Comparative Liturgical Studies Posted Oct 2013 by Madison Perry A friend of yours stands at the end of college and

has little idea what to do next. She is qualified to do many things, but in the end accepts an associateship with an investment bank. She moves and begins work. Then she works. Then she works some more. She becomes friends with coworkers and mentors. She works hard, but thats OK the present is the time you make investments for the future. She is having to master a whole new set of jargon, but it is helping her make sense of spreadsheets. Along the way, she comes to value the way she can make things happen for people who need to start companies or transition them to do new things. She is a creator and recreator. Finally, three years after college graduation you get time for a good chat. You speak about the future, and she predicts with great specificity what the rest of her career and life will resemble. If you had asked after one year of work, she would have listed this future as an option. If you had asked before college graduation, it would have been an unlikely option. So at what exact point had she made this decision? Of course, it isnt likely that there was a conversion moment when this option became a goal, when possibilities became preferences that became passions. The life and priorities of investment banking are now the water she swims in its what she looks forward to and the language she has learned to speak. By doing it, it became what she is meant to do. One of our highest callings is to choose and shape the routines that shape us. These routines that encourage us to seek some good are liturgies. Liturgies are intimately related to love,vocabulary, and time. Liturgies are activities of repetition that aim at some good something desirable that leaves its imprint on us. As that good becomes clearer, it focuses our words so that we can better describe what we are seeking. As we speak with greater specificity, we come closer to what we seek. And as we move forward in this pursuit, time passes differently through our fingers it rushes toward new hopes and pauses at new joys. We live liturgically. Feeding Not long ago, I became a father. Professionally, I was in graduate schools summer doldrums, in between fairly intense semesters. With my sweet working wife out four days a week, the duties of bottle-administering & diaper changing fell to me. Each morning greeted me with a similar request heat up that bottle young man! After I had mastered it, bottle administration was perfectly pleasant, my daughter pausing to smile, my fingers on her nearly-bald head. I invented dozens of songs to punctuate these acts, already hoping to smuggle an SAT vocabulary into that miraculous brain. And after twenty minutes! there. Perfectly happy. I was making another human being perfectly happy. And what an adorable human being she was. However, the idyll was soon interrupted by a messy burp, a thud against a diaper, or my daughters sudden primal urge to see

whether my clavicle contained milk. This outraged infant had shattered my equilibrium! How could it be regained? Quick, heat the milk back up! And so the mornings passed into afternoons, the afternoons into evenings. And it was evening, and it was morning, another day. And so I was being disciplined to keep a certain schedule and love a certain young creature. I was also being kept from performing other acts. My range of activities had narrowed nearly completely to this schedule. I was becoming the father to the infant. Months later, I had a friend ask me, Where have you been? I happily answered, I dont know. Evolutionary psychologists have described mammal infancy as natures way of making sure that parents and children bond the children are so cute and needy that the parents form intense connections with their young, thereby insuring the survival of the children. I would say that my daughters infancy was a time when I got to choose to live in a new time a time that never ended and repeated and just as suddenly was over, a time within which I felt a sheet of frost around my heart (that I didnt even know existed!) melting. Work Have you ever noticed what work does to your sense of time? Occupations occupy us, and teach us to be productive by dividing time up into what can be achieved during those periods. For many attorneys, there is the billable hour. For the salesman, there is number of sales that needs to be made. For the student, there are the pages to read and papers to write. Rather than painstakingly lay out how work is a predatory liturgy that seeks to devour all others, it could be better to consider the flip side. Perhaps work is a place where we can be trained to be speak better and to give our limited time its proper value and to love worthy objects with a greater intensity. A day with my father, a long-term attorney in a small town, is a lesson to this end. The days are filled with clients to advise personally and professionally to love. There is a specialized vocabulary about contracts and evidence that my dad masters in order to tell his clients stories with integrity. In his jam-packed days, time is precious because there is too little time to give himself away to so many people. And so our occupations can intensify our vocabularies and loves in a direction that is good. Here is a place to be careful: when it comes to working, we have the duty to safeguard our occupations vocabularies to resist and innovate. At one point, a dear friend of mine had been encouraged to over-treat a client (to render unnecessary services in order to generate revenue) she explained to me her refusal to do so in an outraged tone: But he wasnt a client, he was a person! My friends moral resistance hinged on a simple word choice client or person. We can also innovate when it comes the words we use at work I am thinking about several ingenious attempts to convince companies to set their sights on a more holistic understanding of success. Steve Garber has long been insisting on a triple bottom line: People, Planet, and Profits.

Comparative Liturgical Studies Liturgies are not necessarily competitive I can bill my clients by the hour during the week and feed my babies from the bottle every night but liturgies cultivate loves that spill over their boundaries and push other loves aside. When you enlist yourself in a trade that actually makes you get stuff done, you are being trained to orient your time around an object of affection with an especially intense energy, and it leaves a mark on your soul. There is a great tradition of ordering our loves, and ordering our loves requiring ordering our liturgies. In Ecclesiastes there is a time for every activity under heaven God has made every thing beautiful in his time. If each of our activities is like a song, our lives can be a sweeping performance that incorporates each in its own proper place. One final thing to think about, then, is whether our lives makes sense liturgically. What kinds of people are our lives making us? Do we have a time to work? Do we have times to play? And is there an overall structure that holds these things in place? My grandfather died at the age of 78. Like my father, he was a small town attorney. After being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he went to work the next day. He deer hunted that winter. He played golf with the dog and pony show (his name for his group of friends who played together once a week). He recited poetry after meals. He prayed with his wife. A month before his death, he helped a widow with her will. These were just things that he did and would choose to do regardless of how much time he had left or how much money he had in the bank. His life had developed a coherent order the structure didnt really have a name until he pulled it off for a lifetime. Now his picture hangs in my dads office and my family talks about my granddads good life in our own ways we hope to innovate on it and practice liturgy in this great school of life, each thing in its proper place, where God makes each thing beautiful in his time.