Fr. Jurgen Liias, then an associate priest at the Advent and perhaps one of the most talented preachers in Anglicanism, preached that year. He took as his text the line from the creed, "Suffered under Pontius Pilate," speaking of how this line grounds the events we memorialize in the liturgy in a concrete time and place and that even as we ritualize the action, we look back to real, urgent events that effect our lives today. I would often think of that sermon when Peter Gomes, my homiletics professor and a mentor, would remind those of us in his seminars to ask ourselves, where's the good news in your sermon. He was always quick to remind us that people didn't drag themselves out of bed on a Sunday morning to hear how clever we were but to hear something that will help them get through the week. And that's just what the vigil does: it retells the whole story in words and music and gesture. These things happened. They are real, true, and urgent.
The liturgy teaches us things that syllogisms can't. I remember being back at the Advent one Sunday with a good friend and fellow student at Harvard Divinity School. She took me to task as we walked to the Charles Street Red Line Station after Mass for crossing myself at the elevations since I had always been one of those who argued that it was the whole of the canon that effected the change in the elements. I could only say, "Everyone believes in classic transubstantiation when they're at the Advent." Not very profound or logical, but an accurate description of what happened to me in that Mass. Like Thomas, I saw and I believed. I don't know that hearing the deacon sing Exsultet will convert the masses, but that piercing cry going up in the darkened church speaks to the receptive heart in a way that prose cannot:
Now is come the night, wherein the bonds of death were loosed, and Christ harrowing hell rose again in triumph….
The holy mystery therefore of this night putteth to flight the deeds of darkness, purgeth away sin, restoreth innocence to the fallen, and gladness to them that mourn: casteth out hatred, bringeth peace to all mankind and boweth down mighty princes.
That's good stuff. As a speech and position paper writer, I have learned something that is no less true of liturgy: if you lose the poetry you lose the reader or hearer even when the logic is solid. Even in our Ikea world, the rhetorical flourish that soars takes us out of our Prufrockian existences and carries the hearer along on the leap into new places. This is why so many of us still bother putting on these rites and why more and more of us in Gen X and Y are devoted to the traditional Mass. There is nothing daring or provocative to anyone under 40 about the Bauhaus liturgical fare that we're told we should like. To us, most modern and experimental liturgies are as much of a period piece as the Tridentine Mass. Any young urbanite who is practicing Christianity in the year 2005 is already committing a transgressive and entirely voluntary act. In the end, I find the sight of a humeral veil much more daring, and evocative, than standing in a circle passing an earthenware plate of pita bread.