Why (I) go to church?
By Victoria Xiao
A new believer celebrates the beautiful mysteries of the liturgy.
To say anything real is to describe a pattern from within one’s own experience. Insofar as anyone can actually answer the question, “Why go to church?”, it is only as the question, “Why (I) go to church?” I have no authority to speak on why one might go to church, unless authority (εξουσία, “out of being”) is just the ontological transformation that the Church engenders in each one of us, which realises truth through, and as, personal experience.
A year and a half in as a Christian, maybe I have taken churchgoing too much for granted, so I struggled to begin to say why I go to church. But is this unreflective attitude without merit? When I see the liturgy unfold in the actions of the deacons and the priests, I have a sense that tradition should wash over us, who are no longer, as in a secular setting, individuals from certain groups but members of a body—members who can finally find rest in a radical, unselfconscious receptivity. When the waves of the ocean come crashing in from all corners of the world and submerge me, completely transcending the dialectics of safety and danger, acceptance and terror, a sweetness permeates the experience, one that is akin to the feeling of grace. It may be best if I could make a subtle distinction: in the first case, a proper appreciation of the liturgy comes into being with an attending I, while in the second case, the grace comes in the form of calling the I to attention. Nevertheless, what’s important here is the givenness of reality, and the I that always accompanies it.
This is the question that Jean-Yves Lacoste wrestles with as he expands on Heidegger’s phenomenology in a book I recently read, Experience and the Absolute. Necessarily contextualised and “involved,” we human beings are what Heidegger calls Dasein, with “being-in-the-world” as a fundamental existential condition. Where, then, is the possibility of transcendence? Lacoste, building on Heideggerian terminology, locates it in liturgy. It is, for Lacoste, where Dasein can finally transcend what is previously intranscendable—say, having “a world,” a network of already meaningful things–and go before the Absolute. He calls liturgy the “nonplace.” It is not a specific location that we go to, but a metaphysical event that reveals the meaning of being at any location at all. As such, it demands no special geographical feature. The cities, the wilderness, our houses, out in the open field: liturgy can take place anywhere. The reason why it takes place in churches is that we have built churches for the special purpose of doing what we could have–and indeed should have–done anywhere, at all places, all along. I have always felt that during liturgy, what I experience is an “inversion” of reality, where what is true and real, that which underlies all things and all my life up until that point, streams “out” from the altar and transforms everything that it touches: the air that we breathe, the candle lights that we see.
The cities, the wilderness, our houses, out in the open field: liturgy can take place anywhere.
Many things that we do in liturgy may seem superfluous. But what matters is why we think so. For beauty is not by nature an imposition but what is inherent to life itself. Put in another way, the inside of reality begets beauty. Far from being superfluous, processing in a certain, orderly way, putting on delicately patterned vestments, etc., are ways that we act in conformity with the living reality and its patterns, at the recognition of which, we cannot but adore, and it leads us to adorn. As much as we adore, as much as we adorn, to no end. While some church services may make us feel out of place, liturgy is, in the first instance, an act of worship and thereby inherently participatory. Instead of passing judgement on our “mundane” life outside of church, liturgy is the highest expression of its indestructible glory, the “kerygma” of the Kingdom, importantly, on earth.
What unites all of my experiences in life is the me, which analytical philosophy systematically forbids, at the cost of incoherence and misery. Phenomenology affords the room for this me, but without reflecting its true importance. In all manner of existence there is not only the fact or act of being, but a person, who is precisely me. This is how I knew that God existed as a teenager in Beijing. I exist, and I am not the reason for it. How can we doubt our own existence? It is the truth beneath all truths, and this truth is not true because of anything in the world. And yet the world does not exist without this truth. Descartes could not have thought that the truth that he exists is a conclusion to be proud of, unless he didn’t really understand it. Our own individual, unique existence is more primordial than what we call “being.”
The transcendence for Dasein occurs in the “space” between existence and nothingness, as a re-unification of all that exists into an “I,” and an encounter. To see the living presence that underlies all things and unifies our experiences across time and space, we must relinquish all objective knowledge of the world (“there ‘is’ a cup,” “that ‘is’ a tree”) that would prevent us from seeing the amazing truth that there is anything at all. When we lay aside all earthly cares, as it is sung as part of the Hymn of the Cherubim, we are doing what Edmund Husserl, my favourite philosopher, calls “bracketing.” However, Husserl could never have told me the urge that I would feel to praise at the Great Entrance. An outgoing kind of yearning that is as if an endless spring. Such extravagance can only be briefly touched upon with words, without me damaging its meaning.
Our Lord is “He Who Is,” person “before” being. (“Before” with quotation marks because temporality only belongs to the realm of being.) At the core of all mundanity is a mystery, which means a Person with Whom there is communion that transcends space, time, and materiality. Simple bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. The personal communion precedes the material one, and makes it possible. I go to church to reach to the depths of all beings and being, and in that reaching, become truly alive.
The personal communion precedes the material one, and makes it possible.
Our Sunday service commemorates the Resurrection of our Lord, the final triumph of person over nature. Person before nature lies at the heart of Christianity and liturgy. As a personal experience of God, the main “function” of liturgy is praise. Indeed, Divine Liturgy opens with Blessed is the Kingdom, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, followed by a series of Lord, have mercy, between which we pray for the whole world, and everyone in the parish. It is what we do not in the anticipation of God, but in His Presence, as a direct communication. Indeed, what the choir and the readers utter always, to my ear, assumes an air of publicity. In our praise and asking for mercy, we do not “prepare ourselves” before approaching God, but rather approach Him already. As one of my professors said, it is now all kairos, no kronos. Living liturgically just means living as if the Kingdom is already at hand—and it is, in a way that involves our whole body.
Liturgy, as a state of pure adoration, allows me to utterly behold of the beauty of the Other, and to do so freely. It is where we can give thanks with all our hearts, and thereby a foundation for all acts of thanksgiving. It is the unveiling of the presence of His Person, Who is already victorious and eternally present, everywhere and at all times—a revelation, by the same stroke, of my true identity as precisely me, with all of my senses alive, integrated, and transcending the perception of individual things, be them physical or conceptual. Liturgy is the experience of a Person, an entirely free, dynamical, and everlasting communion, in love. I go to liturgy to experience God and His love, which is my entire constitution, strengthened most by my actions according to this truth—a sacrifice of praise, a giving of thanks, and a remembrance of His commandments.
As I reflect on the meaning of liturgy and attempt to understand it for myself, it is always a good thing to compare my experience with the rest of the Church. Church dogma and teachings are the result of such comparisons. And I have truly felt that in talking to others at church about my experience, even that of ordinary life, there is a qualitative change to it that makes it more real, or perhaps, filters out the unreal. When I talk to people after church, it is as if something like a mathematical wave arises, creating a hierarchy, or different combinations, of the meaning of what was only potential—a vast field of raw, experiential data. The shape of this wave can change, and the more I speak to different people, in this mode of a personal encounter, the more my internal landscape is realised. And the spots that are the “most realised” are those that most resonate with others, for the reason of being intuitively the same across different instances and experienced by many across time and space. Those are the loci of our genuine knowledge of God.
The same consolidation of experiential meaning also works by negation. The face of another who is holy is our Judgement Seat, not in the sense that we are condemned, but in the sense that everything falls into its own place and proper order. If I am unable to bring a certain issue up in church, it means that it is not a problem that threatens anything that is truly important. The presence of the Other is not Hell, as Sartre made it out to be, but the truth of what is most important to us, which may prove somehow offensive to ourselves, but hopefully increasingly less. In this way I continue to live honestly, which is to say, by the joy of the Lord. Such is the formation of the interior-exterior life in the body of Christ, and some experiences of His Kingdom.
Photos by Lawrence Chismorie, Annie Spratt, and James Colemanon Unsplash.
Victoria Xiao is studying the New Testament at Oxford, after majoring in Philosophy at Dartmouth College. An American by birth, she grew up in Beijing, China, and is interested in thinking about “systematic theology” from a historical, liturgical, and Scriptural perspective, in accordance with the teaching of the Fathers.
