The Humility of Ceremony

C.S. Lewis and Elisabeth Eliot are two of my very favorite authors. They have extremely different writing styles, but each manages to articulate things I think I know in the very core of my being. Since moving to college, I have been attending a very traditional church. The church my parents attend at home is also much more traditional then the one in which I grew up. (Ironically, they are both called Trinity. Clearly pretty standard for our denomination.) We sing from a hymnal and psalter, and use things like the Apostle's Creek, the Nicene Creed, the Doxology, and the Gloria Patri. Often the pastor doesn't announce which part of the service is coming next, or when to stand, but the congregation follows the bulletin. I did not expect to love this form of corporate worship as much as I do. I think I have learned so much about worshipping with reverence and awe. I love singing and saying things that Christians have recited for centuries, connecting us to the church universal of all times and places. I often hear people make negative comments about worship services that contain some degree of ritual. What ultimately matters is the heart, and I believe that God can be glorified by a Catholic choir chanting in Latin and by Lecrae's rap lyrics. However, I would disagree that a worship service has to be molded to society in order to be relevant. I have been rereading Let Me Be A Woman, which is quickly becoming my favorite book. The other night I was ecstatic to come across a chapter called "The Humility of Ceremony." Eliot quotes Lewis' Preface to Paradise Lost. "Above all, you must be rid of the hideous idea, fruit of a widespread inferiority complex, that pomp, on the proper occasions, has any connection with vanity or self-conceit. A celebrant approaching the altar, a princess led out by a king to dance a minuet, a general officer on a ceremonial parade, ... all these wear unusual clothes and move with calculated dignity. This does not mean that they are vain, but that they are obedient, they are obeying the hoc age which presides over every solemnity. The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for everyone else the proper place of ritual." Elisabeth Eliot is referring specifically to a wedding, but I think the same principle is true in corporate worship. She says that "The ceremony provides the form, the ritual which (to quote Lewis again) 'renders pleasures less fugitive,... which hands over to the power of wise custom the task (to which the individual and his moods are so inadequate) of being festive or sober, gay or reverent, when we choose to be, and not at the bidding of chance.'" I absolutely love this. I never thought of ceremony as a form of humility before. Our society, and the American church in particular, is so quick to base everything off feeling and emotion. People change churches in haste because a particular pastor or worship leader just "didn't do anything for me" or make big decisions because they "weren't feeling it." Churches use all measure of techniques to manipulate the emotions of the congregation. In fact, they are missing the point! In a ritual in which every piece is intentional and Christ-centered, there is freedom for true emotion - emotion based on truth.