Consecrating the World: On Mundane Liturgical Theology

What has liturgy to do with life? The sacred with the secular? This study proposes that the liturgy calls us, in the words of Aidan Kavanagh, “to do the world as the world was meant to be done.” The sacramental liturgy of the Church and the personal liturgy of our lives should be as a seamless garment. Consecrating the World continues David Fagerberg’s exploration of the Church’s lex orandi (law of prayer) by expanding two major themes. The first considers liturgy as the matrix wherein our encounter with God becomes an experience of primary theology. The second illustrates how a believer is made ready for this liturgy through asceticism in both its faces—the one negative (dealing with sin), the other positive (dealing with sanctification). This book turns these two themes outward to a liturgical theology of the cosmos—a mundane liturgical theology of the consecration of the world and the sanctification of our daily life.