1) The liturgy is the speech of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The work of the Son and the Spirit is to bring us into being within this liturgy.
2) The speech of God creates speakers, who can ask God and respond to God with thanks.
3) The Holy Spirit asks the Father for us and the Father approves his request: their act of asking and granting is all the being we have. They bring us into being and make us social and vocal.
4) The people of this world give away what they have been given, refuse to pass it on as from God. They give themselves away, dedicate themselves to local powers, and defer to and promote the part over the whole.
5) They thereby create gods, and make gods of themselves. Gods are accumulations of wrongly-attributed respect, obstructions in the traffic of life and praise.
6) We can identify three levels of idolatry: detachment as such (Cause, Nature, Protology), the autonomous demonic detached observer (a personified figure), and the surface of merely apparent diversity (that we could call ‘modernity’); that is, the fundamental forces, the idol of the Individual, and the (illusorily diverse) world of that idol.
7) Every god is an anthropology that starts to bring into being the man it describes, and makes it impossible for such a man finally to come into being.
8) The effect of many gods is to create the One, in the figure of (1) the autonomous individual or detached observer, and in the figure of (2) the state. The effect of the One (individual) is to create the many forces (passions, diversity, choice), and the effect of the state is to create the detached observer. The detached observer is a personification and microcosm of the state.
9) The divine liturgy names the powers. It takes recognition away from the other gods and returns it to God, who returns it to us again in good order.
10) The liturgy interrupts us, dethrones us and drives the words of the rival masters out of us. It locks and unlocks creation to us. The divine liturgy unseats us as that detached observer who creates his own object and cannot receive any object (from God).
11) The liturgy of the Son animates us, takes away our paralysis, gives us sensation, teaches us to move and serve, ask and give thanks.
12) The liturgy opens and maintains the language within which you reach me and I am able to respond to you. It gives me the words by which I can raise you to God and see you as other than me.
13) For our sake the liturgy produces simpler versions of itself, that protect us from its full impact, while readying us to receive more. Most of the liturgy goes over our heads.
14) The liturgy is the fullness of time that holds itself back, and presents itself to us in serial form in order to ready us for increasingly thick and strong doses of time.
15) The saints are integrated into the work of re-membering and integrating of many disconnected times into the one time of the company of heaven. They are to be the voices of those without voice, and of keeping open the world’s crisis of identity.
16) Theology serves the liturgy, keeping Scripture, Church and world in conversation and confrontation.