Monthly Archives: January 2011

CWOB Posts: A Post-Mortem

My presentation for the Society of Catholic Priests on Communion without Baptism (CWOB) went up on the Episcopal Cafe last week. Due to its length, it was broken up into three parts:

The goal was to provoke thought about the issue and I think we did. Jim tells me that as of today, the pieces have a received a total of 5,800 page views. (How many of those were unique I don’t know,  but it’s still a lot of pondering…)

I think we reached a record on number of comments as well. Over the course of the series we had 138 comments. Editorial conflation of some edits drops the true number to 134.

What’s significant is that of these 134 comments, there were only 25 total commenters. Of these 25, 8 were responsible for 74% of the comments (100).  Within these, there were some clear “identities”.

  • 28 were from a couple who chooses to play the role of “village atheist” on the site
  • 34 were supporting the piece and were advocating for the traditional order of things (16 of these were my own comments)
  • 24 were defending the communing of the unbaptized from the “liberal establishment”
  • 14 were from a fellow contributor who seems to agree more with the traditional position but who was playing the role of “gadfly”

So—the comments display sustained argument within a small group with set convictions. While there was much discussion, I think there was little true give-and-take. I’m not about to change my position and neither were my interlocutors. On the whole, then, we may well have produced more heat than light in the comments.

A few thoughts on what I did see in the comments…

  1. Lack of Engagement. I didn’t see much engagement with the issues I was raising in the main body of the text. In particular, I think my main contribution to the debate was the notion of purpose, that “Discipleship, communal transformation into the Mind of Christ and love of God, is the fundamental pattern in the sacramental economy.” That’s not to say there was no engagement—Sara Miles and Donald Schell did address this topic albeit insufficiently to my mind. Far and away, though the conversation continually  returned to the notion of “inclusion”. Note this and note it well. What I take from this finding is that the center of the discussion about CWOB is not around sacramental theology. This is fundamentally not a debate about theology. If we continue to argue it as if it were a theological debate, we will go unheard and the majority of the church can and will be persuaded that CWOB is a good idea.
  2. The Proper Place of Inclusion.  I believe that most of the people arguing for CWOB believe that they are doing so for the right reasons, and I think that this movement is driven far more by identity issues than theology issues.  The Episcopal Church is branding itself as the welcoming church, the inclusive church. As this concept filters through the body, practices that appear to be unwelcoming or uninclusive are viewed by more and more as anti-Episcopal. I think that most people in our pews want to be nice and make people feel welcome. Too, they want to believe that their parish is the kind of place that makes people feel welcome and included (whether unbaptized people ever show up or not). One of the brief one-off comments encapsulates this view perfectly: “Perhaps giving communion to the unbaptized is the community welcoming the stranger?” This is the view that has and is taking root. Now—we don’t want to argue against inclusion for two reasons: 1) it really is part of the full Gospel message—that’s what the movement of grace to the gentiles is all about; 2) no argument is going to be won from a rhetorical perspective by being “anti-inclusion” or “anti-welcoming.” It’s just not going to fly (especially since it’s not what we really mean either). So—the discussion needs to be re-framed somehow. If, in a discussion around the topic of CWOB, you find yourself being portrayed as the “anti-” side in an argument for or against inclusion or welcoming, you got to take a step back and re-frame the debate. How—well, that’s the question, isn’t it? My current strategy is to move from Communion to Baptism. We are very inclusive when it comes to Baptism. We do want to welcome and include people at the altar and the way that we do that is by not only welcoming them to the altar but welcoming them to the font (first). Additional re-framing thoughts are welcome.
  3. What You Call It Matters. I noticed a new tack I hadn’t seen before in the comments: referring to Communion Before Baptism. I find this term very unhelpful because it elides away a major problem. One of the central problems of CWOB is that it does not take place within a communal sacramental framework that leads through Baptism to Discipleship. The use of “before” instead of “without” implies that Baptism will follow. And I simply don’t believe that the implication is true. I would be somewhat less concerned if I believed that follow-through were occurring and that those who communed out of ignorance or through misguided hospitality were directed from there to Baptism and discipleship—but that follow-through is fundamentally not on the radar for most places doing CWOB. And this may be one of the big differences between a place like St Gregory of Nyssa and other parishes. My sense is that St Gregory’s does do a better job at follow-through and, as a result, Donald Schell can point to people like Sara Miles who did come to discipleship through this process. But St Gregory’s is not the norm for places that offer CWOB.

Those are my thoughts—what are yours?

American Sarum: Sunday Afternoon

Session 5: Dr. John Harper: Sonic Ceremonial

This session was amazing. I don’t have learning to appreciate fully everything that he said, but it has taken my understanding of late medieval liturgy up a level. (That’s not to say that you had to have a lot of prior learning to get anything out of it, just that he covered the whole spectrum. A shotgun blast of erudition!) I received a strong sense of how intellectual my knowledge of liturgy in this period is; I know books and books about books. What I don’t know nearly as well are the spaces in which the liturgies were conducted, the timing of the various parts and how both of these overlapped.

Cathedrals: Multiple and Overlapping Spaces

Using the plans of Hereford Cathedral, Dr. Harper identified the three principal worship spaces within a late medieval cathedral.

The heart of the cathedral’s worship life is the choir (quire) which contained the high altar. This section is located literally at the heart of the cathedral where the two transepts come together. This is where the main body of canons would gather to sing the Offices and would celebrate the Mass of the Day. (I believe the organ is located here, but I can’t swear to it.)

To the east is the Lady Chapel. In this area, a separately funded body of people are attending to the various services for Our Lady. Thus, there was daily a Matins, Lauds, Vespers, and Compline of the BVM, the Lady Mass, and, after Compline, the Antiphon/Anthem ceremony when choral arrangements of the Antiphons (Alma Mater Redemptoris, Salve Regina, etc.) would be sung.

To the west of the Choir is the Nave or the parish church. You don’t see it in the 1950’s plans I inked to, but there was a stone pulpitum (essentially a big stone rood screen that you could get on top of—readings would be done from its top) that separated the Choir from the Nave. The Nave was the parochial space. The parish priest led masses, baptisms, weddings, funerals, and the Friday Jesus Mass in this space. However—note the aisle in the plan… On Sundays and Holydays processions that went forth from both the Choir and the Lady Chapel would travel around this space as the various services overlapped and inter-related. And it’s this inter-relation of space that must be considered to understand the full impact of sound and action in late medieval liturgy. There could literally be three different services going on at the same time—on in each of the three main spaces—and variously interacting with one another sonically if not physically. Indeed, there are surviving complaints from canons that the noise from the parish masses was interfering with their choir services.

The organ would only play on Sundays and Holydays and, I believe, supported what was going on in the Choir. Hearing this piece of information made me realize that I have to reconsider the old Lent and Advent restrictions on organ playing—these never originally applied to parish settings, as far as I can tell, and chiefly impacted the Choir only!

Rochester Cathedral: Who does what when

Who

Rochester Cathedral (note the photo of the in-place pulpitum with the pipe ranks atop it and the railing where the reader would stand to read into the Choir but be seen and heard in the Nave) which has its Lady Chapel in the South Transept gives us a great opportunity to look at exactly how worship would have been late out in the period after Henry VIII’s break with Rome but before the institution of the Book of Common Prayer. This is English Sarum in its heyday. The reason why it’s such a terrific case is because Rochester had been staffed by a Benedictine priory. With the dissolution of the monasteries in 1540, it was re-founded as a secular cathedral by letters patent in June of 1541. Bishop Nicholas Heath drew up a set of injunctions in 1543 and statues in 1544 to regulate the life and worship of the new cathedral structure.

Here’s the breakdown of people we find in Heath’s directions:

  • Dean and Chapter (7 people)
    • Dean
    • 6 canons
  • Choral Body (23 people)
    • 6 minor canons (clergy)
    • 6 clerks (lay or clergy)
    • 1 Master of Choristers
    • 8 Choristers
    • Deacon and Subdeacon
  • Grammar School (22 people)
    • 2 Instructors of Grammar
    • 20 Grammar boys
  • Church servants and poor men (12 people)
    • 2 Vergers
    • 2 Bellringers/sweepers
    • 2 Porters
    • 6 Poor men
  • Household Servants (4 people)
    • 2 butlers
    • 2 cooks

When

These people were then correlated to a chart that displayed how these various groups were deployed across the day for Holydays and Workdays. (The chart is copyrighted or I’d post it.) There are five possible staffing groups that were deployed for various services based on the service and the rank of the day:

  • Choristers: these were the 8 singers and their Master of Choristers who also doubled as the organist
  • Priests and clerks: these were the 6 minor canons and the 6 clerks (I don’t know if the Chapter is included here as I don’t know how often they were around. I expect that the deacon and subdeacon were in this group as well.)
  • Full choir: Choristers + Priests and clerks
  • Full choir & Grammar school: Like it says, full choir + boys
  • Said: It’s on the chart but isn’t explicitly described. Clearly the minimum necessary here is a priest and a server.

From the chart it’s clear that the Choristers and Master of Choristers are the main body for the Lady Chapel and the Priests & Clerks inhabit the Choir on Workdays. The Choristers are used for the Jesus Mass in the parish church on Fridays. On Holydays, the Full Choir and the Grammar School come together for big blowout events.

What

Since this was a conference for musicians, the “what” in this case was the music. There were three basic kinds of music used:

  • Plainsong—sung unison
  • Improvised polyphony (organum)—plainsong with two parts added, one moving in open fifths above, the other moving below by a fourth IIRC
  • Composed polyphony (pricksong)—this is the composed polyphony for a set of voices (anywhere from 3 to a maximum of 12 (!!)) that we’re used to from Byrd and others

On a regular workday, the only people who would be singing polyphony at Rochester Cathedral according to Bp. Heath’s directions were the Choristers when they sang at Lady Mass 8 AM every morning but Saturday. (On non-festal Saturdays, the Lady Mass was the Mass of the Day and was sung by the Full Choir at the main Mass of the Day slot; the Lady Mass was only “said” at 8 AM in the Lady Chapel). On the Eves of all Doubles (including Saturdays as eves of Sunday), the Full Choir sang the Anthem of the BVM in composed Polyphony. The Grammar School joined with the Full Choir for the Anthem on Holydays.  Thus, in the 8 surviving major sources of liturgical polyphony from the period,

  • 29% of the pieces are for the Mass
  • 33% of the pieces are for the Office
  • 39% of the pieces are for the Anthem

When it comes to the Mass, very little of the Propers get embellished. Instead what receives the embellishing is the Ordinary of the Mass. Again, most singers will be familiar with this as the major mass pieces are the Ordinary: Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei. (Note, though, that in Sarum non-votive masses, the Kyrie was troped and thus was part of the Proper, not the Ordinary—hence no Kyries in most Byrd Masses; it’s because they’re Sarum…)

In the Offices, the main areas for polyphony were the final Respond of Matins and the Magnificat (not the Benedictus, note). Compline was sung separately from Vespers and tended to be more formal (more formal than what I’m not sure—my notes don’t say: possible answers could be “than Vespers” or “than continental sources”).

As a side note, note that music composed for the Lady Chapel is small-space music—it wasn’t intended to fill the whole space of the cathedral because it didn’t have to.

Dr. Harper then displayed a fascinating chart that I didn’t have anywhere near time to copy down. It displayed the correspondence between liturgical “height” of a feast and the number of voices liturgical music (usually Masses) for the feast contained. It was a very clear distribution of kalendrical importance expressed through song. Christmas received pieces for 8 voices on one end of the spectrum; All Saints, and Feasts of Confessors and Martyrs received 5 at the other.

One of his main points in the discussion of music on the eve of the Reformation is how much of it survived. Organs narrowly missed being banned by one vote (in Parliament, I believe) and Elizabeth saved the choirs. As we consider late Medieval liturgy/music and the transition into the early Anglican experiment, the retention of music must be kept in mind.

Experiencing a Sarum Liturgy

The second part of Dr. Harper’s presentation was watching a video of a reconstruction of a Sarum service for the reconciliation of penitents. He asked us when we watched it to be aware of its effect on us from a few different angles. First, what does it mean to participate in a liturgy in a language we don’t understand but of which we know the general gist? Second, what is the lived impact of certain uses that seem boring on the page—like the prolonged recitation of the penitential psalms in plainsong—but may be more powerful in the experience?

The service was done at St Teilo’s, a church which is part of a Welsh museum, and which the Harpers (John’s wife is also a formidable scholar of medieval music and liturgy) and other scholars are using to learn more about the lived experience of medieval liturgy. Here’s a pdf of a paper on how liturgists might learn from it and some pointers on how a Sarum Mass might be done in this particular church.

Here’s at least a portion of the service we watched uploaded to YouTube. Jeremy Davies, precentor at Salisbury is serving as the priest, Dr. Harper is the second server.

I’ll put the next session in another post given the current length here…

American Sarum: Sunday Morning

I apologize for the significant delay in getting this out—most of my meager online time this week has been spent in the discussions at the Cafe…

The main event of Sunday morning was, of course, Mass at Christ Church, Bronxville according to their Sarum Use.

The difficulties with logistics came home to roost on Sunday morning. The hotel for the conference was a good fifteen to twenty minutes away from the church. With the number of people at the hotel, one shuttle was not sufficient for the number of attendees without cars. As a result, M and I had to go on the shuttle’s second trip and arrived late to the mass, coming in at the end of the Gloria. We started out seated in a side-aisle behind a pillar where we had no view at all of the chancel area but we moved during the offertory hymn to a spot in the nave where we could see what was going on.

Canon Davies preached the sermon—I quite liked it and thought he did a nice job weaving questions of identity and naming in the beginning of John with the I Am statements of that Gospel; others found it wordy and a bit diffuse.

Three points before I continue to the ceremonial:

  1. It was Mass; I was there to worship. As a result, I didn’t take notes and can’t draw out any schematics. What I am relating is what I can remember seeing based on where I was sitting. Other attendees with better views and/or memories should feel free to offer corrections!
  2. Dr. Percy Dearmer—by way of The Parson’s Handbook—is the best known and most authoritative proponent of the English Use. And that’s the term he uses: English Use. While much of the practices and principles are drawn from Sarum books, his goal was a synthesis of the tradition for his times that would preserve both the English and catholic heritage of the Church of England to be used in strict accordance with the rubrics of the authorized Prayer Book. At one point he writes: ” A great deal of harm has been done by the thoughtless use of the word ‘Sarum’ when the statements of the Prayer Book should have led us to the only exact word ‘English'” (PH 6th ed., 38). That the church identifies its use as Sarum suggests that it is in contact with Blessed Percy and his sources, but also that they are not full exponents of his English Use.
  3. I won’t (and can’t) go into detail on the history of the parish. However, it seems from the rector’s talk later in the day that the church had some early Dearmerite influence at its beginnings, and an influential clergy team later who introduced some aspects of the English Use. There was quite a gap, though, and the rector identified a number of ceremonial changes that he had made to make things more like they were before. As a result, I don’t know how long they have been doing things in the manner that I saw—I can only relate what was done on Sunday.

The service was a Rite II Holy Eucharist from the BCP. They used the high altar, celebrating eastward, which was appointed with riddel posts and riddels. Interestingly, the two angels holding the candles were facing each other rather than outward. There were three vested sacred ministers—the celebrant, deacon, and subdeacon—and the crucifer and thurifer both wore tunicles as well. All five had appareled amices, but I saw no appareling on the albs.  (Alb appareling is present in some of the recent photos in the parish books, though.)

These are the differences that I noticed from my Fortecue Anglo-Catholic parish:

  • There were no genuflections. (Dearmer insists on this.)
  • There was less incense than usual. While I thought I saw the top of the thurifer’s head in the gospel procession, I didn’t hear the pause-clank-pause of censing the book. After the censing of the altar—which the celebrant did alone—he pivoted then censed the choir and congregation with three long swings. Then the thurifer took back the thurible and censed him with three doubles. There was censing at the elevations. (Dearmer reserved censing for things not people and IIRC was against the notion of “double swings”)
  • At the Sursum Corda when the celebrant turned westward to speak to the people, the deacon and subdeacon on their respective steps turned to face each other (and the celebrant) in the “open position.” (I’m told this is a Dearmerite position but it’s not in the directions of the 6th ed. of the Parson’s Handbook; it could be a later concept.)
  • When the deacon and subdeacon lined up with the celebrant, it was always at the middle of the altar. I don’t recall seeing them line up together at either horn of the altar.
  • There were a few textual deviations from the BCP such as the inclusion of Ps 34:8 (“taste and see…”) after “Behold the lamb of God…” at the conclusion of the canon.
  • There was no offertory procession
  • The procession moved in the usual order (crucifer, torches, choir, clergy, celebrant last) as opposed to Dearmer’s order where the clergy are right after the torches and before the choir.

So, by my reckoning, the ceremonial of the parish was definitely catholic and had a fair amount of influence from Dearmer but was not wholly or strictly English Use. The most noticeable influence of English/Sarum custom was in the ornaments and vestments. An anglo-catholic like myself could point out a number of differences from “standard,” the most notable being the lack of genuflections. To an uninformed participant it would probably have seemed like a typical idiosyncratic anglo-catholic Mass.

The thing that surprised me the most wasn’t in the chancel, though. It was watching the congregation (those who weren’t there for the conference). Very few of them made manual gestures during the service; most exited the pew to receive the Sacrament with neither a bow nor genuflection. While the chancel action seemed standard catholic fare, I didn’t see much evidence of catholic practice in the pews. I don’t know if this relates to discontinuity in liturgical practice between rectors or other factors but the spirituality of the ceremonial did not appear to be present in the gathered body.

Admin Notes

I am slowly but surely working on getting my conference notes up. There was a lot going on at the conference, and my notes remain in a fairly rough form so the process of cleaning them up means that they’ll be appearing over the next few days.

In the meantime, the presentation that I gave to the Society of Catholic Priests on Communion Without Baptism is now appearing on the Episcopal Cafe.

American Sarum: Saturday Afternoon

Session 3: Dr. Allan Doig: The Revival of the Sarum Rite in the Nineteenth Century: Liturgy, Theology & Architecture

Dr. Doig is from Oxford University and has published most recently in the field of liturgy and architecture. He began and ended his presentation with references to the Directorium Anglicanum. Published in 1858, this was the first work to advocate a recovery of Sarum rubrics and ceremonial for application to the Book of Common Prayer (English 1662). After presenting a bit about the Directorium itself and the—literal—trials of its author, the Rev. John Purchas, Dr. Doig described the situations in England that led up to it.

In the early nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing. It brought great inequity between the rich and poor and caused major shifts in the population distribution of England. The lower classes were ill-served by the Established church and Non-conformism was on the rise. With the flood of people out of the country and into the cities, the church was caught flat-footed: there qere too many clergy in the rural areas and not nearly enough in the cities. Whereas the Established Churchneededboth houses of worship and clergy, the Baptists and Methodists were able to hire halls and provided lay preachers wherever a need arose.

In 1818, the government tried to address the problem by setting aside a million pounds for the building of 96 churches. A few years later the concept was replicated with a larger scope—but far fewer resources; half a million pounds were set aside for building 450 churches. The result was an architectural style referred to as “Commission Gothic” which was a thinly Gothicized preaching box. These measures helped, but didn’t solve the problem.

In 1833,the Tractarian movement kicked off with Keble’s preaching of the “National Apostacy” sermon. In the same year, A. W. Pugin conducted a tour of English architecture and churches. He connected the spread of modern architecture with a degradation in modern morals. Gothic architecture, on the other hand, had a higher moral structure literally built into it. The symbolism and encoded meanings built into Gothic architecture made it, Pugin believed, a greater vehicle for truth. He found the faith encoded in the Gothic buildings more compelling than what was being preached and, in 1834 as a result of his architectural study, Pugin joined the Roman Catholic Church. Conversely, he associated the lack of architectural integrity in the more recent church buildings with the failures of the Established Church. Perhaps in part because of his route into the Roman Catholic Church, Pugin’s Catholicism had much in common with a medieval, Sarum perspective—it was romantic, aesthetic, and was nurtured in an environment replete with meanings.  

The Tractarian Movement, on the other hand, was well under way in 1834. It had already penetrated to the rural regions and the Tracts for the Times were making their impact felt. The catholicity of the Tracts was rather different from what Pugin desired—he wished to see a return of medieval rite and ceremonial; the Tractarians had quite different goals. Nevertheless, there were some interesting intersections between the two.

John Henry Newman made his decision to swim the Tiber in 1845. Before leaving for studies in Rome, he attended the consecration of one of Pugin’s churches, St Giles, in 1846. He described the building in literally glowing terms. He called it the most splendid building that he had ever seen. Newman’s subsequent discovery of the Baroque cooled his enthusiasm for Pugin’s work. In later years when he preached at another of Pugin’s churches Newman found the altar too small for a proper Solemn High Mass, its tabernacle too small for a proper exposition, etc. Pugin and Newman butted heads on a number of occasions due to competing views on the liturgy and the architecture necessary for its performance. Pugin envisioned a medieval rite like Sarum; Newman, a Baroque Roman.

While the Oxford Movement spawn an Oxford society on architecture that offered advice on building churches in England and in the far-flung English colonies, the Cambridge Camden Society began the central architectural powerhouse of the mid nineteenth century. Founded by Benjamin Webb and John Mason Neale, their views were far more strident than those of the Oxford group. Articles in the Ecclesiologist called for a recovery of medieval practices for use with the prayer book. They wanted a more frequent and elaborate celebration of the Eucharist and were the first to point to the Ornaments Rubric and its importance. Not everyone agreed, however, and they faced significant persecution for their stances; Webb was inhibited for 16 years as a result of his ritualizing ways.

 The central medieval touchstone for the Cambridge Camden Society was the writings of Durandus of which they released a translation in 1843. Inspired by his work, the society promoted “architecture with an agenda.” They won and the Cambridge Camden Society, later known as the Ecclesiological Society , and its aesthetic concepts became the norm for Anglican church buildings. With the renewed vigor of the English Church through the Oxford and Cambridge Movements, some 4,000 churches were built or reconditioned between the 1830s and 1870s. The great majority of these followed the precepts of the society. While Pugin had converted to the Roman Church, he was not in principle a Romanist and shared much in common with the Ecclesiologists.

It is at this point—with the maturity of Pugin, with the success of the Ecclesiological Society—that Purchas’s Directorium Anglicanum appeared. The Directorium insisted that the rubrics of the BCP were incomplete as they stood—some other information was needed to complete them and that the answer lay in the pre-Reformation era. The section “Of Ceremonies” in the 1662 BCP gave some hints and nods towards late medieval practice, Purchas believed. As a result, the Directorium cites medieval precedents, appealing to contemporary Roman ceremonial when a medieval source could not be found. Whenever possible, though, he preferred a medieval Sarum source.

What the Directorium did was to give directions for ceremonial that fit the shape of the buildings that the Ecclesiologist Society had prepared. The shape was there—Purchas provided the ceremonial that worked in them. As a result, the Directorium became the main authority for rite and ceremony in the Church of England for the next half-century.

Session 4: Canon Jeremy Davies, Precentor of Salisbury Cathedral

This presentation is harder to describe because so much of it was based around the PowerPoint presentation of photographs of the liturgies from Salisbury Cathedral. As a result, I won’t be able to do it true justice in a written format.

He began with the question of how a diverse modern community inhabits, uses, and worships within a medieval building—how do they go about being good heirs of a medieval structure?  Peter Brook, an English theatre director, wrote against the newly rebuilt Coventry Cathedral—the building was constructed first, then the church considered how to use it. This is backwards: the ceremony has to come first.

In the medieval world, this was the case. The ceremony did come first and the cathedrals were built to enable and to shape it. When Richard Poore began the construction of the current cathedral at New Sarum, he brought more than a new ground plan; he had studied at the University of Paris and brought back the new theology, a new mindset, and the desire to create something innovative. Just as he brought back the new Scholastic theology, he brought the new Gothic architecture to replace the old monastic styles. The Sarum Rite was first of all rooted in the Roman Rite of the Western Church. While the Roman Rite progressively simplified, the Sarum Rite remained elaborate. [I believe this was a reference to the liturgical reforms along Franciscan lines eventually leading to Trent and the Tridentine forms but I’m not positive of that…] Poore knew that the ceremony had to come first and would dictate the shape of the space; he had the advantage of having experienced the Old Sarum cathedral first.

At this point, the presentation moved into a lengthy presentation of the conduct of the modern Easter Vigil in the Salisbury Cathedral space. Processions remain an important part of the liturgy at Salisbury and the Easter Vigil is no exception. The description that he gave seemed to show a negotiation between a medieval space and a standard Liturgical Renewal Movement ceremony (complete with a recently-added LRM fountain-style font that looks quite out of character with the rest of the building).  

 Cocktail Hour

The day concluded with cocktails at the nearby house of a member of the parish. The finger-foods were delicious , and the setting delightful. We met a number of interesting people, including a number of folks who read the blog, and caught up on doings back in Atlanta with Bishop Whitmore, the assisting bishop of the diocese.

American Sarum: Saturday Morning

Morning Prayer

The day’s events opened with a sung service of Morning Prayer. As you can imagine at a conference of Anglican musicians, the singing was wonderful. The psalms were well-chanted by all; standing in the midst of the congregation singing the hymn was a great experience. Morning Prayer occurred and God was duly worshipped.

It was a perfectly acceptable prayer book service, but I was confused at some of the choices made. The psalms were chanted with the cantor singing the first half of the verse and the congregation singing the second half—I don’t believe I’ve ever experienced that before and found it unusual. The canticle following the single reading was the Te Deum. While I would have chosen the Benedictus on principle, the Te Deum is a perfectly legitimate choice—but the Suffrages were set A. Our current Suffrage B is the set that the West has historically appended to the Te Deum. The ’79 BCP detatched them from the Canticle and appointed them as an option, making them the natural choice when the Te Deum is used.

The combination of these choices made me wonder—if the conference is on American Sarum, why not do a more Sarum-style Office? Why not use the Benedictus, and if the Te Deum is used, why not use the suffrages sung with it at Salisbury? Why not use Sarum practice in chanting the psalms? The implication is that the Sarum Use is exclusively a Mass use. And it may be at this particular church—I haven’t seen any references to public Offices. But it needn’t be and shouldn’t be; a use that consciously engages the Sarum tradition is missing a significant piece of that tradition if it omits the Offices.

Session I: Fr. Unterseher

The first session was by Fr. Cody Unterseher, a priest associate of the parish who is finishing a PhD in Liturgics at Notre Dame, and a member of the Pray Tell blogging team. This session was focused around the notion that, contrary to the oft-repeated parish phrase, no—we haven’t always done it that way. Thus, as a theory-based introduction to the conference as a whole, it served as a reminder that there has always been diversity in Christian liturgy. Drawing on the work of Paul Bradshaw and others, Fr. Unterseher noted that discontinuity is as much a feature in Christian liturgy as continuity. No—we haven’t always done it that way. While I do have some quibbles with some of his historical points—particularly around what level of continuity did exist and an overly hasty dismissal of the Ornaments Rubric—the presentation did a good job of introducing non-specialists to the legitimate discontinuities in the liturgical past. The purpose of this historical introduction was make the point that discontinuities are not uncommon in our liturgical record—and we now live in a situation of much change and turbulence. We should’t let how we’ve done thing in the past hold us back from what we could be doing and how we can leverage our historical resources to help us in this new situation.

Session 2: Dr. John Harper

This session was one of the reason I came to this conference and Dr. Harper did not disappoint. In a fast-paced and data-rich hour, Dr. Harper walked us through the key points grounding the medieval Use of Sarum. He began by reminding us that there was a clear and distincive Ecclesia Anglicana that authorized the Sarum Use between 1534-1549. During this fifteen-year period between Henry the 8th’s definitive break with Rome and the introduction of the first Book of Common Prayer, England was a church apart from papal domination that authorized the Sarum Use as the official use of the realm. Homing in on the word “Use,” he challenged the typical protestant equation of Use with texts and suggested that we gain a fuller sense of the term is we understand a Use to be the confluence of:

  • Materials—both texts and objects
  • People—both as offices held by individuals and the personalities who inhabit those offices
  • Place—meaning both a geographical location and the normative worship spaces
  • Time—used in a general periodic sense but also referring to the local sense specific to a day and place

He then explicated these four factors with a wealth of detail and a fantastic set of slides which included the two cathedral sites at Old and New Sarum and the major stages in the construction of New Sarum. This was coupled with a discussion of the major individuals—mostly bishops—who saw the growth and expansion of Sarum and how the community of canons likewise grew until it reached a stabilized number of 52 canons on a quarterly rotation in New Sarum.

Regarding the spread of the Sarum Use he noted that it was one of the earliest coherently codified Uses in England; due to the cathedral’s shift to New Sarum and Richard Poore’s compilation of the customary and ordinal for the new building, Sarum offered a clearly defined system which other dioceses could borrow for use and adaptation. Furthermore, Sarum Use was frequently adopted by parishes in diocese which retained a monastic cathedral. Since parishes couldn’t use monastic uses without significant adaptation, the secular Sarum Use was a natural substitute for writing/compiling their own.

Dr. Harper’s final point was to return to the concept of a Use as something very much more than just a text. Medieval liturgy was very much a “sensory polyphony” where a variety of sights were overlaid by a variety of sounds and a variety of smells. Texts, actions and movements were also layered with the various parts of the worshipping body participating in different activities at the same time and only coming together at the main cofluences of the liturgy like the Great Elevations.

We were left with a sense of the wealth and richness of the liturgical environment and the possibilities that existed for us in appropriating even a bit of these for our current context.

American Sarum: Friday Night

M and I arrived at the conference late Friday afternoon and have been on the run until now. I’m stealing a moment between arriving for coffee and heading up to Morning Prayer. As a result, I’ll be putting out a few thoughts now that I may go back and fill in later. (Do let me know if there are specific points you’re interested in.)

The conferece is very well attended—indeed, I think that there are more participants than the organizers initially expected and there are moments when the logistics seem clearly scaled to a smaller crowd. There are about 100 participants; I’d guess that about two-thirds are musicians, the other third being clergy. Among the clergy there’s a nice group representing the Society of Catholic Priests.

The main activity of the night was a concert by the Trinity Wall Street choir singing medieval English music. The first half was music from the thirteenth century to the Eton Choirbook (c. 1500). The second half offered selections from composers during Queen Mary’s restoration of the Sarum Rite between Edward and Elizabeth. The music was glorious.

MP calls… More later.

Englishing Sarum

Time and leisure being what they are, this post will be far more a set of pointers than a properly-researched orderly exposition. I’ll loop back and hit Late Sarum later—I think it more important for the purposes of the coming American Sarum conference to consider a key step in the Sarum story: its leap to the modern day.

I choose the somewhat unwieldy “Englishing” quite deliberately because I want to highlight two of its sense, both of which are fully at play. The first is that, for the Sarum materials to have an impact on the England the America of the modern day, they had to leave the language of Latin and enter the tongue of English. This is the simplest meaning of the term.

However, something else is going on here as well. As a recent commenter pointed out in regard to another topic, you can never go back again. Bringing something forward from a past time into a present gives it a whole new set of meanings based on the new context, how the present context views the past, and the purposes and ideologies involved in selecting and reviving this particular slice of the past (and not others). There was a very deliberate program of “Englishing” at work in the 19th century revival of Sarum.

One of the key movements in 19th century, particularly Victorian, England was Gothic Revival. This was a confluence on romanticism, medievalism, and nationalism that found expression in a variety of ways. The term is most commonly associated with architecture, but it stands at the heart of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) and became a major cultural force.

Pause for a moment to consider King Arthur. Unless you’re a trained medievalist, your chief exposure to King Arthur and the Round Table is fundamentally rooted in Gothic Revival forms of romanticized medievalism lavishly illustrated by some of the great painters produced by the philosophy of the PRB. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King is a classic example of how these movements filtered into the broader English consciousness.

Catholic expressions of Anglicanism (i.e., Anglo-Catholics and other folks) typically trace themselves back to the Oxford Movement—and this is correct in a general theological way. The Oxford Movement was not Anglo-Catholic, though, and readers of the Tracts are often surprised at the amount of weight given to topics like bishops and the relationship between Church and State rather than ritual or ceremonial. The movement that had more impact on the daily practice and perception of the Church of England was the Cambridge Movement which birthed the Cambridge Camden Society which would become the Ecclesiological Society and exerted a disproportionate influence on how churches were built, decorated, and appointed. The Cambridge Camden Society, founded by Blessed John Mason Neale and comrades, was explicitly and fundamentally medievalist in orientation. The majority of Neale’s hymns are translations of medieval texts and even his original compositions—like Good King Wenceslaus—are medieval in character.

It’s within this context that a renewed interest in Sarum sources began. If you check back to the previous post on editions, you’ll note that the Victorian period—the second half of the 19th century—is when the publishing really took off. Because of the ideologies surrounding the revival, “Victorian Sarum” is both more and less than “historical Sarum.” Translations and syntheses of “Sarum” practice became an odd amalgamation of 1) historical sources, 2) contemporary Roman Catholic practice, and 3) the authors’ fancy. The balance of these three components varies by author and by work, some being more grounded, some being more fanciful.

Sarum becomes a cypher for a host of things. Sarum becomes directly equated with English. Thus other regional uses like Hereford, Lincoln, Exeter, and York were both plundered for raw material when there were Sarum gaps, and were downplayed in order to keep Sarum front and center. (Christopher, Pfaff’s chapter 14 is entitled “Regional Uses and local variety” and covers the English non-Sarum material quite well.)  When Sarum is equated to English then it was given a natural antithesis: Roman. Now, a more objective view will recognize that in the heyday of the Sarum Use there was no strictly “Roman Use.” The sense I get from what little I do know of late medieval Continental uses is that many of them had their own local customs and traditions. There was no monolithic “Roman” practice from which Sarum diverged, and it was probably as unique as its neighbors. My sense is that when Rome did move to standardize, it relied on the liturgical uses of the mendicant orders—particularly the Franciscans because the orders were already trans-regional (due to the whole “wandering” bit implied in “mendicant”).

Thus, if you wanted to espouse catholic practices but still keep a certain distance from Roman Catholicism and all that stood for in pre-Victorian and Victorian England, an appeal to “Sarum” was your key. It was both medieval and catholic but conceptually not Roman Catholic. It was native and English, and not a foreign imposition. Too, there’s the “Ornaments Rubric” which deserves a massive post of its own for the role it played—or was given to play—in grandfathering in Sarum appointments and ceremonial.

There’s quite a lot more to say here. Actually, there are probably several book-length studies that could written here. I don’t know if any have and would love to hear if you know of any…

In any case, given the current concerns, I want to point to just three resources. These are what I consider to be the three central works on Sarum/English ceremonial from the end of the 19th century and that have done the most to create what is referred to variable as the Sarum or English Use:

  • Vernon Staley’s Ceremonies of the English Church
  • W. H. Frere’s Principals of Religious Ceremonial
  • Percy Dearmer’s Parson’s Handbook

Each of these is available for download from Google Books and each deserves a post in their own right.