THE POWER OF LITURGY

'How is it that something so repeatedly sung, done, or said can remain so spellbinding? Fragments, mere wisps of liturgy, hang about in our hearts and cannot be exercised by unbelief. Familiarity itself becomes unfamiliar. There is no knowing what is happening. Poets know not to grapple with it. To let it be.'

Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature, p.436. 

THE DANGERS OF LITURGICAL ACCESSIBILITY

'Accessibility is often prized above all else in the contemporary Church, but we might question whether even those who are unfamiliar with the Church but come to it for blessing, dedication and consolation really want it to proceed with language that aspires to the semantic and lexicographical smoothness of an episode of a soap opera.'

Andrew Davison, Blessing, p.181.

THE IMPORTANCE OF LITURGY

'He was suddenly aware of the fact that he was defending the liturgy of the church. That had never happened before. But he sensed the danger of a new enslavement to forms developing which would force the spiritual life into an arbitrarily tailored straightjacket, which was both poorer and more rigid than the one that come down from their forebears.'

Bo Giertz, The Hammer of God, p.210.

WHY WE NEED THE SOUND OF SILENCE

'...moments of silence, silence imposing itself on us, are so very important not only for our humanity in general because we habitually live in a world where the "right thing"to do with critical moments is to stop them being critical. The right thing to do with a wild animal is to tame it, so to speak, and the right thing to do with any "wild" experience is to work out what I can do with it, what I can make of it, and, in short, domesticate it.'...

A growing humanity, a maturing humanity, is one that's prepared for silence, because it's prepared at important moments to say "I can't domesticate, I can't get on top of this."'

Rowan Williams, Being Human, p.91. 

THE EXCELLENCE OF LITURGY

'That the constant repetition of the same form does not forcibly arrest the attention as new sentiments and expressions would do, must be confessed: but, on the other other hand, the use of a well-composed form secures us against the dry, dull, tedious repetitions which are but too frequently the fruit of extemporaneous devotions. Only let any person be in a devout frame, and will be far more likely to have his soul elevated to heaven by the Liturgy of the Established Church, than he will by the generality of prayers which he would hear in other places of worship...' 

Charles Simeon in Andrew Atherstone, Charles Simeon on the Excellency of the Liturgy, p.25.