Lent, for all its inconveniences, is quickly becoming one of my favorite seasons. (Ah, well, the idea of a "favorite season" is less than useful. Advent and Christmas and Easter are also some of my favorite seasons. One might observe, I suppose, that the tempus per annum is less interesting, except for its various feast days, many of which are regrettably overlooked.) I appreciate Lent because it is a time in which we are encouraged to change.
Change, though perhaps uncomfortable, is preferable to stasis. I grow most melancholy when I feel myself trapped in the same patterns — of incuriosity, of inefficiency, of sin — and unable to change them. Not for nothing is Dante's hell a place of eternal immutableness: its denizens are forever trapped in the state they have chosen. We may, therefore, be eager — indeed, impatient — to better ourselves, to improve our situation. And yet the higher power that orders our personal change is not beholden to our impatience. In the great majority of cases, we only notice personal changes after a length of time, if at all. I suppose we must learn to wait for such things.
The other day an acquaintance posted a germane poem (on, sigh, Facebook). I'll let the Jesuït speak for himself.
Patient Trust, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
20 February 2013
14 February 2013
10 February 2013
Transfiguration, Observed?
This evening St. Luke's observed the Feast of the Transfiguration with a chant evensong. I am pleased to report that it went well. (And anyway, I appreciate any excuse to use incense and vest properly for evensong — it is one of the few occasions when I am permitted to wear my academic hood over my cassock and surplice.) I adapted the order of worship myself, drawing on both the vespers office from the Liber — which has a lovely series of antiphons drawn from Matthew's account of the Transfiguration — and the BCP (Rite I, of course).
There are, however, several questions about the observance of this particular feast. The Transfiguration was observed in the East by the 4th or 5th century, but is not mentioned in Western sources until around 850. As, of course, different dioceses had their particular calendars, the date of the feast was not consistent. Many observed it on August 6th, but it was also celebrated on July 27th (England and Gaul), March 17th (Meissen), and September 3rd (Halberstadt), among other dates. The feast was not universally authorized until 1456, when Callixtus III instituted it in commemoration of the defeat of the Turks at Belgrade. The date of the feast was established then as August 6th, the day the news of the Christian victory reached Rome. But the siege of Belgrade was lifted on July 22nd, which is of course the feast of Mary Magdalene. And why, one wonders, did Rome not already observe August 6th as the feast of St. Dominic, who died on that date in 1221 (and was canonized only thirteen years later)? There is no satisfying answer. Many early Reformers, being by nature a suspicious breed, viewed the feast as a too-recent innovation, and removed it from the calendar. (It has gradually crept back in.) Add to this confusion the modern custom of observing the Transfiguration on the last Sunday before Lent (the Sunday formerly known as Quinquagesima), for reasons that are not entirely clear. The Revised Common Lectionary has transfiguration readings for that Sunday every year in the three-year cycle, while the current BCP has transfiguration readings for that Sunday in Years B and C. (It was thus fortuitous for our purposes at St. Luke's that this is Year C.) The Romans have placed transfiguration readings on the second Sunday of Lent, but are, apparently, still keeping the feast on its (somewhat) original August date. Those Lutherans lucky enough to be using the historic one-year lectionary — oh, to be able to hear Bach's cantatas in their proper context! — observe the Transfiguration during the Epiphany season, on the Sunday before Septuagesima. (This year, for example, the feast was January 20th.)
All of this confusion probably stems, in part, from the difficulty in placing the Transfiguration in context in the life and ministry of Jesus. Just what, exactly, does this particular miracle mean? Is it the culmination of his early years, or just another event in his ministry? And, what's more, should that matter? To what extent should the liturgical year mirror the life of Christ? I would suggest that attempts to change the calendar to fit the order of events in the Gospels (like the moving of the regrettably under-observed Feast of the Visitation) are not particularly helpful. But then, I am terribly conservative, if not reäctionary, in my liturgical tastes.
For some more information (and a kindred spirit in matters liturgical), I'll refer you to Fr A, who muses on the (neat) custom of blessing grapes at Transfiguration and addresses the awkwardness of a second feast.
There are, however, several questions about the observance of this particular feast. The Transfiguration was observed in the East by the 4th or 5th century, but is not mentioned in Western sources until around 850. As, of course, different dioceses had their particular calendars, the date of the feast was not consistent. Many observed it on August 6th, but it was also celebrated on July 27th (England and Gaul), March 17th (Meissen), and September 3rd (Halberstadt), among other dates. The feast was not universally authorized until 1456, when Callixtus III instituted it in commemoration of the defeat of the Turks at Belgrade. The date of the feast was established then as August 6th, the day the news of the Christian victory reached Rome. But the siege of Belgrade was lifted on July 22nd, which is of course the feast of Mary Magdalene. And why, one wonders, did Rome not already observe August 6th as the feast of St. Dominic, who died on that date in 1221 (and was canonized only thirteen years later)? There is no satisfying answer. Many early Reformers, being by nature a suspicious breed, viewed the feast as a too-recent innovation, and removed it from the calendar. (It has gradually crept back in.) Add to this confusion the modern custom of observing the Transfiguration on the last Sunday before Lent (the Sunday formerly known as Quinquagesima), for reasons that are not entirely clear. The Revised Common Lectionary has transfiguration readings for that Sunday every year in the three-year cycle, while the current BCP has transfiguration readings for that Sunday in Years B and C. (It was thus fortuitous for our purposes at St. Luke's that this is Year C.) The Romans have placed transfiguration readings on the second Sunday of Lent, but are, apparently, still keeping the feast on its (somewhat) original August date. Those Lutherans lucky enough to be using the historic one-year lectionary — oh, to be able to hear Bach's cantatas in their proper context! — observe the Transfiguration during the Epiphany season, on the Sunday before Septuagesima. (This year, for example, the feast was January 20th.)
All of this confusion probably stems, in part, from the difficulty in placing the Transfiguration in context in the life and ministry of Jesus. Just what, exactly, does this particular miracle mean? Is it the culmination of his early years, or just another event in his ministry? And, what's more, should that matter? To what extent should the liturgical year mirror the life of Christ? I would suggest that attempts to change the calendar to fit the order of events in the Gospels (like the moving of the regrettably under-observed Feast of the Visitation) are not particularly helpful. But then, I am terribly conservative, if not reäctionary, in my liturgical tastes.
For some more information (and a kindred spirit in matters liturgical), I'll refer you to Fr A, who muses on the (neat) custom of blessing grapes at Transfiguration and addresses the awkwardness of a second feast.
03 February 2013
Bring Up the Bodies
For anyone with a passing knowledge of Tudor history, the book should have little suspense: we know, after all, how all of the characters end up. (In both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies there are, at the beginning of the book, lists of characters with descriptions, a sort of dramatis personae that eliminates the need for tiresome exposition.) For every character we know it is just a matter of counting down the years, the months, the days, until their demise (usually violent, in that time, it seems). And yet Mantel is a fine enough author to make it all gripping. We know Anne Boleyn's fate, of course, and Catherine of Aragon's, and Thomas Cromwell's, but it is still fascinating to read about them as Mantel has written. She has managed to make us root for a man of questionable integrity. As she writes it, Cromwell is a modern man who happens to have lived in the late Renaissance. But it's not so hacky as that might sound; he is a man of unsure religious conviction, a moneylender (which is to say, capitalist), lawyer, extortionist, possibly a murderer. But he is sympathetic, as she writes him.
It is also helpful that Mantel is capable of simply stunning prose:
When he sleeps he dreams of the fruit of the Garden of Eden, outstretched in Eve's plump hand. He wakes momentarily: if the fruit is ripe, when did those boughs blossom? In what possible month, in what possible spring? Schoolmen will have addressed the question. A dozen furrowed generations. Tonsured heads bent. Chilblained fingers fumbling scrolls. It's the sort of silly question monks are made for. I'll ask Cranmer, he thinks: my archbishop.
...
He sleeps again and dreams of the flowers made before the dawn of the world. They are made of white silk. There is no bush or stem to pluck them from. They lie on the bare uncreated ground.
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