I think it’s a fairly common occurrence for anyone who has spent a great deal of time and energy in a particular field — any field, really — to wonder, after a while, if he has really just been wasting his time. When you focus intently on something so seemingly minute for so long, it can be quite difficult to see how it fits into the broader world and the wider scope of reality. After spending years sifting through sometimes nearly indecipherable documents with frustrating lacunae and unspoken underlying assumptions, and subsequently comparing lectionary and textual traditions across countries and centuries, the whole endeavor of liturgical scholarship can seem a bit feeble in the face of the daunting challenges in front of us, both within the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod and in the Church and world at large.

But then you stumble across something like this:

“The history of medieval liturgy must be treated as one of the main sources of western culture." This judgment, by eminent contemporary liturgists, must be endorsed by all who deal with the medieval world. Christian civilization and devotion were based on and inspired by the liturgy: the development of chivalry and ethics to some extent stems from the 12th-century growth of Marian worship. 'The clergy ... absorbed all the functions of a literary class’ since the arts of drawing, writing, and painting were confined almost exclusively to liturgical books prepared by clerics, and since medieval writers examined the principles of thought, language, speech, and grammar through the exegesis of liturgical texts. The influence of the Franciscans on poetry, at least in England, has been widely explored; largely unknown is the influence of truly liturgical poetry in such genres as the prosa and rhymed office. Education began with the Psalter, and readings and chants were carried into daily life to inspire love songs and epics: computation, formula, and calculation derive from work with problems of the calendar. From the need to explain and summarize the increasing complexity of the services, the principles of organization, abstraction, and generalization were worked out. Whether cloistered or not, man ordered his day by the services and the church bell signalling them, and his year by the succession of church feasts, and he examined all his actions and related them to his religion.” (Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office: A Guide to their Organization and Terminology by Andrew Hughes, par. 10)

The western world, as we know it, finds much of its origin in not only a generic Christian faith, together with a conscience informed by that faith, but also in the lived reality of that faith, ordered and structured and governed as it was by the liturgical life of the Church. And while this could lead simply to a nostalgia for “a loveliness irreparably lost,” it is also, I think, a reminder of what could be. I don’t expect that the 21st century western world will suddenly turn on its heels and once again order its life around the ebb and flow of the Church’s life, but I do think that Christian life and culture, lived in their fullness, can have an extraordinary influence on the course of the world once again, even as we have seen in the past.

The end of all liturgy is to do just this — to bring people to Christ, to open up for the people of God His saving works, and then to order their lives according to this faith, whether in the daily rhythms of the Divine Office, the weekly ritual of the Sunday mass, or the times and tides of the Church’s year. To put it quite simply, the telos of the liturgy is making Christians and preserving them in the faith. That is why, of course, we have such battles over the liturgy and various forms and manners of worship — because we all know implicitly that Prosper of Aquitaine’s maxim is true, and that the real concern is never really what kind of songs we are going to sing, but what kind of Christians we are going to form and what kind of lives those Christians will lead. The foundational question is finally not about what we are going to pray, but about who we are going to be. That, as Hughes makes rather clear, is the outcome of all the church’s worship, whether we realize it or not.