Top 72 Quotes About The Liturgy
#1. By itself, the question of the liturgy's essence and the standards of the reform has brought us back to the question of music and its position in the liturgy. And as a matter of fact one cannot speak about worship at all without also speaking of the music of worship.
Pope Benedict XVI
#2. I like the ritual, the liturgy of a well-crafted, emotional fashion show. I will never be jaded with this side of fashion. The catwalk is pure anthropology, something like an esoteric encrypted parade. It can totally be replaced but it will be missed.
Hedi Slimane
#3. The Eucharistic mystery stands at the heart and center of the liturgy since it is the fount of life by which we are cleansed and strengthened to live not for ourselves but for God and to be united in love among ourselves.
Pope Paul VI
#4. We cannot build up the idea of the apostolate of the laity without the foundation of the liturgy.
Dorothy Day
#5. Father Alexander Schmemann is an Orthodox scholar who wrote a book called For the Life of the World. He says the liturgy is a journey that proceeds from the kingdom of this world into a brief encounter with the kingdom of God, and then back out again to bear witness to it.
Ian Morgan Cron
#6. How are you sacred to me? your lines are golden threads - your patter, my patten - I explore the liturgy of your words ...
John Geddes
#7. Nevertheless, the liturgy of Ash Wednesday is not focussed on the sinfulness of the penitent but on the mercy of God. The question of sinfulness is raised precisely because this is a day of mercy, and the just do not need a savior.
Thomas Merton
#8. Rediscover the Rosary in the light of scripture, in harmony with the Liturgy, and in the context of your daily lives.
Pope John Paul II
#9. One day, a leopard stalked into the synagogue, roaring and lashing its tail. Three weeks later, it had become part of the liturgy.
Franz Kafka
#10. Whenever I hear the epistles of Paul read out loud in the liturgy, I am filled with joy ... If I'm regarded as a learned man, it's not because I'm brainy. It's simply because I have such a love for Paul that I have never left off reading him. He has taught me all I know.
Charles W. Freeman Jr.
#11. I am enormously susceptible to religious environments - the music, the liturgy and the prayers.
Elaine Pagels
#12. I wonder that among all the evils deprecated in the Liturgy, no one thought of inserting flitting. Is there any worse thing? Oh no, no!
Jane Welsh Carlyle
#13. Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don't try and mean it. Nor prayers. The liturgy is best treated and read as if it's someone announcing the departure of trains.
Alan Bennett
#14. The language of the Catholic Church - the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels - was in many ways my first poetry.
Alice McDermott
#15. That rule must be absolutely observed which states that, except for the most serious reasons and with the Apostolic See, no innovations are to be introduced into the holy rites of the liturgy.
Pope Gregory XVI
#16. The real 'action' in the liturgy in which we are all supposed to participate is the action of God himself. This is what is new and distinctive about the Christian liturgy: God himself acts and does what is essential.
Pope Benedict XVI
#17. Guardini recognized that the liturgy is the true, living environment for the Bible and that the Bible can be properly understood only in this living context within which it first emerged.
Romano Guardini
#18. I distrust pious phrases, especially when they issue from my mouth. I try militantly never to be affected by the pious language of the faithful but it is always coming out when you least expect it. In contrast to the pious language of the faithful, the liturgy is beautifully flat.
Flannery O'Connor
#19. They knew only too well the intimate bond which unites faith with worship, 'the law of belief with the law of prayer,' and so, under the pretext of restoring it to its primitive form, they corrupted the order of the liturgy in many respects to adapt it to the errors of the Innovators.
Pope Leo XIII
#20. Can man, the finite and sinful one, cooperate with God, the Infinite and Holy One? Yes, he can, precisely because God Himself has become man, become body, and here (in the liturgy), again and again, he comes through his body to us who live in the body.
Pope Benedict XVI
#21. The mystery of the Holy Night, which historically happened two thousand years ago, must be lived as a spiritual event in the 'today' of the Liturgy," the Pope clarified. "The Word who found a dwelling in Mary's womb comes to knock on the heart of every person with singular intensity this Christmas.
Pope John Paul II
#22. I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful. I thought some of the stories were neat; I liked some of the liturgy and some of the songs.
John Irving
#23. A. Make sure the liturgy is stable. People participate in something when they know what to expect, and what is expected of them.
Frank C. Senn
#24. All mankind, not excluding Americans, are sinners
miserable sinners, as even no few Bostonians themselves nowadays contritely respond in the liturgy.
Herman Melville
#25. Even the darkest moments of the liturgy are filled with joy, and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the lenten fast, is a day of happiness, a Christian feast.
Thomas Merton
#26. 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.
Kathleen Norris
#27. Thus [the altar] brings heaven into the community assembled on earth, or rather it takes the community beyond itself into the communion of saints of all times and places. We might put it this way: the altar is the place where heaven is opened up.
Pope Benedict XVI
#28. Liturgy is the means that the church uses to keep baptized Christians in living touch with the entire living holy community as it participates formationally in Holy Scripture.
Eugene H. Peterson
#29. Sure, sometimes it is great when, in prayer, we can express to God just what we feel; but better still when, in the act of praying, our feelings change. Liturgy is not, in the end, open to our emotional whims. It repoints the person praying, taking him somewhere else.
Lauren F. Winner
#30. If you want a church full of Catholics who know their faith, love their faith and practice their faith, give them a liturgy that is demanding, profound and rigourous. They will rise to the challenge.
Peter Kwasniewski
#31. It behaves more like a tribe than a democratic institution ... responding to custom rather than reason and using its own liturgy and language for the conduct of its domestic affairs.
Chris Patten
#32. You have the women sitting on the left and the men sitting on the right. Everything is to keep your mind focused on God ... To me the most beautiful thing anyone on earth can experience, other than maybe marriage and child-bearing, would be the Orthodox Liturgy.
Troy Polamalu
#33. The author chuckles at the resistance to using a prepared, written liturgy in prayer. He compares it to being unwilling to dress in any clothing we did not make ourselves, or being unwilling to drive a car we did not construct entirely by ourselves.
N. T. Wright
#34. Tea drinking is a liturgy of comfort, and we partake of it everywhere in the world. It's a ceremony of simplicity, nourishment for both the nomads in foreign teahouses and homebodies in their beds.
Tsh Oxenreider
#35. The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us.
George Eliot
#36. Give me bitter years of sickness, Suffocation, insomnia, fever, Take my child and my lover, And my mysterious gift of song This I pray at your liturgy After so many tormented days, So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia Might become a cloud of glorious rays.
Anna Akhmatova
#37. Prayer is, for me, like that - a state of being together with God. It's not usually triggered by liturgy or special needs. It's more like what the Bible instructs us to do: Pray without ceasing.
Bob Buford
#38. [People] need to find words that can reconnect them with each other. That is the gift of good liturgy, yeah. We're not talking about fluffy stuff. We're talking about real life for people around the world. Our prayers should be said like the daily breath that gives us life.
Shane Claiborne
#39. Liturgy and worship were never meant to be confined to the cathedrals and sanctuaries. Liturgy at its best can be performed like a circus or theater - making the Gospel visible as a witness to the world around us.
Shane Claiborne
#40. The charismatics confused the holy liturgy with a school of samba, but than I was converted when I got to know them better and saw the good they do.
Pope Francis
#41. The ancient liturgy, with its poignant symbols and innumerable subtleties, is a prolonged courtship of the soul, enticing and drawing it onwards, leading it along a path to the mystical marriage, the wedding feast of heaven.
Peter Kwasniewski
#42. Liturgy is like a strong tree whose beauty is derived from the continuous renewal of its leaves, but whose strength comes from the old trunk, with solid roots in the ground.
Pope Paul VI
#43. Then suddenly the Roman liturgy disappeared as we knew it.
Richard Morris
#44. But if roteness is a danger, it is also the way liturgy works. When you don't have to think all the time about what words you are going to say next, you are free to fully enter into the act of praying; you are free to participate in the life of God.
Lauren F. Winner
#45. That phrase "hocus-pocus" started out as "hocus-pocus dominocus", and was, in the beginning, a mocking imitation of the holy incantations of the Catholic Church's Latin liturgy. So say the lexicologists.
L. M. Boyd
#46. Both liturgy and what is euphemistically termed 'domestic work' also have an intense relation with the present moment, a kind of faith in the present that fosters hope and makes life seem possible in the day-to-day.
Kathleen Norris
#47. We use the Heidelberg Catechism in our worship. Sometimes we read it responsively. Other times I'll work it into my communion liturgy. I'll quote it in my sermons from time to time. I've seen the Catechism used effectively as Sunday school material.
Kevin DeYoung
#48. The music, the prayers, the bowing and rising, the incense
all of it was breaking down my defenses. That's what good liturgy does. It breaks your heart open and turns you toward God.
Fred Bahnson
#49. For what concerns diversity of rites in the sacred liturgy, the Apostolic See has always made its position clear: not only it does not condemn diversity, but it eagerly and willingly grants to each nation the right to keep and preserve the legitimate customs and traditions of its forbears.
Pope Leo XIII
#50. The Christian experience is not primarily formed by our liturgy, doctrine, or ecclesiology, as important as those might be. We are formed by the dangerous stories of our great hero.
Michael Frost
#51. Consumerism is the worship of the god of quantity; advertising is its liturgy. Advertising is schooling in false longing.
John O'Donohue
#52. When the convert emerges from the water, the world seems changed. The world has not changed, it is always wonderful and horrible, iniquitous and filled with beauty. But now, after baptism, the eyes that see the world have changed.
Liturgy Training Publications
#53. As regards my own 'philosophy,' I continue to be inspired by the music, liturgy and architectural tradition of the Anglican Church in which I was brought up. No one can fail to be uplifted by great cathedrals - such as that at Ely, near my home in Cambridge.
Martin Rees
#54. When I am away from Liturgy for too long, I find I burn for it now, for the steadiness of the calendar, the words" that ring out in repetition, the heavy scented air. When I return each week, I am coming home again. Liturgy is written into my flesh, sinking into my skin and my spirit.
Angela Doll Carlson
#55. ...small bits of our day are profoundly meaningful
because they are the site of our worship. The crucible of our formation is in the monotony of our daily routines.
Tish Harrison Warren
#56. The service
a moved Roosevelt called it the "keynote" of his meeting with Churchill
was working a kind of magic, which is one of the points of liturgy and theater: to use the dramatic to convince people of a reality they cannot see.
Jon Meacham
#57. In accordance with the centuries-old tradition of the Latin rite, the Latin language is to be retained by clerics in the divine office.
Pope Paul VI
#58. What it leads to is the mischief of confusing liturgy with magic
of imagining there are only a handful of properly effective formulas for conjuring up the mystery, when in fact the mystery is always at work, independent of any formula whatsoever.
Robert Farrar Capon
#59. We are bidden to 'put on Christ', to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.
C.S. Lewis
#60. When loneliness mastered him he would go up to the cemetery ... The rest of his time was taken up with a liturgy of habits that succeeded in warding off sadness.
Alessandro Baricco
#61. I'm very eclectic, musically as in other things! But also to frame the hearing and knowing of Scripture within a context of worship, which is what Anglican liturgy does, just seems to me such a very complete and compelling thing.
N. T. Wright
#62. Liturgy, literally the work of the people, is the intergenerational stronghold in Christian history.
Kathie Amidei
#63. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition all this is well known, and incorporated into the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church as well as the rituals and liturgy of Yom Kippur.
Roger Scruton
#64. Persecution always acts as a jell for members of cults; it proves to them, in the absence of history, liturgy, tradition, and doctrine, that they are God's chosen.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
#65. Creation exists to be a place for the covenant that God wants to make with man. The goal of creation is the covenant, the love story of God and man.
Pope Benedict XVI
#66. Music had always been the handmaid of the Roman liturgy.
Richard Morris
#67. Beauty, then, is not mere decoration, but rather an essential element of the liturgical action, since it is an attribute of God himself and his revelation. These considerations should make us realize the care which is needed, if the liturgical action is to reflect its innate splendour.
Pope Benedict XVI
#68. Second, we also got a more authentic liturgy of the people of God, in the vernacular language.
Hans Kung
#69. Dancing is not a form of expression for the Christian liturgy.
Pope Benedict XVI
#71. Forms and rituals do not produce worship, nor does the disuse of forms and rituals. We can use all the right techniques and methods, we can have the best possible liturgy, but we have not worshiped the Lord until Spirit touches spirit.
Richard J. Foster
#72. We throw ourselves down, as Jesus did, before the mystery of God's power present to us, knowing that the Cross is the true burning bush, the place of the flame of God's love, which burns but does not destroy.
Pope Benedict XVI
