Monthly Archives: April 2013

Prayer Book Thoughts

As is usual, I’ve got a number of projects going on across a variety of burners. One of them is a project for Scott Gunn and the folks at Forward Movement on the prayer book. As a result, I’m doing some writing and thinking and reworking of material that’s appeared in a variety of places. The section I’m working on right now is a preliminary part that wrestles with liturgical spirituality as it applies to liturgical practice.

This is a first draft.

I’ve both written some material here and cobbled in some previously written bits that’s moving towards a whole—but isn’t there yet. As I think through this stuff out loud, though, I welcome your thoughts, comments, and push-back.

The audience here is both laity and clergy, but with an eye more to laity—I’m trying to keep the tone and content on the lighter side. No footnotes.

Let me know what you think, and we’ll see where it goes…

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The American 1979 Book of Common Prayer is the official worship resource for the Episcopal Church. On one hand, it stands in the tradition of the English and Scottish Books of Common Prayer that stretches back to the middle of the sixteenth century—all of which partake in the great stream of the Historic Western Liturgy that can be traced back to the Apostolic Age with notable periods of formation in the sixth and eighth centuries. On the other hand, it also participates within the recent ecumenical Liturgical Renewal Movement fostered by the Roman Catholic Second Vatican Council (1962-5) that re-energized liturgical scholarship by looking at the fourth century—the earliest period of church history for which we have solid liturgical documentation. So—it’s a book with a very old heritage that has recently been updated with the best modern thinking about what the early church was up to.

Because there are a lot of historical things that can be said about the prayer book and about the services contained in it, many folks who try to teach about the prayer book start from an historical angle. I’m not going to do that. Don’t get me wrong—the history is important if you want to know how these things developed; we will talk about some historical stuff and about how things changed over the years. But neither do we want to confuse the act of describing development with the act of enriching spirituality. The history can help you understand why some material has been put together; but that—on its own—won’t help you use that material to grow in love towards God and neighbor. As a result, I’m going to focus on the prayer book as it is now, and pull in the history as it helps us understand why we pray as we do and how we can do it better!

I want to start with three fundamental statements about the prayer book from which everything else proceeds. First, the prayer book is best understood not as the Sunday service book, or even as a collection of services, but as a complementary system of Christian formation. Second, this system with its interlocking cycles has a coherent spiritual purpose. Third, this system as enshrined in the successive Books of Common Prayer is an essential part of what it means to participate in the Anglican tradition.

The Prayer Book System

When we consider the table of contents of the Book of Common Prayer, we note that—broadly—there are three kinds of services. First, there are those that take us a life-cycle arc from birth to death that are chiefly of a pastoral nature (meaning that there’s a particular event or life-experience that is bringing the priest and the people together at that moment). Thus, there are services that take us from “Thanksgiving for the Birth of a Child,” to “Baptism” (infant baptism being typical, if not the norm), to “Confirmation,” to “Marriage,” to “Reconciliation of a Penitent” to “Burial.” Second, there are those services that order our worship on a regular repeating basis. The liturgical round is made up of three components: the liturgical calendar where we reflect upon our central mysteries through the various lenses of the seasons of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ and in his continuing witness in the lives of the saints, the Daily Office where we yearly immerse ourselves in the Scriptures and Psalms, and the Holy Eucharist where we gather on Holy Days to most perfectly embody the Body of Christ and receive the graces that the sacraments afford. Third, there are the services for ordaining and consecrating the clergy of the church: deacons, priests, and bishops. (Sometimes these are conceptually grouped together and called “the ordinal.”)

Of these three kinds of services, the second (the regular repeating ones) constitute the theological, spiritual, and practical heart of the prayer book. Again, these are the Daily Offices (consisting of Morning Prayer, Noon Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Compline) and the Eucharist also called Holy Communion. However, they are dispersed through the book in such a way that their importance, their various elements, and their relationship are not easily identified. Grasping the content and nature of these services is the key to understanding the spiritual structure offered by the prayer book.

If the standard by which you measure the services of the church is Sunday morning, you might wonder why they are grouped together in this way. After all—that was one of the big shifts between the current prayer book and the way Sunday was done before it: Morning Prayer used to be the standard Sunday service, now the Eucharist is the standard. It appears that one displaced the other, and functionally that is the case, but when we take a big step backward and get a bigger picture historically, we realize that this is a set of false options.

Indeed, the Sunday morning “either/or” is a relatively recent occurrence historically. The first Anglican prayer books replicated the Sunday morning pattern of services that they inherited from the Western liturgical tradition: Morning Prayer followed by the Litany followed by the Eucharist. All three services were done one after the other! After the Reformation, the piece that got dropped was the consecration of the Eucharist itself: they would do Morning Prayer, the Litany, and the Holy Communion service through the readings, sermon, creed, and prayers but then would stop. (Sometimes the Eucharist was only consecrated three or four times a year!) It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that Episcopal clergy even had the option of doing either Morning Prayer or Holy Communion. So the “either/or” had classically been a “both/and.”

The heart of the prayer book system is given to us in the first real sentence of the first real section of the prayer book:

The Holy Eucharist, the principal act of Christian worship on the Lord’s Day and other major Feasts, and Daily Morning and Evening Prayer, as set forth in this Book, are the regular services appointed for public worship in the Church. (p. 13)

Here in this sentence are the three key items that we identified above. The establishment of “the Lord’s Day and other major Feasts” is determined by the Calendar; the Holy Eucharist and Daily Morning and Evening Prayer alternate as central public services.

Starting with the Calendar, we must begin with the recognition that most human measures for marking time are social constructs. That is, nature gives us a few points upon which we hang our hats. The motion of the sun determines two main things: day and night, and a year broken into four quarters based on our motion around the sun. The motion of the moon provides us with another measure but, as it does not match with the solar cycle, causes more complexity than it solves. Given the sparse directions given by the world around us, the majority of the methods by which we keep time say more about “us” and what we think is important than they do about the nature of time itself.

Like the natural world, the Book of Common Prayer has seasons. However, rather than pointing to agricultural potential or lack thereof, the prayer book constructs time around the person of Jesus in a set of seasons referred to as the Temporal cycle. While the Sanctoral cycle (which celebrates the saints) logically follows subsequent to the Temporal cycle, it is super-imposed upon the year as a succession of static days mostly independent of the seasons. The way that the prayer book orders time, then, is supposed to tell us something about our priorities. Time itself is provided with a Jesus-colored lens.

Now we move to contemplate the Eucharist and Office. The liturgy of the Western Church—especially liturgy that partakes of a monastic spirit—can be described as (among other things) a disciplined and bounded encounter with Scripture. That is, under the early medieval monastic ideal—lifted up as a worthy pattern in the preface to the first prayer book in 1549—the Scriptures were read yearly in the Office; then the Mass could cherry-pick small sections of text (known as “pericopes”) at its leisure, firm in the knowledge that—thanks to the constant repetition of Scripture—the congregation would immediately recognize the proper text and recall its literary context.

Thus, in the Office the Psalms, the garden from which the fruit of all the other Scriptures may be plucked (as Athanasius put it),  would be repeated regularly (weekly, monthly or 8-weekly), and the bulk of Scripture read through every year or two depending on how many lessons you use at Evening Prayer.  This is fundamentally catechectical—it teaches. This pattern grounds us in the stories, the laws, the histories, and the laments of the people of God that illuminate and inform our own experiences.  Too, the canticles serve an important function. They aren’t just praise-bits stuck in with the “real” material, rather they are lenses and orienting devices to help us interpret the readings—especially the set traditional canticles.

The Eucharist, then, as it rolls through the seasons, offers us not only a weekly (or more frequent) experience of the grace of God but allows us to hear and experience the Good News in several major modes: expectation, joy, enlightenment, penitence, celebration—the principle Christian affections. If the Office is primarily catechetical, the Eucharist is primarily mystagogical. That is, it leads us by experiences of grace into the mystery of God and the relationship that God is calling us into with him and with the entire created order through him.

The final aspect of the Prayer Book system is that the Calendar, the Office, and the Eucharist all form us for a continual practice of personal prayer; while the prayer book gives us the words for our common prayer, these words likewise offer models for how we converse with God in our private and passing moments.

The Spirituality of the Prayer Book System

The purpose of any spiritual system is to bring the practitioner and their community into a deeper relationship with God—to create a family of mature Christians. Through their increasing awareness of who God is, how much God loves them and all of creation, they translate that love they have been shown into concrete acts of love and mercy in the world around them. There are several different strategies that different spiritual systems use to accomplish this. One of the classic ones—referred to in St Paul’s direction to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17)—is the recollection of God. The idea here is that if we can continually keep in mind the goodness of God, the constant presence of God, and an awareness of the mighty works of God on behalf of us and others, that we will more naturally and more completely act in accordance with God’s will and ways. Continual recollection is nearly impossible, but there are methods to help us in this habit.

A primary goal of liturgical spirituality is to create a disciplined recollection of God. Thus, if we specifically pause at central points of time—morning and evening; noon and night; Sundays and other Holy Days—to reorient ourselves towards God and the mighty acts of God, whether recalled to us through the Scriptures or experienced by us through direct encounters with the sacraments, then this discipline will lead us towards a habitual recollection of God.

In the liturgical round, the Book of Common Prayer gives us specific moments to stop and orient our time and ourselves around the recollection of God. As a result, one of the most important parts of the book is the Daily Office section that provides forms for prayer at morning, noon, evening and night. These prayer offices are our fundamental tool for disciplined recollection; they provide the foundation for our spiritual practice. This foundation, then, is punctuated by the Eucharist on Holy Days (at the least). And, conceptually, this is how we should view Sundays—not the day of the week on which we go to church—but as a Holy Day which recurs on a weekly basis.

While this sounds all awfully churchy it’s actually not. Indeed, this liturgical structure was mediated into the prayer-book tradition by a spiritual devotion for the laity. The idea of the Daily Office was originally a regular communal practice. By the end of the 4th century, it was transitioning into a monastic practice and began to be less of a feature in lay life. By the medieval period, it was expected that the laity would be at Matins (Morning Prayer) and Vespers (Evening Prayer)—as well as Mass—on Holy Days. With the rise of lay literacy in the High Medieval period, though, came the Books of Hours. These were the central devotional books used by laypeople (men and women alike) and they contained a cycle of offices that followed the basic structure of the monastic and priestly Office books but with fewer psalms and greatly reduced seasonal variations. On the eve of and during the English Reformation, the Latin Books of Hours and the English-language prymers held an important place in the devotional lives of upper- and middle-class lay Christians who prayed these several Offices on a daily basis. The Daily Offices that appeared in our initial 1549 Book of Common Prayer—and in every book subsequent—are equally derived from these lay prymers as well as the Sarum breviaries.

The Prayer Book System and the Anglican Tradition

This pattern of prayer—the Daily Offices prayed twice a day and the Eucharist at least weekly if not more frequent—is the common heritage of the Christian Church. The Eastern Orthodox Churches have it; the Roman Catholic Church has it; the Anglican Churches have it. All of these churches understand that not everybody is going to be doing all of this praying all of the time—and that’s ok. However, in the Eastern and in the Roman Catholic traditions, the Daily Offices (the Divine Praises and Liturgy of the Hours respectively) are practically the province of clergy and monastics. Lay people, for the most part, are not aware of them or encouraged to do them. Indeed, Roman Catholic spirituality since the time of the Reformation has emphasized daily Eucharist to the point that any other kind of daily service would be considered odd! Of the churches that have retained it, the Anglican churches are the only ones that have consistently insisted by means of the prayer book that clergy and laity alike should be participating in this cycle of worship, formation, and transformation on a daily basis. I say “by means of the prayer book” advisedly… Our books insist on it, but that doesn’t mean that the people have always practiced it and that the clergy have always taught it!

However, many of the reform movements within Anglicanism have been anchored by a call back to the prayer book system. We see it with the Caroline Divines; we see it with the Oxford Movement; we see it with the Victorian English Revival. We even see it with the life-long Anglicans John and Charles Wesley—the prayer book system is part of the “method” that earned the (originally) derisive name of “Methodism!”

Can you be an Anglican without engaging, practicing, knowing, or caring about the prayer book system? Of course—millions of Anglicans do it every day! But can you be an Anglican who claims to be engaged in the art and practice of spirituality without grappling with this system? Well—as the prayer book represents one of our central threads of continuity through the ages and across the world, it’d be hard to make a case for that. This is the homeland of Anglican spirituality. Even when Anglican churches and their flocks have not been diligent in inhabiting the system, there is value in realizing that it exists, seeing it as a devotional ideal, and understanding our own efforts with the larger picture of the Church’s spiritual work.

Criteria and Virtues

Abba Anthony said, “Whoever hammers a lump of iron, first decides what he is going to make of it, a scythe, a sword, or an axe. Even so we ought to make up our minds what kind of virtue we want to forge or we labor in vain.”

I’ve been rolling around our current criteria for sanctity in my head as well as my own understanding of our theology of sanctity. Our criterion 2 “Christian Discipleship” is rather broad and vague. Indeed, that’s not necessarily surprising as discipleship comes in a variety of forms. But, what if—as a way of focusing our thoughts—we identified the specific virtues of Christ that we see manifested most fully in the given individual?

The value here is that it accomplishes a couple of things. First, it brings the basic vocabulary of the virtues back before the eyes of the church, reminding them of our ascetical theology. Second, it reiterates a sound theology of sanctity which does not praise individuals for their individuality but which understands them to be participating in the virtues of Christ.

Of course, this does raise the issue of what list of virtues to use—and there are any number to chose from whether that be the classic list of the seven (fortitude, temperance, wisdom, justice, faith, hope, love) or one of the list ennumerated in Scripture or a combination of several. Again, this leads us back to us as a church and how we understand the Christ-like virtues most needful now.

For instance, Catherine of Siena might be (wisdom, temperance) or (wisdom, reconciliation, service). [But are the last two virtues or charisms—should there be a distinction between the two; can there be a distinction? Gonna have to think about that…]

Thinking on the Laity

A few days ago, I was stomping around the house muttering things about clergy having become quite annoyed with a set of them and it got me to thinking…

When I was in seminary—fifteen years ago now (?!)—one of the concerns that I heard expressed was around who was being sent. It seem like anyone who expressed any sort of interest in religion or theology beyond Sunday School got packed off to Seminary. It was almost as if the next logical step after Disciple (this was a Methodist school) was seminary! There are a couple of implications here:

  • It meant that the first year of seminary had to be spent in remedial catechesis because many folks hadn’t been fully formed.
  • It also meant that many local churches were losing their models of what an informed and engaged lay person looks like.

Things aren’t exactly the same in the current Episcopal Church—but I don’t think they’re all that different either.

Here’s the thing: Clergy tend to be folks who didn’t/couldn’t find fulfillment in the church as laity. As a result, if they’re relying solely or even primarily on their own spiritual journey to inform others, they will inevitably direct others towards clerical expressions of engagement.

Something I saw on the Chant Cafe entitled “Clericalism among the laity” that the new pope said while still archbishop resonated deeply with this line of thinking:

“We priests tend to clericalize the laity,” Francis said. “[We] focus on things of the clergy, more specifically, the sanctuary, rather than bringing the Gospel to the world… A Church that limits herself to administering parish work experiences what someone in prison does: physical and mental atrophy.

“We infect lay people with our own disease. And some begin to believe the fundamental service God asks of them is to become greeters, lectors or extraordinary ministers of holy communion at Church. Rather, [the call is] to live and spread the faith in their families, workplaces, schools, neighborhoods and beyond.”

The reform that’s needed is “neither to clericalize nor ask to be clericalized. The layperson is a layperson. He has to live as a layperson… to be a leaven of the love of God in society itself…. [He] is to create and sow hope, to proclaim the faith, not from a pulpit but from his everyday life. And like all of us, the layperson is called to carry his daily cross—the cross of the layperson, not of the priest.” – Pope Francis

There are priests out there who know how to encourage and build up their laity to be good laity. But there are more who don’t. This is a problem, and we need to identify and name it as such.

I’ve wrestled for decades around whether I have a vocation to the priesthood. I didn’t thinks so initially, but clergy encouraged me to think about it. I was one of those people who needed some basic catechesis in seminary—not in Scripture, certainly, but in a number of other areas. I entered as a Lutheran yet it wasn’t until my second semester that I learned the Lutheran Church had confessional documents! I left the Lutheran Church shortly before I would have been ordained in it, largely due to the sense that I was moving in a different (Anglican) direction and that I would not keep my promise to teach and preach in accord with Lutheran teachings given my understanding of the sacraments and saints. In my time as an Episcopalian, I’ve considered my vocation in this church a number of times, in a number of ways. My increasing sense is that God is not calling me to be a priest—certainly not now.

The result is that I find myself in a church that has little to no idea what to do with me—certainly on the local level. There’s no need to go into details, but some clergy—particularly those used to a “Father knows best” approach—don’t appreciate someone with more formal education in theology who is not interested in putting up and shutting up…

In particular, I’m struck with a growing sense that we lay people need to own our own spirituality. You—I—cannot necessarily count on our clergy for this. Certainly good clergy can help but, ultimately, they’re not responsible for the shape of your spiritual life.

Bottom-line:

  • Laity need to have a sense of what classic Christian spirituality looks like for the lay condition.
  • Recognize that your clergy may not always have the resources to direct you.
  • When in doubt, look to the Office.
  • Clergy—aside from having a great prayer life of your own, consider how to nurture lay spirituality.
  • Martin Thornton’s Christian Proficiency is a great place to start.

 

Yearning for a Grown-up Church

Someone was helpfully passing this article around on social media today.

I read it as a lament from someone critiquing the current Evangelical culture that is (once again) trying to remake itself.

A church trend I’d be more than happy to add in as likewise immature is the tendency to be so self-congratulatory about how socially aware we are, and the perverse delight in seeing how “transgressive” we can be. (This last particularly after almost straining my face muscles from an extended session of eye-rolling after discovering the bookstore of a certain major church in a certain northeastern city stuffed to the gills with Elaine Pagels’ books as she was coming to speak there…)

I wouldn’t say that these are so much “childish” as quite “adolescent.”

 

American Sarum 2013

I may have mentioned this is passing before, but there is going to be another American Sarum conference this fall. It’ll be at St. John’s Church, Washington, Connecticut from October 11–14, 2013. A number of the speakers who were at the first will be at the second, and the topic this time around is “The Sarum Influence on the Book of Common Prayer.”

I’d love to be there, but it’s scheduled over exactly the same time as the Society of Catholic Priests’ conference.

Full information on the conference can be found here at www.americansarum.org.

Wisdom of Solomon: The Righteous One

We’re in a great section of the Office lectionary as we got into both the Wisdom of Solomon and Colossians today. The Wisdom reading sparked a thought I wanted to share…

Some of my early work on the New Testament revolved around the notion that, when we turn to the gospels, the remembrances of Jesus there are not—could not be—flat historical narratives no matter how much modern academics wish they could be. Instead, I contend, we do not read the gospels rightly if we are not at least aware of the ways that Early Christian worship and devotion connected to the way that the early Church remembered Jesus and wrote his story. They understood him—rightly—to be the promised one of whom the Law and Prophets spoke. As a result, when they thought of him and when they looked at Scripture, they saw a profound congruence; as a result, when it came time to put stylus to wax and record these memories for later generations, what they wrote and the languages, images, and specificities with which they wrote were profoundly shaped by the Scripture that pointed to him. Indeed, my first master’s thesis was on the use of the Psalms in the Markan Passion narrative; I argued that the Church’s liturgical practice was an important aspect of how that central story was shaped at its earliest recoverable level. (no—you can’t read it: it sucked. The idea was good, by the execution was poor…)

I’m trying to be careful here in how I phrase this. What I’m saying is that the Scriptures shaped their remembrance due to an essential congruence. What I would reject is the notion that Scriptures were applied to him outside of any such historical congruence. That is, I don’t think the gospels were written to fulfill the Scriptures regardless of whether the “historical Jesus” so acted…(which is what some scholars would have you believe).

The Wisdom of Solomon passage from today speaks wisely on a number of levels. Here it is in the NRSV:

But the ungodly by their words and deeds summoned death; considering him a friend, they pined away and made a covenant with him, because they are fit to belong to his company. For they reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves, “Short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no remedy when a life comes to its end, and no one has been known to return from Hades. For we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been, for the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts; when it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes, and the spirit will dissolve like empty air. Our name will be forgotten in time, and no one will remember our works; our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud, and be scattered like mist that is chased by the rays of the sun and overcome by its heat. For our allotted time is the passing of a shadow, and there is no return from our death, because it is sealed up and no one turns back. “Come, therefore, let us enjoy the good things that exist, and make use of the creation to the full as in youth. Let us take our fill of costly wine and perfumes, and let no flower of spring pass us by. Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither. Let none of us fail to share in our revelry; everywhere let us leave signs of enjoyment, because this is our portion, and this our lot. Let us oppress the righteous poor man; let us not spare the widow or regard the gray hairs of the aged. But let our might be our law of right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless. “Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law, and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange. We are considered by him as something base, and he avoids our ways as unclean; he calls the last end of the righteous happy, and boasts that God is his father. Let us see if his words are true, and let us test what will happen at the end of his life; for if the righteous man is God’s child, he will help him, and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Let us test him with insult and torture, so that we may find out how gentle he is, and make trial of his forbearance. Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected.” Thus they reasoned, but they were led astray, for their wickedness blinded them, and they did not know the secret purposes of God, nor hoped for the wages of holiness, nor discerned the prize for blameless souls; for God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world, and those who belong to his company experience it. (Wisdom 1:16-2:24)

There’s an unfortunate tendency of many modern people to think of ancients as unsophisticated because they’re not, well, “modern.” The literary framing of this belies any such notion… The focus on the unrighteous gives us access to their logic; showing us the righteous man through the eyes of the unrighteous is a fascinating technique that allows the writer to both expose a fallible thought process and to depict how the righteous man appears to the external world.

First off, this passage speaks so deeply to me because of a discussion M and I were having around the radio. We’ve both been struck by the number of songs on Top 40 radio are “grounded” philosophically in a reckless hedonism. If there were any question about it, this bit from the Wisdom of Solomon reminds us that the logic of these modern “artists” is as old as the hills… It rang as true in the Hellenistic age when Wisdom was composed as it does now.

Second, in this ageless description of the conflict between righteous and the unrighteous, the Church saw in the generic image of “the righteous man” a clear congruence with a certain specific righteous man. I can’t read this passage without lining it up with the passion of Christ as recorded in the gospels. And, indeed, that’s not an accident. I don’t see any way that the gospel writers could have written their account without this and the “passion psalms” spinning around in their heads. Likewise, we can’t do the gospels full justice if we don’t have these same points of reference floating around in our heads.

As I used to tell my students when I taught NT and preaching (paraphrasing Augustine, of course), the single best way to be a better interpreter of Scripture is to read more Scripture. Today’s reading not only underscores that point but also underscores our need to read the Apocrypha, most particularly the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach/Ecclesiasticus, and the Ezra/Esdras additions. While Jerome and generations of Protestants my look down their nose at them, these books were Scripture as far as the Early Church was concerned (and as much of the current Church still is!).

SCLM Meeting Update

I think that the meeting went quite well yesterday.

The main topic of conversation, of course, was how to get the work done with the amount of budget that we have. We did get a fair amount of funding—enough for two face-to-face meetings—but we’re a product-oriented group rather than just being policy-oriented. That is, we produce things (our liturgical stuff) rather than just making decisions that others will then implement. A lot of what we hoped to do with meetings and consultants will either have to be done by and in the Commission or not at all. Web meetings and conference calls will be our main methods of communicating together.

That all sounds fine to me—I’m used to working that way.

There was some vigorous discussion around my proposal for HWHM. Overall, most of the people who expressed an opinion about it were positive. There were some questions about its scope and whether it was doable. I expected that and feel that concern as well—it’s a lot of work, but I think is necessary work. The chief reservations around the idea focused on concern about a two-tiered system. That is, are we setting up the Calendar as an “upper” tier and the Almanac as a “lower” tier? This seems to be the main hurdle to overcome. Sandye and I have been directed to put together a structure for the work to present at our June meeting to give people a hands-on feel of what this would really look like.

On the Electronic Publication front, it appears that Church Publishing already maintains a database of liturgical material that it uses to produce the material that it prints. That database would not provide exactly what we’re talking about for a device/platform independent means of communicating the material. However, they already have a system of tagging in place that could be adopted in an XML format. I found that quite interesting on the technical level.

As you can imagine, the main debate here was around copyright and cost. The first discussion was around what exactly the General Convention resolutions were asking: does “freely available” mean that they should be” easily accessible” (for purchase) or does it mean that they should be provided electronically “without cost”? Several people who had been on the liturgical/prayer book committee at GC indicated that they had intended it to mean “without cost.” My sense is that this is the will of the Commission—to figure out a way to provide these materials for free on the internet. But what would that do to Church Publishing and the Church Pension Group? I noted that, particularly with prayer/spiritual materials, a digital and a physical copy are not mutually exclusive; people will often buy and use in hardback what they already have electronically. We shouldn’t paint it as a zero-sum game. Nancy from Church Publishing agreed and said that they did have some material showing that to be the case as well. The main deliverable here for our next meeting, then, is for the Church Publishing folks to take a look at what it would do to their costs and how feasible free electronic dissemination is based on their current business model.

So—I’d say that some progress is being made. However, nothing has been made official at this point; no final decisions have been made. It’s progress, but still tentative progress that may yet be overturned.

SCLM Meeting Today

The Episcopal Church’s Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music (SCLM) is meeting this afternoon. This is our first meeting since the budget numbers have come back and, with those in hand, we’ll be able to set our plan of work for the various sub-committees of the SCLM for this present triennium.

In figuring out what that scope of work will look like, I’ve submitted two documents for the two committees that I’m involved with. Here are the highlights on those two…

Further Thoughts Towards an Episcopal Almanac

At the last meeting, I raised again the possibility of an almanac that would supplement the sanctoral calendar. My sense is that some of the commemorations currently being placed on the Church’s calendar don’t represent true sanctoral occasions but that there are those in the Church who still see them as worthy of note. An almanac could be a proper repository for these or for people that the Church would like to remember but for whom the title of “saint” either doesn’t quite fit or where we’re still exploring their sanctity. The sense was that they wanted to hear more in terms of details.

This piece presents some a proposal containing details.

First, I identify six “centers of energy” that I see in the Church around HWHM (with the caveat that my labels are admittedly broad and imprecise and that they are not meant to represent everyone who may identify with a certain label):

  • A Liberal Protestant energy: This movement sees inclusivity as a core commitment of TEC. The definition of “saint” is a broad one. It tends be more vocal about a reluctance to judge the holiness of another. This energy would likely see a reduction of HWHM—particularly if it adversely impacted the diversity represented in the Calendar—as an attempt to “roll back the clock” to a calendar of old white male bishops. [I see this at the Episcopal Café and Facebook]

  • A Broad Church middle energy: This movement seems concerned with the number of commemorations, a loss of ferial days, and is not sure about the sanctity of some of the additions. On the other hand, there is also a reluctance to judge the holiness of others. In general, this group expresses puzzlement around TEC’s theology of sanctity. [I see this at the Episcopal Café, Facebook, on my blog, and specifically on Crusty Old Dean’s (Tom Ferguson of Bexley Hall) post on Lent Madness]

  • An Anglo-Catholic energy: This movement may or may not have an issue with the number of commemorations, but has a narrower definition of saint: inclusion in the Calendar is seen as the church’s official declaration on the eschatological status of the commemorated. There are concerns whether all of the commemorations in HWHM meet this standard. Too, there is a concern that the collects do not appropriately express a robust theology of sanctity. [I see this at on my blog, on Facebook, and summarizes most of the feedback I have received personally]

  • A conservative protestant energy: This movement sees HWHM as a yet another example of the political liberalism of TEC leadership and regards most of the new commemorations as politically motivated. [As seen particularly in the comments section on Lent Madness regarding Frances Perkins]

  • An agency energy: This movement comes from the fact that we explicitly asked specific agencies and groups within the church to put forward candidates. Having done so, there seems to be an obligation to accept them. Furthermore, the work has been done to create the biographies and the propers; to not use them now would be a waste of that time and effort.

  • A legislative energy: This movement is around the establishment of official, published criteria. There is concern that the committee created criteria, then disregarded them in the addition of new commemorations raising an integrity issue.

These are the main tensions that we need to negotiate if we want to create a successful product that will be used across the Church.

Then I turn to the current shape of HWHM and show that it contains an odd alternation between temporal and sanctoral material. It’s a book made up of small sections pieced together and doesn’t have a coherent structure. My proposal is to gather the current material into three sections:

  1. a “Holy Women, Holy Men” section that contains the propers for the sanctoral Days of Optional Observance and recommendations on the local identification and observance of saints containing the Commons of Saints.

  2. a “Temporal Cycle” section that contains the ferial propers in temporal sequence as adapted from the Canadian BAS followed by the alternative six-week thematic lectionary.

  3. a “Various Occasions” section that contains the votive propers followed by an integrated Almanac.

Thus, the resource would put the three principal options for non-Holy Days (a lesser feast, a temporal ferial day, or a votive) on more or less equal footing. The third section would contain the almanac and the people and commemorations there would be presented as specific representatives or examples of certain votives.

My plan for work in light of this is admittedly ambitious. I’m suggesting that we put *all* of the Lesser Feasts back on the table, create a wiki, and—once we have nailed down our operative criteria at our June meeting—we document our evidence for each criterion for each commemoration. Those who fulfill the criteria are candidates for inclusion in a re-formed Calendar; those who don’t meet all the criteria and who are yet deemed significant to our Church and its history will be placed in the Almanac along with other worthy people, movements, and occasions.

Too, I recommend that each section will be prefaced by some basic information regarding what the section is about and how the material in it can and should be used. Specifically, this will address the question about how the Lesser Feasts interact with the Daily Office.

We’ll see how this goes. Some of the folks I’ve discussed it with see it as a workable solution given the various difficulties that have to be negotiated. We’ll see what the others think…

Electronic Publications

As I reviewed the relevant General Convention resolutions around the issue of Electronic Publications, I was quite surprised to find this one:

Resolution 2009-A102 (Authorize Use of the Enriching our Worship Series) represents a major change in policy with regard to the digital realm. After first enumerating the complete set of materials within the EOW series (Enriching Our Worship 1: The Daily Office, Great Litany and Eucharist; Enriching Our Worship 2: Ministry with the Sick and Dying and Burial of a Child; Enriching Our Worship 3: Burial Rites for Adults together with a Rite for the Burial of a Child; and Enriching Our Worship 4: The Renewal of Ministry and the Welcoming of a New Rector or other Pastor) a resolving clause states: “That these liturgical texts be freely available in electronic format on the internet” (emphasis added). It should also be noted that the original text of the resolution did not contain this resolve clause; it was added by the committee in the House of Bishops and concurred in the House of Deputies. According to this resolution, therefore, one of our tasks must be to ensure that these four resources are freely available for download and use.

So—GC has already resolved that this action should be taken. It hasn’t been. Now, I’m not going to say that EOW is my favorite set of resources out there, but I am curious to find out why this resolution wasn’t implemented.

We had a couple of resolutions referred to us as a Commission; referrals are non-binding in that they are there for us to review and then to decide what we believe the best course of action to be. Here’s my take on these two:

Resolution 2013-D060 (Planning for Making Liturgical Resources Freely Available on Any Device or Platform) was concurred for referral. Unlike the previous resolutions, it is not binding, but has been given to us for our study and to formulate policy with regard to whether and how it may be put into place. It directs the SCLM:

to begin planning in the next triennium for the structuring of all liturgical and musical resources as format- and platform-independent content, so that it may be made freely available to any device or medium, and to return to the 78th General Convention with a proposal and budget to begin the work.

This resolution goes a step beyond the policy laid down in 2009-A102. It does affirm the free availability mandated in the prior resolution, and furthermore introduces the principle of format- and platform-independent material. The key point here is that, following this policy, a PDF is no longer sufficient as it does not meet the format-independent requirement.

Also concurred for referral was 2013-D079 (Provide Electronic Availability of Liturgical Resources). While similar in spirit to 2013-D060, it is less specific. It too directs that all liturgical resources approved by General Convention be made “electronically available and easily accessible, both online for downloads and in electronic media such as CD-ROM, DVD, and their successor technologies.” It does not use the word “freely.” While it does so less clearly than 2013-D060, this resolution also functionally requires platform-independent solutions in its mention of successor technologies. The main difference is the urgency and accountability; it directs a timeframe (by the end of calendar year 2013) and a mechanism for oversight (reports to Executive Council by DFMS staff).

I’m in favor of these. I think that they’re very much heading in the right direction.

Electronic frontiers do not—for the most part—open up new mission fields. Instead, I think they give us a new angle onto the existing mission field. Social media and mobile computing give us a means to put worship, devotional, and formational tools at our congregations’ finger-tips quicker and easier than ever in the past. Too, in this resourcing, we can also make it easy for them to communicate via social media that they are using these things and that they are a part of their spiritual life. That, in turn, will raise awareness of their spiritual practice amongst their social networks and possibly lead to helpful and healthy conversations about what modern faith looks like and what faith practices foster it.

We need to free our liturgies and our hymnals so that they can be easily and effectively leveraged to create useful devotional tools and helpful worship aids. Period. Full stop.

As long as there is a monopoly on these materials, ours hands will be digitally tied.

On the other hand, these two referred resolutions, while having the right idea, are pretty short on awareness about the multitude of issues facing such a move. I see four main policy issues that will have to be sorted through before material can be put online:

  • “freely…”: I support freely available electronic materials on the internet. As a member of a small congregation and keeping in mind 2013-A076 on the dissemination of resources to small congregations, I know that free access to all of our liturgical books would be a financial bonus to cash-strapped parishes. However, we would be remiss if we did not note that Church Publishing is in the business of selling liturgical materials including the electronic Rite Series software. As the Church pension system is tied to Church Publishing, we should consider the impact free liturgical materials might have on the broader system.

  • “All liturgical materials”: One of the issues tied to expenses is that some of our resources—notably the Hymnal 1982—make use of materials already under copyright and someone must pay licensing fees for them. Given the incorporation of copyrighted materials in some of our liturgical books, are we legally able to make all of our resources freely available for download? If not, what will our policy with regard to these materials?

  • “…available”: Another facet of copyright is that the materials produced by the Church are under copyright. As a result, their re-use is restricted if not prohibited.   The only exception of which I am aware is the Book of Common Prayer which has been placed in the public domain. While 2013-D060 does not mention copyright, it cannot be effectively implemented with copyright protection in place as currently configured. Creative Commons licenses offer a more nuanced approach to copyright protections. Rather than doing way with copyright, these licenses represent a way to retain intellectual property rights and protections but to voluntarily waive certain aspects of those rights to enable greater digital development particularly around the creation of derivative works. We should explore how these might help us in making our materials more available.

  • “platform-independent”/”successor technologies”: In order to present electronic material in a stable, flexible and—above all—useful format, we need to move beyond PDFs. A PDF document is superior to a book in two ways: it cannot be directly altered and it is far more portable. However, it remains locked into a linear paradigm. Hyperlinks and bookmarks mitigate this shortcoming to a minor extent, but do not solve it. Following 2006-A049, we need to decide upon an open standard format that offers more dynamic possibilities than a PDF. While PDFs are fine in the short-term and ought to be part of our long-term distribution strategy, they need to remain a facet of it and not be its totality.

I’m recommending that we figure out what the barriers are to implementing a freely-available EOW and get that material up as soon as possible in PDF form. I’d also like to honor the intention of the other two resolutions as fully as possible. This means getting as many of our authorized books as possible online as free PDFs before the end of 2013.

Too, we need to work towards platform independence. My goal here is too look at the encoding options, pick one, and to draft a resolution for GC2016 requesting funding and approval for the construction of a Standard Electronic Edition of the Book of Common Prayer.

So—a lot of interesting discussion will be taking place today. I’ll keep you updated on how things unfold…

Eastern Anglicanism?

M mentioned to me that she’d seen something on Facebook about an Eastern-leaning Anglican group.

The Eastern churches are a very interesting bunch.

We—I—sometimes talk about the theology of the Undivided Church in a frequently simplistic fashion. Typically the phrase “the Undivided Church” refers to the things held in common by the churches East and West before the official never reconciled separation of the Great Schism in 1054. But dating the divide strictly at 1054 ignores the tensions between the Greek-speaking and Latin-speaking sides of the church that existed almost continuously through the first Christian millennium. I have written on this before.

There are  interesting things that we can and should learn from the Eastern churches. Just as there are interesting things that we can learn from the pre-Reformation Western churches and from the Roman Catholic Church. Just as there are interesting things that we can learn from non-Christian Eastern and Western thought…

We are Anglicans, though. As Anglicans, we have committed ourselves to the belief that the Christian gospel is effectively and completely mediated in the habits and patterns laid down in the Books of Common Prayer. We are a Western church. Our liturgies partake of the Historic Western Liturgy grounded in the doctrine and practice of the Latin Fathers. There have been points of cross-pollination at various times both before and after the Reformation and I’m not trying to deny nor diminish these. On the contrary, I think a realistic appraisal of these serves to reinforce our ecclesial identity as fundamentally Western.

Learning about the Eastern churches and learning from them is good and important.

But we do this best and most faithfully when we are grounded in an understanding of who and what we are as Anglicans. We have to know who we are, what we believe, and where our commitments lie to get the most out of an encounter with any other tradition. While learning Eastern ways can provide a helpful alternative angle on the faith for those grounded in prayer book practices, all too often liturgical lingering looks over the Bosporus have more to do with a desire for exoticism than anything else.