Many years ago I went to a Sunday morning Eucharist in the Coptic Cathedral in Addis Ababa. As in all Orthodox churches there was not what you might call a hushed stillness about the liturgy but I do remember clearly the children coming back from communion with their hands over their mouths and an expression of awe or perhaps suppressed excitement in their wide open eyes because they had just received communion.
Their expression reminded me of a wall painting I had seen in an Egyptian monastery; most of the painting had flaked away and all that was left was the head of the Virgin Mary with wide open almond shaped eyes and a finger on her lips again giving a sense of silent wonder.
It was the intention of those Anglo Catholic priests who worked in the slums in the late 19th century to create something of that atmosphere in their ‘high church’ liturgies, to put before the eyes of the people the pattern of the worship of heaven. We see this mood reflected in the hymns from that period as they try to recreate something of ‘the vision glorious’:
Sweet sacrament divine,
Earth’s light and jubilee,
In thy far depths doth shine
The Godhead’s majesty.
Or again:
Let all mortal flesh keep silence
And with fear and trembling stand.
Or the hymn from which the phrase ‘the vision glorious’ comes:
Yet she (the church) on earth hath union
With God the three in One
And mystic sweet communion
With those whose rest is won.
Such hymns create an atmosphere which is a far cry from 19th century Anglican matins where the Church Warden used to have to go through the church waking up members of the congregation (though not the Lord of the Manor who could be reading the newspaper in his private pew with its own fire place – heated bricks might be provided for the laity to keep their feet warm). Of course the Church Warden might be unable to observe these duties if he was smoking his church warden pipe where the stem was long enough to allow the bowl of the pipe to be outside the window. Of course not all Anglican worship was like this but the atmosphere in most Anglican services even if conducted with decency and propriety would have been a long way from creating a sense of the vision glorious and the worship of heaven.
I write this as a way of introducing the idea that we might this Lent think about the atmosphere of our worship at St John’s. The aim of our main Sunday Eucharist is to be as welcoming and inclusive as we can make it. The music will not always appeal to everyone, we may sometimes choose hymns that are unfamiliar, the sermons may sometimes cause you to think about something entirely different, or we may find ourselves easily distracted or worried about whether our children are making a noise; most of these things we cannot change. But we can do something about other aspects of the service; we can make the silence before confession a little longer; we can make our sermons a little shorter and leave a few moments of silence when the preacher has left the pulpit; we can reduce the length of our intercessions and leave a little more time for silence between each section; at the start of the service we can take our places quietly and during communion keep silent before and after we have received. And the purpose of such silences will be to focus our minds a little more clearly, to remember that it is God we are addressing in most of the things we say in Church.
Silence can of course feel very unfriendly and lifeless (‘silent as the grave’); we can feel anxious if the silence is suddenly broken by the sound of a dropped toy or a hungry baby; if we are naturally extrovert silence is perhaps harder for us to cope with than if we are more introvert – though Quakers are by no means all introverts. A lively silence is one in which we have a greater sense of being together in silence rather than shutting each other out. A lively silence is one where you have a sense that everyone is focussed on the same thing, rather than thinking their own thoughts about what to have for lunch or how a meeting will go on Wednesday, or what the person in front of you is wearing. One of the greatest privileges for a preacher is to realise that everyone is actually concentrating on what he or she is saying. In the same way we should be concentrating on what any part of the service might be saying to us through words, or music, or silence, or in the bread and wine – for in all these things God is speaking to us – and the radiance of his glory is flickering at the edges of all our worship if only we have the eyes and ears reverently to perceive it.
With my love and prayers for a holy and reverent Lent,
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker