UPDATE ON QUINQUAGESIMA

Thonas Cranmer, with his Prayer Book

 I've been neglecting this blog, not because of a falling-off but because I've been too busy trying to incorporate daily Matins and Evensong into my life. A pity in a way, because I notice that readership has been diminishing as well; and as thinking and writing about thinking are one of the few things I can do to take my faith beyond the walls of my skin, this is clearly a message that I should pick it up again.

Daily Matins and Evensong (from a 1662 Book of Common Prayer stamped "property of York Minster" -- sorry, York Minster) is an interesting experience. It makes you read the Psalms in an intens(iv)e way, and the old Lectionary gives you longer and more consecutive readings that most modern ones. Also, as is always the case when you repeat old and trusted liturgical texts on a regular basis, they acquire a slightly different content each day. Why?

A liturgical text is a score for performance. The real "text", in other words, is not the words as written but the written words pronounced, said (or sung) by your voice in the context of a service, even if it is a private one, said within the walls of your own inner room. And as such it consists of two parts: the words, the score, as written by Thomas Cranmer and/or Miles Coverdale on the one hand, and what your mind, heart and soul bring to those words at this time on this day on the other. And since that part changes each day, the liturgical text is never the same two days running.

Things you notice: first, the readings, being more or less consecutive, take you through stories in the form of a coherent narrative in longer sections than you are used to, which is not only salutary but pleasant and interesting. Second, you keep getting blown away by the Psalms, those strange haunting poems that keep changing the person of the speaker and therefore keep upsetting the manner and level of your own identification with them.

At the moment, the Old Testament readings are from Exodus, and recite the interminable and depressing story of the Plagues of Egypt. It goes on, and on, and on, and you occasionally feel a certain sympathy for Pharaoh, the more as we are told that it is the Lord who keeps hardening his heart so that even after the frogs, the hail and the locusts he still won't let the Israelites go, when it comes to the crunch.

The Morning Prayer New Testament readings are from Matthew and show us Jesus in conversation with Pharisees and Sadducees, with the ordinary folk listening in and oscillating between fanzone crowdcrushing of the Meshiach and politely urging him to go somewhere else. Again, sometimes you can see their point: when he lets the Legion (of) demons move into the herd of pigs at Gadara, which then plunge off the cliff into the lake and drown, that herd was presumably someone's livelihood.
There is a directness about Jesus' healing which can be disconcerting.

The Evening Prayer New Testament lessons are from Acts, and currently concern Paul's interaction with two Roman governors-general and the local King Agrippa, culminating in his being sent to Rome to bejudged by Cæsar because he has insisted that he is a civis Romanus as our school books called it. Great narrative, that has you wondering (because you had forgotten) what comes next, as in any good thriller.

As for the Psalms, they are demanding a separate post and I think I will indulge them, because there is a lot to be thought and said about them. I will try to be more regular about all this, so stay tuned.
 

THE DAILY ROUND

"Ora et labora": the ploughman ploughs and prays. Work, play, food, sleep and prayer interact and intertwine.

I always hesitate to write here of personal prayer habits, as there are so many who are vastly more advanced in such matters than I: more experienced, more assiduous, more structured, and certainly closer to God. In Charles Morgan’s The Judge’s Story, Vivian, the Judge’s young married ward, describes her conscience as “a swerving beast” that has a tendency to shy at steep hills. For those whose prayer-life is as swerving a beast as mine is, though, I will set out briefly what I do, and what I pray it may be granted me to do beyond that: perhaps it can be of use to someone.

I used to “say my prayers” at night, in bed, before going to sleep, until I found that sleep usually overtook me in the middle of the Second Collect., which meant that a large number of friends in trouble went unprayed-for. So I changed it to the morning, after waking and before rising: reality may still be a little fuzzy, but one is at least heading in the direction of sustained wakefulness. At night, I still say the Lord’s Prayer and the Second and Third Collect for Evensong before reposing in the arms of Morpheus.

In the morning, then, I begin with the Lord’s Prayer and the Second and Third Collects for Morning Prayer: the third especially makes a wonderful stand-alone prayer for the beginning of the day. I then go on to pray for the human race, that we may find a way to diminish our numbers on this planet by about half, without catastrophe. (A long-term desire, obviously, but nothing is beyond God’s power.) I then pray for the men and women in the jihadi movements the world over, that they may come to know that God, the only true God, is a God of love and understanding and not of vengeance and violence. I pray for Valdimir Putin, that he may come to the knowledge and love of God, and bring his country into the friendship of nations. Finally, I pray for all those in governments (not excluding The D*nald), asking God to grant them “a listening heart, discernment, and charity”. (A note on these prayers: I have written here before that I am continually struck and dismayed by the fact that in no church I have been to have our enemies and/or adversaries been prayed for.)

After these “public” prayers, I pray for my loved ones, and for friends and acquaintances who (as the Prayer Book puts it) “in this transitory life are in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity” – always in the same order, which acts as a mnemonic, so that I forget no one. As intercessions are philosophically difficult (I’ve written about this before: one worries about Huck Finn’s fish-hooks), I pray that they may be brought to the knowledge and love of God, and that if it be His will, He may “relieve their infirmities”. I pray for children, stepchildren and grandchildren, and earnestly beseech the Father to bring to His knowledge and love those who not only are in need but do not know it.

Finally, I come to myself. What to pray for? After years of practice, I’ve come to begin by asking for the courage and discernment to face and confess my “manifold sins and wickedness”: as Fr Jean-Kamel puts it, all good things begin with housecleaning.

After that beginning, I ask to be taught to pray – to pray all the time, whether one is praying or not: what Carthusians calll “the prayer of the heart”. To pray simply but all the time: a sort of cross between Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God, Don Camillo, and a hermit of the Charterhouse. Obviously, to do this in the midst of the world isn’t easy, but if you get into the habit of frequent little reminders, in the gaps of activity, I’m beginning to sense that eventually it may come. Especially if I remember to ask the Holy Spirit to open the shutters, windows and doors of my soul so that He may enter at will.

There is a third item, after housecleaning and prayer. I beg the Father to grant that I may also be “an instrument of His peace” – and it’s with that wonderful prayer, often erroneously attributed to St Francis (in reality it is by an anonymous early-20^th-century Frenchman), that I will end here as I do at getting up:

O Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace:

Where there is hatred, let me bring love;

Where there is offence, let me bring forgiveness;

Where there is discord, let me bring unity;

Where there is error, let me bring truth;

Where there is doubt, let me bring faith;

Where there is despair, let me bring hope;

Where there is darkness, let me bring the Light;

Where there is sadness, let me bring Joy;

O Master, let me not seek so much

to be consoled, as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive,

in forgetting ourselves that we find,

in forgiving that we are forgiven,

in dying that we are resurrected to life eternal.

Amen.

P.S. During the day, the Angelus at noon and a crucifix over my desk help me not to wander off too far……

Images: the ploughman is from the blog lavenderandlovage.com; the painting above is Jean-François Millet's "L'Angélus" (1859)

ON OUR OWN

This morning I attended what the French Church now calls an A.D.A.P.: Assemblée dominicale en l’absence d’un prêtre, a Sunday assembly in the absence of a priest. This is relatively new: it was foreseen by Vatican II, but it is growing in importance as the number of priests declines and the number of clochers (literally ‘spires’) served by each increases. Our local parish priest now has 48 spires, which obviously borders on the ridiculous, indeed the monstrous. 

In the little modern missal-cum-hymnbook I found the official passage explaining ADAPs and giving some idea as to what they should be like. Some of the points I remember: congregations should be reminded that where two or three are gathered together, Christ is in the midst of them, and should therefore rate such events at their proper value (read: don’t complain because there’s no Mass); there should be readings from Scripture and prayers; but on the whole there should not be communion (from previously consecrated Hosts), because then people might end up thinking of the Mass as only one of several available ways to receive communion. 

What fascinated me was that for the form of such assemblies, no rules are given at all: ‘they can take many different forms’ is all that is said. They appear to have no consciousness of, or no interest in, the fact that in the Anglican Church, for example, there are beautifully-structured ADAPs called Matins and Evensong, which can perfectly well be celebrated without a priest: the only difference is that in such a case the Absolution is replaced by the glorious Collect for Trinity 21:

Grant, we beseech thee,

merciful Lord,

to thy faithful people

pardon and peace;

that they may be cleansed from all their sins

and serve thee with a quiet mind

through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I don’t believe that the way ADAPs are conceived here includes a Confession and Absolution of any kind; at least this morning’s had none. (What I found alarming was the first intercessory prayer: ‘for those who confuse the Faith with a collection of rituals to practice: for those whose prideful obstinacy divides the Church and the World and imperils Peace; for them, Lord, we pray.')

I once owned (and have now, alas, misplaced) a beautiful little French translation of the Book of Common Prayer, published (curiously) in Dublin in 1777. Later I discovered that many Huguenots (French Protestants) who had fled France when their faith was proscribed by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 had gone to England but had then continued on to Ireland and joined the Church of Ireland. Being French, they were clearly not known for their ability to learn languages, so the CofI decided to print French Prayer Books, just for them. I should rustle up the texts of Matins and Evensong from that book again, remove the prayers for the Queen and Royal Family, and present them to the organisers of the next ADAP . . .

NB: the exquisite little painting above represents a village congregation coming from Evensong. It is by Samuel Palmer, a pupil of William Blake's, and was painted during his mystical year at the village of Shoreham in Kent. 

THE SUNDAYS AFTER TRINITY

The Sundays after Trinity are a peculiarly English phenomenon. The Roman Catholic Church calls them the Sundays after Pentecost; other churches don't call them anything much. But in the Church of England they are a long, lazy period from the end of the Easter season to the beginning of Advent. Thinking of them makes me long for the churches, not of my childhood but of my early Anglican days, churches like the Dorset village church above, in the days before villages sported BMWs and when churches were allowed to be customary without being deserted. A world of Matins and Evensong, of Women's Institutes and summer cricket, in whites. So when I found the poem below in the recesses of my computer, I thought I would put it up here. The author was a businessman, a poet, and also the novelist who wrote Moonfleet. His father was a reclusive clergyman, of a type the Victorians seemed to breed, in the far reaches of the Dorset combes.

AFTER TRINITY        
John Meade Falkner

We have done with dogma and divinity,          
Easter and Whitsun past,      
The long, long Sundays after Trinity          
Are with us at last;      
The passionless Sundays after Trinity,          
Neither feast-day nor fast.        

Christmas comes with plenty,          
Lent spreads out its  pall,      
But these are five and twenty,          
The longest Sundays of all;      
The placid Sundays after Trinity,          
Wheat-harvest, fruit-harvest, Fall.      

 Spring with its burst is over,        
 Summer has had its day,      
The scented grasses and clover          
Are cut, and dried into hay;      
The singing-birds are silent,          
And the swallows flown away.        

Post pugnam pausa fiet;          
Lord, we have made our choice;      
In the stillness of autumn quiet,          
We have heard the still, small voice.      
We have sung Oh where shall Wisdom?          
Thick paper, folio, Boyce.        

Let it not all be sadness,          
Not omnia vanitas,      
Stir up a little gladness          
To lighten the Tibi cras;      
Send us that little summer,          
That comes with Martinmas.        

When still the cloudlet dapples          
The windless cobalt blue,      
And the scent of gathered apples          
Fills all the store-rooms through,      
The gossamer silvers the bramble,          
The lawns are gemmed with dew.        

An end of tombstone Latinity,          
Stir up sober mirth,      
Twenty-fifth after Trinity,        
Kneel with the listening earth,      
Behind the Advent trumpets          
They are singing Emmanuel’s birth.

photo: Lynda Franklin