ON MONDAY, the Church commemorates Dom Gregory Dix, who died on 12 May 1952, aged only 51. His great work The Shape of the Liturgy has had an immense influence not only for Anglicans, but on many other liturgical Churches. I read it as an ordinand, as we all did, but I also read it as a poet.

The heart of its 750 pages is all there in the title. The liturgy is not an itinerary, nor an inventory of all that we are called on to remember: it is a carefully and beautifully shaped vessel filled afresh at every celebration, to the brim and beyond, overflowing. It is also shaped in the sense that it shapes us, it shapes our experience. We enter into it in whatever state it happens to find us, often scattered, incoherent, unable, in the midst of busyness, to discern the shape and meaning of our lives.

But then the liturgy begins its work in shaping us, conforming us to the transforming shape, the ever-replenishing story of our salvation. The famous “four-fold action” that Dix discerned in the Last Supper, and showed to be present in all the historical variations of eucharistic liturgy — offertory, consecration, fraction, and communion — is not only what happens to the elements in the hands of the priest: it is also what happens to us, over a lifetime, in which the blessed and broken body, the freely offered blood, become part of who we are, and, in that communion, we become part of who Christ is.

The poet in me thrilled to that insight into shaping; for a poem is also, in its own smaller way, something lovingly shaped, something through which the reader passes, only to find that it is shaping them, shaping all their perceptions. The Shape of the Liturgy was the book that shaped the way in which I approached the celebration of the eucharist, because it told me that the poet in me could be as alert and present as the priest, that even if, after all my attempts, I failed to write a poem that was truly shaping, truly transformative, I could nevertheless utter into being the great primal poem of the liturgy itself, through which my community and I would be shaped and transformed.

The other part of that book that thrilled the poet in me was a particular passage of sheer prose-poetry that comes towards the end, a passage in which the liturgical scholar suddenly dons the robes of an inspired bard. There is not space here to give its full 359 words, but here is a little flavour:

“Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold . . . for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover . . . while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk. . . And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei — the holy common people of God.”