by Jessie Bazan
“God, come to my assistance. Lord, make haste to help me.”
I cling to these ritual words, day after day, especially when I feel hope slipping away. What to say when young, black Philando Castile is fatally shot? Or when the body of refugee child Alan Kurdi washes ashore? Can I even make a dent in the Gospel call to serve the poor when so many people experience so many different kinds of poverty? In the face of injustices, I don’t always know what to say. I don’t often know what to do.
I’m grateful to the liturgy for giving me a place to start.
I’ve slid into a choir stall in the Abbey Church three or four times a day most days for the last two years. I am not vowed to this routine, and there are many times when class or work could keep me plenty occupied. But the liturgy gives me hope, and that hope draws me in day after day.
Liturgical hope is not naive to real problems of the real world. Intermixed with the psalms of thanksgiving and praise are psalms of lament. We, the psalmists of today, continue to ask God, will you be angry forever? How could this happen? When will the evil end? The prayers we voice through the psalms do not whitewash the stains of sin or pretend like human beings can fix everything on our own.
Such honesty gives me hope.
Every morning in the Canticle of Zechariah, we ask God to “guide our feet into the way of peace.” Then we offer intercessions for the work and healing of our communities. Every evening in the Magnificat, we remember with Mary God’s commitment to “lift up the lowly” and “fill the hungry with good things.” Every single day, we pray for guidance because the kingdom has not yet fully come. We recognize that. We also pray because we are confident that someday, it will.
Such conviction gives me hope.
Liturgy is active. We are doing something in our ritual movements and words. Liturgy is also contemplative. I’ve come to cherish the quiet time liturgy carves out in my noisy life. It’s good to sit with Scripture. It’s good to sit with my own thoughts. It’s good to simply sit in the presence of others. I think community is the greatest gift liturgy offers. No matter what the day brings, I know come morning, noon and night, there will be a community of holy people standing and singing together, bowing to the God alive on the altar and in each other.
Such commitment gives me hope.
Liturgy offers me — rather, us — a foundation rooted in honesty, conviction and commitment. It gives us reason to hope in a world where hope can be hard to come by. God really does come to our assistance in the liturgy. Hour after hour, God makes haste to help us.
Jessie Bazan is an M.Div. theology student at Saint John’s School of Theology and seminary in Collegeville, Minnesota who works in the university Campus Ministry office.
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