Liturgy: John-Bede Pauley

The following comment by John-Bede Pauley from the AOF Facebook site offers insight into the concept of liturgy as a both-and outlook and experience, a key aspect of a spiritual heritage preserved in the Anglican tradition and retained in the Personal Ordinariates established by the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus.

[edited/formatted with embedded links by Gilbert]

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John-Bede Pauley, Faculty Member, College of Saint Benedict/St. John's University, responding in a thread initiated by a post by Sarah Rodeo Dzialo, who asked, "What are the most influential/significant/important hallmarks of Anglican spirituality, to you?"

Liturgy. But that in an ethos that gives the word “liturgy” a different sense than commonly found in the Roman context.

For example,

1. Liturgy in the Anglican tradition means both Eucharist and the Office. This both/and was sometimes more a Prayer Book ideal than a lived, daily experience, depending on the where and when. But as shifts occurred over time, the Prayer Book stood as a both/and reminder.
2. Liturgy is the essence of the ecclesial community’s encounter with (both praising and listening to) the Triune God. It is expected to be the catechetical point of reference (for the “babes in Christ” who still need milk) as well as the constant re-membering of the more spiritually mature as they understand and live more deeply the basic sacramental encounters with the both/and of the unknowable God who has made himself known shockingly as one of us. Devotions (private or of the group) have their place, but when they impinge on the energy, effort, resources, truth, beauty, and goodness of liturgy, it suggests the liturgy is viewed as an obligation to be got out of the way more than the essence of the Church’s life (both the particular church and the universal church in and outside of time).
3. Liturgy in the Anglican tradition is courteous homeliness. As St. Julian of Norwich claims, this encounter should be one of both courtesy (worthy of divine majesty) and the homely (the familiarity of being part of the family—not “homely” in today’s sense of unattractive). It’s a both/and little understood today and apparently presented challenges in Julian’s day as well: “But we must beware lest we take this homeliness so recklessly as to forsake courtesy. Our Lord Himself is sovereign Homeliness. But as homely as he is, even so courteous he is; for he is very Courtesy.” A challenge the Anglican patrimony faces in the Catholic Church of the moment is that the template, so to speak, is one in which “traditional” liturgy seems to reflect a cultural/liturgical memory that goes back no further than, and is often entrenched in, the late-Renaissance/Baroque, when, in the West, the liturgical penchant was to emphasize (perhaps to over-emphasize) a variant of Julian’s courtesy. And many mainstream liturgies seem to reflect a cultural/liturgical memory that goes back no further than, and is often entrenched in, the 1970s, when, in the West, the liturgical penchant was to emphasize (perhaps to over-emphasize) a variant of Julian’s “homeliness.” When liturgy is regimented rather than ordered, or over-familiar to the point of forsaking “courtesy,” something is amiss.

From liturgy viewed this way should flow several things:

1. Readings read as the actual word of God. (I’m not sure Anglicans/Episcopalians themselves have retained this appreciation of a courteously-homely way to read Holy Writ in liturgy, alas.) How much can be accomplished if a lector actually reads the appointed reading(s) prayerfully one or two times, at least, before setting foot in church; and strives mentally to stay out of the way as a reader so that it is the reading itself, not the reader reading the reading; and/or strives mentally to give the reading its due rather than treating it as the-next-item-on-the-liturgical- checklist?
2. Homilies that pitch themselves towards those new to the faith and towards those more seasoned in it; that speak to the reason-and-affect integration of the Anglican tradition (though it went through some dissociation, T. S. Eliot claims, after the so-called Metaphysical poets but is nonetheless part of the Anglican patrimony); that aim to realize the science/art of intermingling both exposition of doctrine and poetry that penetrates—as the prophets, Church Fathers, and the Tractarians understood—to the power of “doctrine lying hid in language.” (G. Rowell, “Spirituality in the Anglican Tradition,” in An Introduction to Christian Spirituality, ed. R. Waller and B. Ward [London: S.P.C.K., 1999], 136).
3. Music sung by choirs as alter-homiletic, i.e. written, chosen, and sung as auditio divina rather than as catchy and/or sentimental aural wallpaper.
4. Coffee hour (fellowship) as an extension of the liturgy’s same expectations of courteous homeliness. That is not as easy as it sounds and involves its own gentle catechesis in regarding the community’s “social events” or “fellowships” or (in the U.K.) “bun fights” as having their own element of ascetical reserve and discretion but not without the jolly and joyous. [...]