One of the goods things which have emerged recently from the travails of Anglo-Catholicism in a riven Anglican Communion is a more profound reflection on what constitutes our patrimony: what makes Anglo-Catholicism actually distinctive, and justifies the anxiety which unites us to find a future for what we have received. After all, the great majority of Catholic Christians manage quite well without adding a national qualifier to the third mark of the Church adumbrated by the Creed. But those of us who live within our embattled, contrary tradition know that there is a tone, a way of doing things, a pastoral and liturgical ethos which is both absolutely distinctive and yet also prophetic in pointing beyond itself towards a greater unity ”“ those of us who went recently with the Archbishop of Canterbury to Lourdes will understand what I mean. When we look at the lives of the saints we see that in their diversity of character and spirituality they point us towards the truth of Revelation in different ways: for S. Thomas Aquinas, the overarching principle which organizes his understanding of reality is truth, for S. Francis of Assisi it is goodness, for S. Augustine it is beauty. Our tradition, rather at odds actually with the puritan mentality of the first Tractarians, values beauty: the beauty of holiness in Christian living, the beauty of holiness in Christian worship, the beauty of holiness in the magnanimous expenditure of human wealth on the splendour of Christian cult.It is important to recognise that this is not just an aesthetic preference (although there is nothing wrong with that). Attentiveness to beauty in religion is not like an enthusiasm for Bellini or Bonsai, it is to recognise a fundamental characteristic of the nature of truth as indeed beautiful because divine: as Augustine cried, Late have I loved you, O beauty ever ancient, ever new. To prefer the trite, the banal, the makeshift to the artful, the well-crafted and the beautiful is to make a theological mistake about God. The present Pope is very anxious to rescue the ideal of liturgical beauty from the charge of aestheticism and is determined to put this right in a way which should rejoice all Anglican Catholics who have from the beginning been attentive to this core aspect of evangelisation. It was both moving and significant that on the feast day of Ss. Peter and Paul this year he invited the Ecumenical Patriarch to inaugurate with him the year of Paul in a liturgical celebration which reflected a new commitment to beauty in music and vesture which many of us thought was lost in the 1960s. But the great eastern fathers of the Church were not simply interested in aesthetics, not simply Christians of good taste. They understood beauty to be a morally valuable quality, human creativeness which exemplified our creation in the image of God himself, and our transformation into the divine likeness by the work of grace.
We have to be careful to differientiate between “High Church” Anglo-catholics and “High Ceremonial” liturgists. The former (“true” Anglo-catholics) use their theology and liturgy to reinforce each other. Their focus in on living what the Church has taught and has always taught and in letting the litrugy flow from their theology of grace and beauty and of the whole world being and outward and visible sign of God’s grace. In Anglo-catholic liturgy, I see the perichoresis of the Holy Trinity in the “dance” of the liturgy. For the high churchman, the emphasis is on the Tradition (capital T important) of the Church. It is possible to be High Church without being high ceremonial.
The high ceremonial person, however, sees beautiful liturgy and an expression of beauty, but not as an expression of theology. Many on the reappraiser side love beautiful liturgy, but don’t understand the theology that underlies it. For the high-ceremonial person, liturgy is the end itself.
One of the joys I have as a deacon in the Diocese of Dallas is that I get to travel with my bishops to different congregations and experience the liturgy in different settings and different styles. I’ve worshipped in the highest congregations and in the lowest. I’ve worshipped in charismatic congregations and “frozen chosen” congregations. I love it all. For me the liturgy is like a frame around the truth. Just as different frames will make different aspects of the same picture stand out while the don’t change the picture itself, different liturgical styles will point out different aspects of the Truth.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
An Anglo-catholic Evangelical with Charismatic overtones.
[blockquote]To prefer the trite, the banal, the makeshift to the artful, the well-crafted and the beautiful is to make a theological mistake about God.[/blockquote]
[blockquote] What we do in church: the manner in which we worship and the beauty with which we surround our sacred celebrations is not simply the fulfilment of a duty and the satisfaction of a particular taste, it is a participation in the divine, and a re-ordering of our moral life in accordance with the its true end, the vision of God.
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Yes, yes, and yes! This from an unexpected source:
Hear ye the Master’s call, “Give Me thy best!”
For, be it great or small, that is His test.
Do then the best you can, not for reward,
Not for the praise of men, but for the Lord.
Every work for Jesus will be blest,
But He asks from everyone his best.
Our talents may be few, these may be small,
But unto Him is due our best, our all.
Salathial C. Kirk, 1912.