On Liturgy

Introduction

“Our Mother in Heaven,
Hallowed is your name,
Your Queendom come,
Your will be done on Earth as in Heaven.
Give us today your daily bread.
Forgive us our sins,
as we forgive those who sin against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For the Queendom, the power and the glory are yours
Now and forever,
Amen.”[i]

The above prayer managed to work its way into the liturgy of Queen Elizabeth II's 80th birthday in 2006 in a Parish Church in Kent. To many Christians, this version of the Lord's Prayer will at least seem a little odd and at most just plain wrong. Why? Simply because it has clearly changed the words that Our Lord Jesus Himself bids us pray.

For Traditional Christians, the meaning of what we pray is bound up intrinsically with what we believe: this is the famous principle of "lex orandi, lex credendi"[ii] - the law of praying is the law of believing. In the Anglican Catholic Church, we take lex orandi , lex credendi to heart and this means that we do and must take our liturgy with the greatest seriousness. Indeed, Pope Benedict XVI said, “It is in the treatment of the liturgy that the fate of the Faith and of the Church is decided.”

What is liturgy?

Ever since there has been religion, there has been liturgy. As people seek outward ways of expressing their belief in union with others, they develop common patterns and disciplines to share belief with others and state it to those who do not share that belief. The word liturgy comes from the Greek leitourgia which derives from laos (meaning "people" from which we get the word “laity”) and ourgia (meaning "work", and from which we get the word “energy”). So we see that, for religious believers, liturgy is a duty of the people, not just something nice to do for oneself.

If one is serious about one's religion, then one must be serious about one's liturgy. "To believe" literally means to hold something as precious, and so our liturgy has to make clear what we do indeed hold precious through ritual (what we say) and ceremony (what we do).  Liturgy is a way of allowing people to engage in common worship by word and by action and use this to engage with their belief in their daily lives.

We read in the Acts of the Apostles that the first Christians “continued stedfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.  And fear came upon every soul: and many wonders and signs were done by the apostles.  And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.   And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, Praising God, and having favour with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.”[iii]

We see here that the liturgy of worshipping in the temple, “breaking bread” (i.e. celebrating the Eucharist), praying, and being taught by the Apostles  fuelled the first Christians into living lives in the worship of God through Jesus Christ. These are all liturgical activities, and they still take place today.

The Holy Bible is riddled with liturgy and the documentation of liturgical practice. We can easily see liturgical practice in Exodus xii when God commands how to eat the Passover: which animal is to be used[iv], when it is to be killed[v]; how the meat is to be eaten[vi] and indeed in what manner[vii]. These actions are to be repeated by direct command[viii] so it is clear that God Himself prizes liturgy to unify people’s actions and bind them into a believing community.

Our Lord Jesus also instigates liturgy. At the last supper, we read,

“For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, That the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread: And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said , Take , eat : this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.  After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye , as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me. For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come.”[ix]

We have received instructions for ceremonial and we have also received instructions for ritual:

“And it came to pass , that, as he was praying in a certain place, when he ceased , one of his disciples said unto him, Lord, teach us to pray , as John also taught his disciples. And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth. Give us day by day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.”[x]

We notice that Our Lord says “When ye pray…” and not “If ye pray…” or “Should ye pray…” We are commanded to pray and we are given words to use. We therefore have divinely prescribed ceremonial and ritual which help us as individuals to share our belief with our community and indeed with God Himself. This is what liturgy is and this is why it is important to the Christian Religion. C.S. Lewis says,
“Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best--if you like, it "works" best--when, through long familiarity, we don't have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don't notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.”[xi]

Which Liturgy?

In the Early Church, liturgies were largely made up on the spot by the Bishop, though as Justin Martyr[xii] and the Didache[xiii] demonstrate, there were prescribed forms for the Eucharist and Thanksgivings from the earliest times. The Didache was written at the turn of the second century and shows that within 70 years of the Lord’s ministry the Church was organising itself in order to support a believing community.  This extemporisation was bound by certain rules, and most Bishops naturally fell into repeated formulae the more they celebrated the Mass. Certainly St Clement in the latter half of the second century is making use of liturgical prayer when he write to the Corinthians on prayer.

“We would have You, Lord, to prove our help and succour. Those of us in affliction save, on the lowly take pity; the fallen raise; upon those in need arise; the sick heal; the wandering ones of Your people turn; fill the hungry; redeem those of us in bonds; raise up those that are weak; comfort the faint-hearted; let all the nations know that You are God alone and Jesus Christ Your Son, and we are Your people and the sheep of Your pasture.”[xiv]

The 4th to 8th Centuries were a time of great formation and crystallisation of Christian belief. The great heresies of Arianism, Nestorianism and the like meant that Bishops could not extemporise the Eucharistic prayer with such freedom and, to protect them from heresy, standards to the Mass were introduced. In Greek, the word for standard is kanon, and we still refer to the Canon of the Mass today when we talk of the Eucharistic prayer.

However, there were still many liturgies which could be said to be properly Catholic, i.e. following the rule of faith laid down by Holy Scripture, Tradition, and the Oecumenucal Councils.  Several of them still survive in the Eastern churches, such as the Syrian Liturgy of St. James, from which the famous hymn "Let all Mortal Flesh" is taken, and the two Byzantine Liturgies of St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom, both of which the Orthodox Church still use.

As the Church grew, so liturgies went from being peculiar to one bishop to being common to larger areas under the patriarchs. There is an Alexandrian Rite, and Antiochene Rite, the Syrian Rite and, of course, the Roman Rite which are still used throughout Christendom. The latter was given its essential shape by St Gregory the Great who died in 604 and today forms the basis of the Gregorian Rite and the Tridentine Rite. Even these great rites had their local variants in later centuries. In England, the Roman Rite had subtly different forms such as the Hereford Use and the use in Salisbury famously known as the Sarum Rite.

All these different liturgies, rites and uses sprang up from common Catholic belief and enabled Christians over wide areas to find great commonality with other Christians and yet find some cultural identity. According to Ferdinand Probst[xv], all Christian Eucharistic Liturgy has its roots in that of the Apostolic Constitutions and his theory has been corroborated by subsequent historians. There is a unity at the heart of every traditional liturgy.

The wonderful thing was that, in large geographical areas, the Liturgy would be recognisable to all Christians. While there were regional variations, anyone from England could follow the same Mass in France, the area which became Germany and, of course, Italy even if they spoke no other language. In the West, the language was Latin and united the Western Roman Empire in a common liturgical tongue. This is still true today: one can follow Lutheran liturgy knowing only a minimum of German!

We see, therefore, that subscription to a particular rite means subscription to a Christian Community and a particular expression of Catholicism. Further, since alterations occurred largely through addition to the liturgy, there is a historical unity with those who have used the same words in centuries past. We can be sure that if we use a traditional liturgy, we are joining in with Christians who have long since departed and with whom we have the hope to join in the liturgy of praise and thanksgiving after the Resurrection of the Dead.

So which liturgy do Anglican Catholics use? The clue is very much in the name. We are Anglicans and that means we subscribe to the English Rites. We identify ourselves with the historical Catholic Church in England. We belong to the same Church that produced St Bede, St Alcuin, St Alban, St Dunstan and the like. It is therefore important to us that we worship in a way that encompasses as much of English Catholicism as is possible and is as recognisably so as possible. We try to be both locally English and yet remember that we are art of a larger Church that transcends local boundaries. For Anglican Catholics, lex orandi lex credendi is a vital rule by which we examine our worship.

Which Language?

Initially, the language for the Liturgy was that which was spoke by the first Christians and was usually either Latin or Greek. In the West, the language for liturgy was Latin despite the fact that many indigenous people had their own language. Saxons, Franks, Normans, and Angles had their own languages and expressions, and yet their Liturgy was in Latin meaning that the uneducated could not potentially understand what was going on. All they needed to know was that the priest was celebrating the Mass on their behalf and only he needed to understand what was being said. This mirrored the fact that, in Jesus’ time, the language spoken was Aramaic whereas the language of the Liturgy was Hebrew, though the languages are closely related.

The first Reformation in England did away with Latin in favour of a language “understanded of the people”[xvi] Since at the time, many did not actually know Latin, there were many abuses. During Mass, business would be done, conversations had – even arguments! A bell had to be rung in order to inform people that the Elevation of the Host was to take place. The initial intention was indeed to return to “the custom of the primitive Church”[xvii] and allow the congregation to do their duty, their leitourgos.

However, the trouble with this approach is that it made a clear separation from other Christians and reinforced the divisions that the Reformations introduced. Either everyone has a common language that they don’t necessarily speak, or they have their own language and lose the universality of their language. Miles Coverdale, an eminent translator of Latin, translated the entirety of the Gregorian Canon as well as the psalms.

Translation does cause problems in that it is often very difficult to translate terms exactly. In translation, one has to take into account culture and circumstance. Take, for example, Psalm cxix.83.
“For I am become like a bottle in the smoke; yet do I not forget thy statutes.”
This is a rather peculiar thing to say. However, we can put this together with St Mark ii.22
“And no man putteth new wine into old bottles: else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred : but new wine must be put into new bottles.”
We begin to realise that the “bottle” is leather and not glass – it is a wineskin. The Latin word being translated is uter from which we get the word uterus.  Thus we see, just by investigating the words that a wineskin that is smoked, shrivels and we understand the words of the psalmist more fully.

It becomes important that when we translate liturgy into our vernacular, we need to keep the sense of what it means.
Another example is “diliges amicum tuum sicut temet ipsum”[xviii]. In modern English we would say “you shall love your neighbour as yourself.”  The trouble here is that in modern English, “you” can be either singular or plural. In the context, God is giving Moses words to speak to the Hebrews and so, without the Latin, we might think that the “you” is a plural “you”, but it isn’t. It’s a singular “you” and shows very clearly that God intends each single one of His people to take this commandment to heart. The Lord Jesus repeats this commandment in St Mark xii.31 as one of the two greatest commandments.  In modern English we miss the emphasis on the individual because we do not have a way of telling you plural from you singular. However, in 16th Century English, there is a very clear distinction. “Thou” is you singular and “You” is you plural. This makes it much easier to translate the words of the Latin or Greek into a language which we can understand after a bit of work.

Anglican Catholic Liturgy

The Anglican Catholic Church obviously subscribes to Anglican Liturgy and, because she is Catholic, she seeks to “contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.”[xix] Our Liturgy must reflect this and so we hold fast to the traditional Liturgy.

Looking at the history of the Anglican Church, we have already seen that there are peculiarly English ways of doing the Roman Rite. The most important of these is the Sarum Rite and it was the Sarum Rite which formed the basis of the Reformed Liturgy of the Anglican Church in the Book of Common Prayer. Of course, the Reformation had a tendency to throw the baby out with the bath water as far as doctrine is concerned and within a few years of King Henry VIII’s death, the Book of Common Prayer would be augmented with Calvinist doctrine.

The major casualty of this is the movement away from the Canon of the Mass of the 1549 Prayerbook to the severely truncated version of the 1559 and subsequent Prayerbooks. The later Books of Common Prayer end abruptly with the words of consecration and this causes difficulty if we are trying to hold to the traditional shape of the Liturgy.
The Anglo-Catholic solution was to utilise the fact that the Prayerbooks are based on the Sarum Use which is itself a version of the Roman Rite. This meant that they could keep the substance of the Rite with the lessons and collects and many of the prayers and use the Gregorian Canon or the Canon of the 1549 Prayerbook without damaging the shape or sense of the Liturgy. This concordance has allowed a truly Anglican Rite to be used with great effect and is found in the Anglican and the English Missals. In the use of these missals, the Anglican Catholic Church is using a Rite which is recognisable to the Roman Latin Rite (if not identical) in the language of its indigenous culture. Anglican Catholics can be assured that, when they go to Mass, they are using a liturgy that has its roots back to the first liturgies, preserves the sense of the original language and allows them to worship God in their own culture.

Objections

Such a restrictive Liturgy does not allow the Holy Spirit to act.

This is an objection raised by those who prefer more extempore prayer. Actually, the Anglican Catholic Church certainly does not forbid its members from praying in whichever way they wish outside of Church services. However, we are required to profess One Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in us all.[xx] Since we are commanded to come together as one with the one intention of worshipping God, we need something to focus our souls and minds and the Liturgy, as we have seen, performs that function admirably.
Restricting ourselves means that we can decrease so that God may increase in us.[xxi] This is no restriction of the Holy Spirit but the liturgy allows a mind well-disciplined by the use of liturgy to be more open to the Holy Spirit. Indeed, in the Mass, the Holy Spirit is most active in bringing us closer to Our Lord Jesus Christ by consecrating the wafer and the wine into the Real Body and Blood of Christ. Far from restricting the Holy Ghost, the liturgy helps us to allow Him to act in our worship and to take that into our daily lives.

16th Century English is not understanded of the people, so why use it?

We have already seen that 16th Century English is actually more accurate at translating the senses of the original languages of the Bible and the ancient Liturgies than modern English which would require more words to render the ideas as faithfully as the writers intended. The language of the English Liturgy has always been regarded as very beautiful and has inspired musicians to set these words to some of the most wonderful music. It is nonetheless true that for our 21st Century ears, 16th Century English is not as straightforward to understand as our modern vernacular.
However, we forget that we read Shakespeare in his English, likewise Milton, Bunyan and Swift. Their language does not change and, if we really want to understand and enjoy these authors, then we have to put the work into understanding their English. Yet, we have already seen that Liturgy is the work of the people – it requires effort! The true Christian has to work to find God. We all know that the spiritual life is hard work. The liturgy reflects this very well.  It reflects the fact that, really, God’s ways are utterly incomprehensible to us. If we are sincere about worshipping God, and we find some piece of the liturgy hard to understand, then what is to stop us afterwards from finding our, from making that search, from asking questions. After all, the Lord does say, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek , and ye shall find ; knock , and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth ; and he that seeketh findeth ; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened .”[xxii] We have to work at our faith and we are rewarded for doing so.

The English Missal still contains the Latin Canon. If people are used to the Latin Canon, then the language is “understanded” of the people in the same way as the 16th Century English, and so it may be used in the same manner.

There’s no opportunity for change.

Actually this is not quite true. The Prayerbook can be revised at a convocation of the Holy Synod of the Anglican Catholic Church on behalf of the whole Church. However we believe in “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever!”[xxiii] The truth does not change and so our Faith and subsequently our prayers do not substantially change. There is no room in the liturgy for change for the sake of change, but rather when the liturgy fails to express the faith delivered to us all.
As we have seen, all of our liturgy, our hymns, and our prayers must fit the Catholic Faith and thus be in line with the liturgy which points us on the way to God. If this seems static, then this is a good thing for it expresses the Timelessness of God. If our hearts desire a change then we need to look into our hearts to see why we desire that change in the first place. A stricter liturgy helps each of us examine ourselves carefully rather than bend and move with us to fit our whims. We have seen right at the beginning how playing with the words changes the fundamental nature of our belief. To call God “Mother” is contrary to what the Lord Jesus teaches us when He prays, “Our Father.”

Conclusion

We have seen that God has given us liturgy by which we may approach Him more closely. We do so as a Church, seeking unity with all Christians who are, who ever have been or whoever will be. The Anglican Catholic Church is a church that continues in the Catholic Faith as received in the English manner. Dom Gregory Dix puts the unifying sense of following the traditional liturgy so very beautifully and he is worth quoting at some length.

“Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.”[xxiv]

We Anglican Catholics are the common people of God and we seek to be Holy. Through the liturgy we have received from the Catholic Church, we work to that goal.

Acknowledgements

Thanks must go to Ed Pacht, Dr Jim Ryland and Fr David Straw for reading through this tract and offering a few suggestions. Thie help has been appreciated.

[i] Version of the Lord’s prayer altered by a Church of England Vicar in honour of the H.M. Queen Elizabeth’s Golden Jubilee in 2003.
[ii] Prosper of Aquitane (c. 390 – c. 455) Patrologia Latina 51:209-210. ...obsecrationum quoque sacerdotalium sacramenta respiciamus, quae ab apostolis tradita, in toto mundo atque in omni catholica Ecclesia uniformiter celebrantur, ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi
[iii] Acts ii.42-47
[iv] Exodus xii.4-5
[v] Ibid. v6
[vi] Ibid vv8-10
[vii] Ibid. v11
[viii] Ibid, vv14-17
[ix] I Cor xi.23-26
[x] St Luke xi.1-4
[xi] C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm. Chiefly on Prayer
[xii] 1st Apology Chaps 13 and 61
[xiii] Didache chaps ix & x
[xiv] Epistle of St Clement to the Corinthians xlix
[xv] F Probst. Liturgie der drei ersten christlichen Jahrhunderte
[xvi] Article XXIV of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer
[xvii] Ibid.
[xviii] Leviticus xix.18
[xix] Jude i.3
[xx] Ephesians iv.5-6
[xxi] Cf St John iii.30
[xxii] St Matthew vii.7-8
[xxiii] Hebrews xiii.8
[xxiv] Dom Gregory Dix, p744 The Shape of the Liturgy  Continuum 2001

On Canonical Obedience

I once had to write essays for my ordination training. I found this one and thought it might be worth a blog post in the hope that it might clarify matters.

Lawful Authority and Canonical Obedience, what does it mean and what does it include and exclude?

When was the last time you got told off? How did you feel? Indignant or ashamed? Angry at the injustice or acceptance that it was a “fair cop”? Of course it depends on the circumstances, but the fact that you have just been told off means that you have broken some kind of law or rule. You may even question whether the law was fair or unfair in the first place. So why is that law there in the first place? If it’s unfair, then obedience to it surely shouldn’t matter. But if the law is there, then there is a reason for it, is there not?

We often view Law very negatively. Sometimes we see it as nit-picking, fiddly, technical, just getting in the way, wasting time by moving too slowly and then coming out with the wrong answer! Sometimes we’re indignant at the effrontery that the Law has in telling us what we can or cannot do. Look at how often some folk, unhappy with one court’s ruling, appeal to a higher court in order to get their way.

Is that how we should live life?

Our Lord Jesus finds Himself in a land where there are two laws – the Roman Law and the Jewish Law – which are balanced on a knife edge. One false move could incite religious riots and the deaths of many! It is into this situation that Our Lord finds His ministry challenged by the Pharisees and Scribes who are out to destroy Him by forcing Him either to reject the Jewish Law and thus be guilty of blasphemy and apostasy, or to uphold the Jewish Law and thus rebel against the occupying power.

Our Lord set His agenda out very plainly. He has not come to abolish the Jewish Law[1], nor does He condone lawless rebellion. Rather, one must “render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.”[2] In this, He demonstrates that it is the Will of God that we live in peace and harmony with each other. We need to abide by laws to keep community together.

But which laws?

There can be only one Law. Look at the two commandments the Lord gives us. We are to Love God first and we are to love our neighbours as much as ourselves[3]. The community of Christians can only be built upon the principles of the same unconditional love that God demonstrates Himself in all three Persons.

St Ignatius of Antioch advises us “And do ye, each and all, form yourselves into a chorus, that being harmonious in concord and taking the key note of God ye may in unison sing with one voice through Jesus Christ unto the Father, that He may both hear you and acknowledge you by your good deeds to be members of His Son. It is therefore profitable for you to be in blameless unity, that ye may also be partakers of God always.”[4]

St Ignatius stresses that we must be bound in unity, not all singing the same voice part but rather in harmony to produce beautiful music. How can beautiful music be achieved without a conductor – someone to keep unity? Who might that be?

St Cyprian maintains that Christian Unity can only come from God and be maintained by the bishop and that the bishops should set the example for unity: “this unity we ought firmly to hold and assert, especially those of us that are bishops who preside in the Church, that we may also prove the episcopate itself to be one and undivided”[5]

So you see that living in such turbulent times, the early Christians prized unity in order to preserve Christ’s message of true love, and that this unity is to be found in the bishops of the Church. St Ignatius mentions in each of his letters that obedience to the Bishop keeps us under the rule of Christ, “For when ye are obedient to the bishop as to Jesus Christ, it is evident to me that ye are living not after men but after Jesus Christ, who died for us, that believing on His death ye might escape death.”[6]

Thus, we see from the earliest authorities that the standard of living for Christians is in obedience to the Bishop and the Bishops to each other. This standard of living is called, in the Greek, a canon and so we find that, as Christians, we owe our Bishop canonical obedience so that we may truly follow the teachings of Christ. St Benedict says in his Rule: “Our hearts and our bodies must, therefore, be ready to do battle under the biddings of holy obedience; and let us ask the Lord that He supply by the help of His grace what is impossible to us by nature.”[7]

Every priest and deacon at his ordination must swear canonical obedience to his bishop, “I, N, do swear that I will pay true and canonical obedience to you, the Bishop Ordinary of the Diocese of the United Kingdom and your successors in all lawful and honest commands. So help me God.”[8]

This is all very well, but the Bishop is a fallible human being like we are, isn’t he? What is to stop him from over-exercising his authority?

We’ve already seen that the obedience must be canonical; it must come from the agreed standards of the Church. These Canons have their roots in Holy Scripture, the Church Fathers and the Seven Oecumenical councils and from these we have our standard of living. This is the famous Canon Law. While there is a lot of it, the underlying principle is that same commandment of Love that Christ has commanded us.  Obedience to the Bishops is restricted to the Canons of the Church and his authority is in “all things lawful and honest”. His commands must be in the spirit of the Canon Law[9]. For example, a bishop cannot demand that all his clergy grow beards, but he can command a priest to adjust his dress if it undermines his priestly authority. The Bishop is responsible for liturgy in churches in his diocese but has no authority to regulate anyone’s personal prayer life, save only to ensure that his priests say their daily office of prayer.
We tend to have a very negative view of law because we are always thinking of how it can be broken or sidestepped. This is, of course, a hazard of being a human being with free-will; we can freely choose not to obey the law. Perhaps we should learn to take a different view of Church Law and see it as a wonderful gift of God to us. After all, a Bishop is very much a servant[10] of his diocese. On his head lie all the concerns of every single member of his flock. He must be a good shepherd and remember the stern warning that Our Lord had for all those in authority, “It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.”[11]

Once we realise the hard burden that our bishops bear on our behalf, then we should seek to ease that burden by being obedient to him that together that we may hear the words of Christ spoken among us by the diligence of our obedience to Him. If we do something wrong, and the Bishop has to have a quiet word, do we have the ability to see how much love is being shown to us? If not, how do we develop that ability?

[1] St Matthew v.17-18
[2] St Matthew xxii.21
[3] St Matthew xxii.37-39
[4] Letter of St Ignatius to the Ephesians IV.2
[5] St Cyprian De catholicae ecclesiae unitate, 4-5
[6] Trallians II.1
[7] Rule of St Benedict, Prologue
[8] Found in Ordination to the Diaconate
[9]John P. Beal, James A. Coriden, Thomas Joseph Green  New Commentary on the Code of Canon Law, p346  Paulist Press
[10] St Matthew xx.27
[11] St Luke xvii.2

The Lie of Freedom

Are you really free?

The question is a bit disembodied, yet most of us in the West would say a resounding "yes!" These folk cherish their freedom and seek to ensure that everyone has that freedom. However, I believe that the question is incomplete. Indeed, anyone responding to the question, "are you free?" now needs to ask two questions before even beginning to answer. The questions are, "from what?" and "to do what?"

It's considering these two questions that we can really begin to see that perhaps we're not as free as we'd like to be. If we truly are beings with a non-physical mind then free-will is a distinct possibility. Given a choice between things we should be able to make that choice freely. Our minds become the non-physical cause of that choice. That's deep philosophy, though.

Yet, what are we not free to do? From what are we not free? This is where the Lie comes in, that freedom becomes a license to exercise the will in each and every respect. The Lie tells us that, if we can imagine it, it not only can be done but it is an affront to our freedom not to do it. It is often said that our fathers fought and died to give us the vote, and to ensure that we have that right in a free democracy. It's false. These men and women died to allow us the right to choose to vote, or not. Of course, in a democracy, voting is a duty. If, however, we are not in a true democracy, then our vote can do little. In a false democracy, voting could even be the endorsement of something which is morally suspect. Exercising the choice not to vote may actually be morally preferable.

Look carefully at Democracy, and we see that the power and freedom of the people are necessarily restricted. That's as it should be, and brings up the main point. Our freedom is not about the capacity to do whatever we want. We live with others of equal humanity to ourselves and with wills that are no less crying out for expression and exercise. We cannot be free to do whatever we want, and a society that bases the whole notion of freedom on that basis cannot remain functional.

It is an illusion that we are free even to define ourselves. God created each of us in His own image according to His will. Even the Creator has limited His freedom to allow us to be what He created - to be what we are! This involves a lifetime of wrestling with others, ourselves, and even with God as we try to discover our existence in Him.

One thing we cannot do is to define ourselves to be what we want us to be. This is very much like trying to put ourselves into a Procrustean bed of our own making. We see what we want to be, and define ourselves to fit it. Appearances, of course, are frequently deceptive. We cannot choose to be a cat. Cats don't have human brains and so we have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of what it's like for a human to be a cat. One might as well think of the square trying to be circular. The square and the circle share the same topology  (if you travel around their edges far enough, you end up back where you started) but they do not have the same geometry  (corners!).

Our freedom as human beings extends only to what we are and how that fits in with the people around us. If we hold onto the maxim "do what thou wilt" then we find ourselves already in Hell. If we see our freedom as something that exists in our limitations, then we can better appreciate the need to allow others the freedom to be themselves so that we can be ourselves.

When we exercise our freedom, we don't try to become something we're not. We accept what we have and seek to find ways of enjoying what we have. The more a boy tries to "act tough" to hide the pain he's really on, the less chance he will have of confronting that pain in himself and dealing with it. The pain is there for a reason. It is not to be hidden, but taken seriously.

The more humanity tries to be free from itself the more it will become frenzied, confused, and self-destructive. We see this already with individuals tearing themselves apart, or using the Law to tear society apart. The only way to find true peace is to turn back to the One that Created humanity in the first place. Our Redemption is in the hands of a human being, that of Christ Himself. The only way to become truly free is to become one with Him.

Are you free? From what? To do what?

Perhaps we'd be better off asking, "are you really you, yet?"

Magnificat, Magnifican't or Magnificant?

Bishop Damien Mead had a bit of a hard task at our Synod on Saturday. His sermon is usually his charge for the Diocese, but this year he also had to cope with the fact that it was the Mass of Our Lady in Eastertide AND that he was to make Fr Roger Bell a Deacon. A tall order to preach! Did we get three sermons then? Well, yes we did but perhaps not in the way you'd think. He reflected on the Magnificat that wonderful song of Mary and drew from that the unifying theme of service. Our Lady served God by bearing Him patiently in the womb and then by being His Mother actively and responsibly.

Fr Bell as a Deacon has to epitomise that but, as the Bishop pointed out, every Bishop and Priest is a Deacon too. We are to serve the Laity because they must serve too.

I hope this summarises adequately the barest gist of what was said.

Yesterday was Good Shepherd Sunday. I didn't have chance to prepare a sermon due to the fact that I have my own act of service to do. I felt guilty about that because I seem to fall between stools at the moment with Church, Family, and Work all pulling me in subtly different directions. The temptation there is to believe that, because one can't do anything well or as fully as one would like,  that there would be no point in starting it. Sometimes we see the obstacles as an overpowering impediment to doing any good. Our Magnificat becomes a Magnifican't.

Obstacles are funny things though. They get in our way, by definition, but consider where our attention goes when faced with an obstacle : we always consider the space around the obstacle, the negative space. Very seldom do we look at the obstacle as a thing in itself.

If obstacles get put in our way, often we blame God that they are there. We blame Him for what we believe to be a deliberate demonstration by God that He is in charge and seeks to prevent us from moving forward. That sounds like celestial bicep flexing. Yet, we forget about Our Lord throwing the Money Changers out of the temple precisely because they are an obstacle to people coming to God.

God does not necessarily put obstacles in our way to show that He is in charge and to force us to do His will. One might think of Jonah running away from admonishing the Ninevites and changing his mind after being swallowed by the whale. He was running away from service. Yet often we believe ourselves to be serving God actively when the obstacle comes in. That may be true yet our way cannot be as easy as that. The obstacle may be deliberately and directly  imposed by God, or it may be imposed indifferently by circumstances, or it may be imposed by agents inimical to God's love. There are always thorns on life that need to be uprooted.

However, the diligent soul (oh how I wish I were diligent! ) will stop and look at that object carefully, objectively, and prayerfully with God on side. Whether or not that the obstacle is directly willed by God does not stop it from being God's creation. There is good there that needs to be seen.

For the Anglican Catholic Church, there are many obstacles without and within. In the U.K, we are tiny and often seem to be pitted against the Established Church. That's an unfortunate way of looking at things. The ACC is not the CofE, as Bishop Damien points out. We may continue in the orders and liturgy once promoted and beloved by the Established Church, but we are markedly different with our own identity as English Catholics. In some sense, we are still searching for that identity but this is true for us all.

The one who is truly against us is the Devil, and his presence needs to be recognised and shunned. He is not a human being, nor will he be, I  suspect. He would like that lie to continue so that we continue to try to identify fallible fallen human beings with Evil and thus cause more hatred and misery through human hands. We must remember that pure Evil is an absence of Good. Human beings always possess some good in them and in their will. While we are fallen, we can still choose to do good things as well as bad.

When we meet our obstacles, we must meet them with God. We must see God's hand in them and use the to help us grow. Our will is not the will of God, though we Christians do want to do His will. That is why we pray the Lord's prayer daily. Our way forward is not the way we think. Advertising is not the same thing as Evangelism. Preaching is not the same thing as Teaching, and Prophecy is not Foretelling. If we think too simply, the the obstacles we face will help put us back on track.

Yes we wrestle, and we can even wrestle with God Himself. We won't win in the simplistic view of competition, but we will won much when we see the wrestling for what it is, namely rebirth, redemption, transformation, repentance,  justification, and our final sanctification. It is in this struggle to serve God and others that we can say with Our Lady, "Our souls do magnify the Lord". In Latin, that's "Magnificant animae nostrae Dominum"!

So, yes, M'Lud, you can preach three sermons at once!

Devotion at Benediction: April 2016

At this time, the disciples gazed upon their Risen Lord in joy and wonder as the conventions of Nature are overturned and the dead receives life again. We too gaze upon the same Risen Lord under the form of the Blessed Sacrament.

In this we are permitted to gaze with the disciples, sharing their fellowship of joy. This is why we have been given this sacrament that we might become one body across Time and Space. We shall die, but Christ on whom we gaze will bring us His life. Then we will not see Him in Sacraments for Sacraments will cease. Then we shall be like Him for we shall see Him as He really is.

Therefore we before Him bending...

The Lie of the Invisibility of the Media

I am rather ashamed to admit that I only became aware of the recent terrorist attacks in Iraq, Turkey, and Pakistan sometime after Easter Eve. Yet the news last week of the attack on Brussels dominated the news to the exclusion of all other stories that day. It is somewhat depressing that while the BBC did report these attacks,  they were not as obviously reported, presumably because they were so far away. That's not an excuse on my part - the information is there but I needed to look for it.

However, I have noticed the BBC being quite selective in what it reports. Some reports about the junior doctors' strike made it seem that the doctors were striking over a reasonable adjustment to overtime. In fact, reading the new contract, it rendered those doctors dependent on overtime payments worse off. For many doctors, it represents a significant pay cut! This fact was not as loudly reported as the Minister's defence that the new contract is reasonable.

I do have friends in journalism and I know them to be reputable and responsible. Yet, it does seem that mainstream media is not as reliable as people would want. Is this The Lie? Well, everyone knows that the Media is not as infallible as they are led to believe, don't they?

I once took part in a reality television show in which I had to guide some inexperienced twenty-somethings around the business of teaching. The two blokes were pleasant and actually quite hard-working despite being plunged in the deep end into a difficult profession. For all of the valiant attempts of these two individuals, the programme makers chose to show them as workshy, indolent and generally stupid which was rather unfair. In this case, the reality being portrayed by the Media was markedly different from my experience.

Part of the problem is that, when we watch reality on television, the Media are generally invisible. We forget that we are observing reality through someone else's point of view - a point of view that is carefully constructed to make whatever appears to be happening to be taken as actually happening. When the credits fly, we only pay attention to the main cast and crew and forget the others who have helped to shape that vision. We're used to seeing the subject of paintings as 3D despite the fact that they have to be 2D. That's not a pair of parallel lines, it's two lines meeting on a horizontal line called "the horizon". That's not a cube, that's a carefully shaded hexagon. Paintings give us an illusion of what's there: the reality is much different!

At the moment, all the news I seem to be getting is some increasingly unpleasant back and forth argumentation for and against the presidential candidates in the forthcoming US election. Such are the allegations about each candidate that it appears that none are suitable for one of the most powerful positions in the World. I now have so little confidence in the reports that I consider the Media to be thoroughly unreliable in putting forward anything that pertains to the truth. I may not have a vote, but I should have an interest in who might be playing in a key position in the political arena.

Likewise, I cannot trust the British media with regard to the forthcoming EU referendum. There are too many opinions presented as facts, and suppositions presented as certainties. We have no idea what the exit from the EU might look like any more than we have an idea as to what staying in would do. I have come to the same conclusion as the Scots and think we would be better together, but I cannot trust the facts and figures that I am given. Sometimes the journalists don't ask the right questions: sometimes the politicians answer questions that have never been asked.

The Lie is that facts about the world are not presented in a vacuum. We do need to think about sources and methods before we allow ourselves to be convinced. I believe the Gospels because their writers could gain nothing from what they wrote. I distrust modern biblical scholars because they do have something to gain - reputation and accolades for exposing "the Myth". In most cases ( if not all) their scholarship is rooted in opinion and arguments from silence.

We must listen to what the Media says in order to learn about what is going on. We also have to learn how they say it as well. If we don't, the facts we hear will be as illusory as the disappearing bust of Voltaire.

Paschal Planting

Sermon reached at Our Lady of Walsingham and St Francis on the Feast of the Resurrection

On Friday, fear reigns. We are presented with the very things that can frighten us the most. We are presented with the ways in which Society can not only fail us, but go out of its way actively to destroy us. In that Society we can find the wayside, the rocks, the thorns all determined to kill in us the word of God. On Friday, they succeeded.

Yet the Word of God also said, "unless a seed die it cannot bear fruit". The soil of our hearts may not be perfect for growing, but as long as it receives that seed deep within and lets it die within us, then it will grow and make us more ready to bear fruit.

And this Lent, we too have tried to die so that we do not become the wayside, the rocks or among thorns. We have tried to die to the things that separate us from God. We may not have been wholly successful, but that we have honestly tried is enough: it is a beginning.

It is in us that Our Lord's Resurrection is broadcast to the world in the best news Creation has ever heard. It is in us that Society can begin to be reborn as a community in which Love can flourish and produce fruit that will gladden the hearts of men.

It is not Friday any more. Why should we fear what me can do to us? Whatever they can do must end, must give way to what is truly Eternal: Faith, Hope, Love - all tied up in the Eternal Trinity. This is the Day that has no end where no fear can be, for fear disappears in the Kingdom of Light, Truth and Love.

It is in us that God will bring this Kingdom to shine. This is the day that the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.

Fearful Friday: "God is dead, and we have killed Him."

As we stand here at the summit of Calvary gazing up at this terrible sight of three men dangling in agony on crosses, how attuned are we to the fear that surrounds us.

This method of execution is supposed to strike fear into our hearts so to remind us to fear what men can do to us. Look what they have done to the man on the cross in the middle. What was this man's crime except for embarrassing the Establishment?

Isn't the Establishment to be feared? They have taken this man away from his friends, out of his circle of trust; they have taken away his clothes, his dignity, his justice, his health, his happiness, his life. If they can do that to him, can't they do it to us?

They prey upon our fears more than anything else. We are afraid of being taken out of our comfort zone, afraid of being laughed at and mocked, afraid that noone will hear our cries for help, afraid of pain and agony, of our secret person being exposed to all only to be beaten, spat on, nailed and pierced. And we fear death. 

That's what the Establishment can do to us. If they can do that to God, what's stopping them doing it to us? Shall we then worship the Establishment?

Maundy Thursday in Eternity

Sermon preached at Our Lady of Walsingham and St Francis on Maundy Thursday

It says in the Missal that it is very expedient for the priest to say a few words on this most holy day. However how can I speak of unspeakable mysteries?

For we have Christ Himself transforming bread and wine into His very self. We have Christ transforming that last supper into a banquet in Heaven itself. How is this possible?

We have the mystery of Eternity which, being in Time we cannot comprehend. The words I have just spoken are irretrievably in the past and are not. The words I am yet to say are in the future and are not. We are bound by things inaccessible to us.

Yet, in Eternity there is only now...now...now. Now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation. All these nows are accessible to God reaching out to all humanity throughout Time at the same time. However many of us are in this little space, we are now in Heaven.

There is only one Mass, for Mass is always now, and Christ is always now so that we can be with Him in the nowness of Eternity.

Ants, crabs, and the horror of Holiness

I seem to remember a nature programme in which a crab was overcome by a group of army ants and summarily taken to pieces from the inside out. My own squeamish nature prevented me from watching the whole ghastly spectacle, though, as a small boy I'd have probably watched this with some fascination. I wondered to myself, why didn't the makers of the film help the poor crab? What a horrible way to die!

Two things struck me. First, why should the camera person help the crab? Wouldn't that deprive the ants of a meal, starving their young to death? Whose life is more important, and who gets to make that decision? My emotions were with the crab because I was imagining the excruciating pain it must have been in and I wanted that pain to end. Yet somehow that pain was necessary for the ecosystem. There is no Good or Evil here, just a fight for survival. The army ant is doing exactly what the crab is doing - trying to stay alive. As Professor Richard Dawkins would say, there is nothing here apart from blind, pitiless indifference.

Second, why was the programme made in the first place? I assume that the makers were not actually interfering in the situation. If that's the case, then the crab would have met its end, cameras or no cameras. The point of the programme was to educate, to show us what Nature is like, how it works, how the animals behave. We learn about our world, its variety and colour, of the brilliant and beautiful creatures interacting and contributing to a complex ecosystem. So too, we must learn about Death in its many and varied forms. The beautiful geometry of the spider's web exists only for the painful paralysis, suffocation and digestion of the fly. We cannot have one without the other.

How can a Loving God create a world in which such horrible things happen, first to humans who might deserve it, second to beasts which don't. Does God really have to pit animal against animal in such a horrible manner?

As we walk into Holy Week with our Master riding ahead on an ass, we will be presented with the same question, "Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani?" "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Where has all the love gone? Why is all brutality and pain?

The fact that Christ is our teacher does remind us that our present state is one of deep, meanugful learning to be human, of feeling our way through life to a future which is neither light or dark but bears only that dread epithet: UNKNOWN. Our Lord completes the lessons taught by the Law and the Prophets: that God exists and the meaning of our lives is to be found in our relationship with Him forged by fidelity and recognition of His Holiness. Our Lord bids us be holy for God is holy.

We know that holiness is a state of separation from that which is not-God. God stands apart because He is Creator. He calls Israel to stand apart as an instrument of His blessing for all peoples. That vocation has fallen to Christians. We are to be instruments of God's blessing on this world. If we are to be holy - separated - then we must know what we are to be separated from. True freedom of will means that we have to be exposed to what is evil as well as what is good. True freedom means we have to know the brutality of mindlessness, of Nature's indifference to our lives and happiness in order to begin to know that we are alive and that we can be happy.

And we have to know our own separation from God. This is no theoretical separation, but an actual separation of creatures given freedom yet who have wilfully claimed independence from God and have fallen far into a darkness from which only God can rescue us. This is Holy Week - the week in which God has to show us that our suffering in this life is recognised and even given a value. He does this for the express purpose of reconciling the paradox of our free-will with His Divine authority, and so that we might be freed from the Hell-bound consequences of our decision to be separated from God. We could have the same existence as the ant and the crab by denying God, and He would allow this because of His love for us and the scandalous respect that He has for His Creatures.

What of the crab and the ant, living pitiless and brutal existence devouring each other oblivious to the other's pain? This is Hell, even for creatures that don't appear to be able to cry out to God. Yet even their suffering is noted. Even their tears are put into His bottle. We are told that there will be new skies and a new earth. All these former things will pass away.

Holy Week is horrible as we watch one man's life torn to pieces. This is reality in its brutality, yet through this we find ourselves aware of God in His Death and, in this death, we can a life that makes all suffering not only worthwhile, but a badge of honour!

Let us travel with Our Lord Jesus, not as viewers of His Passion, nor just as participants remembering that we are responsible for His pain, but as bearers of that pain and humanity which He decided to share with us. Let us also remember that as we watch one another suffer, trying but failing to prevent that suffering through acts of compassion, Christ is there with us completing that suffering into its Eternal significance and the infinite joy associated with it.

I wish all my readers a blessed Holy Week filled with God's presence, and offer my prayers to Him for all those in suffering and need, begging for their joy to be found and completed.

Streaming the Cross

It's a strange little vision that I have when I make the sign of the Cross over people and things. It's as if this simple little action on my part cuts a hole in my perception of reality and through this cross-shaped hole pours a river out into the world. I see this happening every time I  sign the Cross.

Then I remember that, by my sins, I have crucified Our Lord. It is my actions that have contributed to His Death two-thousand years ago and that I have wielded the spear that pierced His side from which flowed blood and water.

Although I must bear responsibility for that sin, the Sacrifice of Christ has forced all sin confessed to Him to travel in Time to that cross and be nailed there forever. Any sin that I confess now travels back in Time to that dreadful day. Any sin that I don't confess travels with me into my future to continue my separation from God.

However, as a priest, I really rejoice in being given the authority to cut the veil of reality in this way. Every time I sign the Cross,  the waters of God's blessing pour from that wound into the world. This happens because, for all my wickedness and sin, I participate in that unique priesthood of Christ through whose side His blood of the New Covenant spilled. In making benediction, Christ's grace in me is reproducing that wound so that we may be covered in that blood and find blessing and true joy therein.

I am thankful to God for these little visions and pray, albeit faltering and unworthily, that He would be pleased to continue to use me for His blessing so that more people may feel His touch of joy and peace. Therefore, I am in much need of prayer and beg my readers that they would remember me in their prayers.

The thorns of passion

Sermon preached at Our Lady of Walsingham and St Francis on Passion Sunday

Thornbushes make up quite a bit of the vegetation of the wilderness. While He is walking there being tempted by the Devil, Our Lord encounters many of them growing from the ground and strangling the shoots of grass and other wild plants. He knows that these thorns will be plaited and jammed upon His head during His Passion. He also knows that He has to bear these thorns because we have such an ordeal bearing ours.

The parable of the Sower reminds us that it is the thorns that choke the life out of the seed of the word of God. These thorns are the cares of this life, the things that make us distract us from hearing the word of God in our lives and doing something with it. For us, perhaps,  the thorny wilderness is not out of the towns and cities,  but rather in the shopping centres and high streets where the word of God is drowned out by trivialities. The paradox is that we leave this faithless wilderness by leaving civilisation for a while. The suffering that we endure is the silence from our distractions. It is a silence that can become quite painful.

When we suffer, we are said to undergo a passion. A passion inflames the emotions which is why we say we are passionate about the things we enjoy. We can also be passionate for a cause, or against some injustice. Either way, passions need to be examined for, if they bear thorns, they will choke the word of God in us and we will not bear fruit.

When we allow life's distractions to crowd God out of our lives, we are essentially contributing to the Crown of Thorns that Our Lord wears upon His head during His Passion. We can be distracted from God, even by good things. This is why a good prayer life is so important to cultivate. Henri Nouwen suggests that, in times of distraction, we take a prayer we know off by heart and say it slowly to ourselves deep within.

We share in Our Lord's passion when we do not allow life to get in our way of worshipping God and hearing His voice. We share in His crown of Thorns when we deny ourselves some pleasure in order to sit down and pray. We share in the death of Christ when we cease to live for ourselves and our distractions, and live for God Himself!

Yes, this is hard. Thorns hurt, but God will carry us through if we do not allow those thorns to hinder our looking for Him. Christ's greatest healing took place when he was in the greatest pain. Let us look to that and His Resurrection rather than things of this world.

Faith, Fascism, and why not being Liberal is not necessarily evil

I've had to leave another Facebook group where one group of Protestants has started declaring Roman Catholics Hell- bound and not-really-Christian. I am not a Roman Catholic only insofar as I do not hold to the idea of the existence of a "Bishop of bishops" other than God, nor that Papal Infallibility can be inferred from the Doctrine of the first milennium. However, these niggles notwithstanding, I find myself standing proudly with the Roman Catholics against these unfounded Protestant allegations. I left the group because I simply cannot be bothered with the same old spiel from those who will not actually read Holy Scripture with the Holy Ghost but rather dissect it for proof-texts against all and sundry who do not share their views. It all sounds a bit Fascist!

Hang on a minute! That word gets bandied about a lot. Does it really apply here? Really, we need to determine three things. What really is Fascism? Is it necessarily evil? Is the traditional understanding of the Church Fascist?

The word Fascist seems to be used a lot by people to mean the opposite of Liberal and especially in the pejorative sense. The mainstream philosophy is Liberal and centrist. We'll have to make sure that we know what these terms mean too.

What I understand by Fascism is

1) the exaltation of  the Nation and State over and above the individual;
2) the existence of a centralised autocratic government;
3) the presence of a dictator;
4) severe economic and social regimentation;
5) the forcible suppression of opposition.

Is this an evil idea? I don't think that it's hard to see that it could ( and indeed did) lead to great evil. The trouble with working out whether it is an evil idea depends especially on what we mean by Good and Evil in the first place. Now that's a problem, especially in a morally relativitic mindset. This isn't quite what is meant by Liberal in a theological way, but rather part of the political meaning of the word. It is this confusion that causes problems.

Moral Relativism is, of course, in the strict sense self-defeating. If the individual is responsible for his own morals, then how can he object to the atrocities of ISIS if they are only following their individual morals? What is it about the Strict Moral Relativist's moral code that makes it any better than that of ISIS? If one relaxes in one's strictness of Moral Relativism,  then one still has to deal with the arbitrary nature of one's morals.

Those who insist on tolerance for their beliefs must also insist on tolerance for those who object to those beliefs. The principle must be applied because, if there are no moral objectives, then all moralities are interchangeable.

Since I believe in objective moral values and duties, I can only really judge Fascism with respect to the Christian morality that I love. Am I therefore being just as arbitrary as the Relativist? I don't believe so. Objective morality is good evidence for the existence of God and, despite people trying to show otherwise and failing miserably, History shows the existence of the person of Our Lord Jesus and bears witness of His claims to be the Son of God as authentic. There will be those who believe the modern scholars' attempt to deconstruct this view as a myth, but they are not convincing in their arguments that the Historical record be changed largely because they perform an eisegesis on a naturalist assumption that has not been proved. Thus Christian Morality is a good candidate for the objective morality. It's also worth pointing out that British Law is founded on Christian principles. While that might not be overwhelming evidence that I am not being arbitrary in my choice of morality, I think that at least makes my position reasonable.

If I assume Christian Morality is the objective morality, it may appear, then, that I will automatically acquit the Church of Fascism if Fascism turns out to be intrinsically evil. However, we know that churchmen are far from morally perfect! The beauty of Christian morality is that we are able to tell when churchmen are being far from morally perfect. It holds everyone up to the same objective standards. There are no exceptions just a rigorous scrutiny of acts, their contexts and their motives. This is how someone like Christopher Hitchens is perfectly able to call the Church into question against the standards She preaches. Under the Christian morality, atheists can be seen when they act morally and Christians when they don't and vice versa.

Let's make a start.

Is exalting the state or nation above the individual morally wrong? Christian Morality starts with loving God first, then the neighbour. The greatest exaltation has to be for God alone. It is when Christians exalt the Church first and then God that she begins to satisfy Fascist Criterion 1. Loving one's neighbour should form the basis of the community and the beginning of the Nation or State. The needs of the individual should not be ignored by anyone, whether in government or not. When the Church fails to do this, then She is satisfying Criterion 1. Thus, from a Christian point of view, Criterion 1 could be seen to be immoral if that exaltation of Nation and State supercedes the proper worship of God which has the consideration of the individual as its main byproduct. I don't believe that the Church does exalt herself above God, though some priests and prelates do go that far, but it is an important indicator of her spiritual health.

I suppose Criteria 2 and 3 do go together. An autocratic government will essentially be a dictator as a body. The crucial aspect of the autocrat is their motivation. There are good kings and bad kings in history, good emperors and bad emperors, good popes and bad popes. Absolute Monarchism is very much like a dictatorship, and the concept of benign dictatorship does exist. Moses, David and Elijah could be seen as such. I strongly accept the Pope as the first Bishop in the Church with all the honour and veneration that affords. Is he a dictator? Is the Sacred College an autocratic centralised government unaccountable to noone?
"In the realm of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." If the dictator is such a one as possesses a quality of sight or intellect that noone else possesses, then he is eminently qualified for the position. Yet if he is unaccountable to the people, even the most qualified dictator runs the risk of immorality. While unaccountability is not necessarily immoral, it is practically a near occasion of sin. A Synodal church in which the voices of the bishop, clergy, and laity can be heard is less likely to become a Fascist government.

It is Criteria 4 and 5 that are the most morally problematic as they stab at the heart of the freedom of the self to live a life of one's own making. Coercion and oppression may be apparently for the individual's own good but if this restricts their choice, then the ends of that coercion do not justify the means. Any regimentation must be morally justified. A prison is more regimented than a school, but both are regimented appropriately for their inmates. What makes regimentation severe? I would say that it prevents one from freely forming and working towards one's own goals in life.

Is the Church like this? A Church has laws based on Christian Morality. This includes prohibitions and regulations. The 10 Commandments explain these regulations which are expounded and clarified by Christ. In becoming Christian, we accept the kingship of Christ on His terms. This acceptance is the contract by which we may be prohibited from certain actions and required to do others. Yet, the Church has no police to enforce this law. Excommunication is possible but rescindible and, for many sadly, no hardship. Salvation is the reason why people should be in the Church, but people are now largely free to come and go as they choose. The Church should promote both corporate and personal relationship with God, but not by forcing God down people's throats in such a way as to make His Kingdom a torture.

It is probably good that the Church and the State are separate so that the Church does not get engaged in power struggles any more. Nor do we have any military strength. We must remember that the Inquisition was called by a king, and that it was the military power of kings which led to the abuses in the Crusades.

I do agree that the Church tends to authoritarianism but only legitimately possessing only the authority given to Her by Christ. The Church is not coercive enough to be Fascist nor does She forget the individual.

However, the Church is not Liberal. She possesses a morality which does not change because each human being is held to the same standard by God. Attempts by Liberals in the Church to relativise Her teaching cause people to fall away from seeking and striving for that standard of living. We do not reach the standards by our own effort but we are assisted by the Grace of God.

If the Law of God scandalises us, perhaps we are trying to hold God to a different morality from the one that really exists. Perhaps we should use that scandal to examining ourselves before charging the Church with Fascism.

Not all oxen are dumb

Today, according to my breviary  (albeit in commemoration only) marks the Feast of the Dumb Ox himself, St Thomas Aquinas.

In the light of my recent postings about Reason and Poetry, none epitomise this more for me than St Thomas. The Summa Theologiae is a wonderful read but it is taking me years to get through it given the hurly burly of life. Yet, St Thomas also has a poetic element. His liturgy for the Feast of Corpus Christi is so rooted in the presence of Christ that the heart and emotions are stirred as well as the mind.

Of course, while Anglican Catholics tend to believe in a form of Transubstantiation,  we are not bound by any particular explanation of the Mystery. Nor should we be, and even St Thomas would accept that, I think, given that, towards the end of his life, that magnificent Summa becomes a thing of straw.

Reality is deeper than just reason, yet reason is how we talk to each other. In asking St Thomas to be one of my patrons, I ask him to pray with me and for me that we may learn to communicate better at the level of the soul rather than just the mind or the heart. That way perhaps we can find that common love for each other in the light of the Love of God.

Infinity and Trinity

I've finished yet another reading of Infinity and the Mind by Rudy Rucker. As a mathematician, I always hear some strange ideas from people about infinity. Is it a number? Well, yes and no. It is not a number in the sense of standard arithmetic. In standard arithmetic, numbers can be added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided providing we are not dividing by zero. Share four cakes between two people and each person gets two cakes; i.e. 4÷2=2. Share four cakes between no people, how much does each person get? Dividing by zero is not technically infinity - it is technically meaningless.

Infinity is sort of a number when it comes to counting things. The trouble is that there are different types of infinity. Indeed there are bigger and bigger and bigger infinities until one reaches the Absolute Infinity - except we never reach the Absolute Infinity. All this is mathematically sound.

Now how do we understand infinities? We can say that they are the number of objects in a set. For the non-mathematician, a set is just a collection of specific and identifiable objects. We can call the set of numbers {1,2,3,4...} the set N for example. I call the set of all numbers which can be expressed as a decimal (which may be infinitely long,  like pi), R. It turns out that there are more numbers in R than in N.

Where on earth can this arcane discussion be going? As Rucker points out, a set is a Many that can be thought of as a One. Rather than think of all decimals, one by one, we can just conceive of R and use that to prevent ourselves from wasting intellectual resources.

The point is, we comprehend infinities by comprehending sets. Sets are the key thing here. You might think we can form a set of anything such as the set of all cats in Hull in 2016, or the set of bishop's wives - you are the set of all the cells in your body! Yet there are sets that cannot exist as sets such as the set S of all sets which don't contain themselves. That's a tricky concept and you can take time to think about it and enjoy the logical conundrum, or move on and just hold to my conclusion. There is no universal set, no set of all sets, but there is a class of all sets.

The point is that we can easily talk of the class of all sets as one object, in which case it really ought to be a set, but it can't be a set without some awful logical contradiction taking place. We can even conceive of T the class of all possible thoughts and the same thing happens. It is not a set. If a set is a Many that can be treated as a One, T is not. It is a single conceivable thing which cannot be treated as a single conceivable thing.

For the Christian, this sounds very familiar. We hold to a Unity that is a Multiplicity - a Three-in-One. Of course this is impossible by anything bound by the laws of Physics, but perhaps we see that in the laws of mathematics such a being can be possible albeit beyond finite comprehension.

I do apologise if I lost my readers along the way here. My aim was simply to show that the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity, although utterly transcendent, permits itself to be seen as a shadow in mathematical thought. Beyond that we must keep silence and lift ourselves above such Earthly thoughts.

Beneath the humeral veil

I suppose that every day, somewhere in the world, a solemn High Mass is said. It is supposed to be the norm rather than the exception, but the average parish will only have a priest with no one to function as Deacon or Subdeacon. I once tried to argue the case in the CofE that the office of Reader ought to be converted into that of Subdeacon,  but the lack of interparish cohesion rather put the mockers on that idea.

The office of Subdeacon is practically extinct in itself. At High Mass, the liturgical role of Subdeacon is taken by a Deacon or Priest. The Liturgical role of Subdeacon is, like the other sacred ministers, packed with symbolism and meaning. (And, yes, I'm fully expecting to be accused of pushing the symbolism again. I  make no apologies.)

Functionally, the Subdeacon is the Deacon's deacon. His job is to be by the Deacon's side when the Deacon plays his part, holding the Gospel for him, passing things across, and standing behind him during the prayers.

It is at the Offertory when the role takes on its unique character, thanks to the humeral veil.

The veil itself should cover the credence at the beginning of High Mass. In this we see that it represents the Veil of Mystery that is uncovered in the Apocalypse. God reveals Truth to us by taking the veil away. The drama of the sacrifice of the Mass is that revelation.

The Subdeacon, then, as the sole bearer of the humeral veil takes upon the role of the vehicle of God's revelation. First, he reveals the chalice and paten at the Offertory which are taken by the Deacon to be presented to the Celebrant.

In this we essentially see the Lord's prophecy of His Death being revealed. The Chalice will become a symbol of God's covenant with us in which humanity and divinity are mixed and together become the Blood of Christ. The Paten becomes the Tomb on which the broken Body of Christ is laid. At the Offertory, this is a time of prophecy; the hour has not yet come. Thus, the Deacon returns the paten back to the Subdeacon under the veil, and the Subdeacon retires behind the Sacrifice until the hour indeed has come and the Broken Body of Christ is to lie before its resurrection in all who consume it in faith.

Further, it is the Subdeacon who distributes the Pax to the clergy in choir. Why the Subdeacon and not the Deacon? The Celebrant prepares himself to receive Christ into Himself. With the Deacon on side to help in this moment, the Subdeacon must bear the responsibility of bringing the Peace of Christ to the clergy and thus out into the world. Again, the Subdeacon is an agent of revelation and proclamation.

The loss of the Subdiaconate to the Church is unfortunate, and perhaps telling of this age's hatred of Mystery. All of Reality bears mysteries that cannot readily be solved. Yet one can understand a mystery, but not br able to communicate it. Words are not enough to explain all truth and only a life which  recognises the Cosmic Humeral Veil in humility and faith may be permitted by the Divine to peek beneath it.

Rationalising Reason

Immanuel Kant is not the easiest to read or understand, but he does raise rather interesting points when it comes to how reason does fail us at times. When two opposing sides give apparently equally compelling reasons for their cases, there must be something wrong there. The point that springs to mind is Catholic v Protestant - a deadlock about the Truth. It can only be a leap of Faith (to throw Kierkegaard into the mix) to accept one of the positions.

Ed Pacht has always played the Ubertino Da Cassale to my more scholastic leanings. We both see the limits of Reason in different ways. He reasons with the mind  of a poet, I sing with the heart of a mathematician. It's amazing how we draw the same conclusions from different approaches!

One criticism that I noticed of my previous post, is that people reject the whole necessity of reasoning. They prefer to abide by the Holy Mystery of Faith rather than the fides quaerens intellectum.

Of course that's not only a valid way of living one's life, it's recommended by saints such as St Bernard and writers such as Pseudo-Dionysius. In order to approach God, we must strip away every preconception, every means of logical deduction and enter a state of unknowing. It's something I've tried to do. But how does one talk about the Truth, or discuss it with others?

One way will be with poetry and allegory. The power of narrative is incredible and the words of Genesis gain their strength not from Science but from what it means to be human. The trouble is that not everyone sees the same thing. The inexpressible is indeed inexpressible. Well - duh! as my students will say. This can potentially lead to misunderstandings and disagreements about the nature of God and our relationship with Him on apparently subjective terms.

The rational approach gives precision and validity to the conclusions one draws. It lays the cards on the table and, if one accepts the premises and the means of inference, then one is bound by them to accept the conclusion. This indeed leaves very little wiggle-room for the colour in our lives. Further, we can use Reason to rationalise sinful behaviour.

If we openly oppose homosexual relationships then cold reason will say that we will be in the wrong if we engage in homosexual relationships even if we can rationalise them away. There have been clergymen who have hidden the fact that they are engaged in such a relationship, yet the facts that they live together and do everything together would seem to suggest otherwise. The observer cannot leap to the conclusion that such a relationship is any more than platonic because there is clearly not enough evidence to complete the chain of reasoning. However, neither can the clergyman truly square it in his conscience that he is not engaging in homosexual activity when he knows that he is. There will be a fault in the reasoning here and that flaw will be very much due to the nature of that sin and a desire not to be seen as a hypocrite. The trouble is that this very flaw can be well hidden. That's the trouble with Reason: one missing link in the chain, one hidden assumption, and the conclusion is no longer watertight.

If one lives by the Rulebook then one will die by the Rulebook. Yet if one lives purely by the heart, then everything can become subject to emotion, feeling, and whim. Reason gives structure to our understanding, Mystery gives it a colour and depth to approach the unimaginable. Neither one rules the other unnecessary; neither one can destroy the other. That's the beauty of being human. The Pastoral dimension is strengthened by Canon, and Canon is softened by the Pastoral. The priest has the unenviable task of trying to be both.

Thank God for poets and scholastics!

The Terror of the Cute

I notice among some folk that there is an apparently strange reaction to things that are cute. We can be presented with a playful puppy or kitten, or be given a baby to hold who just smiles and smiles at us. It is as we get overwhelmed by the happy feelings that these wonderful things that a certain negativity arises in us. We suddenly want the cuteness or beauty to end. We seek to push it away, even crush it, destroy it. Somehow we just cannot cope with this wonderful thing. Cuteness hurts.

Yet, this is actually very normal, if rather unwelcome or disturbing. It seems we have a limit to the sheer joy that we can feel before it becomes too difficult to endure. We see this in St Peter's reaction to Our Lord. The sheer greatness of God, even as a human being is too much for us that, like St Peter, we say "away from me, Lord, for I am a sinner." We are so used to the sin in our lives, the darkness of the World and the blind indifference of the universe to the needs of its inhabitants, that we cannot cope with the beauty with which we are all created.

Cute things come with the label, "please take care of me". The purity and innocence they convey shows up in us the filth and wretchedness within our own selves giving us the the dreadful realisation that, actually, we cannot take care of them. Yet, the cuteness is insistent to the extent that the vision of ourselves causes the feelings of affection to cloy and corrupt. We know that we cannot adequately meet their demands, and so try to obliterate the demand that cuteness infallibly makes.

To recognise that our love and ability to take care of lovely things is limited is always a shock. Yet it points to the fact that we need taking care of too. We need help and kindness and warmth if we are to function. We too bear a label that says "please take care of me". Although we may not present the same cuteness as a kitten or baby, we still have it. God beholds us as being adorable. That's the terrible fact and it is unavoidable. We are loved and cannot fail to be loved.

Worms might never get the same press as kittens, but God rejoices in creating them. Even more does He rejoice in us so much as to send His Son, Our Lord, to burst the prison of our own making. And that's the scandal.

We seek to be in control. We seek always to meet the challenge that is thrown at us. We seek to repel the invader and protect all that is vulnerable and all that we cherish. We try to possess the cute things in life and give them unwavering and absolute nurture. The fact is that we can't and it hurts us.

Dealing with these feelings and fears is the work of humility. It can only be done with God's help. We have to learn to walk away from cute things with a spirit of thankfulness to God and recognition of our inability to provide what He alone can provide.

Kittens and babies grow up and become their own selves. We can only do our best for them in the love of God.

The Lie of Deliberate Obstruction

Occasionally in our prayers and reflections, we human beings can suddenly get a sense of clarity, and we realise that we have been lied to. Thus has happened to me a few times and I  have tried to blog the results. Given that we should always be seeking the truth, indeed our family motto is veritas omnia vincit, I do intend to record these moments of clarity as they occur. We are being lied to, but not necessarily by other folk. Thus here begin reflections on The Lie.

You know the sort of situation. You turn onto a single lane road, only to see another car coming towards you. Someone has to back up.

Or you're in a hurry at the bank, and you're behind the little old lady who has decided to take out £100 in 10 pence pieces and the clerk is counting every wretched one.

All too often, we blame the other driver, or the old lady, or the bank clerk for our inconvenience as if they were acting with the express purpose of inconveniencing us, or at least blaming them for their selfish behaviour. Have we really thought about what is actually going on here?

One might say that everyone is naturally selfish. That's not quite true. Everyone is naturally looking out for their own ends and both society and religious practice can help train us to look out for others. Wilfully being self-serving is true selfishness having its expression in Lust, Avarice, and Gluttony. The old lady may need those 10p pieces to feed an antiquated gas meter that her stingy landlord hasn't bothered to replace. The bank clerk may be driven by professional courtesy to ensure that the old lady isn't diddled out of a single coin. The other driver may be just visiting his mother. Or they may all just be out to ruin your day. Which is most likely?

The real thing to blame is the timing. Human beings interact chaotically. Simple social rules and conventions create complex and colourful behaviour, allowing us to express ourselves and live our lives. But the complexity of living mean that we do get in each others' ways albeit for the most part unwittingly and ignorantly. Indeed, we can be at our most obstructive to others when we are actually trying to help.

We have to see the clear thing here. Unless we actually have the information in front of us, we can assume nothing about the other's motives or intentions. Any obstruction is most likely to be bad timing more than anything else.

This does mean that we have to learn to relinquish the illusion that things are deliberately out to get in our way. This illusion is born of another illusion which is more pernicious, namely the illusion that we can control every aspect of our lives. If we live with others, then the Divine mandate to love one another as ourselves compels us not just to allow those obstacles but to rejoice in them as an aspect of our and the other's shared humanity in the sight of God.

Of course, we ought not seek to obstruct others deliberately, but perhaps we should cut ourselves a little slack when we do.

There is nothing to blame here save our own propensity to be impatient and intolerant. Yet we must recognise that while our patience and tolerance are limited, God's is not.

Let us see the Lie of Deliberate Obstruction for what it is, and seek to see in others not an obstacle but an ikon of God's love.

Growth upon the Rock?

Sermon preached at Our Lady of Walsingham and St Francis on the Third Sunday in Lent

Rocks have a bit of a mixed press biblically. It is upon the Rock of Christ that the Church is built, and St Peter is so named because the Church will be built on him too.

Yet, it is the rocky ground that yields a shallow faith. The seed of the word of God can only grow a little before it withers and dies because it has no root. Thus here we have a bit of a problem  Rocks are good for building,  but not for growing. Which should we be?

Rocks build temples, but rocks stone St Stephen to death. How can we be rocks and grow?

Remember that it takes time for rocks to form - a long time. Some rocks are born out of the furnace of a volcano, forming as the lava cools and hardens. Other rocks form by compression with the weight of ages of material crushing them into hard rock. You already know that coal and even diamond are the result of prehistoric trees being crushed under millions of millions of years of earth. There was a time when rocks were soft and able to support growth. When a rock is finally hard, it can't grow any more.

This is what happened to Pharaoh as he tried to prevent the Israelites from leaving Egypt. We are told that first of all he hardened his heart against Moses and Israel and wouldn't let them go. Then after more and more plagues, he still hardened his heart.

It comes to a point when God hardens the heart of Pharaoh. This is important. At first Pharaoh hardens his own heart, then God hardens it for him. He has lost the ability to choose because he can no longer see the goodness of God through his own pride. His heart has hardened against God.

This is frightening because it could happen to us if we decide to walk away from God. Growth on rocks is shallow because the seed cannot take root. If we want to make sure that we harden into a rock for the service of God, like St Peter, then we have to work at allowing our faith to deepen and develop.

St Peter hardens into rock for the love of Christ. Although he makes errors, he never allows himself to completely lose sight of God. See how he weeps bitterly when he realises that he has betrayed Jesus. His hardening into rock happens as a result of his perfection by God.

We, too, must harden into rock, and we have to do so for the love of Christ. How do we do this? We are already engaged on studying the Bible and praying to God. Any deepening of our faith must come from living what we believe. Do we know the fourteen works of Mercy? Do we practise them?

Our lives are spent slowly becoming what we live them to be. If we live for Christ and then we become the precious stones in the walls of Heaven.

Biblical Balderdash

"If the bible said that two and two were five, I'd believe it. It would take me a while to think through what it means, but I'd believe it."

So says one "bible-believing" Christian, and he's not alone. This actually upsets me a great deal because it shows not only a misunderstanding of what the Bible really is, but that human beings are essentially trying to live lives as "brains in vats" with everything around them being pure illusion save that which is literally printed in the Bible.

Let me be clear, I am not saying that Science holds all the answers, nor am I intending to pour scorn on those who believe the literal interpretation of Genesis, but I am concerned that people believe that the Bible is to be accepted uncritically.

I am not going to be able to find a general solution of the Navier-Stokes equations in Holy Scripture. Nor should I think that I should. If the solution there, then I trust the Holy Ghost to lead me. Until then, I will rely on mathematical sources to aid me in this Quixotic quest.

My point us that, although I believe that Science and Mathematics are not capable of obtaining a monopoly on the truth, they do indeed bear witness to the truth. "The Heavens are telling the glory of God". Mathematics is infallible in the truth that it can tell, but this truth can never be complete - indeed the incompleteness of mathematics has been proved mathematically!

This incompleteness is no reason to doubt the truths uncovered by Science. Religion is impregnable to any attempts by atheists to use Science to dismiss it as false. It can't be done, and as of today, I have seen not one single coherent argument for the non-existence of God.

Yet Science does tell the truth. If you drop a vase, it will fall unless there are external entities that prevent that failure. Two and two are four and that is obvious though surprisingly not self-evident. The fact that we have observed gravitational waves almost a century after Einstein predicted them gladdens my heart, and I do thank God for the beauty of Mathematics.

The Bible says that pi is three, but if you read I Kings vii.23 & 26 carefully, this is not a collection of blueprints but a description of the glories of Solomon's temple. Even then, there are interesting features of Phoenician mathematics and mensuration that make it closer to the truth than is apparent. Again, the exact value of pi is not the point: the glory of God is.

The Cappadocian Fathers tell us to revere every word of Scripture carefully, not because it has a literal point, but rather it points to that which is deeper. St Thomas Aquinas would ensure that, following Holy Tradition, we make use of all the senses of Scripture to find the word of God.

Yet Christians must learn not to be so simple-minded as to drive people away from them sniggering at our stupidity for accepting what is manifestly incorrect. To believe that two and two are five based on Scripture really would make a mockery of Scripture. It would make God out to be a liar or at best, inconsistent. Too often, the Bible is carved up into proof-texts to prove a point as to deprive it of any context or depth, or insightful vision of the deep truths of God. We are to be as shrewd as vipers as well as being innocent as doves. This means that, in order to talk with people, to help them find the God we love, we cannot pay for two drinks each worth two pound and expect not to get a pound in change. We are already counted as fools for Christ, why be counted as a fool for oneself?

I am deeply saddened by those Christians who are anti-science, or those who do not think beyond the confines of the Textus Receptus. The integrity of Christian thought starts with Holy Scripture and ends with God. There's a massive distance there and this gap can only be bridged by living the Christian Faith in the world that God made!

While I remain a sceptic on many of the claims of Science on non - scientific issues, I find myself drawn evermore closer to God by the sheer complexity of the world around me, and the fascinating theories that lie behind that complexity.

Of course if two and two were five, then that really would prove that I am the Pope!

Ritual Ridicule Noted

As you can imagine, I am a member of a few online groups dedicated to the practice of ritual and ceremony. I often find that occasionally, these groups have a season of some quite unpleasant interchanges. It usually goes like this :

A: O foolish *insert denomination/jurisdiction here*! The Bishop Ordinary is present and you haven't put a seventh candle behind the crucifix. The vimpa is of the wrong colour, and the MC should not be wielding a flame - thrower outside of Ash Wednesday.

B: Who cares? It's our intention to worship God that counts, not all this pedantic obsession with ornaments and rubrics.

A: Surely sir, you have read the raison d'etre of this group. It is our intention to bring to light abuses of ritual.

B: But you ridicule them as well! That is just not the spirit of Christianity!

A: We only do so in a spirit of lightheartedness. If you're such a prissy hater of ritual, please leave the group.

B: I'M prissy? You're the bunch of lace loving losers who faint when it's half an inch too short....

...and so it continues into sarcasm, snipery, and snotty parting shots.

It's an unfortunate interchange which shows all kinds of Christians up as unpleasant and unkind and thus tars us all with the same brush. It is very difficult to see the person of Christ there in the argument. Yet He is, but you would be hard pushed to see where. Human nature is operating at its best to obscure the Love of God which fuels it.

Let us withdraw from the smoke of competing incense and try and understand A and B and why they are posting as they are.

A is clearly a ritualist following one of the great texts on the practice of ritual and ceremony like Ritual Notes, or the Anglican Directorium, or Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Explained. He subscribes to a standard, presumably the same standard that everyone else is interested in in the group.

There is nothing wrong with this. Ritual is an essential part of the worship of God right back to the beginning of our conversation with Him. In each of the texts I've mentioned, there is an integrity of theology - lex orandi lex credendi - which surrounds all the tiny details ranging from numbers of candles to whether the water of the lavabo should be from the blessed cruet of water or not. The paten is hidden from view until the fraction when it becomes the Tomb in which the Body of Christ rests after it is broken on the Cross.

All this gives colour and meaning - indeed a very precise meaning to what we do. It is this zeal for God's house that has consumed A.

In the confines of this group, A hopes to release some of the frustration he feels when he sees what he perceives as deviations from his standard. He complains with the same attitude as you might complain to your friends about the little old lady dithering about in front of them in the queue at the Post Office.

B, on the other hand, is concerned that such an overemphasis on details will detract people from living the life that Christ would want us to live. He fears an idolatry of things that Our Lord Himself cast out of the temple for clouding the sincerity and worship of God. In this, what gets done, or does not get done, is subordinate to the intentions of the heart.

For B, complaints about what he perceives to be the minutiae of ritual are evidence of that idolatry representing the traditions of men censured by Our Lord. He has probably joined the group out of a genuine interest for how things could be done, but does not hold the standards of ritual to be as authoritative as A.

In my parish, we try to follow the English Missal with our ritual guided by Ritual Notes. That is the standard of our ritual to which we subscribe subject to the approval of my jurisdiction - the Anglican Catholic Church. However, with my limited resources and relative inexperience, I doubt that I have ever said a Ritual Notes perfect Mass. My Archdeacon is always ready to instruct and I am so grateful for his pointing out my errors. It means that I can improve and seek to make my Mass better and more integrated into the Catholic Faith. For my sins and omissions, I have to rely on God to supply what is lacking and correct what is done amiss and pray for a better approach to excellence in Worship. The problem is, does this set me up for A's ridicule?

Probably, yes. I wonder how much he would complain if he knew my intentions. If he did ridicule me, would he do so according to the basic premise of joke-telling? You should only say something light-hearted if you can be sure that everyone who hears it would consider it as light-hearted. I am open to be ridiculed as much as anyone else. Does that mean that I should be ridiculed?

Out of my earshot, I guess that I am the target of much criticism and ridicule. The CofE Parish that I left painted me as autistic, crackers, and mad, and the priest did nothing to stand up for me but rather allowed the criticism to continue. I was the one standing up for high standards of ritual because I knew that it reflected our theology. I too employed ridicule of such a laissez faire attitude which, to my mind, showed full well the deterioration of belief in my old parish. I still believe that, and while my sense if humour is still as wicked as ever, I do try to make my humour appropriate to my listeners. As a Benedictine, however, I should strive to get away from complaining and murmuring. It does damage communities, especially online communities where the non-verbal nuances are missing.

While I sit with B on his concern about the tone of the comment, I must side in spirit with A. There have to be high standards of liturgy which reflect the theology of the church and for which one can strive so that one can approach God in the Catholic Faith. Chopping and changing according to whim follows only the individual subjective and reactionary view, rather than the comprehensive and universal standard set by the Catholic Faith.

I have no concern about Anglicans of the Strict Observance - this is my little joke about Prayerbook Anglicans who hold to the entirety of the Book of Common Prayer : it is intended as affectionate and respectful of their position. They have their integrity written in, for example, The Parson's Handbook. It's there and they respect it. Thus they have my respect. I do have concern, and this was one of the causes of my ejection, with those ministers who believe that the heart is the source of liturgy. They are pushing a personal theology which may or may not be true.

For me, the conversation should have gone something like

A: O foolish *insert denomination/ jurisdiction here*! The Bishop Ordinary is present and you haven't put a seventh candle behind the crucifix. The vimpa is of the wrong colour, and the MC should not be wielding a flame - thrower outside of Ash Wednesday.

B: I appreciate that this group is for those who subscribe to the liturgical standards in the description of this group, however, I am concerned about the depth of adhering to the rubrics in such detail, and feel that it is wrong to describe that denomination as foolish.

A: My apologies. I was blowing off some steam. Was there anything that you particularly object to?

B: Please do instruct me on the liturgical use of flame - throwers and explain to me the theology behind them.

A: Well....

Yes, I  know that's a little stilted. However, before we post, we really should try to see the person we're addressing and see their motivation. To seek to respect the other where they are is a sign of God's love in us.

Hmm. Maybe one day even I will give that a try!

The Devil take you?

Sermon preached at Our Lady of Walsingham and St Francis on the First Sunday in Lent

The first place that receives the seed is the wayside, the pathway where the birds swoop down and take the seed away. Our Lord explains that this is those who receive the word of God, but the Devil takes it from them. Well, whose fault is that?

As we have already seen, if we allow the Devil to influence us, he can lead us by the wayside where we can lose God completely. We know that this is something that he wants to do. Look at the lengths he goes to to take the Word of God away! Had Jesus succumbed to temptation,  then the Word of God would have been lost to us all!

So what do we do? We need to protect the seed that we have received. We protect it by arming ourselves as St Paul would have us do.

By pureness, by knowledge, by long suffering, by kindness, by the Holy Ghost, by love unfeigned, By the word of truth, by the power of God, by the armour of righteousness on the right hand and on the left.

We need to be pure in our intent to love and serve God. We have to read our bibles and know what it is to be Christian. We need to stick with it through thick and thin. We need to see God in our neighbours and be kind. We need to pray to the Holy Ghost for His presence and continual influence to drive away the lies of the Devil. This is how we protect the seed that we want to grow in us.

We will suffer for it, there is no doubt. The Devil will give us a hard ride through Earthly things, but not through heavenly things. We will fall so many times in so many sad and terrible ways. We will fail, but the Holy Trinity gives us an Eternal Hope!  If we pray for help, it will come and it will bring us closer to God through Christ. We just need to cling on to what we have, and allow it to grow. Then the word of God will truly grow in us.

Springtime in the Wilderness

Many people confuse the wilderness with a desert. This isn't really that true. While the wilderness is by definition a challenging place to live, it does not challenge one's actual survival.

We go into the wilderness to think, reflect, listen, or simply realise who we are as opposed to who we think we are. It is not exactly clear how this can be accomplished if we spending the energy fighting for our lives. We know that shepherds took their flocks a way into the  wilderness for them to graze. We also know that they would have to be on the lookout for the beasts like lions, which is why shepherds had to be sober and vigilant.

However, in this challenging landscape there are many places where the vegetation is lush and green, where the water runs as clear as crystal, and where the native animals live their simple little lives unencumbered by the shackles of reason, law, order, and politics. Here in the wilderness we can truly meet God being who we are, as we were created. Here is an opportunity to sit down and allow ourselves to be known by God.

As we enter the season of Lent, we embrace the challenges of asceticism in which we seek not to make ourselves uncomfortable as if to atone for the lives that God has given us, but rather to step back from ourselves as we believe ourselves to be. We allow ourselves to see beauty in the simple things in the artificial aridity of a life forgetful of God. Like the Pharisees, we can do all the right things but in forgetting the presence of God, our efforts are vain because we forget the presence of Love.

We do not fast in order to make ourselves miserable - carrying the Cross will do that for us. We do not give things up for the challenge - the testing of our faith by Sin, the World, and the Devil will do that. We do these things to strip away the encumbrances of worldly living to find freedom to be what God created, to explore God and how He has both created and redeemed us, and to do so in the presence of that loving Creator and Redeemer!

I wish you all a blessed, happy, and fulfilling Lent!

Loving substance

It's a bit of an eye-opener when you see the question,  "what is love?" in an RS exam and see that they've only allowed two marks for the answer. Can we really sum up Love in a sentence where saints, poets and novelists have written libraries? Students are encouraged to be succinct, in which case you could say with St Thomas Aquinas that "to love is to will the good of the other". This still does not say explicitly what love is: we still have to understand what "will" and "good" are.

First, we have to see that Our Lord shows us that "to will" is not passive. We cannot sit down at a desk and say that we love our enemies because we will them nothing but good. This isn't what "will" means. It is a confusion with the word "wish". Our will consists in the capacity to choose between options the result of which usually is a clear outcome. We can wish someone well but that needs no further action on our part. Think of how decisive we are when we respond with "I will do this"!

Human beings are interesting in that it is in our nature both to love and to hate. Humanity possesses a peculiar rationality in which we can choose to act reasonably or unreasonably. Only a truly rational being can be foolish. We can choose what is truly bad over what is truly good. We can even choose to define what "good" and "bad" mean for us irrespective of how else they might be defined. And that's a problem. It's a problem that we face in this very day and age. How can we will the good of others if we don't know what "good" is?

Often what we mean by good is whatever makes life most pleasant for ourselves. This cannot be right. Whatever is truly good must be outside of our own point of view. It must be outside of everyone's point of view.

In that famous chapter by St Paul, we read:

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

Look at how all of these attributes of charity look beyond anyone's point of view. True love lies not in the emotions but outside in the very being of other people. And that very being is the image of God Himself. God is love because God is what it means to be good. Whatever God does is good because He does whatever is consistent with Himself. We have our being within the substance of God because our creation is good. We do not deserve love because of what we do but because we are human beings and possess the ultimate dignity of being a child of God.

It is in our nature to hate others because we have lost the sight of God in others. We are fallen from the grace of union with God and we can only have our sight restored in Our Lord Jesus whose flesh given in love restores our substance. Let us pray continually for the grace to see the image of God in others and thus will their good that divine image determines.

Hierarchy by Candlelight

When I was ordained a priest, I knew that the age of deference to the parish clerk had passed. Very occasionally, I  will hear, "mornin' Vicar" or, "thank you, Father " but more often than not I am not recognised as a priest. I get the odd look, but nothing more than that.

In many ways this is good. No-one should be compelled to recognise or defer to a priest as part of social mores. I am a human being among others, worthy of no greater nor lesser respect than anyone else. This is exactly what Our Lord wants when he upbraids the Pharisees for wanting all the honorific titles and places of honour for very little. Earthly honors and titles are worth nothing.

In a previous post, I alluded to Boethius and his view on honours. I used to rate the Oxford DD as the most prestigious academic degree. Then Oxford University awarded that very degree to Katherine Jefferts Schori, the woman who has done most to destroy Anglicanism in America as well as besmirch the reputation of Christianity in that country. This is the essence of Boethius' proof that honour and title are not worth seeking. If that title can be given to anyone, deserving or undeserving alike, what can it really be worth? Honours are purely subjective and can have no objective existence.

Time and again do we see bishops, priests, and pastors fat with their own self - satisfaction insist that their message be heard by everyone because they are the bishop, priest, or pastor while, at the same time, either quietly hiding their hypocrisy or justifying it loudly and proudly. This was true in medieval times, and it's true now.

Yet, the priesthood is a gift of God to His people. The existence of the sacerdotal ministry is like a computer's installer. It exists in order to download and install software onto a computer. Likewise a priest is one called by God to give to His people the objective and efficient grace of His Being.

A priest is an alter Christus in that he participates in the single priesthood of Christ making real Christ in the Mass. I was once asked the question, if you meet an angel and a priest walking together down the street whom should you honour most? The answer is the priest who bears Christ in himself and makes Him present at Mass.

Like many people, I rather balked at this. It makes the priest seem superior to angelic beings, more glorious than the Cherubim. But man is lower than the angels, and in the Incarnation, Our Lord was indeed made lower than the angels. The point is that it is the presence of Christ in the priest that His people will recognise. It is His presence that is called "Father" not of the fallible little person that bears Him.

This cuts two ways. If a priest or bishop seeks the accolades proper to Christ for himself, then not only is he defrauding his congregation, he is also committing self-idolatry. That's just what the Devil did!

This, then, is where the priesthood meets Candlemas. The aged Simeon departs in peace after presenting the Christ child to God and thus to the world. Like St John the Baptist, Simeon seeks only his decrease in the light of Christ. In the ritual purification of Our Lady, Simeon's Old Testament is purified in the light of Christ. As Christ becomes the only true high priest at the altar of the Cross, so is this light shone out to the world.

This means that each priest, and more so each bishop, has a truly onerous duty. Every day the priest is confronted with, "how have you presented Christ to the world today? How have you made Him present in this dark some world?" This should terrify each cleric. If it doesn't, then he has forgotten the enormity of his orders. He is under orders, lesser than his congregation whom he serves, lesser than the society he inhabits, because he is always beneath the shadow of the cross that he bears but, by virtue of his sins, he is unworthy to bear. Thanks be to God for the grace that a priest receives in order to do this at his ordination!

The more that a priest shows the light of Christ, the more will people show the honour due not to him but to the One he bears. If people can recognise the presence of Christ, then and only then will the priest be able to depart in peace according to His Word.