Mater Dei Institute of Education, a college of Dublin City University (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Mater Dei Institute of Education,
Dublin:
Anglicanism:
Patrick Comerford,
23 October 2014,
2 p.m., Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.
Faith, Practice and Spirituality:
1: Faith and Practice:
2: Spirituality
2 p.m.:
2: Spirituality
Earlier this afternoon, I was quoting the theological maxim,
Lex orandi, lex credendi. In other words, how we pray is what we believe.
If you want to know my theology, you do not have to set me an examination. Simply see how I pray, and in the case of the Church of Ireland, see how we pray on our own, and how we pray with others.
Many Roman Catholics in Ireland know by heart the words of the Angelus and the Hail Holy Queen from the prayers they learned in families and schools as children. Only in Catholic Ireland could people with that background understand the lines in plays such as “full of grapes,” or “the Lord is a Tree,” or the title of a book,
A monk swimming.
Similarly, many members of the Church of Ireland will have learned from an early age, prayers from
The Book of Common Prayer:
Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secretes are hidden,: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy name: trough Christ our Lord, Amen.
The words of many collects are known by heart, such as:
“Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” … words from the collect once used for Advent 2.
So, part of the inherited riches of the Church of Ireland and Anglicanism and the personal spirituality and piety is founded on the liturgical tradition of Anglicanism:
“Prevent O Lord/Go before us O Lord;”
The words “Stir up” from the post-communion prayer for last Sunday, the Sunday before Advent, and the collect used this week have given us the colloquial name “Stirrup Sunday” for last Sunday, the day many women traditionally began preparations or making their Christmas cakes:
Stir up, O Lord, the wills of your faithful people: that, richly bearing the fruit of good works, they may be richly rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.
Many of these collects are the work of Thomas Cranmer, who left his mark on Anglicanism through his pivotal role in the compilation of the first
Book of Common Prayer.
Among his best-loved collects is the collect for Advent Sunday:
Almighty God, give us the grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; So that, on the last day, when he shall come again in glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, now and for ever, Amen.
Famously, when
John Keble was asked about what was at the heart of Anglicanism, he replied: “Study the Collects in
The Book of Common Prayer.”
Cranmer was adept at weaving passages of scripture into the liturgy, so that many Anglicans are familiar with words of scripture woven into liturgy through the versicles and responses.
Many are familiar with the Psalms and other portions of Scripture through the use of the Psalms and Canticles in the daily offices of Morning and Evening Prayer.
The pointing of the Psalms and Canticles allows them to be sung by a choir without little training and rehearsal in a unique style, based on Benedictine monastic choir-style and now known as Anglican chant. And singing makes familiar
Personal prayers and family prayers for many will include reading a passage of scripture, perhaps reading, or even reciting from memory, a Psalm, and some prayers from
The Book of Common Prayer, such as a familiar collect.
Or the Prayer of Saint [John] Chrysostom:
Almighty God, who hast given us grace at this time with one accord to make our common supplications unto thee; and dost promise, that when two or three are gathered together in thy Name thou wilt grant their requests; Fulfil now, O Lord, the desires and petitions of thy servants, as may be most expedient for them; granting us in this world knowledge of thy truth, and in the world to come life everlasting. Amen.
Hymns and Spirituality:
One of the rich aspects of Anglican worship that is carried into personal spirituality is contained in hymnody, including the hymns by Irish hymn writers.
For example, Mrs Cecil Alexander, wife of William Alexander, Bishop of Derry and later Archbishop of Armagh, was the author of
All things bright and beautiful and of
Saint Patrick’s breastplate.
The Revd Henry Francis Lyte, a former curate of Taghmon, Co Wexford, and previously at school in Portora, near Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, was the author of a least 40 hymns, including
Abide with me and
Praise my soul the king of heaven.
But we also use hymns that include words by Thomas Aquinas and John Wesley; traditional Irish hymns; the Taizé Community. The music here at the Cathedral Eucharist on Sunday mornings in Christ Church Cathedral may include settings by Mozart, Vittoria, Haydn, Brahms, Fauré, Bach and Palestrina (last Sunday), or one of the great Anglican composers such as Byrd (next Sunday).
There is an important choral tradition throughout Anglicanism, and many of the English-language carols by Anglican hymn writers are now popular throughout all English-speaking traditions.
For many people outside the Anglican tradition, Anglican spirituality is experienced in its full splendour as they hear Choral Evensong, and the canticles
Magnificat and
Nunc Dimittis sung by great cathedral choirs, at Evening Prayer, particularly at Choral Evensong.
Devotional legacy
There is such a rich inheritance of devotional literature that it could be said that Anglican spirituality has been shaped by Anglican devotional writers, and the Anglican spiritual heritage is also a literary heritage.
There is a pre-Reformation corpus that is an integral part of Anglican spirituality. This includes the anonymous work we know as the
Cloud of Unknowing, as well as the writings of mystics such as Margery Kempe and
Julian of Norwich, the most popular of English mystics.
Julian of Norwich ... All shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well
Julian was a joyous mystic who stressed the homely love of God which has been poured upon this planet and humanity for ever. She concludes in these beautiful and well-loved words: “All shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
When we come to great post-Reformation writers in Anglican spirituality, we should remember too that, like Julian of Norwich, these writers have not always been ordained and have not been exclusively male. Indeed who could have been a more unexpected but-oft quoted author of a pithy but mystical and spiritual understanding of the Eucharist or the Holy Communion, than Elizabeth I?
Elizabeth can be credited with holding together in one Anglican tradition the competing claims within the Church of England and Anglicanism after the death of her half-sister Mary. And it is she who is said to have written of the Eucharist:
His was the Word that spake it:
He tooke the bread and brake it:
And what that Word did make it,
I do believe and take it.
In the immediate post-Elizabethan age, Anglican spiritual writers included country parsons such as
George Herbert (1593-1633), who is remembered for his careful pastoral nurturing of his parish and his parishioners, and for his poetry, much of which has been adapted as hymns.
Herbert’s spirituality is the Anglican
Via Media or Middle Way
par excellence. His poetry is constantly evident of the intimacy of his dealings with God and his assurance that, alone in a vast universe, he is held safe by the Crucified Christ.
Richard Baxter later said of him that Herbert speaks to God like one that really believes a God and as one who whose business in this world is most with God.
In his poem
Obedience, George Herbert wrote:
O let thy sacred will
All thy delight in me fulfil!
Let me not think an action mine own way.
But as thy love shall sway,
Refining up the rudder to thy skill.
George Herbert ... Prayer, the Church’s banquet
For George Herbert, prayer is concerned not only with things heavenly, but also with the earthly. In his poem
Prayer he writes:
Prayer, the Church’s banquet, Angels’ age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;
Engine against th’Almighty, sinner’s tower,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The Milky Way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
In this poem, Herbert is saying that in prayer it is possible to be transported, even if momentarily, to another realm. “Angel’s age,” “the milky way,” and a “tune beyond the stars” suggest that prayer touches the infinite. The poem concludes with “something understood” – a profound but elusive encounter with the mysterious otherness of God.
Herbert was close to
Nicholas Ferrar and the Community of Little Gidding, which showed that prayer, community life, and a life of discipleship and service ought to be inter-woven.
Herbert, John Jewel and Richard Hooker and were profoundly influential on the Caroline Divines, including John Cosin, Lancelot Andrewes and Jeremy Taylor.
John Cosin was as a bishop who sought to improve the worship and liturgy of the Church, and who drew on patristic sources for his
Collection of Private Devotions, as did
Lancelot Andrewes in writing his Latin
Devotions. There he wrote that “he who prays for others, labours for himself.”
John Donne ... Each man’s death diminishes me
He was a contemporary of the poet
John Donne (1571-1631), who was Dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London, for his last ten years. He is best remembered today for his lines:
No man is an island,
entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thine own
or of thine friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
for I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
for whom the bell tolls,
it tolls for thee.
The devotional writings of the Caroline Divines emphasised the centrality of the incarnation in Christian spirituality: the incarnation revealed to humanity in Jesus Christ, the Word Incarnate, in the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood, in the revelation of Christ’s continuing presence in the holy example of the saints. In their devotion, the Carolines shied away from abstraction in favour of the fruits of love and charity, and their devotional life was worked out in their pastoral service.
Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), who ended his days as a bishop in the Church of Ireland, in the dioceses of Connor, Down and Dromore, is best known for his
Holy Living (1640) and
Holy Dying (1641), which had a profound influence spiritually on later generations, including figures as diverse as John Wesley and
John Keble.
No book other than the Bible and
The Book of Common Prayer has had a more profound and lasting influence on the distinctive inwardness of Anglican devotion. No other book so clearly expresses the essence of the classical Anglican understanding of the spiritual life, with its insistence that there is no division between what is religious and what is secular.
Nor should we neglect the Puritan divines, who were contemporaries of the Caroline Divines but are often written out when it comes to telling the story of Anglican spirituality.
Among them was Richard Baxter (1615-1691). He too was influenced by the poetry of George Herbert, and although he ended his days as a Presbyterian he spent most of his life as an Anglican. He described his faith as ‘catholic’ or ‘mere’ Christianity – a term that we can see was later to be adopted as his own by CS Lewis. One of his most joyful yet mystical contributions to our hymnody is
Ye holy angels bright, with its mystical understanding of the Communion of Saints and our place in it.
Thomas Traherne was a hidden mystic of the same period, whose writings only became known long after his death in 1674. In his
Centuries of Meditation, Traherne sees God in everything and everything praising God.
Curiously, the most influential book from this time, though, may have been one whose author remains unknown.
The Whole Duty of Man, first published in 1657, reached its 28th edition in 1790, so that for more than a century, this anonymous book shaped an Anglican spirituality that was defined by the Bible and
The Book of Common Prayer in terms of doctrine and worship, and in practice by an understanding “that religion without morals is but superstition, that Christianity is not a set of beliefs but a way of life.”
Jeremy Taylor’s spirituality, as expressed in his
Holy Living and
Holy Dying has many echoes in William Law’s
A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728), which brought deeply sacramental piety and emphasis on community of the Nonjurors back in the mainstream of spirituality, especially through his influence on John Wesley.
The great Anglican movements of the late 18th and the 19th centuries were the Evangelical Revival and the Oxford Movement, which had a second generation expression in the
Anglo-Catholic Movement.
Those two strands were not so much about style and churchmanship as about mission work: the evangelical movement gave us the Church Mission Society (CMS) and its related family of mission societies, while the Oxford Movement and the later Anglo-Catholics gave us USPG and its family of mission agencies, now known simply as Us.
In both cases, they show us once again that to be truly Anglican is to be incarnational. And in living this through, their faith was expressed in social action. For men like William Wilberforce, it was translated into action through their opposition to slavery and the slave trade. He was convinced that Christianity required the response of the heart as well as the head. For a later generation of Anglo-Catholics it was lived out in commitment to the poor and the oppressed in the slums and the inner cities, exemplified in the life and work of the slum priests.
The great hymn writer of the Oxford Movement and of the later Anglo-Catholics was
John Keble, whose hymns and poems are collected in
The Christian Year. If what we sing rather than how we pray shows what we believe – a new way of looking at the maxim
Lex Orandi Lex Credendi – then through the
English Hymnal Percy Dearmer and Ralph Vaughan Williams have had a profound influence on modern expressions of Anglican spirituality.
But two of the most influential writers in terms of Anglican spirituality must have been CS Lewis and TS Eliot. CS Lewis, who was born in Belfast, is known to all of us as a spiritual writer ever since we first read the
Chronicles of Narnia. However, if you have not already read it, could I recommend to you
The Four Loves, which is known and loved well beyond the Anglican tradition of spirituality.
TS Eliot, on the other hand, is one of the most celebrated poets of the 20th century.
Ash Wednesday (1930) is the first long poem written by him after his conversion to Anglicanism in 1927. In this poem, Eliot deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith strives to move towards God. Sometimes referred to as Eliot’s “conversion poem,”
Ash Wednesday is richly but ambiguously allusive and deals with the aspiration to move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation, inspired by Dante’s
Purgatorio. Its groundwork of orthodox Christianity discomfited many of the more secular members of his literary circle.
The Four Quartets ... considered by many to be TS Eliot’s masterpiece, it led to him receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature
However, Eliot and many other critics considered
The Four Quartets his masterpiece, and it was this work that led to him receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. In
The Four Quartets, Eliot draws upon his knowledge of mysticism and philosophy. It consists of four long poems, each first published separately:
Burnt Norton (1936),
East Coker (1940),
The Dry Salvages (1941) and
Little Gidding (1942). Each has five sections. Although they resist easy characterisation, each approaches the same ideas in varying but overlapping ways, and are strongly theological and spiritual.
Burnt Norton asks what it means to consider things that might have been.
East Coker continues the examination of time and meaning, focusing in a famous passage on the nature of language and poetry. Out of darkness, Eliot continues to reassert a solution: “I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope.”
The Dry Salvages strives to contain opposites:
… the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled.
Little Gidding is the most anthologised of the
Quartets. Here for the first time he talks of Love as the driving force behind all experience. From this background, the
Quartets end with an affirmation of Julian of Norwich:
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
In
The Four Quartets, Eliot draws upon the theology, art, symbolism and language of such figures as Dante, and mystics Saint John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich. The “deeper communion” sought in
East Coker, the “hints” and whispers of children, the sickness that “must grow worse in order to find healing,” and the exploration that inevitably leads us home all point to the pilgrim’s path along the road of sanctification.
Poets, Artists and Writers
‘The Light of the World’ by William Holman Hunt (1827-1910) …one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
There are others. We could have looked at poets like Christina Rossetti, artists like William Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelites, writers such as at Dorothy Sayers, for example, or modern novelists like Susan Howatch and Catherine Fox today.
For many, Anglican spirituality has been conveyed down the generations by great composers, from William Byrd, John Taverner, Thomas Tallis, Orlando Gibbons and Thomas Tomkins, to Hubert Parry, Charles Stanford, Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells and John Rutter.
Who can say whether the lyrics of U2, most of them Dublin-born Anglicans, will shape future spiritual thinking? – already we have had celebrations that have used the designation U2charist.
But spirituality is always elusive and mercurial when it comes to defining or analysing it. It is not always true that its influences and growth can be found in writers and poets.
Who can claim credit for the interesting movements in the past century, such as the Parish Communion Movement of the 1930s, the Charismatic Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the search for Fresh Expressions of Church in our own time? Yet each has had a profound impact on our understanding of Anglican spirituality.
Many of these new insights have been and hopefully will continue to be channelled into the life of the church, and become part of the spiritual life of all Anglicans, though liturgical revival, through theological education, through the ways we live out our lives.
Conclusion:
The Presentation of the Christ Child in the Temple ... a window in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
I have spoken of the way the canticles
Magnificat and
Nunc Dimittis are an integral part of what has shaped the Anglican tradition of spirituality.
One of two poems written at the time of TS Eliot’s conversion,
A Song for Simeon, is based on the Canticle
Nunc Dimittis, although Eliot titles his poem
A Song for Simeon rather than
A Song of Simeon, the English sub-title of the canticle in
The Book of Common Prayer.
The story of this poem concludes the Christmas season, which you are all looking forward to, I imagine. Some of you may have noticed the windows in this cathedral that tell the Christmas story, including the window telling the story of the Presentation of the Christ Child in the Temple. And so I conclude with that poem:
A Song for Simeon (TS Eliot)
Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season had made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.
Grant us thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
Have given and taken honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.
Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children’s children
When the time of sorrow is come?
They will take to the goat’s path, and the fox’s home,
Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords.
Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation
Grant us thy peace.
Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,
Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,
Now at this birth season of decease,
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel’s consolation
To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.
According to thy word.
They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation
With glory and derision,
Light upon light, mounting the saints’ stair.
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision.
Grant me thy peace.
(And a sword shall pierce thy heart,
Thine also).
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
Let thy servant depart,
Having seen thy salvation.
Next:
4 December 2014:
3, The Church of Ireland and its place in Irish society today;
4, Church, Culture and being relevant.
11 December 2014:
5, The Church of Ireland Anglicanism, from the Reformation to the Act of Union;
6, The Church of Ireland Anglicanism, from the Act of Union to today.
Canon Patrick Comerford is Lecturer in Anglicanism, Liturgy and Church History, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor, Trinity College, Dublin. This lecture was delivered on a course at the Mater Dei Institute of Education (MDI), Dublin, on 23 October 2014, in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin. MDI is a College of Dublin City University (DCU).
