Liv and the Anglo-Catholics
Jan. 5th, 2015 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livSo 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
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
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.
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 (
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 Nightwhich 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.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-11 07:31 am (UTC)I'm unlikely to make it to Cambridge any time soon - it's a pain to get to from here - but if I do,
(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-11 10:59 pm (UTC)