Robert Louis Wilken, "The Church's Way of Speaking"

First Things

The unique gift of liturgy, Roman Guardini wrote in his Spirit of the Liturgy, is to “create a universe brimming with fruitful spiritual life.” Liturgy does not “exist for the sake of humanity, but for the sake of God.” If the Bible is the lexicon of Christian speech, then the liturgy is its grammar, a place to come to know and practice the Christian idiom and to be formed by it. For Augustine, the reciting of the Psalms was a way of making the words of the psalmist his own, and he talked about what the words of the Psalms “had done to me.”