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“Beauty, then, is not mere decoration, but rather an essential element of the liturgical action, since it is an attribute of God himself and his revelation. These considerations should make us realize the care which is needed, if the liturgical action is to reflect its innate splendour.”
― Pope Benedict XVI

“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 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.”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“I worry that when our gathered worship looks like a rock show or an entertainment special, we are being formed as consumers - people after a thrill and a rush - when what we need is to learn a way of being-in-the-world that transforms us, day by day, by the rhythms of repentance and faith.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

“You have made us to be free,
But we crave the cheap comforts of our chains.
You have made us to serve others,
But we have eyes only for ourselves.
You have made us to love,
But we are inflamed with lust.
You provide, that we may be generous,
But we greedily hoard as if your well will run dry.
You forgive time and again,
But we hold fast to the sins of others.
You offer light for our path,
But we insist on making our own way.
You are the God who saves.
Lord, save us from ourselves. In your great mercy, restore and heal us, and grant us your peace.”
― Ecclesia Catholica

“So the Eucharist -- in its sumptuous liturgical setting, surrounded by music, art, the word of God, and the prayer of the community -- does more than sustain the divine life in us. It delights us, as a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.”
― Robert Barron, Eucharist

“The most sacred truths of the faith are given full material reality, leading up to that moment when Christ himself becomes present at the altar. This was marked by the moment of elevation when the priest held up the host, become by a miracle the body of Jesus. At that instant candles and torches, made up of bundles of wood, were lit to illuminate the scene; the sacring bell was rung, and the church bells pealed so that those in the neighbouring streets or fields might be aware of the solemn moment. It was the sound which measured the hours of their day. Christ was present in their midst once more and, as a the priest lifted up the thin wafer of bread, time and eternity were reconciled.”
― Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More

“That the Eucharist is the sacrifice of Christ is clear; that his sacrifice should be imitated and lived out by us in the lives of self-transcendence, self-sacrifice, and service should be equally clear.”
― Kevin W. Irwin, Models of the Eucharist

“Pope Benedict XVI wrote that liturgy should be "the rediscovering within us of true childhood, of openness to a greatness still to come, which is still unfulfilled in adult life." The child at play is an image for the kind of openness to life that adults should cultivate--that, in fact, the liturgy is trying to help people discover. In church I am seeking my true childhood.”
― Natalie Carnes, Motherhood: A Confession

“The use of incense and processional lights has been of late discussed in the Anglican Church with considerably more fervour than knowledge, and it has assumed an importance in controversy all out of proportion to its merits.”
― E.G. Cuthbert F. Atchley, A History of the Use of Incense in Divine Worship

“Habits are a pattern of repeated action that are ultimately formational (for good or bad, realized or not) and this - ultimately - is worship. Liturgy is simply habit that admits itself to be worship. (paraphrase from pg. 8-9)”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“Del gesto de revestirse se pone de manifiesto el acontecimiento interior y la tarea que de él deriva: revestirse de Cristo, entregarse a él como Él se entregó a nosotros.”
― Benedicto XVI

“Wer verlangt, sie [diese Sprache] müsse so sein, dass der moderne Mensch sich ohne Einübung sofort in ihr wiederfinden könne, verlangt Unmögliches. Dieses Postulat ähnelt dem, die Kirche müsse auf die Fragen des heutigen menschen antworten, ohne zu sagen, dass sie vielleicht lehren muss, die richtigen Fragen zu stellen. Als Leute von Jesus wissen wollten, welches der gerechte Verteilungsschlüssel bei ihrer Erbauseinandersetzung sei, da erklärte er sich für unzuständig. Seine Lehre war: "Suchet zuerst das Reich Gottes." Das heißt, er ließ sie nicht finden, was sie suchten, sondern sagte ihnen, was sie suchen müssten, wenn sie nicht umsonst gelebt haben wollten.”
― Robert Spaemann

“If we find ourselves offended or disturbed by elements of the Ikon services, we might ask ourselves whether the disruption of a disturbing liturgy is necessary at times to arouse people like us from the religious slumbers that so frequently overtake us - like the bizarre characters in a Flannery O'Connor novel or short story, for example - to jolt us into the realization that we routinely tolerate the intolerable in the ways we speak of God.”
― Brian D. McLaren

“Habit and obligation have become bad words. That prayer becomes a habit must mean that it is impersonal, unfeeling, something of a rouse. If you do something because you are obligated to, it doesn’t count, at least not as much as if you’d done it of your own free will, like a child who says thank you because his parents tell him to, it doesn’t count. Sometimes, often, prayer feels that way to me, impersonal and unfeeling and not something I’ve chosen to do. I wish it felt inspired and on fire like a real, love-conversation all the time, or even just more of the time. But what I am learning the more I sit with liturgy is that what I feel happening bears little relation to what is actually happening. It is a great gift when God gives me a stirring, a feeling, a something-at-all in prayer. But work is being done wether I feel it or not. Sediment is being laid. Words of praise to God are becoming the most basic words in my head. They are becoming fallback words, drowning out advertising jingles and professors�� lectures and sometimes even my interior monologue.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God

“At the practical level all liturgical rites are arranged for the participation of the community. Rite, as we have seen, enables people to relate to each other (the kiss, the handshake—both symbolic gestures) and also to the community. Once can become part of it or enter more deeply into its life.”
― J.D. Crichton

“[The Eucharist] is neither simply intellectual, addressing itself to disincarnated reason, nor moralistic, exhorting men to do better, though it contains both these elements, but deriving as it does from Christ, who is both divine and human and who is the invisible priest of the visible Church, the liturgy addresses itself to the whole man and seeks to draw him into union with God by means that are consonant with human nature.”
― J.D. Crichton

“Through [the Eucharist's] celebration Christ makes himself present and that presence, it is interesting to note, is largely made through words which may be those of holy scripture or those of the poets who, together with the music that their words have evoked, have enriched our worship throughout the centuries. These patterns of words, music, gesture, and movement, sometimes of great beauty, have formed the setting of the eucharistic action on whose content in one way and another they have thrown light. Together they have manifested the Christ who makes himself present. Likewise, the prayer of the Church, whether it is called the Divine Office or Mattins and Evensong, which are so largely scriptural, recalls the past, speaks through Christ who is present, and constantly looks on to the end.”
― J.D. Crichton

“[Theology is] the attempt to express Truth itself, to find words adequate to the mind and experience of the Church, then it must of necessity have its source where the faith ,the mind, and the experience of the Church have their living focus and expression, where faith in both essential meanings of that word, as Truth revealed and given, and as Truth accepted and “lived,�� has its epiphany, and that is precisely the function of “leitourgia.”
― Alexander Schmemann

“[It is within the liturgy above all that] the Church is informed of her cosmical and eschatological vocation, receives the power to fulfill it and thus truly becomes “what she is”—the sacrament, in Christ, of the Kingdom. In this sense the liturgy is indeed “means of grace”…in the all-embracing meaning as the means of always making the Church what she is—a realm of grace, of communion with God, of new knowledge and new life. The liturgy of the Church is cosmical and eschatological because the Church is cosmical and eschatological; but the Church would not have been cosmical and eschatological had she not been given, as the very source and constitution of her life and faith, the experience of the new creation, the experience and vision of the Kingdom which is to come.”
― Alexander Schmemann

“might not this “something else�� be the living address of the Word of God spoken and responded to in faith, which is indeed present in, experienced by, and celebrated in the liturgical act, but in no way bound to that act but bound instead to the Spirit of God?”
― Maxwell E. Johnson, Praying and Believing in Early Christianity: The Interplay between Christian Worship and Doctrine

“Dear Alessio, yes, I was an altar boy. And you? What part among the altar boys do you have? It’s easier to do now, you know: You might know that, when I was a kid, Mass was celebrated different than today. Back then, the priest faced the altar, which was next to the wall, and not the people. Then the book with which he said the Mass, the missal, was placed on the right side of the altar. But before reading of the Gospel it always had to be moved to the left side. That was my job: to carry it from right to left. It was exhausting! The book was heavy! I picked it up with all my energy but I wasn’t so strong; I picked it up once and fell down, so the priest had to help me. Some job I did! The Mass wasn’t in Italian then. The priest spoke but I didn’t understand anything. and neither did my friends. So for fun we’d do imitations of the priest, messing up the words a bit to make up weird sayings in Spanish. We had fun, and we really enjoyed serving Mass.”
― Pope Francis, Dear Pope Francis: The Pope Answers Letters from Children Around the World

“There are indeed moments of spiritual ecstasy in the Christian life and in gathered worship. Powerful spiritual experiences, when they come, are a gift. But that cannot be the point of Christian spirituality, any more than the unforgettable pappardelle pasta dish I ate years ago in Boston's North End is the point of eating.

Word and sacrament sustain my life, and yet they often do not seem life changing. Quietly, even forgettably, they feed me.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

“The Eucharist—our gathered meal of thanksgiving for the life, death, and resurrection of Christ—transforms each humble meal into a moment to recall that we receive all of life, from soup to salvation, by grace. As such, these small, daily moments are sacramental—not that they are sacraments themselves, but that God meets us in and through the earthy, material world in which we dwell.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

“There's a liturgy to each of our lives, whether we realize it or not.”
― Meagan Church, The Last Carolina Girl

“Ordinary habits shape the soul in the most extraordinary ways. (p. 6)”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“Orthodox theology is a different matter from beginning to end. It does not assert a proposition; it bears witness. It is not contradiction, but confession.”
― Archimandrite Vasileios, Hymn of Entry: Liturgy and Life in the Orthodox Church

“Seeing Christ externally, objectively, loving Him without repentance, and weeping from sympathy, like the daughters of Jerusalem (Luke 23:28), leads to a delusive emotionalism alien to the Liturgy. By contrast, the quiet celebration of the Liturgy gives guidance for a correct Orthodox attitude and provides an air of devout contrition. Joy does not laugh aloud and wound those who are sorrowful, nor does pain cast gloom and disillusionment over the weak. There reigns everywhere the devout contrition which secretly and inexhaustibly comforts everyone, making them joyful and uniting them as brothers. Human emotionalism is one thing and the devout contrition of the Liturgy quite another. The one causes man skin-deep irritation but torments him physically; the other nails him down but comforts him, revealing our God-like nature in the very depths of our existence. This is something that burdens you with a heavy obligation but at the same time gives you the wings of invincible hope.”
― Archimandrite Vasileios, Hymn of Entry: Liturgy and Life in the Orthodox Church

“The Liturgy is not just a sermon. It is not something to be listened to or watched. The Liturgy never grows old. Its cup does not go dry. No one can say he has got to know it or got used to it because he has understood it once or once been carried away by the attraction of it. The faithful are not like spectators or an audience following something that makes a greater or lesser emotional impression on them. The faithful partake in the Divine Liturgy. The mystery is celebrated in each of the faithful, in the whole of the liturgical community.
We do not see Christ externally, we meet Him within us.
Christ takes shape in us. The faithful become Christs by grace.
What happens is a miraculous interpenetration by grace and an identification without confusion. The whole man, in body and in spirit, enters the unalloyed world of the uncreated grace of the Trinity. And at the same time he receives into himself Christ, with the Father and the Holy Spirit. The whole of God is offered to man,
"He makes His home with
him" (John 14:23); and the whole man is offered to God:
"let us commend ourselves and each other and all our life unto Christ our God." "God united with and known to gods.”
― Archimandrite Vasileios, Hymn of Entry: Liturgy and Life in the Orthodox Church

“The elements of the world pass away with a loud noise
(II Pet. 3:10): and everything is clothed with light and existence as with a garment. Everything exists and acquires substance. Representing the cherubim in the liturgical singing of the thrice holy hymn, we are caught up into heaven-whether in the body or out of the body we do not know, God knows (cf. II Cor. 12:2) -and we sing the triumphal hymn with the blessed powers. When we are there, beyond space and time, we enter the realm of eschatology. We begin to receive the Lord "invisibly escorted by the hosts of angels." Thus anyone who participates in the Liturgy, who is taken up-"he was caught up into heaven"-acquires new senses.
He sees history not from its deceptive side, which is created and passes away, but from the true, eternal and luminous side which is the age to come. Then the believer delights in this world too, because he experiences the relation between it and the other world, the eternal and indestructible: the whole of creation has a trinitarian structure and harmony. The thrice-holy hymn is sung by the "communion of saints," the Church, in the depths of its being.
Solemnly sung as part of the Divine Liturgy, the thrice. holy hymn overcomes tumult, and makes everything join in the celebration and sing together in complete silence and stillness, the silence and stillness of the age to come. This is an indication that we have already received the pledge of the life to come and of the Kingdom.”
― Archimandrite Vasileios, Hymn of Entry: Liturgy and Life in the Orthodox Church

“Anything which does not feed everyone, which is not the joy of all-"for all the people"-is not your joy either. A joy of your own--even the greatest joy cannot be other than denial and remorse for you when it is not a joy, nourishment and relief for all. If your joy is divided when it is broken, or consumed when it is eaten, it is hell. Leave it alone and look for something else. For instead of nourishing your inner and true man, it will inevitably consume you and give you nothing in return. It will corrode you, it will devour you.
In the Divine Liturgy we find the food, life and joy which is cut up and shared out, and yet is not divided but rather unites; it is partaken of and eaten, and yet is not consumed but is embodied in us and sanctifies us. We come to understand that this organic link we have with everyone else is a great benefit and an assurance of the total and personal salvation of man. It is made perfect in the Orthodox Divine Liturgy and is revealed with complete clarity as a gift of divine grace sent down upon us.”
― Archimandrite Vasileios, Hymn of Entry: Liturgy and Life in the Orthodox Church