time, and how our modern ideas of time are just that: modern ideas.  Time exists for man, not the other way around, and the meaning we assign to it, and how we experience it, say a lot about who we are as a people.  

(I wrote my master's thesis on how the Eastern Orthodox Church thinks about time and how that thought is embodied in physical space as a historical matter.  So I have some skin in the game on this topic).

In the medieval Russian context of the novel, time operates on a vertical spiral, rather than the progressive horizontal line of the post-modern psyche.  In our context, time ever marches onward, toward a (theoretically) brighter future, because: progress.  What has happened before is hardly relevant then, because it does not help us go into the future.  We need the new, the novel, the curious, in order to maintain our experience of forward movement. 

In the medieval world, the novel was viewed with suspicion, and not easily accepted, simply because it was novel and new.  The idea is that you continue to plumb the depths of what you know for ever greater meaning and complexity.  To take that idea in a concrete context, if you understand the presentism of liturgical time (as in, everything is always present in the Eternal NOW of God--everything past, present and future is always happening), when you go to the service of Pentecost, you are not only remembering the event of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples in the upper room, you are mystically present with them and experiencing the actual descent of the Holy Spirit in that moment.  It means all of history is present, and can be examined for additional meaning and facet. I found myself praying: "Holy Spirit, come dwell with us!" throughout the service this weekend. 

I suppose I find this theme interesting and important because it gives the lie to the consumer self.  That is to say: I am more than the sum total of my desires, and I can transcend these things for greater spiritual meaning.  I've pondered a lot on material things these past months, as we've faced grocery and household shortages, learned different ways of doing (rediscovering older ways, really), and figuring out what is really necessary.  Human connection and understanding are necessary.  (Extremely so, as we've found through our isolation.  We are on yellow phase now, and had some friends over for dinner the past couple of nights, and the kids are having a hard time coping with the sudden abundance of riches in this area after months of poverty in spirit). 

Even the new green growing things in our newly installed kitchen garden are a way of experiencing the vertical spiral of time.  The plants that are there now, some of them will renew themselves next year, and we will experience the plant again, but in a new way, with the knowledge and experience of this summer.  Some of the plants will need to be replanted, and we learn to know a whole new existence.  Some will bolt by summer's end and make way for the hardier plants we can seed in the fall to eat in the early winter like kale and spinach.  There is a whole world in that garden. 

It brings me to the passage from Wheesht that I posted on yesterday's Yarn Along post:

(As an aside to that post, I have often wondered what it was like for the company of Coriolanus to live with that level of anger and muscular intensity over a large number of performances.  Did it stay with them in their lives off-stage?  Did it inform the work that came after?  What knowledge or wisdom emerged from excavating the truths of that play over that many performances?) 

 

It would be tempting to look at the new ways of doing that have developed in our household during the quarantine, or to see the growth of the kitchen garden and think we should leave the city for a more rural existence, but we have no strong reason to leave the city, and many reasons to stay (church, school, work, well-established health care providers, friends and neighbors, all slowly and painstakingly built and maintained over the past 13 years). 

Just as the repetition of the church services teaches me to delve more deeply into the Truth of the liturgy, to find new spiritual truths to examine and understand, the repetition of our city routines and the basic rootedness of it, even when it is hard, even when I get sick of the things that make it hard, is still worth doing and excavating for meaning. 

Sometimes the truth to find is subtle, and only reveals itself slowly, over many turns of repetition.  Sometimes it is more obvious, and shows itself on the first revolution, but adds nuance with time.  Sometimes we can only see the facets when we have gone around it and up or down a few times. 

But it is always worth finding.  Keep digging.