The Liturgy of Life

 Matzot and Easter Eggs (Not Yet Colored)

I have no iconic representation of God: no fatherly figure, no white beard, no puttering around in the Garden of Eden, no wrathful overlord: it is more like a shining - I go there, and fall quiet, and it seems to shine.

Coming off the Lenten period and Easter and Pesach celebrations, I was driving home from the airport yesterday and somehow my attention went from the road to the train of liturgy, and how many of us seem to place a template of liturgy upon life, and we re-enact and re-experience things which happened to other people very long ago.
Yet the same sorts of things happened to those people long ago as are happening to us today, for we hunger, we thirst, we suffer, and we have joy. Why, then, do we seek to disguise our spirituals lives in ancient clothes? There was nothing in antiquity that we do not have.
Some would say that antiquity had the presence of special spiritual entities; some would say God was present in the past - and God is not so much present now in this age of disbelief or in this age of the non-miraculous; some would say some man or woman with a very special relationship with God was present in the past, and the best we can do now is to emulate those ancient special ones.

God is present. The Holy is present intimately. God pervades us as thoroughly as God pervaded any ancient Prophet, even though we remain tongue-tied in Gaza... and "baffled in Ashdod".
The Holy is more real in the present than it could ever hope to be in Memory: in old liturgies and prayers from long, long ago.

I looked at the side of the road. To be precise, I looked at the shoulder along Adams Road heading north. I saw the road to Emaus in the dust and dirt remaining from last year's road work. I saw "liturgy",  and I saw something or someone else shine. Then liturgy became life, and life was no longer a play of the past.
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