The Liturgical Fidget
Thoughts on worship services from C. S. Lewis
Toward the beginning of his book Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer C. S. Lewis writes a good bit about worship, especially worship within the confines of the local church service. A lot of what he wrote resounded with me. Here’s a bit of what he says (bolding mine):
Novelty, simply as such, can only have an entertainment value. And they don’t go to church to be entertained. They go to use the service, or, if you prefer, to enact it. Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best—if you like, it ‘works’ best—when, through long familiarity, we don’t have to think about it. As long as you notice, and don’t have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.
But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing from worshipping. The important question about the Grail was ‘for what does it serve?’ ‘‘Tis mad idolatry that makes the service greater than the god.’
A still worse thing may happen. Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude it, the question ‘What on earth is he up to now?’ will intrude. It lays one’s devotion to waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, ‘I wish they’d remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks.’
Thus my liturgical position really boils down to an entreaty for permanence and uniformity. I can make do with almost any kind of service whatever, if only it will stay put. But if each form is snatched away just when I am beginning to feel at home in it, then I can never make any progress in the art of worship. (pp. 2-3)
Lewis goes on later to call the desire to tinker with worship services “the Liturgical Fidget,” which is a brilliant label for what he’s describing here.
I’m not a worship leader or any sort of professional at leading worship services, but I don’t think I’ve ever resounded as much with writing on the subject as I do here with Lewis. Perhaps that makes me a stodgy traditionalist or something—oh no!—but I think he’s onto a great point here.
I think there’s a lot of wisdom in the idea that the best kinds of worship service liturgies, music styles, and other such elements of worship get out of the way. I love the worship minister at my church and the cadre of musicians he has on stage any given Sunday, and, at the same time, the less I’m thinking about them the better!
Likewise, I think Lewis is right that the key is predictability. Unpredictability in worship services seems to me like a folding chair that may or may not hold up when you sit down or like shoes that squeak when you walk, but only 50% of the time—distractions from the ultimate goal. The more a parishioner has to track with the ever-changing ebb-and-flow of a worship service, the less she can focus on the object of her worship—this is just logical.1
But again, I don’t presume to tell worship leaders—mine or anyone else’s—how to do their jobs.
As Lewis says on the next page following these thoughts, “The business of us laymen is simply to endure and make the best of it. Any tendency to a passionate preference for one type of service must be regarded simply as a temptation.”
It is best to hold our worship preferences with an open hand, but perhaps, as Lewis says, there is something to be said for resisting the “liturgical fidget.”
This isn’t to say that unpredictable things can or shouldn’t happen. The Spirit works as the Spirit works, and it isn’t going to necessarily be neat and tidy. But if we think the Holy Spirit is limited by creating predictable worship service cadences, I think we underestimate the ways the Spirit can work. I’ve never quite understood the somewhat-common idea that “the more free-flowing and unpredictable our worship service is, the more spiritually-attuned it will be.” The Holy Spirit doesn’t seem to me to be opposed to orderliness and routine.