Permission to Behold the King in His Beauty

School starts back tomorrow and I’ve got a ton of things left I’d like to do, so I was debating whether or not to go to our Wednesday noon service (something I can’t do in the school year), but then I thought about M. Thornton’s admonition that it’s not about just missing a Wednesday service, I’d be missing the Transfiguration of our Lord. That’s how important the Church’s Kalendar is, I’m learning.

Thornton quotes Mascall who is quoting S. Bulgakov:

The Church’s worship is not only the commemoration, in artistic forms, of evangelical or other events concerning the Church. It is also the actualization of these facts, their reenactment on the earth. During the service of Christmas there is not merely the memory of the birth of Christ, but truly Christ is born in a mysterious manner, just as at Easter he is resurrected. It is the same in the Transfiguration, the Entry into Jerusalem, the mystery of the Last Supper, the Passion, the burial, and Ascension of Christ, ans also of all the events of the life of the Holy Virgin, from the Nativity to the Assumption. The life of the Church, in these services, makes actual for us the mystery of the Incarnation. Our Lord continues to live in the Church in the same form in which he was manifested once on earth and which exists for ever; and it is given to the Church to make living these sacred memories so that we should be their new witnesses and participate in them” (68-69).

In this chapter about the importance of recollection in our prayer lives, Thornton goes on to say: “Thus the Church’s Kalendar provides not just a useful means of conducting services in an orderly way, but a practical basis for our grasping eternity in our earthly lives, and it has obvious connections with the true practice of actual recollection.”

The collect for today is breathtaking: “O GOD, who on the mount didst reveal to chosen witnesses thine only-begotten Son wonderfully transfigured, in raiment white and glistering; Mercifully grant that we, being delivered from the disquietude of this world, may be permitted to behold the King in his beauty, who with thee, O Father, and thee, O Holy Ghost, liveth and reigneth, one God, world without end. Amen.”

Deliver us from the disquietude of this world and permit us to behold the King in his beauty.

There is so much to contemplate and wonder about in this story. I hope each of us will get glimpses of its magnitude and of its implications as we go through our day.

But I’d like to linger and consider the language some. Once again M. Thornton gets to the essence of recurring debates. He writes:

Modernists plead for a revised liturgy, in modern idiom, to bring our worship ‘more in line with the needs of everyday life.’ They argue that this would give a new impetus to spirituality by freeing us from the shackles of Medievalism, convention and indeed, misrepresentation. It is urged on the other hand that liturgy is a rightly formal thing which demands a language of its own, that our approach to God should be couched in a different and more majestic idiom that that of casual conversation.

It should be noted here, too, that another tiresome, and insulting in its arrogance, comment we often hear is that the average person can’t understand the “antiquated” language. Thornton sees both sides, though, and resolves the issue by considering the whole of our prayer life, which is both participating in the liturgical Eucharist and our individual, private prayer. He continues:

If Latin and Greek supply the former quality, and modern idiom the latter, then it looks as if Caroline English is the most perfect liturgical language in the world today; as indeed, I believe it is. But, and here is the real point, this language is not vaguely “religious” but definitely liturgical, and there is not the remotest reason why it should be carried over into private colloquy (89).

In his practical and droll way, Thornton goes on to say that it’s also a question of Christology, that modernized liturgies tend to be more subjective and human-centered with an “undue familiarity with God.” Yet, on the other hand, to use Caroline English in this day and age in our private prayers, “‘Oh Lord, vouchsafe in thy goodness to succour this thy humble servant in his dire distress,’ when we mean ‘Christ help me I’m in trouble” would only lead to insincerity and dishonesty (90).

May our corporate collect help each of us today as we walk the road between time and eternity, earth and heaven, and nature and grace (Thornton, 68). On this day of remembrance, St. Peter wants to stir us up: “For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Peter 1:16).