ROBERT : In a liturgical service . . . .

In a liturgical service, just after the sermon and the saying of the creed, after the confession of sin has been said by everyone present and the absolution has been pronounced, the priest will say, ‘The Peace of the Lord be always with you.’
      ‘And also with you,’ the congregation will respond.
      And then we turn to each other in the pews around us and say the same things back and forth to each other, offering Christ’s peace to each other, often with a kiss or a handshake or a hug. It is called the passing of the peace.

When my father passed away, I ended up with some of his books. Some of them, books that were his favorites, have his marks in them, sentences and phrases and passages that caught his eye or his ear. Some of the books are my favorites now as well, and now they have my marks in them too. Something about that is moving to me.
      In the past few days, I having been going through one of those books with the two sets of marks, and I noticed a mark I had not noticed before. The mark is a reference to the passing of the peace in a liturgical service. My father had marked the phrase and the explanation of it. I have no way of knowing for sure, but it was as though he had stumbled upon it for the first time.
      It is possible. He was raised in a part of the Church where the liturgy was not used, and the passing of the peace may well have been new to him.
      I do know that in those days he was beginning to learn and explore and dig around in the ancient traditions and practices of the Church, practices that came from the the liturgical end of this great long pew that is the Church. He was learning some things about the ancient ways that were new to him and they drew him in their direction.
      He never left his end of the pew, the part of the Church from whence he came, I do not expect that he ever would have. He was ordained there as a minister and his friends and his roots were there. But he was very much engaged in and intrigued by trying to bring some of the ancient practice and wisdom to bear within that community. I knew him well enough to know that when he stumbled upon the passing of the peace, he began that very day to look for ways and places and times to incorporate it into the retreats that he led and other settings as well. And I can imagine the grin that would have been on his face as he did so.
      I saw that grin when he started ending his retreats with Holy Communion. I saw that grin when he and my brother developed a breviary of sorts that introduced an ancient way of prayer into their community. I saw that grin when he would quote from saints and monks and nuns and mystics in his talks, people who were rarely mentioned in the community from whence he came. I thought about all of that the other day when I saw his marks again.
      That got me to thinking about the fact that the passing of the peace, the kiss of peace as it used to be called, is a part of the practice of the faithful that goes back all the way to The Apology of Justin the Martyr, the first century letter that first explained what the early Christians did when they gathered up for worship.
      And about the fact that by the time it got to the church where my father grew up and where my father raised me, we no longer even paused for a moment whenever we gathered up to worship to acknowledge our sin and accept the need for God’s forgiveness and Christ’s peace in our lives. Our version of it was something you did after a the first couple of songs and it began with, ‘Now everybody turn to your neighbor and tell them that you are glad they are in church today.’ Which is not a bad thing to say to people, but it is not the same somehow.
      And I was thinking about how sad it is that so many of the great traditions and practices and habits and rituals of the Church were set aside in the Protestant West and that so many of us had to leave home, so to speak, to even get a glimpse of them.
      Finally I was thinking about my father some more. And how sad it was that he could have given his whole life to the Church and have never been taught about these things at all. And how he was just beginning to discover these things when he died.
      And how they might have made him grin.