(No disrespect to all the liturgics tutors whom I respect, and too bad for the ones who irk me.)
On the first day, I would begin by asking (even before discussing the syllabus), ‘Why is a family car not shaped like an orb?’ After a while discussing all the myriad of reasons for non-orb family autos, I’d ask ‘All right, why don’t autos have orbs instead of wheels?’
Again, after talking through it for a while, I’d turn the conversation to liturgy. ‘Granted that orbs are good things, and it might be an entertaining diversion to imagine rolling about in orbs like the ones in a Jurassic Park film, we can probably grant that not all good things are good for all purposes. Wheels were invented millennia ago, and we continue to use them, because they are uniquely apt for the jobs we give them. A wheel and a dinner plate may be roughly the same shape, but you can’t simply substitute one for the other. (A hubcap, perhaps, but not a functional wheel. And not a hubcap for very long, I suspect.) Sometimes we hit on something that does its job so well that there’s hardly room for improvement, and it’s not stodginess or traditionalism to stick with wheels on autos — it’s optimal engineering.’
‘Some liturgical forms have been road tested by millions of congregations for hundreds, thousands of years. Acknowledging the distinctive aptness of those forms for liturgical worship needn’t be rebarbative traditionalism; it’s acknowledging that those forms have done something exceptionally well in a vast range of contexts over a staggering span of time. You may have a clever idea that nobody ever thought of before about improving liturgical communication — but that’s vastly less probable than that you will sacrifice a great range of liturgical effects in order to effect one or two deliberate ends that you’ve imagined (without attending to the losses).
‘The pertinent questions about liturgy involve not only “Do you think that your clever idea improves on the whole idea of the automobile?” but also “How does your clever idea integrate with the rest of the liturgy, the contemporary church, the historic church, the ‘chief end of man’, church doctrine in general, the world outwith the church, and so on?” If your idea works brilliantly on its own, but doesn’t engage functionally with the rest of the vehicle, it is (pardon my saying so) a non-starter.’
An optimally functional vehicle comprises a good number of different parts, each of which has to be working well in order for the vehicle to operate. Even more, though, they all have to be working well together for the vehicle to accomplish well its goal of transporting people and goods rapidly and reliably.
Likewise the liturgy: it’s not just a matter of a well-composed collect, or an apposite eucharistic prayer — it’s not a ‘one from column A, one from column B’ affair. In order for the liturgy to achieve its end, all the parts must work well on their own, and must be snugly integrated in a balance and alignment that makes for effective liturgical performance.
After all this, we would study the liturgy, its historic forms, the moments of ‘innovation’ and how they operated or didn’t, and how different liturgical forms belong to different expressions of ecclesial identity (no Solemn High Mass for my beloved brethren of the Kirk, but by the very same token no austerely reformed hymn sandwich for my catholic-minded Anglican congregations). How does it work, how does it fit?