Liturgies Quotes & Sayings

The core of the person is what he or she loves, and that is bound up with what they worship - that insight recalibrates the radar for cultural analysis. The rituals and practices that form our loves spill out well beyond the sanctuary. Many secular liturgies are trying to get us to love some other kingdom and some other gods. — Dallas Willard

Books are good but they are only maps. Reading a book by direction of a man I read that so many inches of rain fell during the year. Then he told me to take the book and squeeze it between my hands. I did so and not a drop of water came from it. It was the idea only that the book conveyed. So we can get good from books, from the temple, from the church, from anything, so long as it leads us onward and upward. — Swami Vivekananda

Fashion is not a government, is not political; and yet it mantles the world much the way religion does. It includes and enforces its own rules, liturgies, disciplines. It has its own territories, its own language, its own hierarchy. — Richard De Combray

But what else can we do when we're so weak? We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; it is any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenious but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every other primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently impenetrable mystery? — Nick Hornby

The new Episcopalian and Catholic liturgies include a segment called "passing the peace." Many things can go wrong here. I know of one congregation in New York which fired its priest because he insisted on their passing the peace- which involves nothing more than shaking hands with your neighbors in the pew. The men and women of this small congregation had limits to their endurance; passing the peace was beyond their limits. They could not endure shaking hands with people to whom they bore lifelong grudges. They fired the priest and found a new one sympathetic to their needs" Anne Dillard- Teaching a Stone to Talk- An Expedition to the Pole — Anne Dillard

The higher we go, the better we shall hear the voice of Christ — Pier Giorgio Frassati

Leaning into the breeze was the closest she came to flying these days. — Sarah J. Maas

[Happiness] comes when we choose to be who we are, to be ourselves, at this present moment in our lives. — Jean Vanier

If he were not as he is, he would be better than himself. — Thomas Middleton

We look about in puzzlement at our world, with a sense of unease and disquiet. We think of ourselves as scholars in arcane liturgies, single men trapped in worlds beyond our devising. The truth is far simpler: there are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm. — Neil Gaiman

James Smith argues that liturgies are compressed, performed narratives that recruit the imagination through the body. — James K.A. Smith

In short, liturgies make us certain kinds of people, and what defines us is what we love. — James K.A. Smith

You won't be liberated from deformation by new information. God doesn't deliver us from the deformative habit-forming power of tactile rival liturgies by merely giving us a book. Instead, — James K.A. Smith

Perhaps the crescent moon smiles in doubt
at being told that it is a fragment
awaiting perfection. — Rabindranath Tagore

We live now in an era that is intensely seeking what is sacred; but because of a sort of dictatorship of subjectivism, man would like to confine the sacred to the realm of the profane. The best example of this is when we create new liturgies, the result of more or less artistic experiments, that do not allow any encounter with God. We claim somewhat arrogantly to remain in the human sphere so as to enter into the divine. For — Robert Sarah

What we have at the moment isn't as the old liturgies used to say, 'the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,' but a vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end. — N. T. Wright

Dialogue with Catholics and other nonevangelical Christians offered some correction to the Church Growth movement's fixation on cultural accommodation and baptism rates. However - save for those few who converted - evangelicals attracted to other Christian traditions have made those traditions their own. They assemble do-it-yourself liturgies from a hodgepodge of monastic prayers and mystics' visions. They lionize medieval dissenters - Celtic monks, or renegade Franciscans - but don't understand their broader Catholic context. Without quite realizing what they have done, evangelicals often use these ancient teachings and practices to confirm, rather than challenge, their own assumptions. History becomes a sidekick to one's twenty-first-century journey with Jesus. — Molly Worthen

Indeed, within Castro's periphery there evolved a bizarre mutation known oxymoronically as "liberation theology," where priests and even some bishops adopted "alternative" liturgies enshrining the ludicrous notion that Jesus of Nazareth was really a dues-paying socialist. For a combination of good and bad reasons (Archbishop Romero of El Salvador was a man of courage and principle, in the way that some Nicaraguan "base community" clerics were not), the papacy put this down as a heresy. Would that it could have condemned fascism and Nazism in the same unhesitating and unambiguous tones. — Christopher Hitchens

You have no choice but to operate in a world shaped by globalization and the information revolution. There are two options: adapt or die. — Andy Grove

So it is precisely our allergy to repetition in worship that has undercut the counterformative power of Christian worship - because all kinds of secular liturgies shamelessly affirm the good of repetition. — James K.A. Smith

Liturgies aim our love to different ends precisely by training our hearts through our bodies. — James K.A. Smith

Deronda ... gave himself up to that strongest effect of chanted liturgies which is independent of detailed verbal meaning ... The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us; or else a self-oblivious lifting up of gladness, a Gloria in excelsis that such Good exists; both the yearning and the exultation gathering their utmost force from the sense of communion in a form which has expressed them both, for long generations of struggling fellow-men. — George Eliot

Ancient worship ... does truth. All one has to do is to study the ancient liturgies to see that liturgies clearly do truth by their order and in their substance. This is why so many young people today are now adding ancient elements to their worship ... This recovery of ancient practices is not the mere restoration of ritual but a deep, profound, and passionate engagement with truth - truth that forms and shapes the spiritual life into a Christlikeness that issues forth in the call to a godly and holy life and into a deep commitment to justice and to the needs of the poor. — Robert E. Webber

Do your own thing. Speak in your voice. — Dylan Moran

Each time a high-wage job is lost, a family is turned upside down. And that affects the communities where they live. — Philipp Meyer

It was when my children were 5, 3 and 10 months old that I just felt the desperate need to get to know God through the pages of my Bible. And as a result, I started a Bible class in my city for the primary purpose of being in it. — Anne Graham Lotz

He, the Life of all, our Lord and Savior, did not arrange the manner of his own death lest He should seem to be afraid of some other kind. No. He accepted and bore upon the cross a death inflicted by others, and those others His special enemies, a death which to them was supremely terrible and by no means to be faced; and He did this in order that, by destroying even this death, He might Himself be believed to be the Life, and the power of death be recognized as finally annulled. — Athanasius Of Alexandria

The gospel has but a forced alliance with war. Its doctrine of human brotherhood would ring strangely between the opposed ranks. The bellowing speech of cartoon and the baptism of blood mock its liturgies and sacraments. Its gentle beatitudes would hardly serve as mottoes for defiant banners, nor its list of graces as names for ships-of-the-line. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

There are lots of things to like about being Eastern Orthodox - incense, liturgies, all the baklava you can eat - but you know what I like best? None of that stupid 'women's ministry' stuff. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

I'm very into the military and police stuff. Gear and technical gear is something that's changing every day and every day you're trying to be on the cutting edge and improve your stuff more and more because your life depends on it. And so, the guns and the gears are changing constantly. — Steven Seagal

Never stand still. Only stand still enough to learn, and once you stop learning in that stance, move off. Always keep yourself engaged, in theater, in whatever job you can get. If you can't get an acting job, then go backstage. Or take tickets. But be around actors because that is where you will primarily learn. — Ed Asner

AARP is a large and powerful organization, similar to the Mafia but more concerned about dietary fiber. — Dave Barry

sacred pathways Naturalist - finds God in nature Ascetic - is drawn to disciplines Traditionalist - loves historical liturgies Activist - comes alive spiritually in a great cause Caregiver - meets God in serving Sensate - senses God through five senses Enthusiast - loves to grow through people Contemplative - is drawn to solitary reflection and prayer Intellectual - loves God by learning (For more information on these categories, read — John Ortberg