Liturgy and Vocation

Perhaps one way of defining “liturgy” is to understand it as a restored participation in the original created order. That is, by the grace of Christ, the New Adam, humanity can reclaim its Adamic vocation as priest. By the grace of baptism, Christ extends his own priesthood, sharing it with all who are born again by water and the Spirit. The baptized thus share in the unique Priesthood of Christ, which restores—and elevates—the original priesthood shared by Adam and Eve.

God, as Irenaeus was to argue strenuously against Gnostic theorizing about cosmic origins, creates everything ex nihilo, out of his own goodness, and not from any need or compulsion; creation is not the result of the malevolence of a lesser deity or cosmic mismanagement on the part of an inept inferior power. The distinction central to Gnosticism—matter versus spirit—is trumped in Christian theology by a more fundamental one unavailable to the Gnostics: between created reality, comprising both matter and spirit, and the one, good God, himself distinct from but not disinterested in his creation. Creation, fashioned by the very Logos of God, “through whom all things were made” (John 1:3, RSV), has a meaningful purpose and end. The entire created order is meant to reflect, by its very status as created, the goodness of the good God and thereby offer him glory. It is the very vocation of creation to glorify God. In this sense, the created cosmos is also a sacrament; that is, it is patent of the glory of the Creator and indeed points to him. Rational creation—encompassing both humans and the angelic orders—is to perceive God’s glory reflected in, by, and through all created things and freely to order its own act of grateful praise to God. It is precisely in this way that rational creatures glorify their Creator, seeing the goodness and beauty of God’s handiwork (including their own literally marvelous existence) and glorifying God. As the French Oratorian Louis Bouyer put it most elegantly, the very heartbeat of the cosmic order is heard as the graced reciprocity of divine agape and humanity’s free—and genuinely free precisely because graced—eucharistia:

Across this continuous chain of creation, in which the triune fellowship of the divine Persons has, as it were, extended and propagated itself, moves the ebb and flow of creative Agape and of created eucharistia. Descending further and further toward the final limits of the abyss of nothingness, the creative love of God reveals its full power in the response it evokes, in the joy of gratitude in which, from the very dawn of their existence creatures freely return to the One who has given them all … like an infinitely generous heart, beating with an unceasing diastole and systole, first diffusing the divine glory in paternal love, then continually gathering it up again to its immutable source in filial love.¹

This created response, which Bouyer calls “created eucharistia,” is itself, of course, graced—the synergy of divine and human freedoms is made possible (one might even say forged) by the fire of the Spirit—for as the Apostle would chide the cliquish Corinthians, “what do you possess that you have not received?” (1 Cor 4:7). Of course, our own erratic life of prayer and the muddles of a fallen existence betray the fact that this heartbeat may not echo as clearly in our quotidian experience as Bouyer describes. But what he is describing is, of course, the original order intended by God that, despite being skewed by sin, is to be restored finally in Christ, who alone has revealed agape in its fullness. Sin—our own unreflective self-referentiality that distorts our perception of ourselves, of others, of the world, and that leads us to see God as perhaps simply not quite to be trusted, as a wily and invisible competitor for the glory we seek for ourselves—has occluded our perception of the cosmos and wreaked havoc on our imagination. The primal, sacramental nature of all that is created by God is lost on the fallen imagination, which sees things...