Like many people, I gave myself the luxury of holding certain views for much of my life without really knowing much about the issue. Growing up in a mainstream Evangelical missionary setting, I was taught early on that Roman Catholics have it wrong because they're trying to earn their salvation and because their doctrines and traditions are additions to the Bible and whatnot. I not only held this view, I defended it as well, even though I didn't know many Catholics, didn't know much about their theology, and had never been to mass in a Catholic church.
Then I experienced liturgy.
Most of my life I had assumed that a church service consists of two things: songs and a sermon. There were of course other elements, like an offering, a communion celebration, maybe a time for announcements or testimonies, but the main course, the indispensable bit, was the singing and preaching.
I had a hard time finding a church in which the music and the sermonizing really moved me. I brought my standards down to "one out of two ain't bad". Then I stopped expecting to get anything out of going to church at all, telling myself that it is a fleshly and not a spiritual attitude to go to church in the expectation of "getting something" out of it.
Then I experienced liturgy.
The Anglican Church in Amsterdam was not my first exposure to liturgical services, but it was where I started "getting it". The sermons were hit and miss and the hymns were difficult and obscure (though I loved them because they were challenging), but that was secondary. I saw that sermons and songs did not have to be the main part of a church service at all. And I experienced that God met me and lifted my spirit week after week in the repetition of the liturgical "dialogue". I would seriously spend much of the week looking forward to hearing the priest say "lift up your hearts" and replying with the rest of the congregation, "we lift them to the Lord." I know this sounds a little bit pathetic, but I had really stopped expecting to have spiritual encounters in church, and this moment (among others) could touch my spirit in a way that made me giddy.
Like many Anglican churches, ours then got rid of much of the liturgy in an attempt, I assume, to be more "relevant". Since then I viewed the Roman Catholic Church in a different light. For all its faults, it could at least be counted on to not try a trick like that (or so I thought), and maybe that would be a place where I could still experience the Spirit of God. So as I walked past the Franciscan monastery in Zarautz and saw that Mass was about to begin, I went inside.
