Dearmer’s Grand Rant

One of my chief conversation partners as I work on my presentation for the Society of Catholic Priests is Percy Dearmer’s Art of Public Worship. I’m about halfway through editing the text as a Kindle file and will be saying more about it as it becomes available. However, I couldn’t help but share this bit where Blessed Percy draws together the threads of ceremonial, theology, and denominational relations in one big argument. I wouldn’t go all the way with him, here, but he certainly makes a passionate case:

For the Church does need guidance, leadership, education; otherwise the silly people will continue to stamp the whole Church with their diverse follies, and the great mass of moderate men will continue to think that the safe and moderate thing is to combine the mistakes of both sides. We have never realized the seriousness of ceremonial, the need of sound knowledge, of aesthetic understanding, of careful thought. And ceremonial, as I have suggested, is of the utmost importance, because worship must express itself in action. You can carry off an almost unlimited amount of inadequate ritual by means of ceremonial, you can hide your ritual behind your ceremonial, as the Latin and Eastern Churches so largely do; but you cannot undo the harm of a bad ceremonial. If our Church is to be at one moment a weak imitation of Geneva or Berlin, at another of Cologne or Cork, or an illogical combination of such shadows, she can have no future. As it is, the Anglican Church is still regarded all over the Continent, from Vigo to Vladivostok, as a mere variety of Lutheranism; while a small section of her clergy are hated by the general public of America and Britain as imitators of Rome, and win the amused contempt of Roman Catholics for their pains. Yet what the Continent of Europe wants, what the whole world is blindly groping for, is what we can offer, what we have always stood for — a reasonable, free, and evangelical Catholicism. Mere Protestantism is shrivelling and weak in Europe, and its deep moral failure in the country of its birth at the very outset of the Great War will be difficult to survive; but Vaticanism, as Loisy has been explaining in France,[i] has also failed morally. Yet the people of Christendom do still want to be Christian, if only they could see that there is another way open to them besides those two alternatives: they think that they must either be Papist or Protestant, and the modern world will not be either; they do not know that it is possible to keep all that is true and beautiful in traditional Christianity, and that there is a more fruitful course open to intelligent men than anti-clericalism or indifferentism. It was the duty of the Anglican Church to make this clear to the whole world, standing, with the Churches of the East, for free, national, and federated Catholicism; and she has hitherto failed, mainly because she has not proclaimed her message in the only language that the whole world can read — a consistent, beautiful, and expressive ceremonial. She has not even been intelligible to her own children. Her ministers have disregarded her rules, and marred her beauty; her members have regarded her as a compromise or a dim reflection of something else. But people will never rally to an imitation, they will never be inspired by a compromise. The Anglican Church could not exist if she had no mind of her own, and would not deserve to exist. She has a mind of her own, and the principles which she has never ceased to maintain are those which alone can make Christianity possible in the future as anything more than a vague sentiment. If by the example of her public worship all over the world she can now show herself for what she is, she will win, and win, and win all along the line; and, proclaiming by her strenuous beauty the undying strength of the old Christian tradition, she will help the peoples of the other Churches to that reconstruction which must surely come if they also are to flourish in the new age.

[i] [Ed.: Alfred Loisy was a French Roman Catholic priest who argued on behalf of biblical criticism and a more modern approach to theology. He was excommunicated by Pius X in 1908 for Modernism.]

General Theological + Candler

News came over the wire yesterday that a pact has been struck between two institutions close to my heart, General Theological Seminary and Emory’s Candler School of Theology. Here’s the official news release from ENS. The perspective from Candler is here; GTS doesn’t have a press release on there site at the moment. One piece of data may help connect the dots: Lang Lowery—General’s Interim President—earned his MDiv at Candler the same time that M and I were there.

The key items here seem to be a book exchange. (The electronic and student exchanges don’t seem to be as significant to me.) Pitts Library in Atlanta will receive 80,000 to 90,000 books from GTS which should ease physical space conditions in New York. What Dr. Graham will do with them once they reach the ATL is an open question, though, barring a massive increase to the size of Pitts since last I was there!

What does this mean? The way I read it, Candler is helping out GTS by reducing the storage cost of the library materials. GTS is likely divesting itself of most of its non-Anglican focused materials to save space and reduce costs. I’ve said before (in chorus with others, of course) that seminaries attached to universities will be better equipped to survive in the emerging landscape than standalone institutions. What we see here is a consolidation of physical resources into a university-based seminary away from a standalone.

If this were a computer network, we’d say that there’s a trend moving from a peer-to-peer system where each unit has its own resources to a distributed computing model where a central server holds resources for thin clients. However, the resource under discussion here are books and people—physical things rather than data packets which concentrates control in the “server” institution.

Interesting…

The Presence of God: Immanence and Transcendence

When we think about the “presence of God” or “the holy” or “the sacred” in the world, I think that there are two main directions from which we can approach it that generally fall under the rubrics of immanence and transcendence.

The transcendent tends to identify God as “out there” or normally distant and God reveals himself to us through big events and moments. The immanent tends to identify God as “in here” and intimately related to us, present in every moment and action, and thought—one of my mentors used to regularly weave into prayers Tennyson’s phrase “Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.”

Another way that this gets framed is where do we find God: in big church events or in the commonplace action of everyday life ( the second a view that heartily believes that ironic scare quotes are needed in the phrase “secular” life).

These two positions tended to be pitted against one another. I don’t think that you can authentically read Scripture and the Tradition without seeing that both revealed wisdom and spiritual learning affirm this to be both/and not an either/or. Heck–it’s hard to read far in the psalter without both things being affirmed.

The preferable way to see it is as a spectrum. Immanence and transcendence take their sides but there’s a healthy relationship between the two. On the ends of the spectrum would be pantheism and (a little closer in) panentheism for immanence and gnosticism and (a little closer in) docetism for transcendence.

At this point, however, is where I’ve got to stop or at least pause. This is as far as Ican go before I have to consider exactly what kind of discussion we’re having and why. Where I get irritated and edgy is when people try to make grand statements about these two terms on some sort of dogmatic level. As I’ve said before, I’m not a dogmatic or systematic theologian. I simply don’t have the tools to wrestle with these terms on an abstract basis. I have no choice but to come at it from the direction of ascetical theology. Thus, the way that I have to frame the issue is something like this:

God is both immanent and transcendent; to base a relationship with a too-exclusively immanent or transcendent deity is to mischaracterize the relationship. If one of the goals of the spiritual life is to cultivate a habitual awareness of the presence of God, what are the disciplines needed to cultivate an openness to the presence of God and what is the relationship between them? I.e., do we start with disciplines of transcendence to learn to recognize God in the big moments so that we can recognize him in the small? or do we begin with disciplines of immanence in order to comprehend and affirm the qualities of God that also appear in the transcendent moments? The true answer (once again) being a balance of the two, are there ways that the balance tends to shift through a “typical” spiritual life—and in recognizing that there’s little “typical” in a relationship with the Living God, to what degree is this balance informed by a given person’s temperament and dispositions?

I do believe that, largely speaking, some people are wired more towards an immanent understanding while others are wired for a transcendent understanding. In a marketplace of religions like we have now in post-Constantinian America, I suspect that some of our inter- and intra-denominational groupings may reflect certain preferences one way or another (among other sorting factors) and are reflected in certain worship styles and practices. Thus—as in this piece in an earlier attempt to fool around with these issues—I think that the guitars vs. chant debate is deeply related to this topic.

I think it’s fair to say that your standard Anglo-Catholic Mass foregrounds transcendence. The environment created by the vestments, the music, the candles, the odd liturgical objects we favor presents a cultural experience that is profoundly different from our everyday cultural experiences. (By contrast, a potted-plant concert hall with a guitar-wielding shirt-sleeved and goateed praise team leader presents a cultural experience that is profoundly familiar to our everyday life.) However, Anglo-Catholic spirituality doesn’t stop at the end of Mass, either. As Fr. Gerth always reminds his herd of servers in the sacristy on the really big feast days, these services have meaning not by themselves but in relation to all of the other, lower, simpler Masses and Offices that fill out our daily/weekly/monthly/yearly round.

So, to begin to head in the direction of an answer, I’m going to suggest that contemporary Anglo-Catholic practice foregrounds disciplines of transcendence through a focus on God’s particular presence in the sacraments, the deliberate cultivation of a transcendent religious culture, and emphasizing distinctions between sacred (space, objects, people [sometimes running to the crazy extreme]) and the secular.  A lively Anglo-Catholic spirituality needs to supplement this with disciplines of immanence like breath prayers and practices of the presence of God (a la Br. Lawrence and others).

I’m thinking out loud here—does this make sense? Thoughts?

I’m feeling the need to go back to Thornton and Underhill to see if/how they approach this…

 

Random Thought on Customaries

I had a random thought this morning at Mass concerning customaries (you know, the list of what a body does when during the service…).

Most customaries come at things from the “descriptive” perspective. That is, they list out what you see the person doing: “Walk from here to there in such a way. Genuflect. Then stand in that place…” In the past when I’ve worked on memorizing a new customary, one of the harder parts was remembering when to throw in various gestures or movements like genuflections, bowings, crossings, etc.

What tends to make this more difficult is that a lot of customaries were created in a descriptive fashion. That is, there was a way that things had “always” been done and in order to keep it that way and to train the newbies, someone wrote down a description what they did—often without reference to what the other folks on/around the altar were doing—and it became “official.”

What’s the problem with this?

Well, if the various versions for the various folks aren’t harmonized you can have different folks doing the same things at different times and, especially if they’re standing right next to each other, that can appear a bit odd… (For instance, if the deacon and the priest standing at the front side-by-side cross themselves at different times at the end of the Gloria.) The real issue, though, is that you’ve got a bigger and deeper problem if you having different folks doing the same things for different reasons.

From my perspective, ceremonial actions shouldn’t happen at random or happenstance; they should have specific “triggers.” The three key triggers that fire-off or initiate a ceremonial action should either be words, motion to or through a place, or an object.

If you look at a good descriptive customary, you should start to see patterns, an internal logic, that will lead you to prescriptive principles about when and why certain things are done. I.e., genuflect when entering or exiting the sanctuary (the space enclosed by the altar rail or rood screen), profound bow at mention of the three persons of the Trinity, and so forth.

Here’s the thing, though: if we start laying out the prescriptive principles, that’s when we start getting into the hard work of liturgical thinking. When we start laying out the prescriptive principles, we realize that we’re starting to bring to a conscious level a practical theology of the holy. That is,  ritual gestures are triggered when we hear holy words, when enter or leave holy space, or engage holy objects. If our prescriptive principles are clear and coherent then they inform us—or challenge us—to think about what we think about the nature of the sacred: what is holy and what is profane, how we show respect for the holy, how the holy is kept distinct from the profane.  Simple reflection on what things shouldn’t been done or brought into what parts of the church, how the altarware should be handled both in and out of the service (is there a difference? should there be?) has the potential to run us into some complicated spiritual and theological reflection about our beliefs on the imminence and transcendence of God, about how we think about orders of ministry, and such.

Is the nave of the church an innately more holy space than the narthex? Is the sanctuary inherently more holy than the nave? Who can handle the altarware and does what they wear when doing so matter?

When you get right down to it, this avenue of exploration will eventually lead us to the key root question: how does God who is fundamentally Other and distinct from creation choose to interact in and with our earthly reality—and how does that impact how we conduct our worship?

Third Annual SCP Conference

The line-up has been announced for the third annual meeting of the Episcopal Church’s Society of Catholic Priests. The presenters include the Rt. Rev. Frank Griswold, the former Presiding Bishop; the Rt. Rev. Wendell Gibbs, the current sitting bishop of Michigan; Mthr. Takacs, Associate Priest at St. Mark’s Philly and an acquaintance of M’s;—and me.

My talk on Friday morning will explore the theological meaning of liturgical ceremonial and I’m projecting that I’ll approach it from two directions. First, how do ceremonial concerns and liturgical matters fit into “real ministry”? Second, how does ceremonial communicate theology and spirituality, and how can we be intentional about what our ceremonial says and does?

As I work on the presentation, I’ll probably be posting some of my thoughts here especially as I read and react to some of my conversation partners. For those who won’t be or can’t attend the conference, I’ll likely post the presentation either here or (perhaps) at the Cafe.

Best Quote to Date on Debt Ceiling

I haven’t posted many political things recently since I tend to fall into the camp that prefers “sanity” in my political discourse and there seems to be precious little of that in most discussions…

Nevertheless, I just read in this CNN article what I’d consider to be a nice Moment Of Clarity. As such—expect it to be ignored uniformly.

Here it is from David Stockman:

 [W]e are collecting less than 15% of GDP in taxes, the lowest since 1950, and spending 24% of GDP.

We’ve got to move in both directions—no two ways around it.

The Bishops’ Prymer and Daily Office Lectionaries

I ran across an interesting discovery the other day…

While looking through the Three Prymers for another purpose, I took notice of the kalendar of the second prymer, referred to as the bishops’ prymer, written by John, Bishop of Rochester and others within the reign of Henry the 8th. (According to my downloaded file, the kalendar of which I speak begins on PDF page 308.)

Just to clarify, this text was written when the official public services of the Church of England were still the Latin-language Sarum services according to the Missal and the Breviary.

The kalendar is not a true kalendar in the sense that it would give a listing of the days and the sanctoral or occasional fixed temporal feasts that fall upon it. Instead, this kalendar is used as a general framework on which is superimposed the moveable contents of the Temporal Cycle with the red-letter days inserted as they appear.

The page has three main columns. The middle column gives only the dominical letters and so is just a string of letters repeating from A to g. A thin column by the side of the page gives a breviary-type reading (you’ll see why I call it that in a second) while a wider column on the other side of the letters gives the incipit and chapter for the Epistle and Gospel readings for Sunday and festal masses. The “breviary” column is roughly aligned with the Sundays listed in the “Mass” column.

These are the contents of the “Mass” column for January:

  • [New Year’s Day]: For the, Tit. ii; And when, Luke ii
  • On the Sunday within eight days of Christmas whenever it fall: And I say, Gal. iv; And his, Luke ii
  • [Untitled–Christmas II? Vigil of Epiphany?]: For the, Tit. ii; When Herod, Matt. ii
  • The Epiphany: Esa. lx; When Jesus was born, Matt ii.
  • On the Sunday next after Twelfth Day: Rise up, Esa. lx; The next day, John i
  • On the Second Sunday after Twelfth Day: I beseech, Rom xii; And when he, Luke ii
  • On the Third Sunday, if there fall so many: Seeing we have, Rom xii; And the third, John ii
  • On the Fourth Sunday, if there fall so many Twelfth Day and going out of ma.: Be not wise in your, Rom xii; When Jesus was, Matt. viii
  • On the Fifth Sunday if there be so many between Septuagesima and Twelfth Day: Owe nothing, Rom xiii; And he entered, Mark iv
  • On the Sixth Sunday, if there be so many between Twelfth tide and Septuagesima: Now therefore as elect, Col. iii; The kingdom of heaven is, Matt. xiii
  • On the Sunday when marriage goeth out [Septuagesima]: Perceive ye not how that, 1 Cor ix; For the kingdom of heaven, Matt. 20

If you check your Sarum Missal you’ll find that this is pretty darn close to the list of readings there. It’s not exact, but that that may have as much to say about variation in the Sarum Missal tradition than anything else. For instance, my Missal shows Matt 8 for the Fifth Sunday (Fourth after the Octave) but the passage pointed to here, Mark 4, is the Synoptic parallel of the same miraculous feeding. Likewise, my missal doesn’t include a Sunday after the Nativity, but the readings here line up closely with the Sixth Day after the Nativity (the only one without a feast) whether a Sunday or not. Thus, this appears to be a rough and ready means for the laity to either follow along or to read beforehand the Epistles and Gospels that will be heard in Latin at Mass.

Here, then, is the “breviary” column:

  • New Year’s Day: Read the Epistle to Tit[us] & 2[nd Letter] to Timothy
  • [Opposite Sunday after Twelfth Day]: Read the Epistle to the Romans
  • [(sort of) Opposite Second Sunday]: Read the Epistle to the Corinthians
  • [(sort of) Opposite Third Sunday]: Read the 2[nd Letter] to the Cor[inthians]
  • [(sort of) Opposite Fourth Sunday]: Read this week to the Gal[atians] & 1[st Letter] to Tim[othy]
  • [(sort of) Opposite Fifth Sunday]: Read the [Epistle to the] Epeshians & [to the] Phil[ippians]
  • [Opposite Sixth Sunday]: Read [the Epistle] to the Thess[alonians] & to the Col[ossians]
  • [Opposite Septuagesima]: On this Sunday the Church beginneth to read the Scripture in order

As we move through the rest of the months, we find that the instructions given in the “breviary” column move in rough correlation with the Sundays indicated in the “Mass” column. Sometimes they are unable to link clearly due to spacing and the type already on the page. However—as in the case of January—by counting back and giving each instruction a week, the proper arrangement can be found. Now I’ll give the sequence for the rest of the year, noting months and Sundays where pertinent, passing in silence over reiterated readings:

  • [Opposite Sexagesima]: Read this week within the Church, Genesis.
  • [Opposite Mid-Lent Sunday [The Fourth Sunday]]: Read here with the Church the Second Book of Moses, called Exodus.
  • [Opposite Passion Sunday [the Fifth]]: Read this week with the Church the prophet Jeremy.
  • [Opposite Easter-Day]: Read this week the Acts of the Apostles.
  • [Opposite First Sunday after Easter]: Read this week with the Church  the Apocalypses of John.
  • [Opposite the Third Sunday after Easter]: Read this week the Epistle of James and of Peter both.
  • [Opposite Fourth Sunday after Easter]: Read this week the Canonical Epistle of John and Jude.
  • [Opposite Sunday before the Cross [Rogation] Days]: Read of the Acts of the Apostles this week.
  • [Pentecost Week]: Read of the Acts.
  • [Opposite the First Sunday after Trinity]: Read in the First Book of the Kings [1 Samuel] with the Church this week.
  • [Opposite the Second Sunday after Trinity]: Read with the Church this week in the Second Book of the Kings [2 Samuel].
  • [Opposite the Third Sunday after Trinity]: Read this week the third [Book of the Kings [1 Kings]].
  • [Opposite the Fifth Sunday after Trinity]: Read this week the fourth [Book of the Kings [2 Kings]].
  • [Opposite the Seventh Sunday after Trinity]: Read this week the Chronicles called Paralipo.
  • [Opposite the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity (First in August)]: Read here the Proverbs with the Church.
  • [Opposite the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity]: Read here Ecclesiastes.
  • [Opposite the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity]: Read here the History of Job.
  • [Opposite the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity]: Read the History of Tobit.
  • [Opposite the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity]: Read here the story of Judith.
  • [Opposite the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity]: Read here the History of Hester.
  • [Opposite the Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity (First Sun. in October)]: Read the First Book of the Maccabees.
  • [Opposite the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity]: Read the Second Book of Maccabees.
  • [Opposite the Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity]: Read Ezechiel.
  • [Opposite the First Sunday of Advent]: Read Isaie with the Church.
  • [Opposite the Fourth Sunday of Advent]: Read Isaie still until the First Sunday after New Year.

What we have here is a pre-prayer book attempt to set the breviary pattern of reading through Scriptures before the literate laity. Note that we’re only talking one passage of Scripture at a time (not four as we’ll see with Morning and Evening Prayer).

As a scheme, it exhibits many of the faults that breviary schemes have suffered throughout Christian history, namely: too much time for some books, not nearly enough for others. The late summer is a classic case. One week is provided for the dense poetic book of Job and its 42 chapters, while just a little later three weeks are given for the 14 novelistic chapters of Tobit. Again, Genesis is spread out from Septuagesima until Mid-Lent (not a bad plan for its fifty chapters, some of which are lengthy); Exodus is allotted one week (not nearly enough).

As far as absences go, there’s no Daniel, none of the Twelve Minor Prophets, no Law after the first two books, and we miss the apocryphal wisdom books altogether.

Nevertheless, this is the first attempt that I’ve seen to introduce a plan of Scripture reading to the laity.

I imagine there’s more to be said about this scheme, how it compares with other pre-Reformation schemes, how it feeds into the prayer books, as well as how it connects to the rest of the prymer as a whole. So this is the first rather than the last word on the subject.

Anglican Chant in Her Majesty’s Service

We yanks sometimes look askance at the Church of England for its situation of establishment—being the official state church. There are fears of the compromises to the Gospel that may occur within such a situation. However, apparently, there are unusual side benefits to establishment as we can see from this previously undisclosed collaboration between certain elements of her majesty’s government and a super-secret chapel…

Breviary Back Up

I’d taken down the breviary for a few days to put in some fixes and patches. It’s back up now. It’s also got a new blog. Something about the old blog didn’t feel right and I didn’t use it much.

So—there’s a new one which is located here.

Look for more of my office related material to be going up over there, particularly items of a practical nature. Some of the heavier research stuff like the current Office lectionary series will probably remain here.