Liturgy and Life

Extracts from ‘The Deacon and the Liturgy’, Being a Deacon Today by Rosalind Brown (Canterbury Press 2005):

It is sometimes supposed that conduct is primary and worship tests it, whereas the truth is that worship is primary and conduct tests it.

We do, indeed, assemble in buildings to worship, but the deacon is the constant irritant to anyone who thereby supposes that daily life is left at the door when we enter, or that worship ends with the dismissal; it merely changes location and expression. Liturgy is radically related to how we live our lives, how we fulfil our baptismal vocation, how we offer God our souls and bodies to be a reasonable sacrifice.

When we are unaware of the social implications of the liturgy, or ignore those implications, we fail to that extent to offer ourselves to God as a ‘reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice.’ For each time we receive the Body and Blood of our Lord, we are by that act sent to be witnesses to Him before the world. This does not mean that we are to lead pious lives, but that we are to be in the thick of the struggle for justice and freedom and peace.

What will it do, for example, to our missionary responsibilities, when we realise that we not only proclaim Christ’s redemptive work in the liturgy, but we offer our own souls and bodies with His in the very same work? And what sort of a social order shall we be content with after we experience a community in which the elements of food and drink are provided and blessed at Christ’s table?

The deacon as a liturgical person must be a person who understands what is being grasped at here - that liturgy is formative in ways of which the casual worshipper cannot dream, that to be given to liturgical ministry is to set outselves in the path of constant transformation.