From an imaginary letter of St. Luke written several months after his conversion:
I will try as best I can to answer your questions. But the real meaning and quality of the life to which these answers point cannot be described in words. They can only be experienced, and that from inside the community of the mystery.
For me to write to you about the details of our worship would therefore be misleading. Because I cannot capture the essential mystery of the truth which lies at its heart, a description of it would seem to you trivial in its very simplicity. Indeed, as compared with all the public worship offered to any of the pagan deities or surrounding the mysteries of Apollo, our Christian worship is so simple and undramatic as to seem sparse and bare. You yourself might perhaps be present at it, and see it for the first time. If you did I think you would say to yourself, ‘Is there really nothing more in it than this? It seems so completely unimpressive.’ And you would look round casually at the worshipers, and they would seem to you very, very ordinary, and even mediocre. But all that would be because you were looking at it critically from the outside. You cannot understand what it really means to us unless you are yourself part and parcel of it, standing on the inside of the circle, and sharing in the deep experience of worshiping our Lord Jesus.
(From The Letters of Luke the Physician by Canon Roger Lloyd)
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