By Bridget Bryan

We all hear “live liturgically” from the pulpit time to time, and we also see it in our spiritual reading. But what does that mean? I’d like to offer a breakdown of the phrase using the metaphor of the “Bride and the Bridegroom,” a “menu” of suggested how-to’s, and an application of the menu to the feast of the Purification.

Living liturgically is living our lives with Holy Mother Church, especially our everyday life. The word “liturgical” comes from the word Liturgy:

Liturgy (leitourgia) is a Greek composite word meaning originally a public duty, a service to the state undertaken by a citizen…leitos (from leos=laos, people) meaning public, and ergo… to do. From this we have leitourgos, “a man who performs a public duty,” “a public servant” … used as equivalent to the Roman lictor; then leitourgeo, “to do such a duty,” leitourgema, its performance, and leitourgia, the public duty itself.

Liturgy [in the sense we are discussing here] … means the whole complex of official services, all the rites, ceremonies, prayers, and sacraments of the Church, as opposed to private devotions. … In the Roman Church, for instance, Compline is a liturgical service, the rosary is not. 1

Therefore, Liturgy is the official public services of the Church. What and Who is the Church? The Baltimore Cathechism says she is … “the congregation of all those who profess the faith of Christ, partake of the same Sacraments, and are governed by their lawful pastors under one visible Head.” She is also the Bride of Christ.

Metaphor

“Christ and His Church,” is a painting based on a journal entry when thinking about our relationship with Christ and the Church. The necessity to remain loyal to them was driven home when they were visualized as a bride and groom.

To understand how the Bride of Christ connects to the Baltimore Catechism, picture an ideal new bride with her husband (see the illustration). Both are newly married, handsome and beautiful. Throughout marriage, a bride lives the same life as her spouse—their lives become one. Then later their children live in harmony with the life of their parents.

As with earthly spouses, so the Church and Christ. As she lives Christ’s life, we also live his life with her and through her. How?

Imagine Holy Mother the Church as a gentle mother deeply in love with her husband. Every time we children come into contact with her, her face brightens as she begins to to tell us about her spouse, and our hero.

Imagine what she shows us all through our earthly life: the Mass, the Sacraments, Tradition and Sacred Scripture (the story and love letters of her spouse, if you will). Then there is the Divine Office, in which she takes Sacred Scripture and makes it so when lay people pray it with one of her priests, who represent Christ himself, it is actually She speaking the divine office to Christ. But the Mass is the ultimate gem she shares with us. In this great event, we not only see the whole story of mankind reenacted through symbolism, but she takes us again and again to the same un-bloody Calvary where her hero and King died for her, for all of us.

The Liturgical Year

The feasts which she throws throughout the year honor and relive Christ’s life. The arrangement of these feasts are called The Liturgical Year. This arrangement reveals God, the story of mankind, and God’s plan for our salvation through the life, suffering, death and resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ. (See illustration.)

"A Mountain Climb through the Liturgical Year," a pencil project requested by Fr. Christopher Brandler. This is based on his old seminary notes from Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.

Imitation

Holy Mother Church is like a mother who teaches all of her babies how to speak properly. She references Holy Scripture and the Church Fathers over and over again in the Divine Office and the Mass and Sacraments. Through this she teaches us to imitate her in praising and loving God, how to speak these praises to Him in proper reverent praise. Can you now see your missal as a metaphorical loving mother speaking to you of the hero God-man, her spouse? She is instructing us how to speak and think of God.

The ancient Greeks had a word related to learning and art: “mimesis,” which means imitation. They knew that formation wasn’t so much about what you were teaching, but who you were as the teacher because all of us end up imitating those around us. If we let ourselves be exposed to Christ, to be around him and those things of his Bride, eventually we will imitate what we expose ourselves to: we will decrease and He will increase. 2 The more we do with her, our Mother and thus Christ, the more we will know both of them and we will see what sort of person this hero of mankind is, the bride He died for, and His Father from whence He came, and their Spirit. We will love them, see them as a close-knit family that we are called to be part of.

Friendship

In Aristotle’s 8th Book in the Nicomachean Ethics, devoted to the degrees of friendship, he quotes an old saying—“Like attracts like,” and in speaking further of friendship, he notices how that the two seek to become one. You see this between spouses, and also with close friends and family who love getting together—close friends even take on characteristics of each other. We will feel welcome and crave the presence of our Mother, her Spouse, basking in the presence of God and being surrounded by their friends, the saints, just like we crave the warmth of human relationships. Except, this relationship with God and His Church will be eternally fulfilling. There will result not only union with our Holy Mother, but also her spouse, Christ. Union with Christ leads to union with God! But we have to make an effort to spend time with them. To hear them. To listen to them. To seek to understand their hears and to share ours as well.

Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue. … Further, such friendship requires time and familiarity; as the proverb says, men cannot know each other till they have “eaten salt together” [suffered together]; nor can they admit each other to friendship or be friends till each has been found lovable and been trusted by each. 3

Live liturgically and you will see you are part of a living story, a mysterious adventure of love and friendship with the Church and Christ and, ultimately will partake in the loving embrace of the Holy Trinity.

But how do we live that out in our daily life? Here are some concrete suggestions, to be taken as a “menu” of sorts. They all stem from the one idea of exposing yourself to the liturgy of the Church. If you can “afford” to order the entire menu, go ahead. However, the greatest chances of success come from picking one thing and doing it well. Eventually everything else follows:

A Menu for Living Liturgically

Option 1: Prep the night before a feast, or even Sunday, “the day of grace,” 4 since it is the weekly feast of the Lord.

Suggested how to’s:

Get your missal right before bed and read the Liturgy—the propers of the feast—in the missal. (There’s lots of other books you can read to complement this, but most of us have immediate access to our missals. If you don’t have that, you probably have a phone: divinumofficium.com gives you the liturgy for the day. It’s great to use while traveling!

Get your clothes and shoes ready the night before. If you can’t make it to the feast day Mass, do something special with your daily wardrobe, like a spray of perfume or cologne, a necklace, dress shirt or ties. Our bodies are the lanterns of our souls!

Write the feast by the date on your planner, or family planning board. (I loved watching a mother write the feast name beautifully on a chalk board in the kitchen the evening before after the kids went to bed. She told me sometimes she talked about it with her kids before they left for school the next day.)

Option 2: Start asking questions about what you read in the liturgy and make connections.

Start asking what certain words mean, or “why” about things. Make connections with ideas/words of the liturgy with your daily life. Do this while you’re reading, at Mass, and just throughout the day before the feast and on the feast. Think of the season, the weather, books you’re reading, parts of movies, music. It’s okay if you don’t make connections the first time, but gradually you will. Once you make one, you’ll feel like you just got a little wink from God.

Option 3: Celebrate with both body and soul:

After Mass, the Divine Office, rosary, or whatever we did for God with our souls that feast day, get food or do something special, even if it’s just a simple visit to a free garden, getting a beer, or putting a tablecloth and flowers on the table. We are creatures of habit—we will be more inclined to keep living liturgically if we take the time and to do something pleasing and memorable to celebrate the day.

This menu can be altered according to your circumstances, needs, duty-of-state, personality, and inspiration from the Holy Spirit!

Little Boy with a Candle: “Purification Day” captures the sweet joy of seeing a young boy with his candle at St. Mary’s Academy Purification student Mass two years ago.

A note

You “can order from the menu” whether you’re a kiddo, a single person, a family, or an elderly person! The prepping the night before was something we mastered as young kids: we always had a long drive to Mass when we were attending mission chapels: it was the only way to get eight plus kids up and ready to Mass the next day, and still it’s a habit. But beware of extremes: “God is in the sweet breeze.” 5

Dr. John Cuddeback, professor at Christendom College and founder of Life-Craft.org, says in a wonderful article:

Many wandering or lost individuals have stepped into such a household of one [Like Little Red Riding Hood and her Grandma, or the hermits of old], and feel that someone has been waiting, and even preparing, just for them…The life-giving power of such a home cannot be measured. In every household, no matter the size, there is the challenge and the opportunity to live a truly human life, which is always a shared life, in generosity, in little ways and in big, every day. 6

In another discussion, he commented that a household starts within your soul: “The kingdom of God is within you!” 7 If you have a soul, it follows that you can live liturgically within no matter your circumstances. If you start applying one option from the menu, a variation of it, or a self-concocted option, a little bit at a time, you will grow in light, joy, and love and spread it wherever you go. True joy is contagious, like a spark, a flame. “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the whole world on fire!” 8

Application to the Purification

By the time this issue is published, it should be nearly Christmas. The Purification, also called Candlemas, is that grand feast which concludes the Christmas festivities and initiates the grand climb up the Liturgical Mountain to Easter were the Paschal Candle takes a central role.

The Purification is a triple feast which celebrates the purifying ceremony that Jewish women would undergo to render themselves clean and able to interact publicly 40 days after the birth of a male child. This feast celebrates the Purification, the Presentation, and the meeting with Simeon the Just and Anna the Prophetess (also the first sorrow of Our Lady). Because of this the Armenians call it “The Coming of the Son of God into the Temple.” 9

The Purification is often referred to as Candlemas in the English-speaking world because of the blessing of candles. It is a jubilant bookend to Christmas and begins a new mode of living: fasting and preparing through Lent for Easter.

Purification and Illumination

The feast begins with the blessing of the candles (many faithful bring bags and boxes of candles to be blessed during the beginning), at which the canticle of Simeon is sung “Nunc dimittis…” followed by a procession. It foreshadows the consecration and lighting of the paschal candle and the procession of it into the Church. Everything that day—the Procession, the Mass, and Vespers I and II of this feast—highlights the illumination of the feast.

So, how does one live liturgically on this feast? Looking back at the menu:

Option 1: Preparation the night before

Get your missal right before bed and read the Liturgy—the propers of the feast—in the missal: Caution: you might be bored by this. Nothing may jump out at you. But if you maintain an open heart and an open mind, something will jump out at you. (This is the beginning of contemplation, by the way.) I’ll highlight a few areas that resonated with me further on. You’ll see a lot about candles and illumination and as you’re reading the missal, you might notice a liturgical pun: the next day’s feast is St. Blaise.

Get the clothes and shoes ready the night before: For this feast day, this is the evening narration in my head: “Clothes…hmmm…oh! there’s a procession! It might be cold and windy out—dress appropriately! Procession? Oh! The blessing of the candles! I need candles! There’s no time to run to Walmart to grab some decent pillar candles to get blessed before the procession...but look! I have a few ‘like new’ ones here on my shelf. Phew!”

Write out the name of the feast day under your date on your planning board or journal.

Option 2: Making connections

I’ll share how my flow of thoughts went: Purification. What does it mean? I grabbed my dictionary. It means “the act of purifying,” which can also mean “to grow or become pure or clean.” 10

So, what does pure mean? That connected perfectly to my spiritual reading at the time. Fr. Jacques Philippe says that our hearts hold what we let into them, and that “evil comes to fill a gap.” 11

Therefore, if evil has no room in a soul, grace will abound, and be pure, unmixed… “Hail Mary, full of grace!” Grace is a form of God’s presence. God is Unmixed Goodness, Joy, Light. Just to think of that conjures up a magnificent vessel of light streaming gleaming rays into space. We, our Lady perfectly so, are the vessels, the lanterns, and He is the Light. A pure heart has nothing but room for Him and that which is like him. One who is full of him is full of grace. “Hail Mary, full of Grace.” Grace is God’s gift. She had her lantern fully lit, her heart full of pure love, unspoiled by any earthly sediment… we need to be purified. And here we are, full circle back at the Purification.

Other connection: A group of us were driven around on carts in a dark salt mine. We were silent in the pure darkness, awed by the completeness of it. Chattering started when the guide’s flashlight light came on, pointing out details on the cavern walls. When she shined her light on an incredibly huge deposit of salt, and described the purity of its content, we all grew silent gazing in awe at the pure spotless white of the crystals which absorbed all the light which was signed on it. Here I understood that being pure means no room for anything else but true beauty, for God, who is Good, True, Beautiful, Light of Light.

There is another connection in the Blessing of the Candles and the Procession. The text reads: “…perfect wax by the labor of the bees…” This same sort of phrase is used in the blessing of the paschal candle at the Easter Vigil.

Journal/Med example: This journal entry was sparked by the study of the liturgy for the Purification while writing this article.

Option 3: Marking the day with celebration

You could have something that goes along with the theme of the feast: light, offerings…feed the local pigeons? Lanterns, candles, bonfires. Listen to songs that have to do with blazing lights, make desserts that get set ablaze…some people burn their Christmas trees that day! (Some good friends and I once had a scavenger hunt on this feast. It centered around keeping a lantern lit with candles blessed at Mass, and took the group across several cities, performing in shops and homes before ending back where we were before at the chapel.)

I hope that the illustration of Christ and His Bride will help to bring alive the liturgical year, and that with the selection of one thing from the suggested menu you will cook up your own tasty and joyful life of living liturgically! May this Purification echo Simeon’s Nunc dimittis as we go forth as living lanterns to live God’s holy will in our daily lives:

Now thou dost dismiss Thy servant, O Lord, according to Thy word in peace; because my eyes have seen Thy salvation, which Thou has prepared before the face of all peoples: A light to the revelation of the Gentiles and the glory of Thy people Israel. 12

About the Author:

Bridget Bryan has been writing and drawing since she was ten years old. After obtaining an equivalent bachelors in Catholic General Education from St. Mary’s College, she taught for 10 years at various SSPX schools. She is grateful for specific impacts from Fr. Cooper, Fr. Torzala, Fr. Brandler, Acies, along with students and colleagues who all helped her to love living more liturgically. Miss Bryan currently works as a freelance artist. You can follow her work at bridgetbryan.com.

Endnotes:

1 Fortescue, Adrian. “Liturgy.”The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 9. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910. 30 Sept. 2021. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09306a.htm

2 St. John the Baptist, John 3:29-30 “He that hath the bride, is the bridegroom: but the friend of the bridegroom, who standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth with joy because of the bridegroom’s voice. This my joy therefore is fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease.”

3 Aristotle. Translated by W. D. Ross.The Nicomachean Ethics. Book VIII. The Internet Classics Archive, 28 Sept. 2021. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.8.viii.html

4 Trapp, Maria Augusta. “The Land without a Sunday.”Around the Year with the Trapp Family. New York: Pantheon Books Inc., 1955. Print. (The section is particularly helpful in rekindling a celebration and love of Sundays. The entire book is an excellent source of ideas of how to help live the liturgical year.)

5 I Kings 19:12 “And after the earthquake a fire: the Lord is not in the fire, and after the fire a whistling of a gentle air.”

6 Cuddeback, John. “Living as a Household of One.”Lifecraft, formerly,Bacon from Acorns. October 16, 2019. https://life-craft.org/living-as-a-household-of-one/ Accessed 28 Sept. 2021.

7 Luke 17:21.

8 St. Catherine of Sienna.

9 Holweck, Frederick. “Candlemas.”The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 3. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908. 14 Sept. 2021. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03245b.htm.

10 “Purify.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/purify. Accessed 27 Sep. 2021.

11 Philippe, Jacques.Interior Freedom. Translated, Helena Scott. Scepter Publishers, New Rochelle, NY, 2007.

12 Luke 2:29-32.