In the last installment of this article, I began sharing thoughts about what Liturgy is. The word liturgy means the work of the people and was borrowed from the political language of Greek cities. It originally had no special religious significance. The Greek translators of the Bible endowed it with implications which, if we want to understand the Liturgy, need to be taken into consideration.

First, we need to confine ourselves to etymology, without over-emphasizing the historical significance of the word. The word signifies a people and an activity. This fact opens horizons to us that we must never lose sight of when we consider the liturgy of Christians.

The people necessarily implies and means an organized community, a human group whose unity is forged by a common destiny, a group conscious of its unity, tending always to strengthen this unity by institutions and laws, by stocking its collective memory with myths. In the last installment I stressed the fact that the Divine Liturgy not only requires the presence of a community (i.e., at least two or three) but also forms the community. Whether based on strict historical fact or not, men cling to communities because of their meaning and it is these myths which, in the liturgy, take on form and life for the present-day community.

A common destiny, a social organization, a collective memory; these elements are all-important for the celebration of the liturgy.

It must be recognized that there is no liturgy that is not the act of an organized group of people – a community. The Divine Liturgy is, possibly, the most serious action that it is possible for humans to do, a set of actions in which human companionship reaches a profundity not found elsewhere. It is one of the few means by which a community can reach union, that is, the   intimacy of exchange, that transparency which brings an end to “I” and “You” and leaves only a truly unanimous “We.”

There is no real and authentic human activity which does not find expression in gesture. We ought to be ashamed to state such a truism, but everywhere we have arrived at such a degree of abstraction, wrongly sheltering under the name of spirituality, that the time is not long past when the liturgy was, and perhaps in some places still is, regarded with contempt merely because it could not be conceived without rites, that is without gestures, as stylized and impoverished as it is possible to imagine them.

It is easy, unfortunately, for ritual to become an end onto itself. And yet ritual, gestures and words, which have lost their meaning, are fruitless. One of the reasons I have initiated our Liturgical Scavenger Hunt is to help focus our attentions on the gestures and words we use in order to give real meaning to them.