November 21, 2008
Liturgical Notes: The End of an Era
We have been attending the 7:30 a.m. Sunday service at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, for approximately ten years, since leaving the parish of the World's Greatest Christians, Christ Church, Portola Valley. The liturgy has been Rite I from the Book of Common Prayer, without music. The service has been celebrated in the Grace Chapel, a small, neo-Gothic gem of the style that in my youth was called a “lady chapel,” but with perhaps a 30-foot ceiling. The Chapel is pictured above.
Retired clergy have taken their turns as celebrants every five or six weeks or so. What these priests might occasionally have lacked in vigor they more than compensated for by incisiveness, terseness and organization in their homilies, qualities worshipers prize more greatly as the years pass. The services proceeded under a cloak of anonymity. I never learned the names of the celebrants because they were neither published nor announced. It was our impression that one was an Englishman who had been the principal of the Grace Cathedral boys school and who had rowed probably at Oxford, another a long time teacher in San Jose who was once spotted in the checkout line at Trader Joes in a heavy, black leather jacket and who hikes the highest Sierra every summer, and another a former engineer who had grown up in a fundamentalist Texas Gulf town and found rational refuge and Christian love in the Episcopal faith as a priest later in life.
We were usually out by 8:15 before the organist in the great nave of the Cathedral began his warm-ups for the 8:15 service. There were generally anywhere from ten to twenty five or so souls in attendance and always a good mix of travelers from far away places such as Ohio or Maryland.
Last Sunday without warning the axe fell. Reverend Forbes, the celebrant advised that in two weeks the lonely outpost of the 7:30 service would be held no more and that the 7:30 and 8:15 services would be combined in a new 8:30 service with music in the Grace Chapel. What to do in the yawning chasm of empty time each Sunday morning from awakening at 6 am as older folks are wont to do to the new time?
I then inquired of Reverend Forbes about Rite I. He replied that the new service would probably discard it in favor of Rite II, to our ears the bland, simplified, basic English version of the Holy Communion service invented 20 years or so ago that jettisoned the best language early 16th century liturgical style of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury at the time of Henry VIII and translator of the Psalms as they appear in the Book of Common Prayer, albeit that some miraculous prayers from the early Greek Church Fathers were allowed to infiltrate.
Alas my more or less faithful attendance at what are commonly called eight o’clock services these past thirty or so years has been based on certain not insubstantial stirrings of duty and love of the Church - which I have come sadly to view as not at all the same as being a Christian - but also on a great nostalgia for the words I heard in my youth at Gesthemane Episcopal Church in Marion, Indiana. I had once won an award for not missing Sunday school for four consecutive years. At the age of twelve in 1944 I had been commissioned to schedule the acolytes. The wonderful priests and lay Sunday school teachers of that time were, excepting my family, the most important people I have known. Manifestations, intimations, emanations and even imagined revelations of the Holy Trinity as I perceive them are inexorably tied to recurring evocations of Mary and Mabel Cole, Al Spurgeon and Ed Curtis, my Sunday School teachers, and Fathers Croft and Sheridan (Episcopal) - not to mention Father Archadiou from South Bend (Orthodox), something of a complication - and the language later incorporated into Rite I that was the air we breathed. Now this vital tie to the foundations of my life is to be severed by fiat coincident with a pending management change at Grace Cathedral and Heaven only knows what exigencies of the economic downturn.
All this hardly seems conducive to a stable and happy ending for a couple of seniors. I am citing the tiniest of vibrations on the sensors of the Church at a time of threatened Schism and all the conflicts threatening disruption. A move to Nigeria or a remote village in England appears problematical, although we occasionally find some comfort when we are able to attend the English parish, St. George's, in west Berlin or St. Paul's in downtown Athens, where an amazing panoply of enormous, spiritually dominant Africans can be found worshiping every Sunday.
Accordingly, we will stiffen our upper lips, continue to hope for the best and trust that God will heed our entreaties under the new regime. But no more will our worship expressly be marked as “meet, right and our bounden duty” as, in the olden days, we proudly proclaimed in the Rite I opening to our Eucharistic prayers.
For more lamentation: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2002/02/27/do2701.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2002/02/27/ixop.html
No comments:
Post a Comment