Liv and the Anglo-Catholics

[liv]

So Little Saint Mary's is a bit of a Cambridge institution. I think of it, slightly irreverantly, as the goth church, which my friend expressed more appropriately as "liturgically conservative, socially progressive". What it actually is is Anglo-Catholic, and even within that tradition rather prides itself on how "high" its rituals are. My friend invited me to join her at an Evensong service yesterday, and it was a really interesting experience.

The church as a physical building is very much like lots of Mediaeval churches, built to be big and imposing and elaborate (it's only called "Little" Saint Mary's in contrast to the huge church down the road, Great Saint Mary's, which really is enormous). Much of the decoration destroyed during the Reformation (which I gather didn't make a distinction between the English and the Roman sorts of Catholic ETA: Never mind me, I thought I'd got my head round this but I'm totally confused, see wychwood's much more helpful comment), so that the interior now feels like a kind of white painted, high-ceilinged barn almost, with a few bits of carvings and heraldry almost lost in the space. LSM is famously super-high, so it has a huge elaborate altar absolutely covered in gold ornaments and coloured banners, and at this season a nativity scene with the figures only a little smaller than life-size. Still, the church felt emptyish, the more so because there were only about 15 worshippers, plus nearly as many again performing ritual roles, a priest and some servers (?) and choristers (?).

Evensong had a decent amount of organ music and communal singing and English language plainchant. Even with the choir the congregational parts of the music were a little thin, with so few people present, but it is a very lovely thing to have woven into a ritual. As I mentioned in my December posts, the English church choral tradition is very familiar to me, to the point that the Magnificat and Nunc seemed almost more homey than the Psalm settings. I have very rarely heard actual plainchant, outside of atmospheric music in historical films, but I know the general idea, it didn't seem weird to me. There is of course lots of genuflecting, which surprised me a bit the first time I saw my mother (!) doing it out of convent-school instilled habit, but I've seen it before.

I'm in a place at the moment of being fairly relaxed attending Christian services. I'll say Amen to prayers that feel at least approximately homologous to something I might say (my usual rule of thumb is that if I can easily translate something into Hebrew, it's probably theologically mostly ok), including Our father, but won't recite the prayers themselves. I kind of discount the bit where there's a prayer that seems perfectly normal to me, but they tack on "in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord" or similar at the end, that doesn't turn it into something I'm not willing to amen. And in principle I'm happy to sing hymns even if I wholly disagree with the words, but in practice, well, I didn't feel like I had much to contribute to the liturgical music, given I could manage neither sincere belief nor anything musically useful, and I didn't know most of the hymns (apart from Silent Night which I completely agree doesn't have any decent English translations ever) so I mostly just listened. Also my guide helpfully reassured me that I'm totally allowed not to participate in the physical side of the ritual, the kneeling and making the sign of the Cross and so on, so I didn't feel awkward about that.

The second part of the service was a thing called Benediction, which is to do with adoring the Sacrament. My friend warned me that this was the point where I might think: these people are really weird. Actually it didn't seem weird at all, theatric, sure, but I think my main thought was, wow, this is what Christians think of as almost embarrassingly high? It's less ritualish than a typical Torah service in the kinds of middle-of-the-road and left of there synagogues I usually spend time in. The congregation were kneeling for quite a long time, and I wasn't sure if it was polite to look at what the priest and servers were doing, but I did anyway, though I tried not to be too obvious about it and mostly kept my head down. One of the servers put a different robe on the priest for this part of the ceremony, covering his already rather elaborate robes, and another had a thurible (I like that word) and scattered incense about the place. (I was pleased to discover that the incense neither triggered my asthma, nor lingered on my clothes, cos I would have felt a bit strange to go home smelling of incense!) And there was a shiny gold thing which my friend told me was the monstrance, but my eyes couldn't really resolve it from the other side of the church and in amongst all the big pile of shiny stuff on the altar.

There was a sermon. jack has been warning me for years that you're not supposed to argue with the sermon in a church, so I didn't, not out loud anyway. The OT reading was Isaiah railing about idolatry, which is always hard to preach and especially so in a denomination which is notorious for being into gold and statuary. Not that I think Catholic ritual is in fact idolatrous, but you have to do something a bit clever with a reading about how bad it is to make statues. So this priest talked about how idols are limited by the imagination of their makers, and true religion is always surprising because God is greater than anyone can imagine, so idols kind of invert the relationship between creator and created. And I forgot to note down what the NT reading was but it was to do with living your whole life as a sacrifice, so that could be woven into the idea of being open to whatever God asks from you. And a bit about transcending artificial divisions between ritual stuff in church and practical social justice stuff in "the world", generally thought-provoking and interesting.

I can't help being a little critical, though, cos preaching is something I'm pretty good at so I always regard other preachers with a quasi-professional eye. So I thought the sermon was a little too rambly, it was longer than I would talk for – I am unusually strict about keeping a d'var Torah under 7 minutes – but that wasn't the real problem, it was more that it made a bunch of points that were somewhat extraneous to the main theme, and was structurally a bit repetitive. And the whole thing was read from a written text; there are good accessibility reasons for doing that, but I have too much professional pride as a science lecturer in my day job to ever read from a script. The result was that the priest sounded somewhat theatrical, he read in what I think of as a "churchy" voice and even his hand gestures and little anecdotes seemed rehearsed.

My main quibble was how he explained Isaiah's context; he referred to "the prophet Deutero-Isaiah" which makes no sense, there was no individual person called Isaiah II, that's the title of a (section of a) book, not the name of a person. Plus it turned out that my generally knowledgeable Christian friend hadn't come across the historical-critical view of Isaiah at all before which made me think the priest ought to have explained that a bit more. I mean, given he explained that when he said idols are always conceptually smaller than their creators, he didn't mean physically smaller, a little bit more background of what was actually going on with the Babylonian exile beyond just "the Israelites were oppressed" would have been in keeping! I was annoyed by the comment that Deutero-Isaiah isn't about the comforting sort of religion, given that the very first word of Deutero-Isaiah is in fact נַחֲמ֥וּ, as in Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God. But see how I just put this in a grumpy comment on DW (ok, and said similar to my friend after we left the church) and did not at all argue during the service!

Anyway. Said priest was very punctilious at greeting the new people in a friendly welcoming fashion after the service. My friend admitted she's actually Roman Catholic and I said I was just a visitor, and was intentionally vague and didn't say that I'm Jewish. Because there are several ways the conversation can go when you turn up in a church and say you're Jewish, and most of them are positive but none of them were conversations I felt like having at that moment.

So anyway, that was really interesting and educational, and I'm grateful to my friend for bringing me to that.

Comments

[nameandnature]

The NT passage sounds like Romans 12.

I didn't know people argued with sermons in a synagogue. How does that work?

[liv]

Oh, nicely done on identifying the passage from my extremely vague description! I meant to note down what the reading was only it slipped my mind.

Arguing with sermons: it varies a lot between different communities and some of it depends a bit on your denomination. In my synagogue people just randomly call out interruptions, a thing I encourage, but it's a fairly small community and I'm confident I can manage that. Some don't have a sermon as such at all, but have a seminar before the service proper starts, where people are expected to argue. Some, especially more liberal-leaning denominations, tend to be a bit formal and it isn't polite to actually interrupt the preaching (which is why not arguing in church is in fact completely normal to me, it's just that jack likes to tease me about how I might get that etiquette wrong), but people will usually argue with eachother or with the preacher during the mingling after the service. Sometimes you get ritualized arguments as part of the liturgy, which isn't exactly the same as a real argument, but it shows how much that approach to scripture is valued in many traditions. And, you know, two Jews, three opinions, there are always some people who'll argue about whether you're actually supposed to argue.

[nameandnature]

Oh, nicely done on identifying the passage from my extremely vague description! I meant to note down what the reading was only it slipped my mind.

It was one of the justifying texts for my former church's interior re-modelling, as discussed years ago on your old blog (Gmail's search wins again). Worship isn't going into a special building and doing special actions (rather it's offering your body as a living sacrifice, which I assume is opposed to a dead one here), Christians are all priests, so there shouldn't be a sort of special bit of the building that only people who are designated as priests get to do stuff in, and it's not an altar, it's a table, and so on.

A seminar sounds like much more fun than a sermon, though I imagine it wouldn't scale to big congregations.

[seekingferret]

I'm used to occasional interruptions of the Rabbi with comments or corrections during sermons, but it was shocking and delightful to me when I visited Dartmouth Hillel that the Rabbi actually had a formally set aside moment at the end of his sermon for people to disagree with him.

[cjwatson]

I find it absolutely fascinating that the direction of the correspondence between liturgical formality/informality and conservative/liberal axes seems to be oppositely aligned in Judaism vs. Christianity. In Christian denominations hierarchical organisation, social conservatism, and liturgical normativity all seem to be roughly correlated.

[wychwood]

There weren't any Anglo-Catholics before the Reformation, they were all just Roman Catholics! No Church of England for them to be at the high end of, after all. Are you thinking of the Puritans? They did a lot of smashing stained glass, etc, but usually that's Civil War era rather than the Reformation per se - a century or so later.

The thing about Benediction isn't that it's high ritual (although it's mostly found at the higher-church end of things) it's that it's essentially a bunch of people worshipping a bit of bread (...except obviously they are understanding it as the Body of Christ, which is why they're worshipping). I think that's usually what weirds people out. Even if you basically believe in transubstantiation, it's kind of... intense. The actual process is mostly just silent prayer, though, which, as you say, isn't that dramatic to watch.

I've heard people talk about "Deutero-Isaiah" before - I think I've probably done it myself. I think of it as a shorthand for "the person or group who wrote the texts that make up chapters 40-55 of our Book of Isaiah". How else would you refer to them? Assuming you weren't going to stop and explain the whole thing properly, although I agree that that would have been clearer for the congregation.

That's really cool about people arguing with your d'var Torah! I didn't know that. I've often been very tempted to it, particularly when the priest is saying something I happen to know is factually wrong (and never mind the offensive comments...)

[liv]

Right, thank you. You are of course right about Anglo-Catholics only happening after the Reformation, and yes, Puritans smashed things, not the Reformation itself. Thank you for being helpful about church history as well as explaining the actual religious stuff, I'm really glad you commented to this.

Really good point about what it is that non-Catholics might find strange about Benediction! I feel much as you describe about the actual Eucharist ceremony, it's either very weird or very intense, and I never feel quite comfortable watching when people take Communion.

My quibble about Deutero-Isaiah was not the term itself, but specifically referring to Deutero-Isaiah as the prophet Deutero-Isaiah. I might say the prophet who wrote Deutero-Isaiah, just cos that's the name for the writing, not for the person. Or just Deutero-Isaiah says tout court, referring to what the book says, not committing myself on whether it's an individual or a group or the same person as the first Isaiah who wrote it.

In a sermon that was fairly discursive and quite didactic, the priest was definitely in a mode of explaining things about the Bible he didn't expect the congregation to know, I think the whole historical-critical thing could have done with more actual explainining, definitely. Especially since part of the examples about not elevating artificial human institutions and divisions was to do with how priests shouldn't be too churchy and too distant from their congregations. Like, this guy specifically addressed "the ordinands present" and told them to avoid discoursing on detailed academic theology at worshippers, and yet he didn't gloss his sermon enough to make it transparent to people who happen not to be familiar with quite an obscure detail of historical-critical text study.

[wychwood]

I feel much as you describe about the actual Eucharist ceremony, it's either very weird or very intense, and I never feel quite comfortable watching when people take Communion.

I don't notice it so much with Communion because that's something we do at pretty much every service - it's just standard, you know? Whereas Benediction is definitely a bit alien to my worship etc. You're right that it's the same thing underneath, though. Transubstantiation: Still Pretty Weird.

And that makes a lot more sense, the Deutero-Isaiah thing - I'd use the same kind of phrasing as you, and I agree his wording sounds odd. It's interesting that he apparently didn't think of that as an example of being too distant / theological; I know about it, but only because of the Bible study group I go to, and even in a fairly academic community like that it's not going to be entirely common knowledge. And of course in a regular parish most people have a genuinely appalling level of ignorance about even really basic Biblical things (I'm thinking here of a very devout regular Mass attender in her sixties or seventies who also comes to our Bible study group, and who, it emerged a few months back, thought St Paul was one of the twelve apostles - which, surely, even just having listened to the readings at Mass over that kind of length of time, surely you would have noticed? But she hadn't!)

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

Yes, but smashing probably happened during the Reformation and now it's a high church so it's weird. I mean, there was church smashing then.

Also, that was what I meant about Benediction being weird to non-Catholics, but obviously didn't articulate very well.

[rysmiel]

I was raised Catholic in Ireland, and my secondary school shared a building with a seminary; so far as I can tell, most of the Mass I grew up with was still thought by many of its celebrants to be bending over backwards in the Low Church direction by being in the vernacular rather than Latin, which was a bit odd. (The seminary was closed by the time fomorian went to said school, though he did abstract an unused cassock from it; I understand he finds it useful for LARPing.)

I think of aesthetically appreciating religious music, much of it in Latin, in much the same direction as aesthetically appreciating songs about or assuming normative monogamy; the example of the one really helped me come to that as a position on the other. (I realised I wasn't Catholic a long time before realising I was hardwired poly.)

And while I'm thinking of religious music, I think some of your readers might appreciate these links to clips from a couple of concerts organised under the auspices of the Festival du Monde Arabe in Montreal; joint performances of sacred music from across the major Abrahamic faiths. I was at the earlier of those concerts and found it powerfully moving.

[liv]

Thank you for the Cercle d'Extase links, I had seen them before in your LJ but definitely worth bringing to a wider audience.

I do think you're right about aesthetically appreciating religious music you don't believe in. Evensong feels like a bit of a grey area, though, because it's primarily a religious service not a concert. So I want to be careful both about appropriating something that's important to other people on a level that isn't only aesthetic, and about appearing to endorse theology I quite strongly don't believe in.

The person who invited me to the church pointed out that Anglo-Catholics obviously don't have to listen to Vatican II, so they're totally free to use Latin liturgy if they want to or otherwise do things that would look retrogressive to Roman Catholics. I can imagine the generation who lived through the transition from Latin to vernacular must have found that hard to adapt, so I can see people thinking they were making a big compromise. My guess is that the High/Low thing is mainly applicable to Anglicans when they're talking about how Catholic-looking their liturgy is, but I can see that actual Catholic congregations can be more or less High too, hence the anecdote elsethread about LSM being Higher than OLEM.

[merrythebard]

I have nothing particularly intelligent to add, but I really, really enjoyed reading this post. :-) Thank you for sharing it.


(Okay, I do have a silly anecdote about LSM: when my Dad was at Cambridge, he did a certain amount of exploring various different churches*. He mentioned this to the chaplain at John's, and when he mentioned visiting OLEM to check out Roman Catholicism, was advised to just go to LSM instead as "it's higher". This was all I knew about LSM before I met our various Anglo-Catholic mutual friends. ;-) )

(In the end, my Dad went along to a liberal-low-church-Christian discussion group at Emmanuel United Reformed Church, where he met my Mum. ;-) And ended up more or less sticking with the URC, which is where both of them grew up.)

[liv]

:-) Everything about this comment is endearing, thank you for saying. Yay your Dad finding both a good community and a partner at Emmanuel, that's lovely. I have been to ceilidhs there and it feels like the kind of church I would find comfortable, if I ever found myself wanting to go to church other than just as a visitor. (Though they're weird about Israel, but lots of generally fluffy churches are, so I don't put too much weight on that.) Likewise Mill Road Baptist seems kind of appealing to me, which I've visited because they're hosting our synagogue at the moment while our permanent building is under construction.

[wildeabandon]

Reading this gave me a great deal of pleasure, although goshdarnit I miss LSM.

[liv]

Yay, I'm glad you enjoyed. You should totally come to Cambridge some time, then you can visit people who like you as well as the church!

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Yay for you being willing to go to a church service.

I think Grace church in north Cambridge[*] allows or even encourages discussion/interruptions in the sermon. The physical layout is more like a classroom than a traditional church, with small groups of chairs gathered around tables. BICBW because I haven't been for a while.

[*]Church plant from Eden Baptist, meets in North Cambridge Academy aka Manor School.

Also, anything in the evangelical church marketed as a talk rather than a service is likely to have Q&A and lively debate at the end, but that's probably moving further away from what you're describing as happening in synagogues.

[liv]

Ooh, thank you for these examples, I hadn't known those possibilities existed not just within Christianity but specifically in Cambridge churches. There's something about Catholic and other High churches that makes me feel comfortable because I'm used to a fair amount of ritual and pomp and symbolism, but there's something about Evangelical and certain sorts of non-Conformist churches that makes me feel comfortable because I'm used to much more direct engaging with the Bible than you get in Catholic-ish contexts.

Talks that include debates feel a very natural part of religion to me. And interesting to have a church laid out like a classroom, that's definitely how synagogues were historically (the Yiddish word shul, which I sometimes use, is directly cognate to school).

[silveradept]

Thank you for the post - perspectives on religious practice from outside the religion are fascinating to read.

I think the Roman Catholic tradition I was raised in could have used a lot more discussion with the priest, but Roman Catholicism there wasn't very tolerant of those things - trust the priest and say the ritual. With a more active discussion, it might have been a more live tradition.

[liv]

Oh, I'm glad you found this interesting and not disrespectful. It is fair to say that having a tradition that encourages arguing is in no way a guarantee against the tradition getting over-hierarchical and moribund, but still. I do like that about Judaism.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

THat's really sad! I was also raised Roman Catholic, but encouraged to argue and check my beliefs and think it all through. I don't argue during the sermon, but I might well argue afterwards! I've not had a priest look at me and go 'hmmm. coffee?' (ie, we need to talk about this longer) to an argument of mine for a while, though, so maybe I'm not trying hard enough :)

(Here via a friend's flist)

[tree_and_leaf]

This was a fascinating post to read, as LSM was my church when I lived in Cambridge (I know the clergy, too, and was trying to guess who the preacher was - if it's who I think it is, he is naturally quite theatrical...) Preaching from a script, incidentally, is the norm in that tradition, although not *everyone* does it that way.

Anyway, it was fascinating to read and also brought back very happy memories. I really miss being somewhere I could go to Evensong and Benediction, even though it's always a very sparsely attended service.

[liv]

Hello, welcome, I think I've seen you around before in fact. And I'm really pleased this was a good thing to read as a former LSM congegrant. I wasn't sure if the small congregation was due to the time of year, it's right after / during Christmas as well as being out of term, but maybe people just don't do Evensong + Benediction very much.

And I don't really object to reading from a script, there are good reasons and plenty of rabbis and Jewish preachers do it too. I'm just picky about it myself! I can't figure out who the preacher was whose interpretation of Isaiah I'm being grumpy about, he doesn't resemble any of the pictures on the website listing the clergy, and they've apparently given up putting the sermons up since 2011.

[damerell]

I can't read this without hearing my mother (a Scots Presbyterian atheist) saying "Papist mummery!"

[cjwatson]

I'm always a bit taken aback when people use "Papist" to refer to Anglo-Catholicism, because, you know, from my point of view the basic point of the Anglican schism was specifically to remove the Pope from the equation.

But anyway, this reminded me of an anecdote. At school we did various interdenominational things in RE, presumably on the basis that actually meeting other people might get young Northern Irish people to be marginally less horrible to each other on average, and one of those was a chat with a Church of Ireland minister. At that point I knew basically nothing about Anglicanism, and they'd normally be lazily classified as Protestant in terms of the Northern Irish divide. He told us that at one point when he was in training, he was sitting on a wall on the Shankill Road when a boy came up and sat beside him. They got to talking, and the boy asked him what he did, so he said he was training to be a minister. "Oh, what kind?" said the boy. "Church of Ireland", he replied. "Oh, you don't want to do that. Them's next t' the Taigs!"

[tree_and_leaf]

As an Anglo-Catholic (and ex-Presbyterian), I'd probably add "And proud of it!" :)