Kristor writes in response to Intellectual Revolutions:

Intellectual revolutions are almost my favorite thing. I love the feeling of things falling simultaneously apart and back together, into a better, stabler order of thought, the way that water flows back into the hole one creates with an oar, vortices upon vortices. When they say that nature hates a vacuum, what it means is that nature hates the absence of beauty. I remember many of my intellectual revolutions, better than I remember where I was when I heard Kennedy was shot. I remember understanding integral calculus deep in my heart, the tears rolling down my cheeks at the beauty of it. I remember learning why Evil is not a Problem (for Christians and Jews, that is). I remember finally “getting” Whitehead’s metaphysics. I am still working away, deep underground, at the Trinity. Dense earth indeed, that. 

So now here is the thing that made me want to respond to your post on Intellectual Revolutions. I find I have them almost every week now in Church; little ones, but they go deep. It happens like this. A sentence from the liturgy, or of Scripture, or from a hymn, that I have said or sung a thousand times, and that is no more remarkable therefore than a particular floorboard in my house, will suddenly leap up at me and make itself known, in a wholly new way. It is as if that floorboard, the sturdy patient platform of my worship, had revealed itself to be a book. The edge juts up a bit as I pace; I notice, stoop, gently tug; and up it comes, so that I see that I have been padding about my whole life on the spines of a great library of learned codices. Suddenly I apprehend the vast abysses of profound thought represented in that particular phrase, see the important pillars of doctrine and insight that it invokes, and grow dizzy at the giddy heights of spiritual attainment whereby it has been made known to us. Sometimes it isn’t even a phrase. Sometimes it is just a number: 7, say, or 3. The connections are revealed to me. Then I am glad, grateful, wakened and somewhat empty, a lovely readiness.  

This has been happening to me with great regularity, ever since my son almost died 10 years ago and I tasted Hell. At first, while he was still in the hospital, I had this sort of experience in response to all sorts of things: a girl walking with her mother, a plate of food, a leaf, a mess in the corner, a favorite old shirt, a swallow of beer or coffee; anything could reveal its Signification, and reduce me to tears. As he recovered, and then as I recovered, a more normal thickness of skin and eye and heart, a renewed blindness to luminosity, again mostly obscured my vision. My neck grew stiffer, from looking less often upward. But not so much at Church. There the meeting with Death and Hell is daily rehearsed; which is to say, effected. There the dragon’s dense dead skin is methodically, ritually ripped away all over again, to reveal the sacred innocent boy within. More or less; usually less, I fear. 

Now, I have much valued the old liturgies since I was a young man and the perfectly gorgeous 1928 Book of Common Prayer of my childhood was replaced with a vain and pathetic attempt to reproduce its majesty in PC form. Sort of like dressing a nun in a miniskirt, high-heeled boots, a halter top, and a wimple, you know? I was outraged, for with the change I could for the first time properly evaluate what had been lost. But, until I began having the experience of which I have here spoken, I had no argument for the preservation of old liturgical forms, other than an argument from their sublime beauty – a beauty invisible to the redactors, apparently. I.e., no very compelling argument at all. But now I have these experiences, and I understand why John insisted that not one word of his Apocalypse should ever be changed. The ancient liturgies are a precious, precious inheritance, an irreplaceable patrimony. Virtually every word of them was written by great saints, and their overall structure predates Israel. Bowdlerizing the Liturgy is like burning the Library of Alexandria, or throwing the icons into the Volga, or defacing the statues and smashing the stained glass of the Cathedrals. It is like – no, it just is, the last stage in the destruction of the monasteries. 

Which leads me to your most recent post, on the Happiest Mothers, who are happy because they are able to teach their children about the things they know are beautiful, good, holy, important. Mothers who thus teach are engaged in liturgy.

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