Players and painted stage took all my love
And not those things that they were emblems of.
W. B. Yeats
Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave is a metaphorical representation of the human journey toward knowledge and truth. It depicts prisoners chained in a cave who are able to see only shadows projected on the wall, which they mistake for reality. One prisoner escapes and witnesses the world outside. He returns to the cave to communicate his newfound understanding to the others, but they find his report unintelligible and will not abandon their familiar, if limited, experience. To them, the shadows are not ghostly outlines of real things; they are the things themselves.
This idea intrigued C. S. Lewis who imported it into his novel, The Great Divorce, in which a group of “tourists” take a bus ride to heaven. The narrator of the story notices that he and his fellow passengers are transparent against the heavenly landscape and that the grass doesn’t bend under their feet. He hasn’t the strength even to pluck a daisy growing at his feet. The narrator realizes that the tourists are the same humans as they have always been, but it was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that men were ghosts by comparison. Unlike Plato, Lewis affirms the substantiality of the world. Creation is no mere projection; it is indeed a real thing—but it is merely a thing and not to be mistaken for the creator.
A few years ago, weary of the evangelical Sunday morning set piece, my wife and I made the hour-long trip to Portland to visit St. Mark, a conservative Anglican parish in the hip northwest part of the city. We were stunned by the historic red-brick basilica and the Romanesque style sanctuary with its stained glass windows, fine art paintings, Venetian statuary , and magnificent pipe organ. We attended high mass, which commenced with a tolling of the parish bell and the solemn procession of the robed officiants led by an attendant swinging a smoking censor of aromatic incense. The entire service was meticulously choreographed: we stood, we sang, we kneeled, we prayed, we recited. The priests bowed, and chanted, their elaborate vestments glimmering in the sacred dim. After a brief, surprisingly homey sermon, all were invited to the altar to receive the Eucharist: a wafer, hallowed at the priest’s invocation, and the wine of the Sacrifice, sipped from a chalice offered by his reverent hands. The service ended with the recession of the officiants and the explosive joy of the pipe organ. Smitten by the pageantry and Calvary-centric service, we returned the next Sunday—and each Sunday afterwards for two years.
Attending St. Mark was wonderful. All I had to do was show up and let the grand ceremony wash over me. It was like entering a poem. I was submerged in imagery and carried along by the precise, melodic diction of the ritual. At the end of each service, I emerged from the basilica’s protective womb infused with the sublime, which pleasantly waned during the drive home like the fading glory on Moses’ face. Eventually, however, the spectacle’s power to move me also began to wane; as it became familiar, I found that it no longer satisfied. The poem that at first had buoyed my soul Godward now thwarted me; the liturgy had become a lid. I began to see the elaborate rituals, not as sacraments, but as the pious inventions of men. As God spoke through Isaiah, “Their reverence for Me consists of tradition learned by rote.” The gorgeous displays promising me a feast seemed but empty gestures, and my soul grew lean at that table. I was starving.
This sense of paucity has extended beyond evangelicalism’s well-oiled mechanisms and the operatic theatre of high church liturgy. It has also taken root in unexpected soil: the carefully tended garden of the scriptures. Steeped in the Protestant principle of Sola Scriptura, I wholeheartedly affirm that the Bible is the final authority for Christian faith and practice, and that it provides the template for divine revelation. Even so, I have discovered—a bit disconcertingly—that the scriptures and all attendant explications are not enough. Contrary to evangelical assumption, I do not find the God of the Bible in the Bible. Yes, I am convinced that this book is essential to my understanding of God and his kingdom. I know that it is the utterly reliable testimony about Jesus Christ. I realize, too, that no amount of commitment or exuberance bears fruit apart from what is found in its pages. And yet I also know that I what I seek is not found within its fine leather covers. “You search the Scriptures,” said Jesus, “because you think that in them you have eternal life. These testify about me.” I don’t want the Bible; I want the Living God.
“You say, ‘If anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing; but anyone who swears by the gold of the temple is bound by that oath.’ You blind fools! Which is greater: the gold, or the temple that makes the gold sacred?”
Human nature seems to impel us toward tangible spiritual emblems. We seem compelled to make the invisible visible, to somehow capture the transcendent within a fixed, visible thing. This is not only a pagan inclination. Even as the glory of YHWH churned upon Mount Sinai in full view of Israel, the people asked Aaron to make them an idol. They brought to him their gold earrings which Aaron then cast in the shape of a calf. When the people saw it they said, “This is your god, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” The terrifying deity hidden within the fiery cloud upon the mountain was too much to bear. The people wanted their deliverer safely encoded within an intelligible device, what T. S. Eliot might have called an objective correlative. Eliot used this phrase to refer to objects, situations, or chains of events used as formulas to invoke particular emotions or states of mind. Aaron’s golden calf was the knowable object signifying an otherwise incomprehensible YHWH, and, like all idols, it functioned as a physical prompt for worship and the associated feelings.
This is exactly what liturgy is: objects, situations, and chains of events as a repeatable formula to invoke mental and emotional states associated with worship. Liturgy isn’t only a feature of the high church; even the most casual congregations have their liturgies. The predictable order of service (welcome, singing, lesson, ministry time), the style of music, the specialized language—all serve to set a tone that congregants are to adopt. Creating this tone is the whole purpose of the liturgy and why so much attention is paid to its elements and their arrangement. The tone is so central that it becomes the measure by which we gauge the success of our worship experience. If we are able to achieve the desired emotional state—whether solemnity or abandon or something in between—we judge the event a success. If we are not able to internalize the tone, we consider the experience less than optimal. Thus, the elements ostensibly employed to direct us toward the invisible God become the very substance of our worship—the “thing” itself.
The problem isn’t liturgy per se. Structure of some kind is necessary for a meaningful corporate experience. In this way, liturgies are like table manners, shared behaviors that enhance fellowship and provide harmonious access to the food. But when protocol hinders eating or is mistaken for the food itself, we have a serious issue. Jesus hints at this when he denounces the Jewish religious leaders who doggedly impose the minutia of the Law: “You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.” Shadow though it is, liturgy (conservative or charismatic) should usher us out of the cave, not acclimatize us to it.
As Isaiah prophesied, Jesus came to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness. All our devices of devotion—our Sunday services, our sacraments, our spiritual disciplines, even our Bibles—are, as Paul notes, a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ. The incarnation, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus expose our religious ornaments as insubstantial and profitless. Christ is the reality; he is the real bread that came down from heaven.
I think of the many people who grew faint seeking God in the franchised caves of Christendom where they were offered shadows to eat, mere tokens rather than what the tokens were tokens of. I myself have offered such baubles to them, and for this I am deeply sorry. I think, too, of my own hunger, unsatisfied by earnest evangelical gyrations or by high church sheen. I’m famished. I don’t want to play; I want to eat. I want the real thing.
Maybe you do too.
“I am the Living One; I was dead, and behold,
I am alive for ever and ever!”
Revelation 1:18