Cantuar Reviews Worship in the Tablet

A very interesting book review in, The Tablet. Rowan Williams, the ABC, writes a very interesting review of a history of liturgy, Worship, by Keith Pecklers. I was most interested by the following paragraph:

"Full and active liturgical participation" is understood quite firmly in terms of conscious and intentional public sharing, and there is quite a high expectation that good liturgy is liturgy that delivers a clear sense of collective well-being. This is, as always, an essential corrective to mechanical attitudes to worship, to an impersonalism that simply fails to suggest that divine activity might ever be around in worship. It needs, though, its own balance in order to avoid that pervasive contemporary temptation, worship as entertainment or displaced activism or rally.

Fr. Pecklers and the ABC make an important point here. Liturgy must be more than the recitation of words and the performance of action. On the otherhand, Liturgy should not be conceived solely as a means to lift our mood.