ABSTRACT
There are some definitions from which one would deduce that Liturgy and Spirituality are one and the same. Regin Prenter has said that ‘Liturgy is service, and every human service, whatever its content, consists in serving God. Thus our whole life may be called a service to God i.e. a liturgy.’ He goes on to maintain that liturgy ‘is a most comprehensive term consisting of the whole of Christian life’ (Prenter 1977:139, 140). This is implied in the favoured dismissals at the end of some new rites, which, after a blessing, send the people, out, as in the Methodist Sunday Service of 1975, ‘to live and work to God's praise and glory’, and in an essay of the English Joint Liturgical Group on ‘The Liturgy after the Liturgy’, ‘Christian worship and Christian living constitute a single liturgy’ (Hunter 1988:140). It is almost identical with Alexander Schmemann's preference for speaking of ‘the Christian life’ rather than ‘spirituality’, a term which, he says, has become
Ambiguous and confusing… For many people it means some mysterious and self— contained activity, a secret which can be broken into by the study of some ‘spiritual techniques’… (T)he very essence of Christian spirituality is that it concerns and embraces the whole life. The new life which St Paul defines as ‘living in the spirit and walking in the spirit’ (Gal. 5:25) is not another life and not a substitute; it is the same life given to us by God, but renewed, transformed and transfigured by the Holy Spirit.
(Schmemann 1976:107)