A Prayer Book November
'Mid withered hues and sere ... - John Keble, 'Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity'.
With November, we enter into late Autumn. Autumnal glories and riches of fade. The days are shorter, late afternoons darker. The year is turning. If October was marked by quietness, a sense of change can be felt in November, a sense of change reflected in the characteristics of a Prayer Book November.
Final Sundays after Trinity
The long stretch of Sundays after Trinity comes to an end in November. Trinitytide started in the days of early Summer. It draws to a close amidst the colder, darker days of late Autumn. The collect for Trinity XXI, with its reference to "a quiet mind", reflects both the character of Autumnal days and of the weeks of November preceding the drama of Advent.
In its echo of the Second Collect at Evensong ("may pass our time in rest and quietness") and of the first Exhortation in the Communion Office ("and with a quiet conscience") it also summarises how the virtues of the life of Faith reflected upon throughout Trinitytide are our natural end, the end for which we have been created and to which we are called. This aspect to a Prayer Book November is, of course, indicated by the month opening with All Saints' Day: "so to follow thy blessed Saints in all virtuous and godly living".
We see this too in the collect for Trinity XXII petitioning that we be "free from all adversities, and devoutly given to serve thee in good works". The closing weeks of the Prayer Book's liturgical year are also thus something of an anticipation of Advent, for - in the words of the Athanasian Creed - "they that have done good shall go into life everlasting". Again, the collect for All Saints' Day prepares us for such reflection when it refers to the "unspeakable joys" of the Church's hope.
Civic commemorations
The beginning, middle, and end of a Prayer Book November are marked, in different ways, by civic commemorations, seeking to sanctify our common life. The historic commemoration of the Gunpowder Plot on 5th November was an opportunity to recognise both the potential fragility of shared life in the polity, and the need for this life to be protected and respected. As such, this commemoration embodied the petition in the Litany that we be delivered "From all sedition, privy conspiracy, and rebellion", from the evils and sorrows which follow upon the disordering of our common life.
Remembrance Sunday in these Islands and in Canada provides for a gathering up in prayer of national memories of immense loss and sacrifice. While not commemorated in the BCP, the Prayer Book has profoundly shaped the prayers and piety of Remembrance-tide. The idea that the Church would not seek to ensure that prayer, commemoration of the departed, and God's blessing upon national life were not defining characteristics of Remembrance-tide represents a profoundly un-Anglican understanding of the Church's mission to and relationship with nation, society, and culture. Instead, as a sign of the gathering up of all things into Christ, it is right that Remembrance-tide's experiences of loss and sacrifice, and the national stories it recollects, are placed within a Christian understanding of death and life, of love and sacrifice, of the right-ordering of our common life.
Both of these commemorations can also orient us towards Advent, evoking the need for the justice and righteousness that will be established when "he shall come to judge the quick and the dead".
And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
Thanksgiving Day in the United States has long been marked with Collect, Epistle, and Gospel in the Prayer Books of PECUSA. The collect in the 1928 BCP wonderfully evokes the agrarian imagination of Anglicanism, rooting Thanksgiving not in the excesses of commercialism but in the blessings of the Harvest:
O MOST merciful Father, who hast blessed the labours of the husbandman in the returns of the fruits of the earth; We give thee humble and hearty thanks for this thy bounty; beseeching thee to continue thy loving-kindness to us, that our land may still yield her increase, to thy glory and our comfort; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
It is another example of the significance and power of Anglicanism's agrarian imagination, challenging the assumptions and practices of much contemporary economy activity and ideology, calling us to a political economy shaped by gift and gratitude, rather than the ugly grasping of commercialism and individualism. In the words from Malcolm Guite's Thanksgiving Day sonnet, the collect sets forth "our deep coinherence, Inwoven in the web of God's own grace".
Black Letter Days
Two Black Letter days have particular meaning in November. The first is Martinmas, the commemoration of St. Martin on 11th November. Traditionally associated with the beginning of a fast which lasted until Christmas, it harked back to observances in some regions of a longer Advent. The day was also widely recognised as signalling the onset of Winter. The second is Catherine on 25th November, another day held to herald the end of Autumn. As one 19th century naturalist put it:
The decay and fall of the foliage is a phenomenon which takes place during the autumnal season ... continuing till the feast of St. Catherine, Nov. 25th, after which few leaves are left.
These Black Letter Days, then, remind us of the passing of Autumn and the approach of Advent. They mark for us the passage of time and seasons, one of the reasons why the bishops in 1661 defended the inclusion of Black Letter Days in the Kalendar. As such, they attune us to a richer, more natural, and organic understanding of time than is imposed by contemporary economic activity and cultural proclivities. Martinmas and Catherine's Day call us to prepare both for the message of Advent and the short, cold days of Winter.
Stir-up Sunday
The Sunday next before Advent: the concluding Sunday of the Prayer Book's liturgical year definitively orients us towards Advent. The deeply resonant collect petitions that we may bring "forth the fruit of good works"; the reading for the Epistle, from Isaiah, speaks of "a King ... [who] shall execute judgement and justice in the earth"; the Gospel reading, John's account of the feeding of the five thousand, has a deeply eschatological echo, with its "Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost".
The richness of this provision, an integral part of the Prayer Book tradition, and with a cultural resonance not entirely lost and worthy of nurture and renewal, stands in stark contrast to the artificial adoption of the recent Roman innovation of Christ the King. Not only are the origins of this observance difficult to reconcile with classical Anglican ecclesiology, it was, until the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, celebrated in October. It is a deeply unfortunate example of recent Anglican liturgists having little or no respect for their own tradition that they would feel a need to conform to an innovation entirely foreign to the Anglican tradition.
Stir-up Sunday rightly draws the liturgical year to a close by gathering up the manifold petitions of the collects of Trinitytide for the fruit of good works in our daily lives, and orients us towards the Advent season, that "when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead", then we "may of thee be plenteously rewarded".
Saint Andrew's Day
In the various classical Prayer Books of the Anglican tradition, the observance of Red Letter Days commences - rather than, as in contemporary Anglican provision, concludes - with Saint Andrew's Day. He it is who first hears the witness of the Baptist, "Behold the Lamb of God". In the words of Saint John's Gospel:
He first findeth his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, "We have found the Messiah" (John 1:41).
Advent Sunday is, as the 'Tables and Rules for the Moveable and Immoveable Feasts' states, "always the nearest Sunday to the Feast of St Andrew, whether before or after". Saint Andrew's Day heralds the beginning of Advent, the encounter with the Lamb who "hath prevailed" (Revelation 5:5), whose "marriage supper" (19:9) is the Church's Advent hope.
Sky and hills and woods are one, grey and dead ...
At night houses shine out in cries across fields of floodwater,
The cold of wet and wind like the cut of a spade
in a bare hand - Kenneth Steven, 'November', in Evensong.
The increasingly bare landscape, the darker days of November are the background to a sense of longing murmuring throughout the month's liturgy, becoming clearer and explicit in Stir-up Sunday and Saint Andrew's Day. Autumn is passing, marked by Black Letter Days and, in the United States, Thanksgiving. Through these weeks, as the landscape prepares for Winter, so the Prayer Book tradition prepares to turn to the Advent hope.
(The first painting is John Atkinson Grimshaw, 'In Autumn's Golden Glow', c.1880. The second is by the same artist, 'November', 1879).
Comments
Post a Comment