Harry T. Cook

11/28/08

The church as an institution is required in most local settings to be all things to all people. Likewise are the church's clergy. What results often enough are a number of unrelated tasks not done particularly well by people minimally trained in too many things so that none of them gets done with any particular excellence.

Occasionally the clergy leader of a congregation will have earned credentials, beyond the basic divinity degree, in a specialized field, e.g. philosophy, biblical language and history, psychology, social work or business administration. If he or she is afforded the space, one or another of those specialties will give the congregation a distinctive shtick -- always helpful in a market crowded as so many of them are with too many churches for too small a churchgoing population. Most Christian churches focus on Sunday services to which members of the congregation are expected come with some regularity, and with scarcely an exception those services are pretty ho-hum -- especially in such catholic denominations as the Episcopal Church. There are the set liturgies with endlessly repeated texts and a hymnody that belongs to another time -- mostly the 19th century, the pieties of which are largely cloying and oversentimental. The Episcopal Church tried out its own Vatican II from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, producing a hybrid revision of its 450-year-old Book of Common Prayer. In an attempt to establish détente if not an entente among its warring factions, church leaders included in the new volume two different texts for the celebration of the eucharist -- one that is called Rite I and the other Rite II. Rite II is the more accessible in terms of language, but still overborne by outmoded theology.

Rite I is an ever-so-slight tweak upon the standard Anglican service that is a compromise of Tridentine and Reformation theology -- a text resonant of Elizabethan diction and syntax, making it pleasant to the trained ear and a total mystery to the uninitiated. A clergy friend calls it "a museum piece." The trouble is that these days most clergy are unacquainted with Rite I and are embarrassed by the need to offer it with all its thees and thous for the sake of traditionalists in their congregations, so they stumble through it in a studied and prosaic manner.

I chanced the other day upon the Catholic channel in our cable area and there saw and heard a most beautiful offering of the pre-Vatican II Tridentine mass with Latin, Gregorian chant, incense, ancient vestments, precious altar ware and all. It was utterly unrelated to anything in the 21st century, yet it was art -- and, in fact, good art. Thus should there be churches large and well-funded enough to create museums in their sanctuaries as a means of educating their people and any people in the cultural history of Western Christianity, which is quite wonderfully illustrated in and by the mass.

Smaller churches that must rely on amateurs who play "at" the organ or strum earnestly upon tinny guitars for the musical accompaniment of choir-less can't-carry-a-tune congregations should abandon any effort to do formal liturgy. You don't hang newsprint scribblings in the Louvre; neither should the classic mass be offered in a manner similar to engaging in casual conversation at a Starbucks cafe. In any event, the eucharist is really not the outward and visible accouterments of ritual; it is the intentional coming together of a community of any size, even the proverbial "two or three." It is the sharing of a meal to remember a teacher and his teaching about love. You don't need what we Anglicans call "smells and bells" to do that.

Eucharistic communities lacking cathedral-type resources can more effectively direct their energies to the intellectual pursuits frequently ignored by parish clergy. Either such clerics have ceased to conduct research and read books, or they are frightened by the prospect of preaching and teaching out of contemporary scholarship that has largely and successfully debunked a lot of conventional beliefs. Either way, any community regardless of size and financial resources, when adequately led, can attend quite well to the life of the mind.

Following the mandate of doing it unto the least of these any community large or small can be a service center, doing retail outreach as simple as gathering food for the poor, visiting the sick and lonely in hospital and nursing home and advocating on behalf of the homeless or otherwise disadvantaged ones. Leave high mass with its liturgical ornamentation to those cathedral-like institutions that can actually pull it off in a superior manner. Turn such churches into the museums they are anyway for the purpose of preserving an art form worthy of preservation. Do the intellectual and service ministries wherever and however.

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© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.