The Next Liturgical Renewal: Liturgical History and the Pax Nashotah Walter Knowles March 27, 2014

Two pairs of dates: 1979 and 2014; 1928 and 1950. 35 years and 22 years, respectively. Do we have any guesses for what they represent?

Today, I’d like to have a conversation about where we we have been and where we might be going in the process of continuing renewal in Anglican . That’s going to take us all the way to apostolic , and then bring to the last century.

Finally, I want us to ask what Nashotah House can do in this process.

The previous BCP was authorized by the 1928 General Convention of the

Episcopal Church, and in 1950 the Standing Liturgical Commission issued the first number of Prayer Book Studies (on “Baptism and ”). Bayard Jones, then chairman of the SLC, wrote, in the to that volume:

Everyone was weary of the long and ponderous legislative process, and desired to make the new Prayer Book available as soon as possible for the use of the Church.

But the work of revision, which sometimes has seemed difficult to start, in this case proved hard to stop. The years of debate had aroused widespread interest in the whole subject: and the mind of the Church was more receptive of suggestions for revision when the work was brought to an end than when it began. …

The Standing Liturgical Commission is not, however, proposing any immediate revision. On the contrary, we believe that there ought to be a period of study and discussion, to acquaint the Church at large with the principles and issues involved, in order that the eventual action may be taken intelligently. ...1

It sounds familiar, doesn’t it? That was only 22 years after the Prayer Book had been authorized. The current BCP was authorized by the 1979 General Convention of the Episcopal church—35 years ago. To some extent, we are in a more chaotic and disruptive situation because of the failure of General Convention and the Standing

Commission on Liturgy and Music to provide leadership in this area—as in many other areas—as well as divisions of the communion over theological and liturgical method and praxis.

The conservative in me might suggest that the problem isn’t that we need revision of the Prayer Book, but rather that we should listen to a former professor of liturgics at this House, Louis Weil, who almost constantly asks “Why don’t people just follow the Book?” Prof. Weil’s question should have a particular poignancy in my diocese. On the upper left corner of the United States, the fastest-growing congregations in the Diocese of Olympia are those who just “follow the book”2, and while I haven’t done a proper sociological study, I observe an almost perfect correlation in this diocese between how closely a congregation “follows the Book” and how it grows

1 Episcopal Church, Baptism and Confirmation ; The Liturgical (New York, NY: Church Pension Fund, 1950), v–vi. 2 These are St. Paul’s, Seattle, a century-old anglo-catholic parish that has grown from less that 50 ASA eight years ago to over 300 now, St. Clement’s, Seattle (also anglo-catholic in orientation), and , Seattle, a “middle of the road prayer-book parish” whose rector, Doyt Conn, asks, “How can you invite people to join you at church if you don’t know what you are inviting them to?”

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 2 (and unfortunately the negative seems also to be true: if you don’t follow the Book, you are dying).

The liberal in me even more strongly suggests, with Dom Gregory Dix, that the next revision of the Prayer Book won’t be a revision of the Book, but rather a collection

(like the Roman pontifical liturgy of the 8th through 10th centuries) of loose leaves with little books for the assembly.3 At least in my diocese, this is already the case; it is difficult to find (at least outside of those parishes that seem to think it is better to spend their money on evangelism than on reprinting what is already in the Book) an assembly that knows what that red book in the pews might be.

Thus it is that I want to talk with you today about liturgical renewal, not liturgical revision or liturgical reformation, and somewhat briefly, what might be the place of the pax nashotah in the leadership and stewardship of that renewal.

I. The current situation

Our Reformed sisters and brothers have a saying “Ecclesia semper reformanda est”—the church is always to be reformed4—but the idea doesn’t spring from the

3 Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, 2d ed. (Westminster, UK: Dacre Press, 1945), 722.. 4 This motto, often attributed to John Calvin, while consonant with his teaching actually comes from seventeenth-century Dutch reflection. The first use in print is probably from Jodocus von Lodenstein in Beschouwinge van Zion, Amsterdam, 1674.

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 3 seventeenth century. It has its roots in the realization that Christians—and thus the church—are to be always undergoing a conversion into Christ. If the church is changing, then her liturgy is going to be changing as well.

Liturgies (and the churches which celebrate them) are subject to the second law of thermodynamics, for they are part of God’s wonderful creation. It is only by God’s direct undergirding and conversion of us by God’s energic Spirit that the church and her liturgy does not descend into entropic chaos. Liturgy—like all of creation—cannot be static; it is always changing. Dix, talking of the Evangelical party in the Church of

England, said:

They themselves have changed considerably both in teaching and practice since the time of Charles Simeon. It is not so much change as the acknowledgement of it that they dislike.”5

We who are anglo-catholics can turn this accusation on ourselves. I treasure my copy of

The Manual of Catholic Devotion (from my confirmation) and my (from my first parish), but the real question that we must face is, in the changes of our lives and , whether we are becoming more like Christ? James White, one of the most important scholars of protestant worship in the last fifty years, wrote in 1979 in the preface to the second edition of The Cambridge Movement (which he wrote in the late

1950’s):

This book was published on the eve of the Second Vatican Council. Events since have left no doubt that the era of the Ecclesiologists [the second generation of the ] is over. Yet, in rereading my own pages, I cannot help but wonder if another generation will find that we have too easily romanticized

5 Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, 720.

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 4 the early Church just as the Ecclesiologists did the medieval Church. Both find a previous period congenial to current needs.6

I think White has nailed one of the most significant causes of the liturgical situation in which we Anglicans find ourselves: we have molded our understanding of tradition— what G.K. Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead”7—to make it vote in our favor, to serve what we perceive to be our current needs.

Thus, let me explore with you, with one eye firmly fixed on what we anglo- catholics can do to lead our communion in a renewal of our worship life together,

• some the liturgical revisions which brought us to where we are, • a quick look at the history of the vigil, and then, • a few ideas of how we might move forward.

II. Liturgical renewals

All of Anglican liturgical renewal is a pretty big topic, so I will limit our discussion to one of the oldest and newest parts of the 1979 BCP: the liturgies. Within that, let’s make it personal and pastoral:

6 James F White, The Cambridge Movement: The Ecclesiologists and the Gothic Revival. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979), xii. 7 G. K Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London, UK: Bodley Head, 1957), 70.

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 5 I have a good friend, in his early thirties: a faithful Anglican, he’s been active in his parish since his first year of university, and he grew up in an Episcopal parish of moderately catholic persuasion. He’s been singing in church choirs ever since he talked me into letting him sing in my adult choir as a third-grader. He’s still in choir, is a section leader, and has served on both vestry and on his parish’s liturgy and ministry commissions. About five years ago, his parish began an effort, within the parameters of the BCP, to adjust its Holy Week practice so that could be a more effective proclamation of the . This would normally set off warning claxons for me, but his rector is a fine practical liturgist and I’m rather impressed with what they’ve done and how they went about it. However, my friend is rather frustrated with the whole experience, and not because he has problems with what they’ve done. Rather, as part of the team working on these changes, he has had to ask hard questions about rhetoric, liturgical semiosis, proclamation, and community involvement. The Great Vigil has been a particular point of discussion between us, and since his parish has moved the Vigil to 5:00AM Easter morning with a reduced choir, he and I went to the local shrine parish for the Vigil. We both loved it, but it only brought out more questions.8

When I reduce all his issues to their simplest forms, I find that there are really two questions: “Why are there so many disparate services slammed together to make up

Holy Week?” and “Why is the liturgical theology of Holy Week so different from that of both Rite I and Rite II, and should that be?” Let me invite you to help me answer those questions, and then a third: “Is there anything we at Nashotah House should or could do about my friend’s desire for a more transformative Pascha in a twenty-first century urban world?”

Now my friend isn’t asking why there are five services he has to sing at in Holy

Week (, on Wednesday night, Thursday , Good

Friday solemn liturgy, and ), because, for him, as long as the liturgy is good, and there’s music to sing, the more the better. Rather, he’s asking about what liturgical

8 This is a summary of personal communication just before , 2013, and similar conversations at about the same time in 2014, with my own son, Martin Knowles, with his permission.

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 6 scholars tend to call “units,” and there are a lot of them (not counting daily mass, the office, and such additional devotions as or three-hours devotion):

• palm blessing m • palm procession m • Matthean passion proclamation m • a • morning prayer at night m • lucenaria (of sorts) m • blessing of oils a • footwashing m • stripping m • sacrament procession m • adoration/devotions (Gethsemane vigil) m • solemn entry a/m • Johannine passion proclamation a • “solemn ” a/m • adoration of the cross m • mass of the pre-sanctified m/a • office a • lighting of the new fire m • procession of light m • blessing of the candle a/m • the prophecies and tracts a • baptism a • “transition to Easter” and/or litany m • First Eucharist of Easter a

That is twenty-four (at least) distinct large scale liturgical elements. I’d like to split them into two major groupings. We could use St. Augustine of Hippo’s categories of “memorial” (which he applied to , because it was a recollection of an historical event) and “sacrament” (which he applied to the whole paschal liturgy, because it effected the change it portrayed). However, scholars of Christian ritual action since the 1930’s have talked about two sorts of ritual actions: those that are mimetic

(from the Greek, μῑμέομαι, to imitate or portray) and those that are anamnetic

(ἀνάμνησις, from Plato’s Meno and Phaedo, to rediscover or more exactly to un-forget).

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 7 We tend to think of in conjunction with the Pauline narratives of the institution of the in Luke 22 and I Corinthians 11 (“This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me,” “Τοῦτό ἐστιν τὸ σῶμά μου τὸ ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν

διδόμενον· τοῦτο ποιεῖτε εἰς τὴν ἐμὴν ἀνάμνησιν.” Lk. 22:19), and mimesis in conjunction with drama, where it refers to putting on a play, or re-enacting an event. We can argue about this, but my count is 18 mimetic units and 6 anamnetic. This is quite the shock, when we compare it to the usual Sunday liturgy, where often the only memetic ritual is a wedding anniversary blessing.

We thus have some sense as to where my friend’s discomfort might originate in the ritual structure of Holy Week. He’s simply not used to this particular style of liturgical drama. But then neither is the congregation. In fact, we might even say that he’s uncomfortable because Holy Week seems to be the sort of spectacle against which many of the early church theologians rail. He’s not having some modernist fit against good orthodox liturgy, rather he’s picking up a dissonance.

From where does this structure of Holy Week come? One answer is that it is, for the most part, the common western tradition. It’s in the late medieval Latin liturgy, as codified by Trent and Pius V, and at the other end of the history of Christianity, we find it in the travelogue of Sr. Egeria of Gallicia (and preached in the Catechetical Lectures of

Cyril of Jerusalem). In , Holy Week found itself on the cutting floor in 1549, but it came back through the work of the second generation of the ritualists in the

1870’s and 1880’s. Any number of the Anglican orders prepared versions in English of

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 8 the rites in the missal of Pius V.9 While this recovery might explain St. Mary

Magdalene’s in Toronto or St. Clement’s in Philadelphia, it doesn’t make an account for why St. Swithun’s run-of-the-mill Episcopal Church in exurban Seattle does Holy Week as well.

If you look at Prayer Book Studies, you’ll find that there are substantial scholarly essays on all the issues which the Standing Liturgical Commission was exploring, but when you get to PBS 19, you’ll find less than a page of background for the 22 pages of liturgical text which comprise the material for Holy Week.10 How did this text get into

PBS 19? We can look around and find earlier attempts—such as those of Winfred Douglas

—but I think Fr. Earle Maddux, SSJE, has to own the prize for bringing Holy Week to

North American Anglicans with his Holy Week Manual in 1946.

The 1940’s through the 1980’s were a sort of “golden age” for ecumenical liturgical study. At the center of this study was the realization that one of the most powerful unifying forces could be found in common liturgical texts, particularly those before a certain sectarianism took hold after the fourth ecumenical council at

Chalcedon in 451. In the 1950’s the list was fairly short: Justin Martyr’s Apology,

Hyppolytus of Rome’s Apostolic Constitutions, and Cyril of Jerusalem’s Catechetical and

9 Notable examples are Society of SS. Peter & Paul, The Anglican Missal (London, UK: Society of SS. Peter & Paul, 1921)., and Earle Hewitt Maddux, An American Holy Week Manual, the Liturgy from Palm Sunday through Easter Day Together with Tenebrae. (Cambridge, MA: Society of Saint John the Evangelist, 1946).. 10 Episcopal Church, The Church Year: The Calendar and the Proper of the Sundays and Other Holy Days Throughout the Church Year, Prayer Book Studies 19 (New York: Church Hymnal Corp, 1970), 27–28 and 172–194, respectively.

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 9 Mystagogical (as supplemented by Egeria’s Peregrinatio). When liturgists looked at the Holy Week liturgies in the west at the end of the medieval period, particularly as gently corrected by Pius XII in 1955, they saw the same structures, and to some extent, the same texts that Cyril and Egeria described. And when we combine this admirable consistency with Anton Baumstark’s teaching that more solemn liturgical seasons tend to preserve older usages11 and Odo Casel’s Mysterienlehre12, we have a powerful force for just touching up the texts of the Tridentine Holy Week liturgies and restoring their celebration to evenings.

In 1946, Associated Parishes was founded as a community which would respond to the call of Dix, Baumstark, and Casel, and soon after, a young Massey Shepherd was invited to join. In due course, he became one of the most important liturgical scholars in the mid-twentieth century, and chairman of the drafting committee responsible for this part of the 1979 Prayer Book. Close on the heels of Maxima Redemptionis, Pius XII’s renovation of Holy Week, Associate Parishes published their Holy Week Offices, edited by

Shepherd.13 Holy Week Offices was a careful anglicization of the revised Roman rites, and it stood strongly in the tradition of Madux’s careful anglicization of the Tridentine rites in the Holy Week Manual. Both editors recognized that since the paschal mystery constitutes the church, we must do that which the church has always done to place

11 Anton Baumstark, Comparative Liturgy (Westminster, Md: Newman Press, 1958). 12 Odo Casel, The Mystery of Christian Worship, and Other Writings (Westminster, Md: Newman Press, 1962). 13 Massey Hamilton Shepherd, Holy Week Offices (Greenwich, Conn.: Seabury Press, 1958).

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 10 itself where it may be a participant in that mystery, and to do that we must take advantage of the best historical scholarship available.

Unfortunately, there was very little original scholarship into the development of

Holy Week from 1940 to 1985. Because most of the writing about Holy Week was pastoral in nature, and situated in a Roman Catholic context not readily translatable to life in Anglicanism, the SLC simply pointed to Shepherd’s work with a footnote, rather than printing what could have been a Prayer Book Studies volume in its own right

(after all, this revision process had been going on for 20 years, and it was time to get off the dime!). What the SLC proposed in 1970 is, for the most part, what found its way into the 1979 BCP.14

There were a few additions to the paschal vigil between 1970 and 1976:

• lighting and blessing of the new fire • procession of the paschal candle • structuring of the lessons • renewal of baptismal vows

All of these fall under the rubric in Introducing the Proposed Book: “All the Proper

Liturgies are sensitive Anglican adaptations of important traditional liturgical substance.”15 What we have in the 1979 BCP is arguably the best Easter Vigil text of the second half of the twentieth century: grounded in the history and scholarship of the

14 The Palm Sunday rite has a added, an and prayer for footwashing on , and minor edits throughout are the changes. 15 Charles P. Price, Introducing the Proposed Book: A Study of the Significance of the Proposed for the Doctrine, Discipline, and Worship of the Episcopal Church, Prayer Book Studies 29 (revised) (New York, NY: Church Hymnal Corp, 1976), 59.

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 11 paschal mystery, a sensitive inculturation16 of the Holy Saturday traditions of the late medieval west, and informed by the liturgical reformation of Vatican II. What then can my friend have as a basis for his problem with the Paschal Vigil. Is it just that he is a lazy millennial who doesn’t want to get up in the morning?

III. Theology and History of Liturgy

Before we dive deeply into the theology and history of the Easter Vigil, let me back up and ask “What is this stuff that we did this morning in the chapel? Or that we’ll do in a few hours?” We could answer that in a typically categorial taxonomic fashion with “morning prayer” and “ and eucharist.” My number theory prof in college had a favorite expression: “true but uninteresting,” and that applies here. In fact, while piling descriptors on those two short names might help us ask the question,

“what is it?” more carefully, I really don’t think that “morning prayer from the 1979

BCP with certain additions from the tradition at Nashotah House as done on Thursday morning ...” is much else than a nominalistic dodge of the question, and it definitely won’t get us closer to a missional answering of my friend’s quandry. All (and it’s a big all) it will do is point us to the Nashotah Chapel Customary, telling him what we do here.

16 For a careful survey of the task of inculturation see Anscar J. Chupungco, Liturgical Inculturation: Sacramentals, Religiosity, and Catechesis (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 1992). The magisterial basis for Chupungo’s work is in Roman Catholic Church, “Decree on the Mission Activity of the Church - Ad Gentes,” accessed March 18, 2014, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat- ii_decree_19651207_ad-gentes_en.html.

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 12 A. Sociology of Religion

We could try an answer, situated in the sociology and anthropology of religion, that is common in the academic study of liturgy:

It was a ritual action which indicates this community’s intent to live within a particular structure of tradition to carry out its mission in the world. As with all ritual actions, it also forms its participants to conform to specific modes of praxis, a particular being-in-the-world, and creates in them a willingness to prioritize distinct beliefs in their understanding of that being.

Now, the engineer in me is repulsed by that sort of social scientific gobbledegook, but is it untrue? Not only does it provide a useful descriptor which can help us measure how well Morning Prayer is doing its job, it provides some real help in working through my friend’s question. We can ask “how does lighting the new fire incorporate new members and empower existing members for witness in the world?” We have an immediate common vocabulary for conversation with other disciplines, with other

Christians who might not share our ritual proclivities, and even with people of other religious commitments. Not only that, but it gives us suggestions for how we might answer his questions: we could create variant Vigil liturgies and use sociological instruments to evaluate whether they achieved their goals of formation.

As valuable as that answer is, particularly within the enterprise of inculturating forms and texts from an existing editio typica (just ask any Roman Catholic liturgist), both the sociological and functional answers leave me cold—the kind of cold that reflects saying morning prayer on a freezing Wisconsin morning at 6:00 AM, Pacific

Time, because I committed to do it in my ordination promises. I want an answer that gets God somewhere in the middle of it all.

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 13 B. Liturgical Theology

i. Sacrifice

There are two major ways of considering Christian worship theologically, and we can find them in the first and last books of the bible. The first is as sacrifice: Abel’s lamb is given up, never to be returned, indeed as a typos of Abel’s own sacrifice to evil by his own brother, itself a typos of Christ’s own sacrifice. “Sacrifice” points us to the human side of worship. We take the lamb, we take the bread, we take ourselves and offer all this on the altar of God, whether to be immolated or transformed. Worship is human action, and it must be an action that is meaningful, intentional, and yes, costly.

If liturgical renewal—on the human side—does what it is supposed to do, it enables what Charles Wesley wrote:

Ready for all thy perfect will, my acts of faith and love repeat, till death thy endless mercies seal, and make my sacrifice complete.17

As much as we seem to overlook sacrifice in our typical constructing of services in 21st- century Anglican worship, the other way of considering God in worship is even more rare: worship, at its most transformative is the Spirit of God drawing us—and all creation—into the eternal adoration of the Holy Trinity by saints and angels, powers and seraphim, surrounding the throne of God and the Lamb.

17 Charles Wesley, “O thou who camest from above” in Episcopal Church, The Hymnal 1982 : According to the Use of the Episcopal Church, Pew ed. (New York, N.Y: Church Hymnal Corp, 1985), Hymn 704 (un-altered).

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 14 ii. Mystical Reality

Liturgical renewal began with with a glimpse of the heavenly liturgy, and we can look over the shoulders of some of the first Christians18 who caught that vision as we look at the kenosis hymn in Philippians19, the revealing of the messianic secret in the

Gospel of Mark, and most clearly in the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine. Massey

Shepherd may have overstated his case that the structure of Revelation is that of the first-century paschal vigil, but he, along with Austin Farrer, was absolutely correct in his insight that the real “prophecy” of Revelation isn’t a military victory of an imperial

Messiah, but rather a vision of heavenly worship which, through the action of the Spirit of God, is eschatologically being made present in the life of the church through the realization of the paschal mystery.20 The earliest “liturgical manual,” Didache 7–10, (ca.

18 See Oscar Cullmann, Early Christian Worship, Studies in Biblical Theology 10 (London: SCM Press, 1953), for a biblical studies approach to this issue. 19 Philippians 2:6-11 (NRSV): who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. 20 See Massey H. Shepherd, The Paschal Liturgy and the Apocalypse. (London, UK: Lutterworth Press, 1960); Austin Farrer, The Revelation of St. John the Divine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); Austin Farrer, A Rebirth of Images; the Making of St. John’s Apocalypse (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1949). It’s worth also paying attention to the intersections between an earth-

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 15 50–60 AD) is clearly in this eschatological space: bread and wine are given to us so that we might feast:

so that [we] might give thanks. And you have graciously showered us with Spirit-sent food and drink so that we might live in the ages of ages through your servant [Jesus].21

Suffice it to say that this biblical and apostolic understanding that we enter into the heavenly liturgy made on earth by doing what the apostles did was the dominant understanding of the early church, and it remains the starting point for liturgical theology in the eastern church.22

There’s only one big problem with this eschatological liturgical theology as we try to use it as the basis for a foundational method for liturgical renewal: it’s eschatological. John caught a big glimpse of that final end of our worship, and given that the last survey I saw about adult converts in the Episcopal Church indicated that a substantial majority came into TEC because of the experience of worship, I’m willing to posit that a bunch of them saw a bit of that heavenly worship—or maybe just smelled it!

I’m here today because God (repeatedly) joined me to that heavenly worship in places as different as a charismatic mission congregation in California, high mass at St. Mary

transforming eschatology and soteriology that N.T. Wright hints at, but never really gets out and says in Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008). 21 Didache, 10.3 (my translation): ἵνα σοι εὐχαριστήσωσιν. ἡμῖν δὲ ἐχαρίσω | πνεθματικὴν τροφὴν καὶ ζωὴν αἰώνιον | διὰ τοῦ παιδός σου. 22 Nathan Jennings, professor of liturgy and Anglican Studies at Seminary of the Southwest and David Fagerberg (On Liturgical Asceticism (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013) are two theologians currently exploring this area.

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 16 Magdalene’s, Toronto, and during Holy Week liturgies in a five-point parish on the desolate Alberta plains. So not only do I know it is real by scripture, tradition, and reason (thank you, Richard Hooker), but also by my own experience (thank you, John

Wesley).

The glimpse of heaven is the driver behind most of the liturgical changes in catholic Christianity. That is what’s behind so much of the iconography (Gregory the

Great and the Holy Spirit dove on his shoulder looking out beyond the window, for example) and the poetry of much of the medieval rhymed office. I could tell stories about the mystical experiences of people who helped the liturgies of their times more effectively lead people into Christ, but there’s a problem: I don’t have any idea how that story-telling is going to help my millennial friend—and all his friends—experience the paschal mystery with more integrity at Easter Vigil.

IV. Liturgical History and the Vigil

There is another way of story-telling, however that will help us peek over the parapet of heaven. Those of you who have been paying very close attention in your historical theology classes will have recognized an allusion to Brother Vincent of Lerins earlier in my talk. We all know the “Vincentian canon”:

Now in the catholic church itself we take the greatest care so that we might hold that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all. That is truly and properly catholic, as is shown by the very force and meaning of the word,

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 17 which comprehends everything almost universally. We shall hold to this rule if we follow universality, antiquity, and consent.23

When we are talking about liturgical history, we have to be very careful of that little word almost—fere—for there is very little that we could talk about without that limitation on perfection! Let’s unpack Easter Vigil with our historical tools to see if we can glimpse what is happening on the other side of heaven’s gates, and as to St.

John the Revelator, bring back songs for the twenty-first century.

A. The core of the Paschal vigil

First, for reference, here’s what we came up with as the structure of the Vigil in the 1979 BCP:

• lighting of the new fire • procession of light • blessing of the candle • the prophecies and tracts • baptism • “transition to Easter” and/or litany • First Eucharist of Easter

Here’s what the liturgist’s favorite nun, Egeria, had to say about the Vigil in Jerusalem around 380:

They keep their paschal vigil like us, but there is one addition. As soon as the “infants” have been baptized and clothed, and left the font, they are led with the straight to the Anastasis. The bishop goes into the railed area and

23 Vincent of Lerins, Commonitorium, 2.3 in Vincent of Lerins, The Commonitorium of Vincentius of Lerins, ed. Reginald Stewart Moxon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1915), 10–11: In ipsa item cotholica ecclesia magnopere curandum est ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est; hoc est etenim uere proprietque cotholicum quod ipsa uis nominis ratioque declarat quae omnia fere uniuersaliter comprehendit. Sed hoc ita demum fiet si sequamur uniuersitatem antiquitatem consensionem. Vincent compiled the Commonitorium in 434 AD.

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 18 after one hymn says a prayer for them. Then he returns with them to the church, where all the people are keeping the vigil in the usual way.

They do all the things to which we are accustomed, and, when the Offering has been made, they have the dismissal.24

She doesn’t tell us what the “usual way” is, though at least some part of the vigil lasts through the night. If we look at the Armenian Lectionary from just a few years later, we find a course of twelve lessons that, even with sermons, would last for only three or four hours.25

We don’t have any service leaflets for Easter Vigil from Spain in the fourth and fifth centuries, but since her travelogue began in Alexandria, in Egypt, there is at least a chance that the boat she might have taken to get there would have made a port of call in Hippo Regius, St. Augustine’s cathedral town. By correlating Augustine’s sermons, we can get a picture of paschal liturgies at the Basilica Major in Hippo.26 It’s worth noting that Augustine’s Holy Week is sparse: there’s no Palm Sunday (on the Sunday before

Easter, he habitually preached on John 3 in preparation for the baptisms), Holy

Thursday is just the offices and morning Mass, like every other Thursday in the year, with no mention of the last supper, seems a “liturgical fast” with just the reading of the (Johannine) passion and a , no offices, no mass, and that fast lasted until the Vigil on Saturday evening. At the vigil, there is no hint that there is a

24 Egeria, Egeria’s Travels to the Holy Land : Newly Translated with Supporting Documents and Notes, trans. John Wilkinson (Warminster, UK: Aris & Phillips, 1981), 157. 25 See Athanase Renoux, Le Codex Arménien Jérusalem 121, Patrologia Orientalis 35:1 and 36:2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1969), sec. 44. 26 See my “Holy Week in Hippo: The Weeks Surrounding Easter in a North African Parish,” Studia Liturgica 40 (2010): 153–66 for the arguments supporting this paragraph.

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 19 lighting of the new fire, a paschal candle, or even any sort of lucenarium. The vigil readings began with the creation narrative from Genesis 1. After the sermon on that first lesson, the bishop (Augustine) and the baptismal candidates left the basilica for the baptistry, which was down a hallway from the back of the basilica (remember—these are adult candidates who were stripped naked for the effusion and anointing, so some privacy was required). My best guess is that they might have re-entered the basilica, taking the sequence of lessons from the Jerusalem Armenian27 lectionary and combining those with glancing comments that Augustine makes in his Easter week sermons, after the Exodus lessons retelling the crossing of the Red Sea and before the

Isaiah 40 lesson of “Arise, shine, Jerusalem, for your light has come.”28 It’s not clear how many lessons were in the vigil, nor is it clear from Augustine’s sermons that there was a

27 Jerusalem codex arménien 121 has this sequence of lessons for the vigil: three lamps are lit next to the bishop and in front of the Psalm 117 (heb 118) Gen 1:1–3:24 Gen 22:1–18 Ex 12:1–24 Ps 112 (111) Jonah 1:1–4:11 Ex 14:10–14:24 Ex 14:24–15:21 Is 40:1-5 (Arise, shine) Job 38:2–28 (Whirlwind) II Kings 2:1–22 (Elisha commission) Jer 31:31–34 (new covenant with Israel) Joshua 1:1-9 Ezek 37:1–14 (dry bones) Dan 3:1–35a (worship Nebuchadnezzar to song of the three) Dan 3:35b–51 At the Vigil mass: Ps 44 (45) eructavit cor meum I Cor 15:1–11 (resurrection narrative) Ps 29 (28) (I will praise because God rescued me) Mt 28:1–20 Renoux, Le Codex Arménien Jérusalem 121, 295–309. 28 We get hints in s. 260B

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 20 eucharist during the night of the Great Vigil, but since there seemed to be a eucharist at the baptismal vigil of Pentecost29, it’s probably the case there.

B. Fires, big and small

Compared to readings, , baptism, and eucharist, everything else is later— much later. Lighting of the new fire, for reasons unknown, didn’t make it from

Shepherd’s Holy Week Offices into PBS 19, but made it back into the Proposed Book of

1976. That rather parallels the historical path of lighting the new fire. It has been all over the place. There are hints of the new fire in fifth-century Jerusalem accounts, but the Holy Fire from the Anastasis is first reported in the pilgrimage of Bernard the Wise in 870 AD.30 When we move to the west, it gets really interesting, for the first attestations in the Ordines Romani (26, 750–755 AD) have the new fire being lit on

Maundy Thursday!31 It seems that all the candles were extinguished at the end of Lauds, and a new fire kindled at the ninth hour, just before the bishop (of Rome) blessed the

29 s. 272: What you can see on the altar, you also saw last night; but what it was, what it meant, of what great reality it contained the sacrament, you had not yet heard. So what you can see, then, is bread and a cup: that's what even your eyes tell you; but as for what your faith asks to be instucted about, the bread is the . the cup the . Augustine, Sermons (230–272B) on the Liturgical Seasons, trans. Edmund Hill, Works of St. Augustine III:7 (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1992), 297. 30 Bernard the Wise, The Itinerary of Bernard the Wise. (A.D. 870). How the City of Jerusalem Is Situated. (Circ. A.D. 1090?), trans. J. H Bernard (London: Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund, 1893), sec. XI, p. 7: However, this should be told that on Holy Saturday, i.e., Easter eve, the office is begun early in this church, and after the office is done, eleison, is chanted, until by the coming of an angel, the light is kindled in the lamps that hang above the aforesaid sepulchre. The patriarch gives this fire to the and to the rest of the people, that each may with it light up his own home. See also F.E. Peters, Jerusalem: The Holy City in the Eyes of Chroniclers, Visitors, Pilgrims and Prophets from the Days of Abraham to the Beginnings of Modern Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 261–264.

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 21 chrysm. One hundred years later, in OR 29, the candles are extinguished at the end of

Lauds on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and rekindled at the ninth hour on each of the days. As a candle was lit from the starter on each of the days, and the person carrying the lit candle from the porch into the basilica was of increasing importance (in OR 29 it is sacristan, prior, and bishop on the three days), we can guess how the connection of new fire and paschal candle might have arisen. 32

In the fifteenth century, we get hints of the final candle at Lauds being removed from the church and then returned, breaking the connection between the office and the new fire. At the same time, a single kindling of the new fire with elaborate and formal blessings of the fire at the beginning of Easter vigil become dominant. When we remember that Lauds would have ended at about 7:00 AM, and the vigil started at the fifth hour (11:00 AM), the loss of fire in the church must have had minimal impact.

The paschal candle and exultet may be less problematic; the idea of a diaconal

(or episcopal) ode to the Pasch, and even a paschal candle, is ancient. For example,

Jerome wrote a letter to Praesidius, one of Augustine’s deaconal associates “de cereo paschali,”33 however the letter is more about the rhetoric and biblical sources for such

31 See OR 26 in Michel Andrieu, Les Ordines Romani du haut Moyen Age (Louvain: “Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense” bureaux, 1931), 3:309–329. 32 For an extensive study of the firelighting and blessings see A.J. MacGregor, Fire and Light in the Western Triduum: Their Use at Tenebrae and at the Paschal Vigil (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1992). 33 Text in Jerome, Epistolae, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina 30 (Paris, FR: Migne, 1865), 188C–194D. James Barnett rather incoherently discusses this letter in James Monroe Barnett, The Diaconate—a Full and Equal Order, Rev. ed (Valley Forge, Penna: Trinity Press International, 1995), 76–78 and associated notes.

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 22 an ode, and why Jerome did not like such unseemly displays of pagan flourish, than its liturgical context. Augustine himself cites a few lines of one of his own candle odes (in hexameters, of course!) in The City of God:

This all you have given, and it is good: because you have made it. There is nothing of us in it: except for the sin which comes by neglecting you: and love creation more than you.34

The council of Toledo in 633 saw both the candle and the ode as innovations, but commended them, none the less.

One of the problems liturgical scholars have when they try to piece together liturgies is that each ministry in a liturgy had its own book: celebrants had their sacramentaries which contained the priestly prayers, readers had which contained the lesson texts, and cantors had graduals which had music, for example. The

“bits” are more or less in order, but things may be added or missing. So it is with the collects after the lessons and the exultet. The early manuscripts with a full text of the exultet (such as the eighth century Old Gallican Missal) usually place it after a set of collects after the lessons, and before a set of intercessions preceding baptism.35 The earliest in cursus text of the exultet is in ninth-century Beneventen manuscripts

(southern Italian, and thus preserving possible Greek and North African customs).

34 Augustine, De civitate dei, 15.22 (my translation): Haec tua sunt, bona sunt, quia tu bonus ista creasti. Nihil nostrum est in eis, nisi quod peccamus amantes Ordine neglecto pro te, quod conditur abs te 35 Leo Cunibert Mohlberg, ed., Missale Gallicanum vetus (Cod. Vat. Palat. lat. 493) (Rome, IT: Herder, 1958), 32–42.

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 23 There it comes between the eleventh and twelfth (and final) lesson, which in that tradition is Is 54:17b–55:13 (everyone who thirsts, come to the waters)36.

As I mentioned above, we have to wait until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that the new fire and exultet move solidly to the beginning of the vigil.

Somewhere in the seventh and eighth centuries, baptisms seem to have started their move from near the beginning of the vigil to after the lessons (and then, the exultet).

V. Renewing the Vigil

So we return to my sleepy friend, but we’ve strengthened him with Vincent of

Lerins, a traunch of history, and most importantly the realization the Holy Week liturgies didn’t come down from Mount Sinai engraved by Cyril of Jerusalem in AD 34.

Can he help us make a contribution to the renewal of the Vigil?

I would assume that any self-respecting Nashotah House scholar can recite the

“believed everywhere, always and by all” version of Vincent’s heuristic, but I find his second statement, “universality, antiquity, and consent,” more interesting if not as pithy. Also, universality will necessarily imply antiquity, though the inverse might not apply. When we look at the earliest descriptions of the Pasch, we find two liturgical elements: baptism and extensive reading of scripture along with with psalmody,

36 Thomas Forrest Kelly, The Exultet in Southern Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 135.

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 24 encompassing the Hebrew psalms and , New Testament canticles, and psalmodi idiotiki. Where mentioned in the first 800 years, this occurs in the evening, at nightfall or soon after. Zooming in on the scripture, it almost always includes four categories: creation and fall, the flood and Noah or Jonah and the great fish, the exodus, and the exilic and post-exilic prophecies of a new messianic world order. At the end of the prophecies, an ode—which became the exultet—proclaiming the resurrection of all the world in Christ was proclaimed. In addition to baptism and readings, we find a eucharist of the resurrection, and the earliest temporal indications here are at dawn. Around 800, with the triumph of monasticism (and correlation doesn’t mean causation, though it might here), the times and their separations began to disappear, and the whole “Easter vigil” complex moved to early afternoon on Holy Saturday. With this change, the lighting of the new fire and the intercessions in the form of a litany of the saints were added until the Franciscan and papal forms achieved their tridentine forms in the fourteenth century.

What might a renewed Easter vigil look like for our time? Some principles would have to apply: the dichotomies of darkness and light, fire and water, and death and resurrection have to be foregrounded, and there must be an almost literal baptism in scripture. The vigil (and liturgy in general) was also “polyphonic,” a texture of many things going on at once, and it was aural, not written, so, at least for the congregation, it needs to be a “book-free zone.” Additionally, since the vigil lasted several hours and there was little to no seating, the vigil needs to be kinesthetic.

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 25 The church is in relative darkness, with only enough candles to help out the readers and presider. Readers should proclaim from memory. The presider should pray from memory or improvise using classical forms.

The congregation sings an opening psalm, and then begins a course of twelve repeated biblical structures:

• lesson • responsorial music (typically a psalm) • sermon or other liturgical action

This series begins with the creation narrative, and then the fall narrative. Baptism (or renewal of vows) begins as a response to the fall.

• Blessing of water comes after Jonah (or the flood) • baptism itself after the crossing of the Red Sea • anointing and introduction of the neophytes after Isaiah 40 (“Arise, shine, for your light has come”).

After the last lesson, and I rather like the Eastern use of the fiery furnace and the

Benedicite, the Paschal candle is lit, and after the preface of the exultet, all the candles and lights in the church are lit, and the exultet would continue. The singer of the exultet dismisses the assembly who would leave into the world, proclaiming the resurrection, and inviting all to “come and see” with candles lit.

Very early (6:00 AM or so) on the morning of Pascha, the congregation returns to the church for the mass of the resurrection, and this would be the most decorated

(music, processions, etc.) liturgy of the day. Ideally, the Easter feast begins after this liturgy, and and the congregation returns for vespers (after a nap, of course!).

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 26 This pattern restores the centrality of the anamnetic elements of baptism and readings ended by the exultet on Saturday night, preserves an eschatological sense

“now, but not yet,” and allows the presence of Christ in his church to be the focus of the

Easter mass.

VI. Pax Nashotah

The problem with the solution we’ve just proposed is that it fails Vincent’s third criteria: it lacks consent. Nobody but a liturgical historian who likes thought games and those people in this room that he’s convinced have agreed. That’s a very small sample for a claim of universality! However, this is a community that is trying very hard—and maybe even sacrificially—to embody catholicity, at least within Anglicanism. The pax nashotah as you are trying to live it out requires you all to be multi-ritual in orientation, and that makes for an ideal platform for liturgical exploration, particularly given the

House’s insistence on faithfulness to the Tradition (with a capital “T”) of the church.

How do we accomplish that balance?

Among the students, faculty, and staff there are at least three forms of Holy

Week with canonical authority: the minimalism of the classical Prayer Book tradition, in which there is no Easter Vigil, but only an office of the word on Saturday morning, the complexity of the Anglican Missal (or other implementations of the Missale Romanum in an Anglican milieu, and the BCP 1979 (or BAS 1985). Since the goal is, in the words of

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 27 the collect for Richard Hooker, “comprehension for the sake of truth” rather than

“compromise for the sake of peace,” these classical forms should be in conversation with each other in the search for a truly catholic paschal worship.

That conversation was missing in the development of the Holy Week rites for the BCP 1979. Truly holy and scholarly , Massey Shepherd, Boone Porter, Thomas

Talley, and Louis Weil, three of whom were part of this community, offered their best work in the development of these liturgies, but there was little of the trial work and scholarly reflection that formed much of the rest of the prayer book. I would thus close by challenging the House active to engage in experiential liturgical theology by putting the liturgies of the past, through careful historical study, and a vision of the liturgies of heaven, through engagement with the meaning of our worship, not just into juxtaposition, but true spiritual conversation with existing liturgies of our churches.

There are many ways to create that conversation, depending on how we might understand the priorities of Nashotah House’s call to liturgical life. The model of holy week described in Egeria’s Perigrinage works best in a pilgrimage environment. If the

House finds itself called foremost to be a holy place whose community has a ministry of liturgical performance, every year should be a “full meal deal” of the 1979 BCP Holy

Week. Then, for example, during Petertide, the community might work through a number of attempts to make a Holy Week for our time. Alternatively, if our model is academic, we might do a three-year cycle of 1979 BCP, Anglican Missal, and trial liturgies. In either case, study of the theology and history of the liturgies (not just those

The Next Liturgical Renewal 04/04/14 28 which attempt to re-imagine the tradition, but the ones in our formularies) before we enact them is absolutely critical, as is disciplined theological, missional, and emotional reflection afterwords. In either case, and there are other ways of structuring our research, I would call us to a ministry of liturgical leadership. Our churches need a paschal liturgy which calls us more fully to enter into the death of Jesus and his resurrection and our new life in him, and brings us, through participation in the heavenly liturgy, to a redemptive evangelism of the world around us.

Nashotah House has been a catholic powerhouse for the enlivening of worship in its time and place; it is now time to take up that leadership once again, so that throughout the church:

Adoration ay be given, with and through th’angelic host, To the God of earth and heaven, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.37

37 John Henry Newman, “Firmly I believe and truly,” from The Dream of Gerontius.

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