liturgical guilt
November 30, 2008
Have you ever had a bought of liturgical guilt? Can you envision what I’m talking about? A possible scenario is as follows: you are deeply drawn in by all this monastic spirituality, lifestyle, etc. As you continue to see the value in this way of living, you decide to pick up some of its habits. I’ve talked about some of these before. For instance, praying the daily office – you start off with great fervor, praying 3 times a day. Woops! Then you slack off and it becomes 2, then 1. Then you forget one day. Then another day you’re too tired. Then a knock comes at your door – hey, it’s guilt come for a visit. He has come to tell you that you’re a terrible liturgical Christian, that you might as well give up – you’re so lame.
Let’s be more timely about this – say it’s observing Advent. You get a wreath with candles, a devotional of some sort, and mark out your plans to have a daily focused time of celebrating the season. You miss a night, maybe two nights. That’s probably all it will take for our friend to come and visit. “Pitiful,” he says.
Well, it happens to all of us. Unless you have someone standing over your bed, making you do something, or in your living room, forcing you to observe, observe! We will miss days here and there. We will not be perfect in our observance. We should resist the desire to make up for what we’ve missed by doing extra next time. We should work, with God, on sensing when guilt for things like this will come knocking and just not answer the door. Putting ourselves in a tizzy about things like this will only help to make us miserable and can eventually wear us out.
It’s the rhythm of life. We fall. We stumble. Our hair isn’t perfect. We forget to take out the trash. Oh well. And I’m not trying to diminish the need for and the value of discipline or disciplines. They are important. We need to continue to embrace them, but not by beating ourselves up. So, if you miss a night this Advent, OK, you missed a night. God is still alive and you very likely still love Him and He can’t stop loving you. Pick up and keep going tomorrow night.
