It was, I think, 1975, while we were living in 20-something poverty in NYC, that I went to a conference on liturgical revision at St. John the Divine. We met in a large ground floor room. It was spring — the magnolias were in bloom and the peacocks were screeching outside the windows. The new Prayerbook was then in its Zebra Book phase. I had been following liturgical revision in the Episcopal Church from the beginning — or at least from the time at which it had been revealed to the laity. First there were purple mimeographed sheets, then there was the Green Book which fell apart because, as I learnt at the conference, it was produced by a printer that specialized in pornographic literature meant to self-destruct.
I first encountered the new liturgy at a service in a church near my college conducted by the curate. He had served under Bishop J. A. T Robinson, the bishop of Southwark who had declared in Honest to God that belief in a God 'out there' was as foolish as belief in a God 'up there' in the sky. Like his mentor the curate was keen to bring the Church up to date. In one sermon he scolded the congregation for clinging to old, outdated customs and practices. He described how in one church where he'd served there was an old lady who insisted on shuffling down the center aisle to go up for Communion blocking everyone else's way. Wasn't life like that? Older people might not like changes that were coming to the church but they had to sacrifice, to step aside for the young people and not selfishly block their way. I was irritated because I hoped to be an old lady myself one day and didn't want to be told 'Shove over, Granny'.
The curate opened the new liturgy standing at the front of the center of the church by asking all grandparents in the congregation to stand. Half the congregation stood. Then he asked all parents to stand (I could now see where this was going). Then the children. Of course, he said, we were all children — children of God. He selected two representatives of each group, who filed up in pairs like animals going into the ark and arranged them side by side to face the congregation. He then issued them with small flowerpots filled with soil explaining that each pot had a seed in it, and that they were to take their assigned flowerpots home, water them, and bring them back on the following Sunday to show everyone the plants that had sprouted. This was my first experience of the new liturgy.
I didn't come back the next week to see if the seeds had sprouted. I didn't like it. It was patronizing. It was inane, made you feel like a fool, and shamed you into going along with it because if you didn't you were not being a good sport.
After that I followed liturgical revision in the Episcopal Church all the way to the new Prayerbook in 1979 and beyond. In the 1970s we were living in NYC and were members of St. Mary the Virgin, aka 'Smokey Mary's'. It was highest of high Episcopal churches in the country — or so promoters claimed. I was, at the time, enthusiastically Anglo-Catholic so Smokey Mary's was the place to be but there were a number of problems. First, the building, a dark, phony-Gothic squeezed between two buildings was just plain ugly. I didn't like the place. I didn't care for the music either. The exhibitionist organist favored Messiaen on which he improvised at full volume. My husband liked it, but I thought it was just noise. The major problem though was that St. Mary the Virgin was a leader in the Anglo-Catholic crusade against women's ordination.
Women's ordination didn't worry most of the laity. They had only two minor concerns: what would 'it is meet and right and our bounden duty' sound like in soprano or alto rather than tenor or bass? And what would you call them? 'Mother'? But Anglo-Catholics, especially clergy, were violently opposed. I got it, though I didn't agree. The pitch for ordaining women had been that women could do the job, understood in secular terms. Women were doctors, lawyers, corporate executives. They were perfectly capable of doing these jobs and doing them well so why shouldn't they be eligible for the priest job?
This argument was anathema to Anglo-Catholics who fervently believed that being a priest was not a job: it was a supernatural, indelible character that conferred the power to do the magic act, to turn bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ. They saw the campaign for women's ordination as an initiative by atheists in the Church — and there were many in high places including Bishops Robinson and Spong — to deny the supernatural and to expunge everything mystical and spooky from the Church.
I felt that way myself, though I didn't see why women couldn't assume a mystical, spooky character. And I thought that the liturgical revision program was directed to the same end: to make religion prosaic, moralistic, and dull, to eliminate everything fancy and fun — the archaic language, fancy dress, elaborate ceremonies and body language, the metaphysical thrills and spookiness. I wanted church to be an acid trip — and Smokey Mary's at its best did not disappoint.
I was threatened by what seemed to me the anti-religious agenda — by Bishop Pike, who ridiculed the Trinity as 'a kind of committee God', Bishop Robinson who declared that belief is a God 'out there' was foolish, and by Bishop Spong who later declared in the first of his 12 Theses that 'Understanding God in theistic categories as "a being, supernatural in power, dwelling somewhere external to the world and capable of invading the world with miraculous power" is no longer believable. Most God talk in liturgy and conversation has thus become meaningless'. What right did they have to collect bishop salaries when they not only didn't believe the stuff but insulted and ridiculed people who did?
It was only years later that I understood why they had a following. They were not speaking to me. They were speaking to people who had been raised in religious homes, often brought up as fundamentalists to believe that the Bible was literally true chapter and verse, and lived in worlds where church-going was de facto mandatory. They were people who felt guilty about doubting the existence of God — and even about doubting the literal truth of Scripture — and felt intense social pressure to be religious. To them the Bishops' message was liberating. To me it was oppressive and threatening.
I was raised secular. My mother held that religion was understandable in old people facing death and in people who had been 'conditioned'. It was a good thing because it 'kept people in line' — especially 'uneducated people'. She held also that while religion was understandable in people who'd had it beaten into them and were afraid of hell, being interested in religion was 'sick'. Religion was bitter medicine — being interested in it or liking it, was perverted, crazy. The only Bible in our house was hardback green plastic-bound New World Translation of the first seven books of the Old Testament that my mother had accepted from Jehovah's witnesses going door to door to get rid of them. I snuck out of bed after she'd turned in for the night to read bits of it along with pamphlets from the Kotex company that appeared on the dining room table once I looked to be approaching puberty. The Bible, at least the first seven books, was disappointing. I was looking for juicy, spooky stuff but there wasn't any.
From childhood on I had lived in a secular world where religion simply wasn't done and when it was mentioned the view was that it was, of course, not for us and generally a bad thing though appropriate for minorities and people in non-Western countries because it was part of their culture. Freshman year, in the required Western Civ course I managed to avoid by passing a test, Freud's Future of an Illusion was on the reading list and in bull sessions there was much discussion of religion as 'neurotic'. My first real exposure to the Bible was in Biblical studies classes, where we read the standard scholarly literature. It never even occurred to me that anyone thought the Bible was historically accurate much less literally true. There might have once been people who did, Fundamentalists, but that was in olden days and they were now extinct. I didn't think the Bible was historically accurate but I didn't think that that made any difference to religious belief.
Biblical Studies classes were concerned with textual scholarship but other religious studies classes were ideologically-driven. In the intro class we read I think 10 books including Harvey Cox The Secular City, Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton The Death of God, Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison, and Camus' The Plague. I remember being puzzled by the discussion of The Plague, centering on the question of whether one could be 'a saint without God'. I didn't get why this was an issue. Why not? What did religion have to do with saintliness? It didn't make people better or worse — apart, possibly, from keeping uneducated people in line.
I was, in a very peculiar way, innocent: I didn't carry the religious baggage most people did. I never got the whole business about being gay. This issue was problematic for Anglo-Catholic clergy who were defenders of tradition and opposed to women's ordination but of whom many were gay. I had never heard of homosexuality until I got to college when a friend introduced me to a guy who, she said, was 'homosexual' and explained to me what that was. As I learnt more about the way of the world I concluded that being gay was a cool-making factor, along with sex generally, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. As I understood it, gay men were ultra-cool — smart, good-looking, artistic, and posh. Lesbians were the opposite: pathetic fat women who were too ugly to get men. And in this, I think, I read the culture accurately.
During the 1970s, when women's ordination was on the Church's agenda, gay Anglo-Catholic clergy were adamantly opposed because at the time gay male culture, at least in the church, was an ingrown, misogynistic boys' club. Anglo-Catholic clergy changed their views when gay culture changed, when it became unisex LGBT.
The rector of St. Mary the Virgin was on the Standing Liturgical Commission that oversaw prayerbook revision. He had written the new version of the Litany. He assured us that the new Prayerbook would be a victory for Anglo-Catholics because it was created by liturgists and only Anglo-Catholics went into liturgiology. It would mean the end of the Morning Prayer Parish, with Communion only once a month: it meant Mass every Sunday. I was generally in favor of this because though Morning Prayer was a nice service it wasn't spooky. But I thought that it would be a shame to lose the Venite and Te Deum. It was Garfield who told us about the conference on liturgical revision at which, he said, we could make our views known and influence the development of the new Prayerbook.
This was, as I soon discovered, a lie. The purpose of the 'conference' was to sell the laity on Prayerbook revision. It had to be done because in order for the new Prayerbook to be adopted it had to be approved by General Convention at which lay delegates had the vote. Liturgical revision, which I had followed it in the preceding years, was entirely a clerical initiative. Laypeople didn't ask for it, weren't interested in it, and when it was presented to them didn't like it. Priests preached constantly that even if we didn't like it other people did and we had to step aside, sacrifice our interests, to get these people into the church and keep them in. It wasn't exactly clear who these people were. There were the occasional anecdotes about seekers who had stumbled into an Episcopal church but couldn't understand the language, were freaked out by the kneeling, and fled.
Mostly the claim was that it was young people (as I was at the time) who were put off by the archaic language and ceremonial. Old people were to step aside — to give up the language, music, and ceremony they liked for the sake of the young people. I didn't like the new liturgy and I didn't know any young people who did. Most had no use for the church and those who did, mostly young gay men, were even more gung-ho about the fancy language and fancy dress than I was.
The format of the conference was one that later became an industry standard not only in the church but in various other organizations and at work. There were large group sessions at which we were lectured, small group breakout sessions in which we were supposed to discuss the materials that were issued to us, and then reports by the small groups to the assembled body.
In the morning lecture session, a variety of clergy who were involved in the making of the new Prayerbook filled us in on the process and the rationale for various changes. Some of it was good. They'd adopted material from other church's liturgies including the Trisagion, which I liked. Some of the changes seemed to me niggling and silly. In the Prayer of Humble Access the clause 'so that our sinful bodies may be made pure by his body and our souls washed by his most precious blood' was changed because, we were told, it reflected a medieval doctrine according to which the bread took care of bodily concerns while the wine handled soul issues, which was not theologically correct.
Other changes I thought were not good. Churches could do either the Kyrie or the Gloria but would not, normally, do both. To me the mass meant the 5 movements of the musical mass: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Benedictus, and Agnus Dei so this was just wrong. Decades later, at a special liturgical blowout, the rector of my then church did both, with the Gloria first. I complained to the choir director, who agreed that this was bad, and complained to the priest. He came and gave a patronizing little speech to the choir explaining that even though most of the time we just did one of them it was ok to do both the Kyrie and Gloria. This ignoramus didn't know how the mass as a musical form was supposed to go and didn't have the minimal sensitivity to see that it was supposed to be down (Kyrie), up (Gloria, Credo, Sanctus/Benedictus), down (Agnus Dei). Most irritating, he viewed the objection as no more than a little fire he had to put out, someone upset about something they weren't used to who had to be mollified.
Some of the changes proposed at the conference were objectionable not so much overtly as in intent. One was the substitution of 'we' for 'I' in the creed. This, we were told, was the more ancient form. I learnt later that this was a lie: both forms were in use. The main reason for the change, we were told, was that 'I' was individualistic. 'We' was a declaration that the church was community. It was important to disabuse churchgoers of the notion that Christianity was 'you and me Jesus' and that its purpose was individual salvation. Church was community. This was hammered in over and over and was the rationale for many other tweeks and changes in liturgy and proposed church practice. Church should not promote the 'vertical dimension', a supposed relation between individuals and a God 'up there', out of the world, but the 'horizontal dimension', God with us, in community. We came to God by coming together with others in the world to work in the world for 'justice, freedom, and peace' — a phrase repeated early and often in the new liturgy. For this reason, altars had to be turned around if possible or replaced so that the priest could face the congregation. With the priest and congregation all facing eastward the message was that we were directing prayers through the priest and out of the world to some supernatural beyond. With the priest facing the congregation across the altar — if possible a central altar — the message was that we were coming together as a community, that God was with us in community, not in some otherworldly beyond.
A related theme that, I learnt, drove liturgical revision was the need to avoid 'escapism'. Religion was not about escape to another world either in this life or the next. Liturgy was to teach us that religion was about working for 'justice, freedom, and peace' in this world and about 'stewardship' of the earth, another phrase that occurred repeatedly. This was a standard theme, the received view in the church. Malcolm Boyd described how on a Freedom Ride in the South he and others couldn't go to the segregated church in town so they had breakfast together and, Boyd said, that was real communion. Harvey Cox wrote that God was a 'work partner' in the secular city. Over and over the beat went on: real religion was marching in a demonstration, real religion was working in soup kitchens, real religion was community organizing, social work, and political action. Churchgoing was a waste of time, unless it gingered people up for marching in demonstrations. Maintaining church buildings was a wasteful expense — churches should be gutted and turned into homeless shelters. Every grain of incense was bread from the mouths of the poor.
Jeez, I thought, can't we have any fun? Can't I have a little incense and 'Alleluia, Sing to Jesus'? Apart from the details, including the repetition of the 'justice, freedom, and peace' mantra, the underlying program was all, it seemed me, geared to expunge every bit of the numinous, everything spooky and mystical, and all dim religious light from church. We would be allowed at best about 2 minutes of spookiness around Communion, but even that was suspect. I learnt that at a General Convention years later instead of a morning church service delegates got Communion at breakfast, passing around pitchers of wine and plates of bread to eat along with their scrambled eggs. This was the ideal of religion as community and the repudiation of escapism. It was, as the title of a book by some 18th century apologist had it, 'Christianity: Not Mysterious'.
The primary weapon for combatting escapism however was contemporary language. This was what clergy were keenest on and what laypeople hated most. In fact, it was all they really hated. They would have accepted any other change — in fact they wouldn't even have noticed any other change — if it hadn't been for the change in language. People, if they were gung-ho about the Episcopal Church, loved the Prayerbook and were proud of it. There were many in the church who didn't really have an attachment to the Episcopal as such but for echt Anglicans the Prayerbook was the identity marker and the revisionists were fucking it up. Auden cursed the revision from his deathbed, we were told, but that didn't stop them.
Clergy were dead keen on contemporary language. They argued first that the church had to do liturgy in 'language understood of man'. Liturgical revision in the Episcopal Church followed Vatican II revisions that had replaced Latin in the Catholic church with local languages so that the people could understand the liturgy. The Episcopal Church should do likewise. Of course the Prayerbook was in English and, even though it was fancy 16th century English, people had no difficulty understanding it. Ok, agreed, they said. Kinda. But that wasn't really good enough because the point of contemporary English was to send the message that religion was relevant, that it wasn't an escape into some Elizabethan costume drama. This was more killjoy moralism. People liked the language and didn't want to lose it. Clergy however assured us that there would be a Rite I traditional language option for the Communion Service, Morning and Evening Prayer, and the Burial Service 'for the old people' and to 'wean people away' from the old Prayerbook — copies of which were removed from churches and pulped once the new Prayerbook was approved. People weren't allowed to take them because that would thwart the weaning process. The church has now I think backed down on this policy and one can buy 1928 Prayerbooks — now, I suppose, because Episcopalians have been successfully weaned and it is no longer a real and present danger or occasion of sin.
What I think offended people at bottom, even though they could not articulate why they were offended, was that the aim of this liturgical revision was to make liturgy a teaching tool. The revised liturgy was in intent didactic and manipulative, including prayers that were effectively sermons. It was done with skill and with a light hand but was impossible to miss. Clergy liked it because they viewed it as a mechanism for 'using psychology' on us.
In the afternoon we broke into small groups to discuss. I was designated to give the report for my small group and took notes diligently (I was, after all, a grad student) No one in the group liked the revised liturgical materials we were assigned to discuss. In the afternoon, we went back to the large group session. I reported the results of our discussion, in as fair and accurate way as I could, and the other designated representatives of the other groups followed one after the other with their reports, some of which were downright hostile. No one was enthusiastic about the revised liturgy and most just didn't like it. They objected, I recall to a petition to keep safe 'all who travel by land, sea, and air or through outer space'. 'Outer space?' It really jarred. But the real target of animus was the 'Star Trek Canon' as it soon came to be known, which praised God for 'the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in the courses, and this fragile earth, our island home'. People hated it and one after the other said so until one of the leaders, said that he had written it and that there was a point to it even if we didn't understand.
The reports went on, one after the other, with the leaders at the front of the room becoming visibly more irritated until one barked 'You people just resist all change'. There was palpable anger in the assembly and at that point one of the leaders said that we should end the discussion, do Evensong, and then go home. Which we did. So the conference broke up early. I'm not sure if everyone got to give their report.