Over the last month I’ve had the pleasure and privilege to “hear, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” the newest edition in the devotional series Every Moment Holy, aptly named Rites of Passage: A Companion for Early Adulthood. In recent days, one of my personal prayers has been to receive all good things in my day as gifts from the Father; sometimes that is easier to pray in the morning than in the evening. Receiving Rites of Passage, however, as a gift from the Father has been easier than imaginable. This collection of prayers comes bound in a vegan-leather with a red ribbon that feels like a prayerbook, reminiscent of a Book of Common Prayer or a Breviary.
As someone finishing up my studies at a gap-year program, starting a new job in May, getting married in July, finishing my undergrad, and having just paid my first speeding ticket last month, I can’t help but admit I feel particularly qualified to write a review about a prayerbook for early adulthood. While there are a lot of directions one could take with a review of any edition of an Every Moment Holy book, I’d like to address two major points of intrigue about Rites of Passage. Firstly, the importance and necessity of beautifully composed liturgical prayers, particularly for young men and women. Then I’d like to explore some of the distinctively “Gen-Z” liturgies in Rites of Passage.
Liturgical Beauty in the Pews of Fluorescent Lighting
Notice my choice of words just a few sentences ago: beauty and necessity. Much has been said and continues to be said regarding some sort of revival of beauty in the culture. This, all things considered, is a good thing. Much of my generation is fascinated by beauty, particularly the beauty of liturgical worship and devotion. The allure of the incense, the holiness of the art, the profound presence of Our Lord in the Supper; for many of us the aftertaste of the Eucharist lingers as but a foretaste of the Eschaton. But I fear, as others do, of a potential “liturgical supremacy” festering in some of these corners. For those who may be concerned with the posture that draws near in words but is still distant in heart, pick up Every Moment Holy. The beauty of liturgical worship is not appropriated to the mundane in Rites of Passage, the mundane is rightly contextualized as holy. Rites of Passage gives us eyes to see; to recognize the sanctity not just in the splendor of stained glass but in the all too familiar hum of harsh, fluorescent lighting in the grocery store aisles; those lights become splendid multicolor glass, aisles in are transfigured into glorious pews of normalcy, the clerk’s face shines with the light of God, and as you unknowingly pass by a brother or sister in Faith you catch the scent, the aroma of Christ lingering on their collar, still.
The prose of the prayers in Rites of Passage reflects the poetical tradition of the Book of Common Prayer and carries with it a Eucharistic tone. From a liturgy for Embracing Adulthood I,“It seems the margins of my life have thinned even as the pressures have increased, like I’m rafting the chokepoint of a river canyon where the rapids narrow to a torrent and I’m fighting to stay upright as I thread that crashing cataract.” (Rites of Passage, 9). The imagery invoked is vivid and tangible. The imagery of our lives “thinning” contrasted up against the “crashing cataract” draws the Christian into meditation on the chaos of life, it’s psalmic. Here, in this prayer book, we will not find sublime prayers grasping towards aethereal heavens but humble, ordinary, earthy prayers seeking to “be content in all circumstances”. God is here, God is now, and we’re amiss when we equivocate the temporal with the unimportant. This life matters, every moment of it; it is holy. Time is a sacred gift, we live in it. If Creation is the theatre of our life then days, hours, and moments are the very tracks upon which the substance of our lives takes place. So we hallow it, we pray the Hours. We commemorate each moment and we recognize rites of passage as visible signs of invisible graces. Liturgical beauty is as mandatory as resting and waking is, in that it is woven into the fabric of our lives. We just need eyes for it; and Rites of Passage gives us those eyes.
Gen-Z Prayers
My generation has grown up as digital natives. I was less than a year old when the first iPhone was released. I have lived in a world of WiFi, Bluetooth, and screensavers from the moment I was born. And with that, Gen-Z has some particular struggles: because we were born at the same time as the mass adoption of smart phones, we were not always digitally catechized. The experience of scrolling mindlessly for prolonged periods of time has even been given a name, “doom-scrolling.” To say this has shaped our spiritual lives would be more than understatement. The inclusion of a prayer before scrolling, as well as doomscrolling at first seemed to me to be bleak, and it is bleak in one sense. But there is hope as well. The prayer begins,
“O Lord, I know these algorithms are designed to fuel an amplified feedback loop, a whirlwind pushing back to me ever more extreme versions of my own interests and opinions. These feeds feed my worst tendencies, trapping me in an insidious cycle of narrow perspectives and customized clickbait designed to rile my emotions.”
We’re caught up into a clear vision of what doomscrolling is, and the same could be said for much of digital media. Rites of Passage gives my generation something we have often lacked: prayerful consideration of technology; a prayerful slowing.
The prayer resumes, “…I would rather learn the slow discipline of contentment in you, O Christ—to practice your presence moment by moment; to be still and know you, to meditate on the eternal truths of your words, to have my heart steeped in your Spirit that I might become a more fitting agent of your mercies.”
Rites of Passage is leading us into true sacramental living. Sacramental living doesn’t seek God in the idyllic and serene alone, does it? No, sacramental living, sacramental Christianity recognizes all of life as an invitation into the depths of God, even the habits and actions we’d rather not bring up in our small-group Bible studies, like our habitual doomscrolling. The liturgy invites us into even the sour moments of daily living to meet with our Maker, who we bless for the creation, preservation, and blessings of this life.
We seek to be made aware of our mercies, so that in the midst of opening Instagram and swiping over to that tab again, we pause. We pause and we say a prayer recognizing the futility of this endeavor and the pure satiation we might find in Christ. Generation-Z knows the harms of doomscrolling, and other poor digital habits, all too well. Scouring looks and shaming glances will help about as much as a screen-time limit with a lock we know the passcode to. What we need is eyes to see, sacramental faith, sacramental living, so that we may live in an unceasing prayerful pause before God in every moment. If God is indeed present in every moment, then surely we can sing alongside the angels that every moment is “holy, holy, holy”.
Why Rites of Passage?
We exist in an anti-ritualistic culture. We reject ritual in favor of spontaneity. Tradition is falsely equivocated with meaningless repetition. However, repetition is actually what gives us a sense of meaning. A meal with friends is meaningful because you’ve done it before and it brings to mind the joy and grace of past meals. It is meaningful because it exists within a stream of continuity, and within that stream we see the reflection of our lives. Others before us have contributed to the act of a meal with friends and stockpiled meaning onto that event, onto that ritual. And it is indeed a ritual. You do the same thing each time. You prepare food beforehand, you set the table, you take your seat, you pray a blessing, you eat, so on and so forth. This was generally how the last meal went and most likely it will prefigure how the next one goes. It sits between the heritage of the past and the sure hope of the future. It is a rite of passage, though one we experience more often. We pass from hungry to full, from lonesomeness to togetherness. It is a journey through time and plates, through forks and space. And we exist also within the landscape of larger rites of passage: our first ride on a bike, our first day of school, our first kiss, the first break-up, or the first time a young girl puts on make-up; celebrations, weddings, the day we move out of our parents home, and our first partaking in Christ’s oblation. All of these things are rites of passage, in each of them we come out the other side formed by the experience, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. The changes that occur during the in-betweenness of it all can be horrifying and awe-inspiring, the moments under the baptismal waters of life are truly moments where we cannot breathe. Someone has to lift us up out of the waters, and it will have to be someone who has passed through them already. So this little book of prayers gives us words to call out for help when we have no words of our own. Rites of Passage gives us eyes to see but also lungs to breathe when we’re under the water.
Editor’s Note: This title was received by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
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