After sharing with you that Thanksgiving (Eucharistia) and Commemoration (Anamnesis) are an essential part of the Liturgy, it dawned on me that, perhaps, I should answer this fundamental question: What is the Liturgy? While the question is easy enough to ask, it is not as easily understood since we have to make certain human presuppositions. For before we can truly understand what the Liturgy is, we must first understand what being is and what man really is. We must explore the mystery of man as a social being, forming a community with other men. In our modern world there is a particular bias towards individualism. Our lack of what is called the social sense of civic spirit can prevent us even from beginning to understand the liturgy. There is a balance between the Person and society, which is a mystery. It will exist and continue to exist only if the individual and society are both referred to him who gives them their meaning, to God in all his transcendence. And this reference, expressed and experienced, is the liturgy in the widest meaning of the word.

Liturgy can only be understood in the context of a community. It is not something that exists without a community.

Mystical Supper

Liturgy belongs, then, to the inmost nature of human society: that is why it makes use of human means of expression and contact – gestures, natural at the outset, then ritualized, are the normal means by which men express and effect their mutual cohesion and their relationship with God. Here again we have a rediscovery of the irreplaceable value of primitive manifestations of the human spirit through the body. We can feel something of it easily enough in the case of poetry, music, sculpture – art, in short. Why then should it be absent from human relationships in our humdrum daily existence or, at the other end of the scale, in their highest form which is the adherence of the community to God in worship? It is possible that we shall be led to perceive not only the high spiritual value of our bodies and the wonderful mission of our controlled  feelings but also the great riches of meaning, of expression, of the true import in those human manifestations to which men devote themselves together body and soul – of which games are the commonest form and liturgy the loftiest.

To simply state this, liturgy then becomes an artistic, ritualistic, symbolic drama that we enact together to come to a deeper understanding of our relationship with God and with one another. The liturgy draws us together into community and expresses, in so many different ways, our relationship with one another through the actions of our God by sharing His life with all of us. We are joined together by the one life-force that permeates the entire universe. This we experience in liturgy!