A nonbelieving friend recently attended a Catholic service for the first time since childhood and described herself as “enthralled with the long-forgotten but completely remembered beauty of the Mass.” She spoke of the gold vestments, candles, incense and back-and-forth singing, contrasting it with Protestant services she had experienced, which she perceived as “a cold, lifeless box.”
Growing up in a conservative Mennonite church, I had the opposite experience. The interior of our sanctuary was starkly simple. We had clear glass windows, one of which overlooked the neighboring farm. During the sermon, I could gaze out that window and let thoughts of God float out to meet fields and sky. The prayers in our church were unplanned, reflecting the lives and personalities of the people who prayed them.
The first time I attended a liturgical service, with a minister in a robe reading the same words other ministers were reading in other churches, I felt cold.
The weekly rosary service at the nursing home where I worked — with its circle of permed heads and wrinkled hands holding rosary beads — brought an even greater sense of un-ease. The repeated prayer, spoken in the low monotone of the female leader — “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death” — seemed to me idolatrous.
While my initial response to “high-church” ritual was distrust and discomfort, an Anabaptist writer of similar background, Anna Graber (https://open.substack.com/pub/christianarejoice/p/in-search-of-healing) describes her visit to Catholic Mass as something she longed for, drawing her body and not just her mind into worship.
“I watch them walk in,” she writes. “They kneel and cross themselves before taking a seat. Small children imitate their parents, connecting their bodies to worship and God before they have words to do so.
“The priest walks the aisle scattering holy water. The drops splash across my face, and again I am reminded that I am here in my body, and this is spiritual, but it is also physical, and the two are inexplicably connected.”
Perhaps this deep connection of body to worship, she suggests, “is what distinguishes the experience of Catholicism from Protestantism.”
Like Graber, many evangelicals are making a loop toward liturgies and visual, tactile religious experiences. I, too, have come to understand this desire, especially after reading Old Testament law, where God gives worship instructions that appeal to every human sense. The Israelites were to use color, incense, trumpets, bitter herbs. Their use of sensory experiences — as for the Catholic child — must have cemented the worship of God into their very bodies.
But I can also appreciate my Anabaptist forebears’ dedication to simplicity and to never making an icon to represent an unseeable God.
Perhaps the high-church worship tradition attempts to say that God is great and to lift our minds from our mundane selfishness, while the Anabaptist tradition attempts to say that God is humble and lives in our hearts.
I once talked to a young man who was considering leaving his Anabaptist practice for a more formal, liturgical iteration. He spoke of the European cathedrals and how their grandeur lifted the mind and pointed to God.
But those cathedrals are bound to earthly religions, I thought. If persecution arises, if the government says you must practice this way to keep this cathedral, how much easier to give in when your spirituality is bound there.
The same, of course, is true of any outward thing. A covering and a cape dress become sham spirituality as easily as a crucifix.
The difference is in the heart and spirit. We may speak words as empty forms in an ornate church house or in a simple one, while reciting a liturgy or while rattling off “prayers from the heart.” Jesus said true worshipers will worship in spirit and truth (John 4:24), for this is what God desires.
When I think back to recent moments of worship, one of the most genuine did not happen in a church at all. It came after a grumpy day when I was frustrated over waylaid plans, wishing to be away from the children and have some time for myself.
I sat down to sew a seam — a quick fix so Annalise could wear the dress of her choice — and both the 2-year-old and the 4-year-old wanted to sit close and watch. They started asking about the different types of stitches pictured on the front of the sewing machine, and I forgot my grumpiness and took time to show them some of the stitches on a scrap of cloth.
As I bent my head next to theirs and gave them the gift of genuine loving presence instead of begrudging attention, that too felt like worship.
This article was first published in Anabaptist World. Feature photo by Kathy Zimmerman.