Spontaneous worship and Hemorrhoids

About 12 years ago, Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon of All Saints Orthodox Church in Chicago, wrote a short comment on the “Willow Creek Phenomenon” in a special issue of Touchstone Magazine devoted to the relatively new “seeker friendly service” of Willow Creek and other similar groups. I happened across the comment today, and found it both humorous and well put. Here it is, a brief commentary on the wisdom(?) of preferring a “non-liturgical liturgy” to the Liturgy of the Fathers:

One thing we know for sure about the way the ancient Christians worshipped together on Sundays—they did not “wing it.” The structure and most of the content of their services were determined by a magisterial Tradition that they felt free neither to contradict nor substantially to modify. From 1 Corinthians 11:23–26 to Justin Martyr in the second century and Hippolytus in the third, then to the majestic liturgical legacies of Jerusalem, Rome, and Byzantium, there clearly reigned a common understanding about the appropriate elements of the common worship. Uniting the variants among the local churches, one rule stood supreme: “I handed on to you that which I also received,” a canon that left no room for working from scratch, shooting in the dark, going with hunches, or the hedging of bets.

In what perhaps even he thought one of the funniest pages of the Bible, the author of 1 Samuel 5 describes to what nonsense people must resort when, unexpectedly dealing with the divine, they are obliged to “wing it.” In a story that bears striking resemblance to the Greeks’ abduction and return of Chryseis in Book 1 of the Iliad, we learn how the Philistines grabbed hold of more than they could handle when they captured the ark of the covenant. They were obliged to dream up a proper protocol for returning it, the sudden outbreak of an epidemic having insinuated to their attention a serious displeasure on the part of Somebody Upstairs. This really was a shot in the dark, because an informal survey revealed that no one present had ever before returned an ark. So what to do?

First, they had noticed lots of mice running around at the time, a circumstance prompting modern scholars to conjecture that their affliction was bubonic plague. The Philistines themselves at least recognized that the two phenomena seemed related, so they made little golden statues of mice to put into the ark.

Second, the affliction had involved boils or bumps of some sort on their bodies, arguably also a symptom of bubonic plague. (Discovered “in their secret parts,” however, these bumps become hemorrhoids [“emerods”] in the King James Version, a sane and solemn rendering that will go a long way, I submit, to explaining Psalm 78:66: “He smote his enemies in the rear.”) A fine sense of liturgical reform prompted them to fashion little golden bumps and place them in the ark beside the mice.

Instructed by Holy Scripture, the ancient Christians knew the danger we court when we start to “wing it” in things divine; we may finish by introducing our little replicas of mice and hemorrhoids into the Holy Place, at which point it is senseless to inquire if the artwork is well done. From all such experiments, may the Mercy be praised, there is a Tradition to spare us.

(Online source, HERE)