Tripp Hudgins is a friend of mine who I have never met in person, which is a little surprising because we are on similar paths. We have each lived in Virginia, Illinois, and now in California, though I have also lived in Wisconsin. Our paths also incorporate being both Baptist and Episcopalian.
As you can see from our guest posts on each other’s blog, our paths cross and diverge. I love the way Tripp thinks and writes, and look forward to the next time we talk.
There’s an old standard text for theologians who study the worship of the Church, The Shape of The Liturgy, by Dom Gregory Dix (here’s the url for the hyperlink -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Dix). Thick, heavy, and a little ponderous in its prose at times, it’s a classic no less and many a seminarian has had to slog through its pages. I’ve held on to the thesis for many years as a way of understanding what it means both to be the people who follow Christ and what that Sunday morning service is supposed to be about. Take. Bless. Break. Give. This, wrote Dix, is the shape of the liturgy. It’s also, I think, the shape of the people of God.
When Greg approached me about writing a post for his blog I was honored (I still am) and a little intimidated (I still am). Spiritual guidance, life coaching, beer pilgrimages, how is a teetotaling Baptist minister from rural Virginia supposed to compete with such an all-encompassing ministry? What can I contribute to the conversation here on this page to help us all be better leaders and happier people in general? I think the answer is found in Dix’s gloss of the shape of the liturgy.
God takes us, God takes our whole lives, blesses us and our lives, and through that blessing breaks us open. It’s always gentle (We’re not always gentle with one another and that kind of “breaking” deserves another post) and intended to help us be open to the world.
The blessing is in the breaking is in the blessing.
As Leonard Cohen famously sang, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
We may be tempted to think of this kind of brokenness as failure, as something to hide. The liturgy, the very act of worship, is to help us to encounter God who says otherwise. God gives us to the world. God gives us to one another. Broken open, we are blessed and can be a blessing to one another, taken, blessed, broken…and given.
[Image by Tripp Hudgins]
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