Before I get into the bulk of this post, I feel a few preliminary notes are in order.
About a week ago, there was a discussion for the Alumni
Convocation at Church Divinity School of the Pacific regarding the resolution
at the prior General Convention of the Episcopal Church to begin the process of
revising the Book of Common Prayer. The
Rev. Dr. Ruth Meyers, the Hodges-Haynes Professor of Liturgics, led the
discussion, and she brought up a number of possible places to consider revision
for the Prayer Book. Following this, the
Living Church, an Episcopal Church blog, ran a summary of that discussion. Many of the responses that I have seen on
social media about this presentation have been largely negative. It almost seems as if people are afraid Ruth
Meyers is going to take their Prayer Books away from them. This is utterly ridiculous. She was one of my professors at CDSP, and
though we might not always agree on everything, I respect the work that she
does and how she pushes students beyond their liturgical comfort zones.
Nevertheless though, I decided after reading the Living
Church article to actually watch the presentation. I feel that this presentation and discussion can
be one of many good starting points for a discussion about Prayer Book
revision, and so I have decided to write a response to this discussion. As a genuine millennial in the Episcopal
Church (I am twenty-six years old), should the Prayer Book actually be revised,
I will likely see it and use it for a good length of my adult life, so I want
to have discussions as to what that revision might look like, because I will
have to live with it.
I do want to acknowledge though that The Rev Dr Ruth Meyers
has substantial more education than I do on the subject, liturgical studies is
area of expertise, and I am a Masters student in religious studies. She is more qualified to speak on the
history, function, and theology of liturgy.
What I want though is a discussion about the meanings and implication of
Prayer Book revision from the presentation.
Finally, though many have read the post on the Living Church
about the discussion, I highly recommend that you actually watch the
presentation yourself. You get a much
clearer vision of what being discussed, and a greater appreciation for her
knowledge and insight into Anglican Liturgy.
Here is the link to the discussion: https://vimeo.com/141953466
Onto the post:
One of the things that I have noticed about the Episcopal
Church is its tendency to assume that the problems of the church and the world
can be solved with one form of liturgy or another. Pastoral, theological, ecclesial, ethical,
and social issues are addressed through liturgy; women’s issues, LGBT issues,
race and ethnic issues, economic issues, environmental issues can be addressed
through liturgy; life events such as the passing away of a pet can be marked by
liturgy. The Episcopal Church loves
liturgy, and it especially loves the Eucharist, and that drive for Christ’s
Body and Blood. Though we have this love
of liturgy, and though the 1979 Book of Common Prayer refocused the centrality
of the Eucharist within the Episcopal Church, the theology of liturgy is not
properly understood. The lack of
connection to not only the historical patterns of liturgy, but also
particularly the lack of connection to the proper theology of the Eucharist, is
what lies at the problem of the Episcopal Church’s addiction to liturgy. Namely, we see it as a means to an end rather
than an end unto itself. We worship God
not to affect the material world, but in praise and thanksgiving for God’s
mighty acts in the creation and in the redemption of this world and us. This is reflected in the misunderstanding of
the role of “context” within the life of the church, and the purpose and
function of liturgy for Christians.
One theme brought up in the presentation at CDSP is the idea
that context matters. Every generation
of the Book of Common Prayer from 1549 in England to the Prayer Books of the
various provinces of the Anglican Communion reflect a contextual understanding
of the Christian life within the culture and traditions of particular regions
or nation-states. Indeed, Anglicanism
seeks to be grounded within the context of the nation to which the church is
present in. However, Thomas Cranmer and
the reformers of the sixteenth century like Richard Hooker, John Jewel, and
others did not see the Church of England as merely a sect that just happened to
pop out of no-where in England at that time, but as the historical Catholic
Church in England that has its foundation through history to the time of
Christ. And though they sought the
Church of England to be English, they desired to be rooted in Scripture and
Tradition first and foremost. That is
why they were so keen on removing those things that they thought distorted the
true history and tradition of the Church.
The universal then takes on forms of the local over a very gradual
period of time as communities understand the nature of that universal tradition. In a similar way Christ, the Son of God,
always existed, and then entered into human history as Jesus through his
incarnation as he took human form upon himself.
Though the Son of God is and always will be eternal, Jesus the human
being did not exist until a particular point in history.
If we put the context before the universality, we end up
with a situation where the tail wags the dog.
The 1979 Book of Common Prayer opened the door in a number
of ways for people and communities to be creative with the liturgy. Though my experience has shown me that very
few parishes actively exercise that creativity to its fullest extent. Most of the time the liturgies in question are
Rite II Eucharists with an agenda. However, when that creativity is fully
exercised, it often times is highly problematic. In hindsight, I think the offer for
communities (and priests especially) to have that “creative” option was a
mistake. The intent was for communities
to form liturgies that are contextual to their needs, but it has the byproduct
of removing of that community from the larger body of the church catholic. When a church gathers to worship God, it is
not an isolated event, but an event where the whole community is drawn up
before the very throne of God with all communities past, present, and
future. We worship with the One Liturgy
before God where Christ is our Great High Priest. When we decide to be “creative,” it can
appear that we are worshiping our own awesomeness rather than God. Sure, we can invoke God all we want in the
prayers we write, but part of the Christian life is discipline, and part of
that discipline is joining with our wider family to worship God because at the
end of the day, it is not about us, but about God alone.
This, more than anything, is why we ought to say the Nicene
Creed at our services, it tells the story of our faith, and unites us with not
only every Anglican on the planet, but the whole of the church universal. We recognize that we are not alone in our
worship, but that we are part of a great story that flows from God through
history. The Creed is a symbol of our
faith.
That is not to say that the specific issues and context
ought not be ignored. Issues like the
environment and greater inclusivity within the life of the church are important
and desperately need to be addressed.
But a Prayer Book revision with such contextual focuses, and
with greater invitations for creativity will not solve the greater problems of
the Episcopal Church at hand. This leads
to the second issue with the Episcopal Church and liturgy, misunderstanding the
function of it.
In the first round of audience discussion a very good
question is raised. To paraphrase, you
have the liturgy; you have the lament for environmental sin, and then
what? It was a very good question, and
one that did not receive much of an answer.
This underlines though that we in the Episcopal Church seem to act as if
liturgy will somehow solve our problems.
Whether we use our creative energies to cry out for our sins towards
creation, or seek to find new and expansive language for God, at the end of the
day the underlying problems are not going to be solved by our liturgical
language or prayers. This is not to say
that I am questioning the efficaciousness of prayer, far from it, but I am
using this to point out two things.
First, this approach to liturgy shrugs off our own
responsibility for sin. The presentation
mentions the EOW Confession where we confess not only for our own sins, but
those committed “on our behalf,” and Ruth cites the procurement and burning of
fossil fuels for energy, actions we are not directly doing, but are benefiting
from nonetheless, as an example of it.
It is a nice sentiment, but that is all this is. The problem of this is that though people may
say this confession, seemingly individuals or communities are doing little to
no action because there is no explicit naming of the sin within this general
confession, and no penance being directed before absolution is given. This is why I generally do not like the
General Confession in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, it lets people off the
hook, and the EOW Confession makes it worse.
If we genuinely want people to care about the environment in the
Episcopal Church, prayer alone will not magically cause our church to disinvest
in fossil fuels, we have to take concrete action as penance for our sins. From the top down, we all should confess, and
then do things within our power to try amend our lives. In fact, if we genuinely care about this as a
Church, then bishops and priests ought to use the disciplinary rubrics and
actually force changes of behavior to those of us living in sin, while also
making changes on how energy is procured and used in dioceses and in the
national church offices. We have the
power to make a difference; we cannot just have a liturgy and be done with
it.
This has led us into a particular trap as the Episcopal
Church, we use liturgy as a masking issue for the problems we see within and
without the Church. It seems the
knee-jerk response to an issue is either to make a liturgy about something, or
modify the liturgy to respond to something, when really we need to look
elsewhere for the problem. An example of
this is the push to have expansive language within our worship when it comes to
referencing God. On the surface, this is
all well and good; there are plenty of images and metaphors of God in the Old and
New Testament that are barely touched in liturgical texts. However, we need to be honest here, most of
those images and metaphors are still grounded in a masculine framework, and even
the images and metaphors from Scripture that are feminine are still functioning
in that masculine framework. What ends
up happening is that we end up debating over what expansive language is and
what it looks like, while leaving the root of the problem unaddressed: there
are a lot of people in the Episcopal Church who are not being represented within
the Church. Yes, patriarchal language
may be a symptom of the problem, but avoiding saying “God the Father” in the
liturgy or Prayer book will do nothing to change the fact that the House of
Bishops is disproportionately male, that full-time rectorships are
disproportionately male, that queer discrimination is considered acceptable in
multiple diocese despite pushes from General Convention, and that on the whole,
the Episcopal Church is very white, and has historically been associated with
white and upper-class peoples in the US, and has a troubled history with the
Indigenous communities of America and the African-American community. Changing the liturgy to be more inclusive
might give the appearance of solving the internal issues of the Episcopal
Church, but unless we actually take time to genuinely tackle these structural
and cultural issues, the liturgical revisions will be for naught.
Second, it assumes that people outside the Episcopal Church
and Anglican Communion will care AT ALL what we do with our liturgical
life. Much of the discourse throughout
the presentation desires to open the rites and practices to be more accessible
to the general public. Things like
opening up the service of the blessing of Holy Chrism, reimagining the place of
the Nicaea Creed in the liturgy, and entertaining the idea of so-called “open
table” might appear to make the church more welcoming. It seems however that it humorously presumes
that if we just make a few changes, the church will experience a deluge of
people who can now understand God and were kept away by arcane language and
practices. I hate to break it to those
of us in the Episcopal Church—we are not that important. Sure, we like to think we are an established
church like our English counterparts, but we are not. No matter what we do with our Prayer Book, it
will only affect us. We might think we
are special, that our Prayer Book revision might be that elusive Vatican III
that so many want the Roman Catholic Church to have in order to become a
liberal church. If Christendom is truly
gone, then we no longer operate at the center of society. We now are at the margins, and we are
shrinking. We must be humble, we are not
that special, and our weirdness of language, thought, and symbols, some of
which are open to the public, some of which are hidden and secret, are our
greatest gifts. The weirdness is what
gives life to the church, but it is a weirdness that we must grow into to
transform us. If we do not allow for
that weirdness to transform us, when we say the words of the Creed or anything
else, it will come off as hollow, dry, and boring. And more than anything else, our sitting on
our laurels of presumed importance and not being transformed by Christ to
embody this weirdness has led the Episcopal Church to be a boring place.
I am convinced that boredom has led more to the decline of
the Church than anything else, more than the presumed liberalness that led to
ordination of women or acceptance of LGBT.
Those that left for those reasons got the media attention because they
were loud, but how many thousands have left because they found something better
to do, and left without saying a word, and without us noticing. They will not come if we are hip, they will
not come if we are simple. We have to be
ourselves over and above anything else, we have to accept and embrace the
weirdness, the same weirdness of Jesus Christ, the Apostles, and the Saints. We have to learn and grow into it to learn
over the course of YEARS that our actions, symbols, and words have meaning, and
we must be willing to educate others and ourselves about it over the course of
YEARS. Changing the Prayer Book will not
make the Episcopal Church important again, it will not draw people in with new
contextual worship, and it will most certainly change a culture of boredom in
the Church.
What concerns me the most about General Convention calling
for a revision to the Prayer Book is that it has triggered a sort-of Game of
Thrones style contest to see who can have influence over what. To be sure, every revision of the Book of
Common Prayer has seen people attempting to influence the revision to suite
their own needs, such as Martin Bucer with the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. I must however ask the question, is this
really the best time for Prayer Book revision?
For all the strengths of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, and with its
emphasis on Baptism and the Eucharist, I think we can celebrate that the
liturgical life of the Episcopal Church has been reoriented towards the
traditional practices of the church universal.
What has not occurred though is the full and complete restoration of the
theology of Baptism and the Eucharist. We
see them as tools for us to use for our own ends rather than the great
Sacraments and Mysteries of God. If we
say we believe that Baptism is participation in Christ’s death and
resurrection, so much more of God’s vision of our lives should flow from that
into every corner of our being. If we
say we believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, so much more of
God’s vision of the Church should flow from that into every corner of the
Episcopal Church. Though many parishes
stick to the Prayer Book and do the quiet work of the church without disturbing
the waters, there are those who want to push for more changes and faster (and
those clerics probably avoid using the Prayer Book all together) and yet in
that rush much is left behind.
We have not yet fully realized the implications of the 1979
Book of Common Prayer on the Episcopal Church, and therefore I believe a
revision for the Prayer Book at this time is ill advised. Instead, the time has come for a new Oxford
Movement to occur in the Episcopal Church, a movement to help us recognize that
we are not some Protestant sect started as a consequence of the American
Revolution, or the by-product of Henry VIII wanting a divorce from Catherine of
Aragon, but the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church that stretches from
the United States through time to the Apostles, and ultimately to Jesus Christ himself,
the one who was, who is, and is to come, the one, with the Father and the Holy
Spirit, to whom we owe our adoration and glory towards.
