I found this important discussion on ceremony in a Christian's life, and it plucked at a lot of strings in my heart.... (It's by a roman catholic, so I have no skin in the game) A few years back I was an Episcopalian thinking about joining the Catholic church. I started visiting a nearby church, talked to the Priest and some parishioners and more or less got scared away by some of the things they said. I was interested in Orthodox Christianity in a sort abstract way and ended up dropping in on a service. I fell completely in love with the Orthodox divine liturgy and shortly thereafter I became a catechumen. Surrounded by Orthodox people, I learned all the ways in which Rome had gone terribly wrong, Crossing themselves the wrong direction, polyphonic singing, trying to understand things that can't be understood, and of course the nefarious filioque. I came to understand that even the smallest deviations from Orthodoxy, the historical and correct practice, was a misguided innovation that led to tragic spiritual consequences. Pace, Catholics, I'm just saying where my head was. Fast forward a few years and I'm on the church board, I'm all in on all the things when bam...covid closes everything down. Strange thing happened then. Without all the ceremony, without all the sensual reinforcement, my faith fell to pieces. I discovered that rather than building my faith through practice, I had been substituting practice for faith. I suspect I was not alone in this. Anyway, this torpedoed a lot of my basic justifications for what I was doing and to make a long story short, I'm attending a Catholic church now. What's my point? Well, I really do understand the attraction of historical and beautiful liturgical practices. But please be careful you don't go down the road that I did, where the practice became the ends rather than the means to the ends. Now those of you who know me, know that I am all aboard on the ceremony and the ritual, and I can't imagine Christianity without them...... the BCP is "my jam," but just, it is important not to substitute the ceremony for the faith EDIT: I should add, that ceremony is not in contradiction to the faith, and in 99% of the people, ceremony is something which grows faith We have seen that the abandon of ceremony has coincided with mass apostacy and secularism in the West.... So don't understand me to mean that we need a little less ceremony in favor of more faith.... No, ceremony is the vehicle for how faith can be grown and nurtured..... Just recognize that the ceremony isn't the faith, that's all
It is quite true that some people revel in the ceremony only. However, the ceremonial practice and faith can, indeed do, go hand in hand. I think the problem often lies in a lack of catechesis. People simply do the ceremonial because it is done. They do not understand what each ceremonial practice means. They are little different from those who criticise ceremonial practices. Often people will make cricisms of things but without knowing the reason why they are done. There needs to be more catechesis about ceremonial to explain why it is done. Sometimes practice changes over time and people adopt practices that many would once have found to be inappropriate. For example, I've noticed that celebrations of the Eucharist in the C of E very commonly now begin with the words, 'In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit'. When I was younger many Anglicans would have been aghast at that. They thought it was a Roman Catholic practice or something 'High Church' people did. Now its mainstream.