Living Within the Reality of Love

So to know the Holy Spirit is not to have some third object put before the eyes of our theological understanding but to live within the reality of an eternal divine witness to divine life as the gift of 'otherness'. As Father and Son show us that giving as perfect mutual 'investment' of life and love, so the generation of the Spirit constitutes the mutual gift as open to be given again: there is in God also a free, self-forgetting act of pointing to the free mutuality of Father and Son. The divine life is not taken up completely in a mutuality that is inaccessible to what is other than God. (Rowan Williams, discussing the trinitarian theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar.)

The Difference Going to church Makes in My Life Part II: To Be Engaged not Entertained

I don't go to church to be entertained as such. I go to church to be engaged. There is a difference, and it is important. In the entertainment industry there is a star up front, with an audience who do not actually participate, but watch. The purpose of the entertainment is fun through distraction, or even worse, manipulation and 'bread and circuses'. Entertainment usually provides less space for the imagination, and engages the senses of sight and sound, but usually in an overwhelming manner. And the entertainment industry is slick, without the still, small voice. (See 1Kings 19:13) Some churches attempt to match their worship to this cultural expectation. Funnily enough, their capitulation to culture on this grand scale seems to go unacknowledged, and they are often the churches that accuse other churches of capitulation to the world on sexual ethics!

Traditional liturgy is not entertainment. In comparison to the entertainment industry it might be boring; and maybe that is not a bad thing. It should be engaging though. And it should provide imaginative and emotional space, time to think and respond, and give a means to do so. It should engage all the senses, but in no way overwhelm them. Even the sixth sense should be attended to in the liturgy. And liturgy should have a structure, most certainly not be manipulative, but rather through the structure of the liturgy open up 'space' to encounter God and glimpse the self, and get an intuition that something deeper is going on in our lives and the life of the world.