Category Archives: Liturgy

New Cafe Piece

I’ve got a new piece up at the Cafe. A little background—this one came directly albeit obliquely out of on-going conversations that I’ve been having with Donald Schell (yes, that Donald Schell)  about liturgy, faith formation, and the place of tradition in our reflection.

Christopher will also recognize some key items on liturgy and tradition that we’ve been discussing together for quite some time…

Too often discussions about liturgy and worship fall into a set of stale rhetorical traps that pit binaries against each other: traditional/contemporary; Spirit-led/rubric-driven, spontaneous/over-planned, etc. The simple fact is that these are not helpful as blanket categories any more (if ever). What I’m expressing here is a understanding of Christian theology and liturgy that is a contemporary appropriation of traditional materials rooted in a pneumatology that understands the spread of human history as the playground of the Spirit. “Listening to the Spirit” doesn’t just mean cocking your ear now—although that’s an undeniable part of it.  Furthermore, while liturgy’s principle aim is the praise and worship of God, we must also attend to its secondary purpose of communal Christian formation.

The bottom line is that if our corporate worship is not playing a major role in our transformation into the mind of Christ than there’s a problem. And the problem isn’t necessarily the liturgy, either—sometimes it’s us!

Plainchant Gradual for RCL Year B from OJN

Prompted by the previous post on English language graduals, Fr. John-Julian has sent me an electronic version of his just completed (note the 2009 copyright date!) Gradual that corresponds with the official lectionary of the Episcopal Church, the Revised Common Lectionary.

A quick history note for those primarily accustomed to the “new” liturgy… Formerly there were only two readings at a standard mass in the Western Church—the “Epistle” and the Gospel. When the cycles were first constructed they were separate as they circulated in two different books. They linked up with one another in the 8th century or so as exemplified by their combined treatment in the Commentarius in Evangelia et Epistolas of Smaragdus and as we find them in the writings of Amalarius of Metz. The “Epistle” was often but not always from the New Testament epistles; on fasts it came from the prophets—see Ash Wednesday in the American 1928 BCP  as a survival of this formerly consistent custom.

Was there a Psalm appointed? Well—yes and no. Technically, no—but there were Mass Propers appointed which originally served as an appointed psalm because the Introit and Gradual—and sometimes the Offertory and Communion—were often taken from the same psalm. After the Epistle, the choir would sing the Gradual (a psalm with an antiphon, eventually only a verse or two of the psalm), then proceed into the ceremony surrounding the Gospel. This was a Sequence incorporating an Alleluia or, in fasting seasons, a Tract. The Sequence/Tract was a fairly late addition to the mass, note that the 10th century Leofric Missal contains no incipts for Sequeces/Tracts. (Sequences as a whole were supressed at Trent with the exception of 5)

So—in Fr. John-Julian’s work you’ll find the psalm appointed for the Sunday/feast in the RCL treated as a gradual with an antiphon, then the appointed psalm with a matching tone. The Sequences are biblical verses preceded and followed by alleluias; the Tracts are sections of psalms or other biblical texts (viz. Proverbs for Lent 2). The Sequences/Tracts are to be sung before the Gospel.

Ok, that’s enough lead in, here’s the file as a PDF: rcl-b-all-graduals-ojn

Liber Usualis Modern Notation in English

The title here is more a string of keywords that bring a lot of people to this site. I have addressed this issue before where I essentially said that it’s much easier to just learn how to read square-notes. I still believe that, but that only addresses one of the issues in the use of the Liber Usualis [big PDF download warning]—it’s also not in English…

The best response, well, I’ll just leave that unsaid… but I will point you to a growing set of resources that have come to my attention. What I’ll try and do here, is to give you some small snippets of what you can find in these resources in comparison with a bit of the Liber itself. So, without further ado, a snippet from the Introit of Advent 1:

adv1introitlu

The Anglican Use Gradual: This gradual contains the Propers for the Mass according to the Anglican Use of the Roman Catholic Church. While it retains the use of square-notation, it is in traditional-language (Rite I) English. Its base material is drawn from the current (1979) Graduale Romanum so it follows the same basic kalendar as the RCL. (I.e., the last proper of the liturgical year is for Christ the King.) For the most part, it presents the propers using the Rossini “psalm-tone” settings:

adv1introitaug1

but on occasion presents a more full and complex setting—as with the Introit for Advent 1:

adv1introitaug2

It also sometimes includes chants that match with the three-year lectionary but this seems rather infrequent and haphazard. Overall, this work is very nicely produced with all of the seasons, commons, propers for major saints, and votives included masses for the departed that one would need. A section at the back includes common tones for the Asperges/Vidi Aquam, Preces, Gloria Patri, etc. A clear index wraps everything up.

Access/download is free but the work is copyrighted and a contact email appears for obtaining permissions.

Here is the PDF of the Anglican Use Gradual.

The American Gradual: This uses both modern notation and contemporary (Rite II) English but don’t on those accounts think that it’ll be “easier” than the Anglican Use Gradual… Bruce Ford here presents the real deal, a full transcription of the chants of the gradual. (It’s worth noting that he states clearly that his material is adapted from a German site that presents the chants alongside the actual early notation and that glosses the Latin in modern German.) Here’s a sample from this work:

adv1introitag

Unfortunately, the copy I’ve found available for download only gives material for the Advent and Christmas seasons, ending with the Communion from Baptism of Our Lord (1st Sunday after Epiphany). I don’t know if other parts come available seasonally or not…

It lacks an introduction, table of contents and index, but it’s certainly got the goods muscially. It is copyrighted, but allows photocopying for the personal use of local churches and individuals provided they give correct attribution.

Here is the PDF of the American Gradual.

Archdiocese of St. Louis Worship Resources: These appear to have both psalm tone and other settings in English with modern notation and organ accompaniment. They’re also still under development. Some of the PDFs contain handwritten scores. Here’s a sample of one of the typed ones, though:

adv1introitsl

This site also contains some Office materials—proper Vespers settings. These may be in square notation. (The one I looked at was.)

So far it only offers Advent, Christmas and Lent, but promises that more settings will become available as the seasons progress.

These resources are collected here.

Files of the Yahoo Gregorian User Group: These are all user contributed and come in quite an array of formats, languages, etc. To access the files you must be a member of the moderated group. A wide and wild variety of things can be found, but be prepared to do some poking around to find what you’re after.

Here’s a sample of one offering:

adv1introitbud

The group is located here.

So—that’s everything that I know of that relates to English or modern notation and the Liber. If others know of more resources, drop it in the comments or shoot me an email.

Liturgy. One More Time…

There’s a post at the Cafe about what Episcopalians can learn from Baptists. To my eyes, it repeats the usual tropes about hide-bound, static “book” liturgy as opposed to free and spontaneous “spirit-filled” worship.

It’s a tired rhetorical dichotomy that really needs to die because it’s based in a fundamentally one-side understanding of pneumatology.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, liturgical worship certainly can become hide-bound, stodgy and dead. But it’s false to say it all is—or even most.

The chief reason why this hacks me off, though, is the assumption that most Episcopalians are at the place where they can profitably learn things from Baptists about liturgy. Unfortunately, we’re not there yet! Most of the Episcopalians I know need to learn a lot more about Episcopal worship before we start looking to see what we can learn from others.

Etiquette and Ethics

We can look at manners and etiquette in three ways:

  1. It is the grease that oils the cogwheels of the social machine,
  2. It is something that belongs to the realm of aesthetics,
  3. but we can also look at them as they belong to the realm of ethics—as having to do with how we treat one another in everyday life.

–P.M. Forni, professor of Italian Literature at Johns Hopkins and one of the co-founders of the Civility Project

I heard this fascinating interview on the radio yesterday on etiquette, the true aims of Emily Post, and the odd place of etiquette in American culture. I bring it up not only because it’s quite interesting but because it occurred to me that there are some very close parallels between etiquette and liturgy.

Just as etiquette helps structure our social relationships, liturgy helps us structure our religious ones.

Give it a listen and let me know what you think…

Liturgy for Families with Kids for Advent

I’ve mentioned online before about how as a family we use the brief services found on pages 139ff of the BCP. At the urgings of bls, Christopher, and others, I’ve put together the first bit of a projected small liturgical project for families with young children tentatively entitled “Episcopal Family Brief Breviary”. It simply uses the framework included in the BCP for the quick office-like services but is made vaguely seasonal by changing the Scriptural sentence to a seasonal one (users of the traditional breviaries will note that it’s the little chapter from Lauds and Vespers respectively) and we introduce either a liturgical text we’re working on or an appropriate hymn. (Again–from Lauds or Vespers.) For the hymns, I’m  indebted to Fr. John-Julian as I’m using his translations.

I call it “Episcopal” rather than either “Anglican” or “Christian” because the bulk of it comes out of the ’79 BCP, but it’s entirely appropriate for any flavor of Christian… It’s here as a pdf (episcopal-family-brief-breviary-advent) that can be printed out in a handy front/back format.

Mass and Office Anglicanism

Christopher has a great post that sparked this one.

What he, I, and a number of us talk and dream about is a way of taking seriously the connection between spirituality and the daily grind: how does the daily grind become transported into a a day that is productive and meaningful yet grounded in the deep mysteries suffused by the love of God?

We keep fussing around the notion of Mass and Office practice that grounds our spirituality in specific daily habits that then give shape to the days, seasons, and years of our lives.

Specifically this means:

  • A grounding in the Psalms: The Book of Psalms is the most human and visceral book of Scripture that explores what it looks like to live a life in the presence of God that acknowledges joy, sorrow, pain, despair, and delight. It offers glimpses of faithful people overly certain of their own apprehension of the mind of God (“…Do I not hate them that hate thee, O Lord?…I hate them with a perfect hatred…”); it shows souls intent on God that yet languish in despair (…Thou hast caused lover and friend to shun me and darkness is my only companion.”) In short, it holds a mirror before our soul and dares us to deny our baser instincts and our capacities to transcend insisting that as realists we embrace both not only as who we are but also as what we bring to the spiritual life and with which the spiritual life must grapple. 
  • An embrace of the seasons: The seasons of the Church Year are designed to guide us through the full rota of the Christian affections—our emotional orientations and ways of being that parallel and bring depth to our intellectual and rational understanding of the faith. That is, joy, hope, repentence, expectation are to characterize our fundamental orientations and outlook, to form the fundamental syllables of our grammar of faith and our song of life. And the seasons enable the patterning process that sets these things in our bones.

Christopher notes: “Paul Bradshaw asks, ‘What is our intent for the Office?'” And I answer from my research and grounding in early medieval monastic liturgy that the function of the Office is catechetical while the function of the Mass is mystagogical. That is, the Office gives us the basic data that forms our life. In it we ceaslessless read through the psalms. In it we read through (ideally) the whole of Scripture. It forms us in the basics. The Mass excerpts and illuminates particular facets of the light of Christ as perceived through season and Scripture that illuminate the mysteries within which we live.

The Office provides the fundamental context within which we understand the Mass. The Mass gives us the moments (and means) of grace that shock our daily patterns deeper into a life hid in God with Christ. 

Without the Office the Mass offers disjointed and discontinuous vignettes offering little by way of a framework and master narrative. Without the Mass the Office becomes pedantica basic teaching repeated again and again lacking the hints that direct us to the spiritual depths therein.

Historically within the Western liturgy—and I think primarily here of my early medieval research subjects—Mass and Office have been bound to one another and to the season by four fundamental links:

  • Antiphons: both seasonal texts and materials from the Mass lectionary informed the psalm and canticle antiphons used with the psalms in the Office.
  • Hymns: The sense of each season was provided by the hymns which, placed after the psalms and the short Scripture “chapter” (usually a line or two long) sounded the key notes of the season that moved the prayer of the Office from the Psalms to the gospel canticle 
  • Preces: Particularly in major seasons the Epistle from the Sundays Mass would work its way into the preces, the systm of bids and responses that followed the gospel canticles in the major offices of the psalms in the minor ones.
  • The Collects: The collects of the major offices bound the season, Mass and Office together, uniting them in a common, brief, memorizable and memorable prayer. Snatches of Scripture from the Mass Lectionaries—both Gospel and Epistle tied (or had the potential to tie) the connections between season, Mass, and Office even tighter into a harmonioous whole. 

Looking at traditional Anglican Offices, though, the Books of Common Prayer have consistently jettisoned the first three and retained only the forth. However the combination of the ’79 American Prayer Book and the adoption of the Revised Common Lectionary have, through ignorance or disregard, further eroded the ties that bound the three together in the collects.

Nothing short of a complete overhaul of the prayer-book collect system will make this pedagogical and theological vehicle operative again. 

And yet we are not without classically Anglican resources or hope. Catholic-leaning Anglicans have kept the breviary hymn tradition alive for centuries forwarding both Roman and Sarum options for the continued use of praying communities. And the 1662’s use of seasonal collects for Advent and Lent, the octave retention of the Collect for Christmas  signal an awareness and a need for the seasonal patterning in both Office and Mass.

Beginnings

Ok—that’s all very theoretical and all. So what do we do now? I’ve got a suggestion. It’s a simple one but it’s a place to start.

Can busy modern households manage full offices everyday?Can we incarnate full-on Mass and Office Anglicanism in modern family communities? Well, it’s not been our experience. Individuals in the households can pray the Offices given schedules with flexibility, but not the whole family, not together. However, what has been working for us is the use of the Brief Offices on pages 137 to 140 of your BCP. At breakfast we pray the morning one (p. 137) at night we use Compline (p. 140) for bedtime prayers. 

Lil’ G (the 5 yr old) memorized the latter when she was 3 and is the major driving force for morning prayer at breakfast.

No, it’s not immersion in the psalter but a bit of a couple of psalms everyday is surely better than none at all. Why not include a seasonal hymn in the space provided for it there and add in the collect of the day before the concluding collect of the office?

It’s basic. It’s doable. It points us towards the pattern of Mass and Office Anglicanism.

Junk Mail Catch

In clearing out my junk mail folder, I discovered a message from Liturgical Training Press. It seems they’re offering 25% off your next purchase if you’re willing to sign up on their email list. Given all the v1@gra spam I have to wade through anyway, a note from a press I actually like seems a small price to pay for a nice discount…and I thought some of you might feel the same.

Of course—I don’t know if this extends to the allied Cistercian Press or not, but if it does, it’ll make me even happier!