Our choir at St. James Episcopal Church in Marietta GA had just rehearsed Morten Lauridsen's O Nata Lux for the umpteenth time, our director shaping our performance to be less about notes and more about texture, color, expressive phrasing, and dynamic contrast. Sharon and I agreed, we could've rehearsed it umpteen times more!
The inspiration comes only in part from the words. In Latin, the first line tenderly responds to the birth of baby Jesus, "O light born from Light," and the rest builds to ecstatic proclamations -- about what, I'm not sure; I've forgotten the translation printed inside the front cover of the music, but I feel -- we feel -- unified as a choir and in union with God when we sing it.
As the music was more than its words, what distinguishes Episcopalians may be less about what we say we believe -- and more about how we believe it.
For a series of books aimed at helping Episcopalians understand their church's salient qualities, theologian Mark McIntosh has written about how we come to know God in Mysteries of Faith. In chapter four, "The Voice of God," about revelation, he surveys how the idea of "knowing" something used to have another aspect, participatory and intimate -- as Adam "knew" Eve (74). Since the seventeenth century, "knowing" has been reduced to an intellectual assent to statements.
Interestingly, today both fundamentalists on one side and revisionist liberal Christians on the other remain locked into this early modern scientific approach to knowing. Revelation itself remains for them either encapsulated in tidy, numbered propositions or reduced to whatever domain of science they tend to favor most, such as psychology.McIntosh's alternative to those views is that we come to know some things, such as the meaning of the word "love," only through experiences and relationships.
McIntosh cites professor / theologian Hans Frei's historical survey of the ways the faithful have read Scripture, seeing by the end of the 20th century two basic approaches. Scholars saw Scripture "as though it belonged either to the genre of literal historical record -- in which case conservatives claimed it was a reliable record and liberals that it was faulty -- or to the genre of ancient myth" (86).
For McIntosh, the Scriptures read aloud at every Episcopal worship service public and private, are like a sacrament. Episcopalians understand that to mean the outward and visible form, in a rite such as eucharist or baptism, of a spiritual reality. Scripture's "outward and visible forms -- stories, prophecy, poetry, letters -- are the revelation of God's invisible and ungraspable presence" (86).
McIntosh writes that we encounter God not through a bottom - line - pop - quiz lesson of Scripture, but through the language itself. He's describing what our choir experiences when we participate in creating music that is like a prayer. Earlier in the book, he has described how Scripture tells one overarching story from Genesis to Revelation, a story that super - charges the way we perceive our day - by -day lives. (See my reflection on earlier chapters, "Not the Moral, but the Story" 01/09/2019)
I recognize these ideas from other ancient sources. "As you pray, so you live," says one ancient source. Monasteries and abbeys imposed habits to form the souls of the religious, whose robes are called "habits." The same theory bolsters Islam, as the faithful must practice their faith daily with body, voice, and wallet. A thousand years ago, when "believing" had the active connotation of "beloving," St. Anselm said, "We do not understand in order to believe, but we believe in order to understand."
If historic Christian worship and ancient spiritual disciplines carry the Story that seeps into our social imaginary, this is in no small part because liturgical practices are also intentionally aesthetic and tap into our imaginative core. It is no accident that the poetry of the psalms has long constituted the church's prayerbook, nor is it mere coincidence that the worship of the people of God has always been marked by singing. …[The] inherited treasury of formative disciplines has been characterized by an allusivity and metaphoricity that means more than we can say.Smith here packs in some phrases that together describe how Episcopalians are supposed to experience belief, through re-living in a social imaginary God's overarching Story, re - told every liturgical year through discipline of habitual prayer with song and scripture, morning, noon, and night, with corporate worship and eucharist weekly at least, until the metaphors and allusions, jumping to mind in all situations, meaning more than words can say, can sanctify perception by forming the imagination.
I must say, there's a huge "if" at the beginning of all that. Southern writer William Alexander Percy claimed in his memoir Lanterns on the Levy that the glorious phrases of the King James Bible and Prayer Book seeped into the sleepy brains of undergraduates at their mandatory morning chapel services, transforming them; but, perhaps, as a writer, he was already receptive. I meet Episcopalians for whom the music and repeated prayers are so much filler; what they want is a pointed message at the sermon, communion as a kind of vaccine against hell, and a blessing on the way out the door to real life.
There's another caveat about this emphasis on liturgy. Theologian Verna Dozier wrote Living into God's Dream as a corrective to those of us -- she means most of us -- who substitute worship of Jesus for following his example (04/03/2018). Howard Thurman, mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., writes in Jesus and the Disinherited about his shift of emphasis away from the other - worldly take - all - the - world - and - give - me - Jesus kind of faith to an emphasis on freeing the oppressed here and now (12/24/2015).
But readings like these by McIntosh and Smith have had their effect on me over the past few years. My morning ritual begins when I set up the coffee to brew while I feed the dog and prepare bookmarks in the Bible for readings. With my first cup of coffee, I start the prayer book's "Daily Devotions" for the morning (137). When I get to the Creed, I take the suggestion of Diana Butler Bass to think of it as a prayer -- not just, "I believe this is true" but also, "let these cosmic truths be the context for the day ahead." With plainchant to help me, I've memorized the service, and often repeat it in the car on the way to work, or even lying awake in the wee small hours of the morning. On stressful days, I can simply think the tune, and there rises in me that feeling of trust.
Is "a feeling of trust" enough to make Episcopalians into faithful servants of Jesus, the true "body of Christ" in our world today? I can only testify that the anxiety about obligations and nagging guilt about daily peccadilloes that I used to feel are tamed now by a quiet sense of God's pervasive presence. If I take that out with me out into the world, what difference does God make through me?
I've responded to other chapters in other blogposts:
- (01/09/2019)"Not the Moral, but the Story" about chapters 1 and 2.
- (01/26/2019)"How Episcopalians Believe" considers chapter 4, along with other sources
- (01/30/2019)"Jesus Saves - but how?" about chapter 6
- (02/12/2019) "Theologian Mark McIntosh Sees Drama in Cosmos" about chapter 7.
Other blogposts of mine relate to these ideas:
- "O Praise Hymn," (10/23/12) explains the expressions of the music, even apart from the words;
- "The Power of Liturgy: I've Heard it All Before"(01/06/17) reflects on Inwardly Digest, Derek Olsen's guide to the Book of Common Prayer;
- I recall first becoming aware of the Episcopal church as a "full immersion" experience in "An Especially Good Friday"(03/26/16)
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