Yearly Archives: 2013

The Anatomy of the Calendar, Part 1

The way that I’m constructing the book is to start each major section with an “Essence” chapter, then an “Anatomy” chapter. The first gives a general spiritual orientation, then the following dives into the prayer book, identifies where the parts are to be found, and offers a more particular discussion of what we find there, drawing on both the general principles and the actual contents. Since we’ve talked about the essence of the Calendar and identified some central spiritual principles (as in part 1part 2a, and part 2b), it’s time to turn to the prayer book contents.

—————————-

The Calendar is most clearly laid out in a section at the head of the Book of Common Prayer. After this initial material, several other parts relate back to it and assume its patterns. In particular, the Collects, the rites provided for special days, and the lectionaries depend upon the shape of the year laid down in the Calendar.

  •  The Calendar of the Church Year
    • 1. Principal Feasts (p. 15)
    • 2. Sundays (p. 16)
    • 3. Holy Days (pp. 16-17)
    • 4. Days of Special Devotion (p. 17)
    • 5. Days of Optional Observance (pp. 17-18)
  • [List of Fixed Feasts and Days of Optional Observance by Month] (pp. 19-30)
  • The Titles of the Seasons, Sundays and Major Holy Days observed in this Church throughout the Year (pp. 31-33)

So, the first few pages of this Calendar section lay out the liturgical rules governing the various days of the year. These provide general rubrics for how to figure out what occasion to celebrate on any given day. Next, we have a section that lays out the months from January to December and identifies which fixed feasts fall on which days. Last, we have a list of titles that specify how we name the various liturgical occasions of the year.

For the most part, this section does a good job of letting you know how to order your services, but there are a few oddities worth noting that effect both how we order things and how we understand the wider year.

First, the normative unit of time throughout this section is the day with the consequence that seasons are given short shrift. Notice—there is no section here that talks about seasons of the Church Year. That’s not to say they are absent; the names of the seasons are mentioned throughout the Calendar section and they are used as structuring devices in the listing of the titles on pages 31-3. However, they are assumed rather than explained.

Indeed, many people assume that the colors of the liturgical seasons and the practices around them are listed out somewhere. There are plenty of such lists—but none of them appear in the prayer book!

Second, the Calendar section begins with three paragraphs that discuss the movable date of Easter. The third paragraph emphasizes that “the sequence of all Sundays of the Church Year depends upon the date of Easter Day” (BCP, p. 15). However, it doesn’t actually tell you that there are tables somewhere within the covers that help you figure out when Easter falls each year and the consequent effect upon other days. These tables, which had formerly been joined to the Calendar rules, are now found in the back of the book:

  • Tables for Finding Holy Days
    • Tables and Rules for Finding the Date of Easter Day
      • Rules for Finding the Date of Easter Day (pp. 880-881)
      • A Table to Find Easter Day [from 1900-2089] (pp. 882-883)
      • A Table to Find Movable Feasts and Holy Days [based on the Day on which Easter Falls] (pp. 884-885)

There is much in this section that seems fairly arcane—like the specific rules for determining the date of Easter—but there are also some nuggets in here that will help you if you have any sort of planning to do that involves the Church Calendar. The Table to find Easter Day is a straight-forward list: you look up the year, and it tells you the month and day Easter falls upon and whether it’s a leap year or not. Once you have that, you can turn the page, and look up that month and day in the next table, the Table to Find Movable Feasts, and it’ll provide the number of Sundays after Epiphany, the month and days for Ash Wednesday, Ascension Day, and Pentecost, the Numbered Proper that the Sunday after Trinity Sunday will start with, and the month and Day of the First Sunday of Advent.

The other thing that’s in here is an explanation of the funny letters and numbers listed in the monthly tables back on pages 19-30. If you look at page 22—the month of April—you’ll see four columns going across the page. The first only appears sporadically and gives a number. This is the Golden Number related to finding Easter Day—feel free to ignore it. The second gives the days of the month. The third is a repeating string of letters going from A to g; these are the Sunday Letters and this column can be handy if you want to know what Holy Days may fall on a Sunday in a particular year. By finding the letter of the current year on the table at the top of page 881, you can learn which letter will represent the Sundays throughout the year. The fourth column, of course, gives the title of the occasion with Feasts in bold type and Optional Days in regular type.

Third, the focus of the Calendar section is on establishing precedence. That is, it helps to identify what days are more important than other days. It doesn’t necessarily help you to figure out what to do or pray in on those days. It turns out that a certain amount of useful material on the Calendar is hidden within the section of the book devoted to the Collects:

  • The Collects for the Church Year
      • Concerning the Proper of the Church Year (p. 158)
    • Collects: Traditional
      • [Collects for Sundays of the Church Year] (pp. 159-185)
      • Holy Days (pp. 185-194)
      • The Common of Saints [for Days of Optional Observance] (pp. 195-199)
      • Various Occasions (pp. 199-210)
    • Collects: Contemporary
      • [Collects for Sundays of the Church Year] (pp. 211-236)
      • Holy Days (pp. 237-246)
      • The Common of Saints [for Days of Optional Observance] (pp. 246-250)
      • Various Occasions (pp. 251-261)

The initial section on the Proper of the Church Year gives us two important principles:

  • The Sunday collect gets used throughout the rest of the week unless there’s a Holy Day.
  • “The Collect for any Sunday or other Feast may be used at the evening service of the day before” (BCP, 158).

Then, a variety of notes get tucked between the collects! There are three kinds of notes here: 1) notes that identify when certain optional movable days occur, 2) notes that give additional directions on how to handle a tricky part of the Calendar, and 3) notes that direct you to other services within the book.

The Calendar section mentions the Rogation Days and the Ember Days but never explains what they are or when they fall; while the “what” never does get explained, the “when” is provided by italicized notes like the one on page 160 following the collect for the Third Sunday of Advent: “Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday of this week are the traditional winter Ember Days” (BCP, 160).

The next page (page 161) gives an example of the second kind of procedural notes: the italics on both sides of the title for the First Sunday after Christmas provide more detailed instructions for how to negotiate the three Holy Days that fall after Christmas and what to do if a Sunday lands on one of them.

On page 166 after the title for Ash Wednesday we find the third sort of note. This one directs you to a proper liturgy for the day in another part of the prayer book. Essentially, these notes are present for the major days of the Redemption cycle that ground the seasons of Lent, Holy Week and Easter that are gathered together towards the middle of the book:

  • Proper Liturgies for Special Days
    • Ash Wednesday (pp. 264-269)
    • Palm Sunday (pp. 270-273)
    • Maundy Thursday (pp. 274-275)
    • Good Friday (pp. 276-282)
    • Holy Saturday (p. 283)
    • The Great Vigil of Easter (pp. 285-298)

All of this sounds awfully confusing. The reason is because there is no piece dedicated to tying it all together. Allusions and references are made to a wide variety of concepts around the Calendar, but these references assume a big picture sense of the whole that the prayer book never actually provides. In order to understand what the mechanics are and how the mechanics then flow into our spirituality, we need to take the time to construct the big picture view that is implied but never stated explicitly.

Preferences Issues

It appears that some people are having issues with the new preferences at the breviary—others aren’t…

Obviously, this is my least favorite kind of error as it’s difficult to diagnose and replicate! I have put in some fixes this morning that may take care of the problem(s), but as I’m not experiencing them it’s hard to say if they’re fully fixed or not.

First, having javascript enabled for the site will remove a whole possible class of issues.

Second, if you are having an issue, telling me that there’s an issue is helpful, but even more helpful is including the url that’s breaking and what browser you’re using. Without this data, there’s nothing I can do to troubleshoot the problem.

On the Essence of the Sanctoral Cycle, Part 2

Following on the heels of the first section, here’s the second section on the sanctoral cycle of the Calendar.

—————————————–

Back to Baptism

There are two primary definitions that the church uses for the term “saint.” The first definition is a general one with biblical roots; Paul consistently uses “the saints” to refer to the whole people of God. Those who have been joined to Christ in baptism are “holy ones” (same word in Greek) because they have become part of a holy whole. Thus, there is a general sense in which “saint” is appropriate for every member of the Church.

But there is also a more specific use of the term as well that the Church has used for centuries: a saint is a person who manifests Christ to the world. They are people in whom and through whom Christ can be seen. In a sense—like the icons that regularly represent them—they should be seen both as a window and as a mirror. The saints are windows because the light of Christ flows through them, and their primary purpose is not to reveal themselves but, in their transparency to the divine, reveal to us the heart of God. The saints are mirrors because they offer us an opportunity to see ourselves as we could be—to show us what a life in the service of Christ looks like. Just as we might glance into a mirror before a big meeting, the saints reveal when we still have spinach stuck in our teeth, when and where we fall short of living a life glowing with God.

The saints represent the goal for us. What we receive in the spiritual patterning of the prayer book, in the spiritual patterns of the Church at large, is a sacramental path to discipleship. Baptism, Eucharist, Confirmation, Confession, these things are tools that lead us ever deeper into a relationship of discipleship where we hear and answer God’s call to follow, to learn, to love, to die, to truly live. The saints are images of the wide variety of what Christian maturity looks like. It takes a host of forms in a host of situations but the central qualities never stray far from the pattern of Jesus himself: faith, hope, love, mercy, justice, peace.

Paul, positively influenced by the Stoic teachings of his day, understood that the true transmission of the faith could only be partially accomplished through language; the deeper patterns required examples. Hence, a critical part of his proclamation is captured in this simple (but not easy) call: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1). There is an inherently incarnation element in the call to imitation. It contains the recognition that the being of people cannot be reduced to their thoughts or their teachings or even their virtues in an abstract sense; their instruction is incomplete and incompletely taught without gaining a sense of the whole embodied reality with which they engaged the world. The saints are mediators of the faith to us because, as Paul, they call us through themselves to imitate Christ and to learn from his ways what it is to be holy, what it is to be fully human.

Imitation of the saints means learning about lives. Some of the earliest literature about spirituality and teaching spirituality did not appear in the form of treatises or doctrinal essays. Rather, they wrote lives. The fathers of the nascent monastic movement presented their ascetical theology in narrative form: Athanasius gave us the life of Antony; Jerome gave us a number—the more fantastical lives of Paul the Hermit and Malchus as well as the more historically grounded life of Epiphanius and the various examples and remembrances in his letters of people with whom he had lived and to whom he had ministered. Even the first great writings on Christian spirituality sought to retain a connection with lives and stories: John Cassian’s great work is a dialogue that weaves oral teachings with human lives; Sulpicius Severus likewise offers a mediation of eastern monasticism to the West by means of a dialogue about ways of life and means of imitation.

What I’m getting at here is that when we deal with the saints—particularly using the second, more particular, sense of the term—we are talking about and working within the realm of Incarnation. How is Christ made manifest in material means to heal and redeem the world? An answer is in the lives of those called to follow him. We, in turn, learn Christ in and through them.

To return again to the prayer book and to Baptism, the Baptismal Covenant lays out a set of ideas made explicit that have always been implicit in Baptism and in discipleship. The specific promises asked: fidelity to the Church’s creed, persistence in the Church’s worship and gatherings, the practice of repentance, spreading the Good News of what God has done in Christ, humble service to Christ in the person of all humanity, striving for justice, peace, and respect for all are nothing new but reflect a variety of facets of discipleship that the Church has taught through the ages. Some individuals embrace these promises more concretely than others. Some embody them more profoundly than others. These are our exemplars of Christian maturity, these are the stewards of the virtues, from whom we learn Christ and imitate him in them. To the degree that they model the more excellent way, they deserve to be set apart and held up by the Church.

And, in making that connection, we come full circle to the issue of the two buckets—the saints, the departed, and who goes where. The good news, of course, is that it’s not our decision. We can’t put anyone into these buckets—that’s God’s work. And, at the end of the day, even the metaphor of buckets fails as being overly concrete. Here’s what we can say: God knows his own far better than we ever will. Recognizing that fundamental truth, no church or ecclesial body has ever said (or at least not properly or wisely…) that it can state the contents of the buckets. Even when churches declare saints, they are not attempting to identify the whole population of the holy. There are far more of every kind who enjoy the fullness of the presence of God than we can imagine. And, if God’s ways are true to what we find in Scripture and in the Tradition, some of those enjoying that nearer presence will come as quite a shock to us! No, the most that churches can—and should—do is to state that there are strong positive signs that certain individuals are among the blessed. Not so that whole company can be catalogued, but to have a sense of whom to hold up as exemplars and representatives of the holiness and spiritual maturity to which all of us are called.

Now, what may these “strong positive signs” be? Well—I’d like to focus on the one that makes us the most nervous… In Late Antiquity and through the medieval periods, one of the key signs of sanctity was identified as miraculous power. The saints could be known and identified because they were agents of supernatural power. For most of Christian history, in fact, sanctity was something declared on the local level by people who were convinced that one who was dead was still serve as an agent of God’s power in their community. Bishops might ratify this by proclaiming a feast, pilgrimage centers would spring up or cool down as healings or apparitions or other manifestations occurred. When the Roman Catholic Church centralized the process of sanctity in the mid-fourteenth century—in a way that the Christian East never did—it incorporated this principle in the famous criterion requiring three documented miracles. To this day, this is the part of the process that most modern people feel uncomfortable about. Significantly, among the various Anglican churches who recognize saints no such criterion exists. Rather than getting bogged down in the whole question of miracles, it’s more useful for our purposes to ask, not how and to what degree it gets fulfilled, but why this criterion is important in the first place. How does this connect back into everything else?

Truthfully—it’s all about connections. The point about miracles originally was that it established proof that the saint was hooked into the life of God and was serving as a conduit of God’s grace and power to the local community. Not only that, most of the miracles that are described in the medieval lives of the saints aren’t terribly original. You’ll have a disciple of St. Benedict do something that Elisha did, or healings and meal multiplications that mirror what Jesus did. What were these people doing, just copying Scripture? No—they were, in fact, imitating Scripture. When the saints either performed or were thought to have performed biblical sorts of miracles it confirmed that they were participating within a continuity of sanctity that points directly back to Scripture and to Christ himself. The Christian life—the holy life—was about embodying Scripture, not only in terms of following its guidelines but in receiving the same graces the biblical personages enjoyed. Imitation of the saints and imitation of the Scriptures ultimately points to the imitation of Christ who is the source and pattern of both the saints and the Scriptures.

Now, it’s one thing to show evidence of holy power when you’re alive—it’s another to do so when you’re dead. Because it’s precisely proof that you’re not dead, at least not in the usual sense. And that’s precisely the difference between secular culture and church culture. The secular culture has days that celebrate certain individuals—Presidents’ Day, Columbus Day, and so forth—and they do it to celebrate important historical figures who are a significant part of our national story. They are dead, gone, and fondly remembered. It’s not so with the Church. When we remember the saints, we’re remembering those around us whom we see no longer—but who are still fellow workers with us in the Kingdom of God. Recovering a truly baptismal ecclesiology requires the recognition that that baptismal connection is not severed by physical death. The prayer book encapsulates this notion in these two collects:

Almighty God, by your Holy Spirit you have made us one with your saints in heaven and on earth: Grant that in our earthly pilgrimage we may always be supported by this fellowship of love and prayer, and know ourselves to be surrounded by their witness to your power and mercy. We ask this for the sake of Jesus Christ, in whom all our intersessions are acceptable through the Spirit, and who lives and reigns forever and ever. Amen. (BCP, 250)

O God, the King of saints, we praise and glorify your holy Name for all your servants who have finished their course in your faith and fear: for the blessed Virgin Mary; for the holy patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs; and for all your other righteous servants, known to us and unknown; and we pray that, encouraged by their examples, aided by their prayers, and strengthened by their fellowship, we also may be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light; through the merits of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP, 504)

The proper theme here is fellowship, connection, continuity. The saints pray for us, love and remember us, just as we love, remember, and pray for those we see no longer. The celebration of saints’ days gives us an opportunity to honor and thank those who pray for us, to lift up their examples before our eyes, and to point back to Christ himself who gave them gifts of grace, and courage in their trials.

New Preferences at the Breviary

The new preferences page and underlying code has been rolled out at the breviary.

There have been a few additions and some cosmetic changes, but most of the changes have occurred under the hood.

As always, I’ve tested it as well as I can, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some errors still slipped through. If you find any, I’m sure you’ll let me know…

The other substantive change is a new option in Morning Prayer that will allow you to substitute the Great Litany in for the ending of the Office with a click (or restore the usual with a click if you decide against it).

iDevice Preferences Solution

Finally, I think I’ve figured out the problem with the iDevice preferences problem with the breviary!

The issue seems to be the way in which the Safari/Webkit browsers implement the Javascript I was working with; I’ve tightened that up and things should work now.

So—if those using iPhones/iPads could check the functionality of this page: http://stbedeproductions.com/breviary/test/combined_preferences.php and let me know whether the preferences stick and work when you click the “Pray with your new settings” link, I’d appreciate it!

Section on the Essence of the Sanctoral Cycle, Part 1

Since we looked last at the seasons of the Temporal Cycle, it’s time to head into the sanctoral cycle. This part is currently incomplete. There’s more that needs to be said here as you’ll see. I’ll indicate some of where we’re headed at the end.

———————————–

The Temporal cycle that celebrates in time the high points of the Creed and, in doing so, the main movements in the life of Jesus is mirrored by the Sanctoral cycle that celebrates Christ and his Church in and through the heroes of the faith. The Temporal cycle operates along two major axes: Incarnation and Redemption. That is, the seasons of Lent and Easter focus our attention upon how God acts to redeem us; the seasons of Advent and Christmas along with attendant fests involving Mary and John the Baptist focus us on God becoming human. The best way to think about the Sanctoral cycle is not as some other separate thing that gets plopped on top of the Temporal cycle to confuse it. Rather, the Sanctoral cycle is the logical next step from the Temporal cycle that flows from the life of Jesus and shows us the fusion of both Redemption and Incarnation as they intersect within human lives. The Sanctoral cycle shows us the promise and potential of humanity reconciled with God; it gives us vivid examples of redeemed humans who incarnated Christ in their very flesh to the wonder of the watching world.

Now, some people are a bit wary of the Sanctoral cycle. And that’s understandable. There’s a wide range of attitudes with in the Episcopal Church and within Anglicanism as a whole towards the heroes of the faith and how we decide to remember them in church. A lot of this has to do with the way that the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches honor these heroes and desires to—alternately—emulate, learn from, or reject what it is that they do. Some Episcopalians are fine with the Sanctoral cycle and are perfectly comfortable using the “s-word” (saints). Others are much more leery of it, and see the notion of saints as inherently troublesome and problematic. The prayer book and associated materials tries to respect the diversity of opinion yet still providing for liturgical celebration of these heroes. We’re not going to solve the difference of opinion here, but, instead, will try to use the principles of the prayer book to wrestle with the topic in a way that helps us touch the heart of it: the intersection of the dual mysteries of redemption and incarnation.

A Baptismal Ecclesiology: Where the Rubber Hits the Road

The best way to untangle this matter, it seems to me, is to cut to the heart of the matter. It starts with Baptism. One of the real achievements of our prayer book is its embrace of the sacrament of Baptism and the restoration of its place as one of the two great sacraments of the Church. You won’t spend very long around arguing Episcopalians without somebody tossing out the phrase “baptismal ecclesiology” or referring to “the Baptismal Covenant.” That’s as it should be, yet these phrases can seem a bit daunting to when you run across them the first few times.

What is “baptismal ecclesiology” and how does it matter?

Baptism joins us to Christ. Using the language of drowning, Paul speaks of us dying in the waters of Baptism with Jesus and rising from it sharing in his new risen life. This is the moment when we get plugged into the life of God. It can be seen as an individual and individualistic event—me and Jesus. And yet, that’s not how the New Testament or the Church have talked about it. It’s not just me and Jesus—it’s me and Jesus and everybody else who is likewise plugged into Jesus; it’s all of us who are connected by Christ into the life of God. That’s the heart of what the Church is: recognizing all those who are fellow travelers with us by virtue of Baptism. The Church is defined by Baptism. We fail to see the Church properly if we’re only looking at the clergy.  Or if we’re only looking at the people who decide to show up to our church on Sundays. A real, robust baptismal ecclesiology takes seriously that everyone who is, was, or will be baptized shares in a common bond, the union with Christ, without regard to church attendance or denominational lines. Furthermore, Paul’s insistence that baptismal life is a sharing in Christ’s risen life means that we don’t see the line between the living and the dead quite so starkly either.

I fear, despite all of our talk of a baptismal ecclesiology, that we tend to have a “parochial” view of the Church. And I mean that in two different senses of the word. I mean it in the word’s negative sense when “parochial” is used to mean short-sighted and narrow; I also mean it in the word’s most literal sense as it relates to the parish we go to on Sundays. We tend to think of “Church” as restricted to the people we see around us—and that’s a mistake. If we take Baptism seriously, we have to see Church not only as the people within our walls, but also the folks in the church down the street (even if we don’t agree with them on some things), and all the folks who didn’t actually make it to our church or another church, but also including the whole host of those who have gone before us and we see no longer. If the act of Baptism replaces our life, plugging us into the life of God in some fundamental, meaningful way—however we understand that—than the dead share the very same life that we do. We are all bound together into the energies of God. What we do with the dead, how we understand them and our relation to them finds focus liturgically in two days at the start of November: the Feast of All Saints and the Commemoration of All Faithful Departed, historically shortened to All Souls. If we want to do the Sanctoral cycle right, we have to start with these two days and what they mean for us.

All Saints and All Souls

If we’re going to approach this topic from a prayer book perspective, than the place we have to begin is one of humility. We don’t have all the answers here, and that’s ok—we have enough to get by on. The first thing to note is that, despite what you might think, the Bible doesn’t spend very much time at all talking about death or what happens after we die. Christian tradition has filled in a whole lot of stuff here and often in some fairly imprecise, rather sketchy, and often down-right contradictory ways. Some of our most treasured notions about what happens when we die are more a product of cultural myths than anything rooted in Scripture and historic Christian teaching. Frankly, that’s part of what makes this discussion a bit tricky—we are touching on treasured notions. It’s certainly not my intention to harm anyone’s faith or pass judgment on what you were taught formally or not. As a result, I don’t plan on arguing against certain presentations of the Christian after-life, but rather want to stick closely to the words and intentions of the prayer book.

In the proper preface for the Commemoration of the Dead, we say, “to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended” (BCP, 382). That’s the foundation upon which everything else is built. Because of our faith in the resurrection and the promises of Baptism, death is a shift—not an end. From that fundamental recognition, the prayer book then makes reference to two general groups: the departed and the saints. Most often, these are placed in juxtaposition with one another. For instance, in the various forms of the Prayers of the People we routinely mention both the departed and the saints in close proximity: “Give to the departed eternal rest; Let light perpetual shine upon them. We praise you for your saints who have entered into joy; May we also come to share in your heavenly kingdom.” (Form III, BCP, 387) and “We commend to your mercy all who have died, that your will for them may be fulfilled; and we pray that we may share with all your saints in your eternal kingdom.” (Form IV, BCP, 389) and “For all who have died in the communion of your Church, and those whose faith is known to you alone, that, with all the saints, they may have rest in that place where there is no pain or grief but life eternal, we pray to you, O Lord.” (Form V, BCP, 391). Too, we have Commons appointed for the Dead and for the Saints. But how do we interpret these two groups? Are they distinct or does one shade into the other?

I’d suggest that the prayer book is being deliberately vague on these points. The clearest statement that I can find that sheds light on the situation comes from the Prayers of the People in the Rite I Eucharist which reflects the language that we inherited from classical Anglicanism: “And we bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear, beseeching thee to grant them continual growth in thy love and service; and to grant us grace so to follow the good examples of all thy saints, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom” (BCP, 330). This language affirms that the saints of God are partakers of the heavenly kingdom, and also envisions a process of growth that is not ended by physical death.  The pattern that is laid out here reflects a classical threefold division into the Church Militant—we the living, the Church Triumphant—those departed who currently enjoy the fullness of God’s presence, and the Church Expectant—those departed who do not yet experience the full presence of God but who shall as that process of growth is played out and as God’s promises in Baptism and Eucharist are fully delivered in the final consummation of all things.

Keeping these categories in mind, the Feast of All Saints celebrates the mighty deeds of God in and through the Church Triumphant; the Feast of All Souls recalls to us the Church Expectant who shall yet enjoy that final consummation.

Now we get to the tricky part: if we’re saying that we have two buckets—who goes where, and why?

Well, that’s complicated…

—————————————–

Ok—that’s it for today. From this point I’m heading back to Baptism in order to define the two major definitions for “saint” and talk about when and where we use them. I’m trying to decide if my usual spiel on patron saints, where that notion comes from and how/why it informs this practice is worth the space and is necessary for this kind of work. Part of the wrap-up of this section includes the difference between secular days of memorial/remembrance and the Christian celebration of saints’ days; the main difference, of course, is that the secular world celebrates the dead while we celebrate the living…

More later!

On the Essence of the Seasons

Here’s a section from a chapter on the essence of the Calendar. It’s not the full thing because I’m still dithering about how to talk about the divisions of the day. I’m being sorely tempted to talk about the eightfold division that we see talked about in the late medieval devotional material and how various points in the day were linked with complementary Scriptural notions and narratives (as represented in the bit from the Myroure below). And yet, to what degree those divisions appear within our current prayer book are tenuous at best. I’d argue that they can inform our current book, but it still seems like a bit of an external imposition. I’ll have to keep thinking about that. In any case, here’s a section on the seasons.

———————

Now, I want to talk about the Christian year from two different perspectives. The first relates to its connection with our doctrine, this seconds relates to its connection with our emotion. We grasp the church year most completely only when we see both aspects, and when the two are understood to be complementary parts of a whole.

Living the creed

Modern Christians like to fight over the creed. What exactly is it, and what is it for? Most often, one of three perspectives prevails: either the creed is a laundry list of ideas, or it is a set of litmus tests for true believers, or is something to be transcended and left behind. Let me suggest that none of these options quite capture the role and purpose of the creed in the life of faith. I believe that our major problems with the creed are due to the fact that we have disconnected it from its proper function: it is a framework to guide our reading of the Scriptures. It turns out that some of the greatest problems and heresies of the early church came about not in spite of the reading of Scripture, but precisely because of it! That is, the Scriptures can be read in many different ways. We can approach it from many different angles. Once we acknowledge – as we must – that Scripture contains both literal and metaphorical material, then one of our chief tasks is to determine which is which. The creed represents a set of interpretive boundaries. It doesn’t tell us what to believe about everything, it just nails down certain points of controversy and renders a clear judgment on the church’s perspective.

It’s worth giving some emphasis to the “points of controversy” notion; I’ve often heard questions and concerns about why the life and ministry of Jesus is not discussed in the creeds. It’s not because the church didn’t think these were important, rather, it’s because there weren’t fundamental arguments about it. The orthodox and heterodox alike believe that Jesus lived, taught, and worked wonders – there was no controversy about these things, and hence no need for clarification.

Rather, the creed addresses specific points of controversy that have practical implications both for theology and for Christian living. For instance, when we confess that God is the creator of the heavens and the earth, we are confirming our belief that the creation of the material world came about through the God who is the father of Jesus Christ and not some evil, lesser god who sought to trap the spirits and souls of humanity in flesh. This is in deliberate contrast to a dualistic impulse which tried to see all spirit as good and all matter as evil and was convinced that no good God would get himself tangled up in material things. But that’s precisely what we believe! Not only did God get himself tangled up in material things, but took the material world so seriously that he became incarnate within it. But that conviction begins with the belief that God is the God of creation and that creation is not what we need to be saved from.

Too often, we only note what the creed says – and lose sight of the mistaken interpretive moves that it prevents. We get so caught up in arguing about what it does say, that we forget that it is simultaneously shutting down other lines of interpretation that can have disastrous pastoral consequences and skew our understanding of and our relationship with the God whom the creed confesses.

So what does this all have to do with the Christian Year?

Quite simply, one aspect of the Christian Year is that it is a temporal embodiment of the interpretive doctrines of the creed. Almost each line of the creed has a corresponding feast or fast. For those who feel a little wary about the creed, this facet of the Church Year should, actually, come as good news! What the creeds state quickly, sparsely, the feasts explore at more leisure. The traditional liturgical material that grew up around these feasts reflect a more poetic, meditative approach that gives greater nuance and the opportunity for deeper reflection about the meaning of the event or concept celebrated by it.

Let me give you an example… The feast of the Epiphany concludes the season of Christmas and begins and emphasis on how Christ alternately revealed himself and was revealed to the world. The early church connected the feast of Epiphany with three different biblical events: Matthew’s story of the Magi arriving to honor the infant Jesus, John’s story of the Wedding of Cana identified as “the first of his signs…and revealed his glory” (john 2:11), and the Baptism of Jesus by John in the Jordan which is at least mentioned in all four Gospels. While these Gospel stories were eventually expanded to their own Sundays, an anonymous liturgist operating perhaps in the 6th or 7th century wove these narratives into a single antiphon as a way of driving to the heart of the feats:

This day is the Church joined unto the Heavenly Bridegroom, since Christ hath washed away her sins in Jordan; the wise men hasten with gifts to the marriage supper of the king; and they that sit at meat together make merry with water turned into wine. Alleluia.

Using the central notion of the wedding feast, the doctrine of the incarnation is made even more relational as the wedding of Christ and the Church by means of the sacrament of Baptism. The first miracle of Christ reflects the joy of the banquet, and the gift-bearing Magi hint at the inclusion of the Gentiles into God’s promise of reconciliation. This is the sort of liturgical play that helps us return again to the creeds with greater appreciation.

Of course, with Cranmer’s great simplification of the Church services, we lost sight of many of these liturgical gems, but the last hundred years has seen a renewed interest in their perspective and they can be found in several devotional resources like the Saint Augustine’s Prayer Book.

The Seasons and the Religious Affections

Doctrines—like those revealed in the creeds—are an important part of the Christian faith. They’re less important for their own sake and more because they help us get a clearer sense of this relationship that we are developing and the identity of the Triune God to whom we relate. More than being an exercise in right-thinking, the Christian faith has been described as a particular pattern of deep emotions shaped over time.

Emotions are tricky things, and the language that we use to talk about them is not always clear or precise. Feelings, having feelings, listening to your feelings is—and must be—an important part of the religious life as well as the whole process of self-discovery. However, we’ve all seen forms of religion that rely upon emotional manipulation—whether that manipulation is based on guilt or a feigned joy—and that’s not what I’m talking about. Emotions, like thoughts, are often fleeting things over which we have little control; they arise within us and we respond to them, express them, give vent to them, or not as we have ability. The affections are more than this; they are more like emotional habits, patterns of feeling that we choose and cultivate. There’s a difference between feeling anger and choosing to live out of an attitude of anger; similarly, there’s a difference between feeling gratitude and choosing to cultivate it as a way of being. The Christian affections, as identified by theologian Don Saliers in his work The Soul in Paraphrase, are gratitude, holy fear and penitence, joy and suffering, and love of God and neighbor.

In what may seem like a paradox, an important part of this “feeling” work is about ideas, thoughts, and doctrines. Just as what we know about a person may influence how we feel towards them, what we know and the ideas we hold about God shapes our feelings in our relationship with the divine. Because of this interrelation between thinking and feeling, the affections are a constellation of beliefs, of doctrines, and feelings that are shaped and reinforced by language that not only provoke emotions within us, but also offer us images and descriptions of reality that help us understand what living out of these perspectives looks like.

When we examine the emotional atmosphere of the great seasons of the Church Year, we recognize that each season provides its own particular entre into one or more of the affections. Lent disciplines us towards penitence; Easter explores holy joy. Advent teaches us about hope and expectation; Christmas also returns to joy—but from a slightly different angle from Easter. These seasons give us an opportunity to concentrate on an affection, to cultivate it, and to understand it more thoroughly. Too, recognizing the seasons as affectional frameworks helps free us from a particular kind of seasonal guilt. Sometimes, I’ll catch myself rejoicing in the Spring air and newly-warm sunshine and feel bad that I’m enjoying myself so much during Lent. Conversely, holidays—particularly Christmas and Easter—can be difficult for those who have recently lost loved ones or who experience familial conflict at these times, contradicting the joyous intent of the Church’s celebrations. If we understand the seasons as training opportunities rather than emotional straight-jackets, we can free ourselves from this unnecessary guilt; it’s okay to feel something different—to experience a whole range of emotions despite an affectional intention of the season as a whole when we understand it as such. Neither our emotions nor the affections should be restricted by the seasons.  Rather, we focus upon particular affections as we move through particular seasons in order that these patterns may become more naturally a feature of our long-term way of being in the presence of God.

The seasons cultivate particular affections in a variety of ways; several factors all converge to create the emotional tenor of a season. The liturgical color often provides an initial first clue as to the season’s character. The bright colors of Christmas and Easter give visual cues as do the darker, more somber hues of Advent and Lent. The use of unflowered greens in Advent and an absence of floral decoration in Lent provide further visual indications of the Church’s mood as you glance around the sanctuary. Music, too, can sometimes change. In the great cathedrals where multiple services were occurring at a time and where the chancel organ played a supplemental role (rather than a dominant role as now) its tones were often suppressed during Advent and Lent. More telling is the use of certain musical elements. The Gloria in exclesis is one of the Church’s great songs of rejoicing and its absence is one of the ways that the Church communicates the time’s tone. It is used at any occasion in Christmas and Easter; not at all in Advent and Lent. The traditional rule that it is only used on Sundays in green seasons elevates Sundays within these seasons of patient endurance. The canticles at Morning Prayer also help shape the season’s mood with some being more appropriate at some times rather than others (we’ll look at this more closely when we go through the Office). One of the more subtle means for creating a season’s mood is in the selection of the biblical readings in both the Office and the Eucharist. For instance, Isaiah’s prophecies of the coming Messiah have been a feature of Advent since its creation while Lamentation is a consistent feature of Holy Week.

All of these elements combine to focus us on certain ideas, certain doctrines, and certain feelings that feed into the composite character of an affection. And the affections together with their sometimes complementary, sometimes sequential, movements between love and holy fear, penitence and joy, form the basic grammar of the Christian way of being.

 

Late Medieval Thoughts on the Office: Purpose

I always like to get a little perspective on questions of liturgy from different periods by looking at vernacular catechetical sources. That is, rather than looking at the conversations that clergy and the learned were having—because they were operating with shared assumptions—take a look at what they were teaching to the unlearned and hopefully were revealing just what those assumptions were!

So—here are two late medieval English vernacular texts that explain the purpose of the Office. The first is from the Myroure of Oure Ladye, the second is from the Henrican Rationale of Ceremonial from the early 1540’s.

The Myroure

Chapter 1: how and why God’s service is said each day in seven hours.

Sepcies in die Laudem dixi tibi. These are the words of the prophet David saying thus to our Lord: “Seven times in the day I have said praises to you.”

All reasonable creatures were made to know, to love, and to praise God and therein to have their endless joy. While our souls are imprisoned in these deadly bodies, we cannot – due to corruption and heaviness of these same bodies – continually accomplish that godly praising as they do who by death are made free from thralldom to the flesh and have come to the end of their joy, that is, the presence of God. Therefore our mother holy church ruled by the Holy Ghost, knowing the frailty and feebleness of her children, has set us every day seven hours. At least in these we ought to be occupied in the service and praise of God that is to say: matins, prime, terce, sext, none, evensong, and compline.

What Solomon says is true, that a righteous man falls seven times a day, and the number of all wickedness is named under seven deadly sins against which the holy church has ordained seven sacraments and is given seven gifts of the Holy Ghost. Therefore, to get remission of our sins, and to thank God for his gifts, we say praises to him in the said hours, seven times each day. Since God made all things in six days and fulfilled them in the seventh day and rested, therefore doing thanks to God for all his works and for all that he made, each day we praise him seven times. Also because the life of man is divided into seven ages where we have spent our time idly or evilly therefore we thank God for our life and seek recompense for such negligence; seven times a day we do service to God. All of this life passes under seven days where the people of this world who are given to active life are occupied in getting their livelihood – and ours – so that they may not freely attend each day in all these times to praise God with their tongues. Therefore we who are called to contemplative life ought to praise God for them – and for us – every day seven times that we may say to our Lord with David, “Lord God, I praised you seven times in the day.”

Chapter 2: why these seven hours rather than others.

But now, you might ask why these seven hours – that is to say, matins time, prime time, and so forth – are assigned by the holy church for the praise of God rather than other hours since there are so many more hours in the day and in the night than seven. To this I answer that these hours are more specially privileged than others because of the great works that God has wrought therein for which he is everlastingly to be praised. Therefore we read that Saints both in the old law and in the new praised God in these hours. For David the prophet says to God this concerning himself: Media nocte surgebam ad confitendum tibi, that is, “Lord, at midnight I rose to praise you.” He also says this: Vespere, et manet meridie narrabo et annunciabo. That is, “At morning, at prime time, at noon, and at evening time, I shall tell and show your praises.” Also Daniel the prophet worships God three times in the day kneeling, according to the exposition of St. Jerome, at terce, sext, and none. Also Peter and John went up into the temple to pray at the hour of none, as it is written in the Acts of the Apostles. St. Paul and Silas, being in prison, prayed to God at midnight, and then the earth quaked and all the prison doors opened and all the fetters and bonds of the prisoners were loosed. Our Lord Jesus Christ also prayed, not only in one part of the night, but all the night he remained awake in prayer as the gospel tells. At the beginning of the holy church, the clergy and the common people – both men and women – rose to praise God four times in the night. First, at the beginning of the night when people are accustomed to go to bed. Second, at midnight. The third, a little before daybreak, and the fourth time at the morning. At evening, our Lord was taken by the Jews, bound and scorned. At midnight he was born. Before day he despoiled hell, and in the morning he rose from death to life. Therefore on some feasts matins are yet said at evening, and in some orders at midnight, and in some before day, and in others, at various times of the night. In some churches they say matins in the morning time.

At prime time, our Lord Jesus Christ was led to Pilate and accused. In the same hour after his resurrection, he appeared to Mary Magdalene, and another day he appeared to his disciples as they were fishing at the same hour. At the hour of terce, our Lord Jesus Christ was scourged, crowned with thorns, and scorned. The same hour, after his resurrection he appeared to the women coming from the sepulcher. On Pentecost Sunday at the same hour he sent the Holy Ghost down upon the apostles. At sext, our Lord Jesus Christ was nailed on the cross, and fed with vinegar and gall. At the same hour after his resurrection, he appeared to the apostle St. James, and on Ascension Day at the same hour he sat and ate with his apostles. At the hour of none, our Lord Jesus Christ cried and he gave up his soul to death. At the same hour, a knight opened our Lord’s side with a spear and smote through his heart from which came water for our baptism and blood for our redemption. On Easter day, he appeared at the same hour to St. Peter. At evening time, our Lord Jesus Christ on Shere [Maundy] Thursday ate with his apostles and ordained the holy sacrament of his holy body and blood. At the same hour on Good Friday, he was taken down from the cross. On Easter day at the same hour, he met with two of his disciples going toward Emmaus, and made himself known to them in the breaking of bread. At compline time, our Lord Jesus Christ on Shere Thursday at evening prayed and sweat blood. At the same hour on Good Friday, he was buried. On Easter day at the same hour, he appeared to his disciples gathered together in a closed place for fear of the Jews, and said to them, “Peace be with you.” Thus you may see that not without great cause are these hours set and ordained to be specially occupied in the serving and praising of our Lord God rather than other hours of the day.

The Rationale

The service used in the Church daily in some places or upon the Sundays and other feasts in all places, that is to say to have matins, prime, hours, evensong, and compline, whereof the most part is of Scripture, as the Psalms, and many times the legends (certain things added by man well reformed) are very godly and expedient both for that the ministers prayeth and giveth and thanks to God for themselves and for the people, and also that by the example of their prayers, they move and excite the people to pray with them. And therefore, for the adorning of the same service, surplices, copes and other vestures and ceremonies in the doing thereof are very laudable and comely.

The sober, discreet and devout singing, music and playing with organs used in the church, for the service of God are ordained to move and stir the people to the sweetness of God’s word the which is there sung [and not understanded (contained but struck out in one of the two manuscripts…)], and by that sweet harmony both to excite them to prayers and devotion and also to put them in remembrance, of the heavenly triumphant church, where is everlasting joy with continual laud and praise to God.

Some Thoughts…

Coming to these texts with the classic distinctions between “monastic” and “cathedral” ringing in my ears, I’m struck at how “cathedral” these descriptions appear—particularly the second. The emphasis on prayer/praise and on the the visual aspect of the ceremonies figure quite large in the standard definitions.

Note the comments in both that the singing of the hours is a means of joining the chorus of the Church Triumphant. Not just joining an angelic chorus, but particularly the saintly dead.

The offices are seen as edifying, but—particularly in the second—edifying by means of their example rather than their content. Seeing and hearing the song of the Offices should put the people in mind to pray themselves and join the saintly chorus. Of course, at this point, the services remained in Latin as Henry retained the Sarum Rite even after his separation from Rome.

“Cathedral” Conundrums

My writing has hit a snag…

I was on a pretty good roll, then page proofs for the St Augustine’s Prayer Book took me away, then focus on some web projects, and with both school and ballet starting up again for the girls the household’s been crazy, and now I’m trying to get my head back into it.

The real problem, though, is that I’m trying to make sense of the distinction between “cathedral” and “monastic” prayer in the Daily Office in a way that’s clear, accessible, and transparent. At the end of the day, the spirituality of the Daily Office goes in one of two major directions based on whether you take a “cathedral” or a “monastic” approach to it. I think I’ll be doing the Office a disservice if I don’t tease that out. On the other hand, so much of the scholarly literature that attempts to define these terms and isolate their characteristics is not terrible clear especially since—at the end of the day—“cathedral” and “monastic” are extracted ideals that don’t actually fit terribly well onto the historical practice. To complicate matters, there is considerable prejudice for the “cathedral” style and against the “monastic” style in the writings of the Liturgical Renewal Movement. To try and put the problem in a nutshell, it’s this: they see “cathedral” prayer as the communal prayer of the whole church and “monastic” prayer as the individualistic prayer of a spiritual elite. In keeping with the LRM’s central focus on worship as the activity of the whole people of God, you can see why they privilege the first over the second!

In line with LRM norms, the framers of the ’79 BCP tried to introduce quite a bit more “cathedral” elements into what they saw as Cranmer’s “monastic” re-write of the Offices.  It’s not until I started digging into this particular angle of this aspect of the problem that I realized exactly what had been done to the Office in the ’79 book. The pieces are falling into place. The Anglican Office really is “monastic” at heart. But the current prayer book attempts to fundamentally imbue it with a “cathedral” character, and understanding how, why, and what that means and communicating it in a coherent and non-technical way is not easy…

This project as a whole is making me realize two big things. First, I’m coming to consciously see myself as participating in the first generation of a post-LRM critique. As I’ve said before, the LRM did many wonderful things, the Church is richer for its work—but it operated out of a number of fundamental assumptions that have to be re-explored. Second, there’s something about being a layman with an interest in lay devotion that gives me a different angle on a field that’s been principally written about and dominated by priests. I’m questioning some of the standard sine qua nons of liturgical scholarship as reflecting a clerical bias… More on this later—time to get the girls up and get the day rolling!

iOS Users: Breviary Update 2.0

Page proofs for the Saint Augustine’s Prayer Book are finally done and off to the publisher. SCLM work is taking up some time as well, but I stole the morning to work on the breviary preference problem and I *believe* I have it solved. So—users of iOS devices (and other devices), give this a try: http://stbedeproductions.com/breviary/test/combined_preferences.php

Once you save your preferences (and a pop-up should show you a long string of numbers), a “Pray with your new preferences” link will show up under the button and should take you to a functional breviary experience. So far, it works in my desktop Chrome browser, on the Kindle Fire, but my Android phone’s browser doesn’t like it and inserts a string of “undefined”s where they shouldn’t be. (That’ll be the next hurdle.)

Give it a shot—let me know what happens in the comments!