Man himself can not simply "make" worship: If God does not reveal Himself, man is clutching empty space. Moses says to Pharoah: "We do not know with what we must serve Lord" (Ex 10:26). These words display a fundamental law of all liturgy. When God does not reveal Himself, man can, of course, from the sense of God within him, build altars "to the unknown god" (Acts 17:23). He can reach out toward God in his thinking and try to feel his way toward Him. But real liturgy implies that God responds and reveals how we can worship Him. In any form, liturgy includes some kind fo "institution". It cannot spring from imagination, our own creativity -then it would remain just a cry in the dark or mere self-affirmation. Liturgy implies a real relationship with Another, who reveals Himself to us and gives our exis­tence a new direction.

In the Old Testament there is a series of very im­pressive testimonies to the truth that the liturgy is not a a matter of "what you please".  Nowhere is this more dramatically evident than in the narrative of the golden calf (strictly speaking, "bull calf"). The cult conducted by the high priest Aaron is not meant to serve any of the false gods of the heathen. The apostasy is more  subtle. There is no obvious turning away from God to the false gods. Outwardly, the people remain completely attached to the same God. They want to glorify the God who led Israel out of Egypt and believe that they may very properly represent his mysterious power in the image of a bull calf Everything seems to be in order. Presumably even the ritual is in complete conformity to the rubrics. And yet it is a falling away from. The worship of God to idolatry. This apostasy, which outwardly is scarcely perceptible, has two causes. First, there is a violation of the prohibition of images. The people cannot cope with the invisible, remote, and mysterious God. They want to bring Him down into their own world, into what they can see and understand. Worship is no longer going up to God, but drawing God down into one's own world.

He must be there when He is needed, and He must be the kind of God that is needed. Man is using God, and in reality, even if it is not outwardly discernible, he is placing himself above God. This gives us a clue to the second point. The worship of the golden calf is a self-­generated cult. When Moses stays away for too long, and God Himself becomes inaccessible, the people just fetch Him back. Worship becomes a feast that the community gives itself: a festival of self-affirmtion. Instead of being worship of God, it becomes a circle closed in on itself: eating, drinking, and making merry. The dance around the golden calf is an image of this self-seeking worship. It is a kind of banal self-gratification. The narrative of the golden calf is a warning about any kind of self-initiated ­and self-seeking worship. Ultimately, it is no longer concerned with God but with giving oneself a nice little al­ternative world, manufactured from one's own resources.

Then liturgy really does become pointless, just fooling around. Or still worse it becomes an apostasy from the living God, an apostasy in sacral disguise. All that is left in the end is frustration, a feeling of emptiness. There is no experience of that liberation which always takes place when man encounters the living God.

from Spirit of the Liturgy