May-day and Eastertide festivity

After Easter. Thus does the Prayer Book tradition describe this present time. Contemporary Anglican liturgies reject this. The Sundays in this season are not 'after Easter' but 'of Easter'. While the Prayer Book tradition expresses festivity by means of the Easter Anthems and the proper preface of Easter Day used during the octave, contemporary liturgies seek to maintain the festivity throughout the fifty days from Easter Day to Whitsun.

It sounds like an expansion of festivity: it is, however, a contraction and narrowing of festivity. It is a contraction and narrowing because it limits festivity to the liturgical, instead of liturgy being an expression of a joy that embraces the social and communal. We cannot sustain social and communal festivity for fifty days (and this is true even in the current circumstances of lockdown).

Hooker reminds us that there are three aspects to festivity, "praise, liberality, and rest":

The most natural testimonies of our rejoicings in God are first his praises set forth with cheerful alacrity of mind, secondly our comfort and delight expressed by a charitable largeness of somewhat more than common bounty, thirdly sequestration from ordinary labours, the toils and cares whereof are not meet to be companions of such gladness (LEP V.70.1).

Festivity needs the social and communal alongside the liturgical. It was for this reason that James I's Book of Sports - a key text in the defence of an Anglican tradition of festivity - refuted the suggestion that "no honest mirth or recreation is lawfull or tolerable in Our Religion" by, amongst other things, permitting "having of May-games ... and the setting up May-poles". This points to how, in addition to the Easter octave, we can mark Eastertide with an authentic festivity.

May-day is a natural celebration of approaching summer: the days grow longer and warmer, flowers bloom, rich greenery emerges. That it falls in the midst of this time 'after Easter' - between Easter Day, Ascension Day, and Whitsun - is a wonderful icon of how all things are restored in and through the Resurrection and Ascension of Our Lord.

That in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth.

While the tradition of the May-pole may be absent from many of our communities, we can recall how it acts as a sign of the joyous fulfilment of the paschal mystery mirrored in the approach of summer:

they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken.

The traditional May-day festivities, and their celebration of the joys of warmer weather and longer days, offer a more meaningful expression of Eastertide festivity than the artificial attempt in contemporary liturgies to sustain Easter festivity over fifty days. What is more, May-day festivities also offer a richer theological account of Easter joy, for the Easter hope, while having at its centre the liturgical proclamation, must also necessarily be social and communal. If the hope of the Resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting does not abundantly flow over into social and communal rejoicing, the Church miserably fails in its proclamation. The physical and the material must be caught up in the Easter hope if it is not to be degraded into the likeness of Gnostic myth.

Having this time of traditional festivity in the midst of Eastertide - festivity rooted in the joyous affirmation of the created order, the material, the physical - enables the Church to unfold the hope of Easter, Ascension, and Whitsun, of "the glory and honour of the nations" feasting in the civitas Dei, in the cosmic summer "for there shall be no night there", gathered around "the tree of life".

Happy May-day.

Why I support the ordination of women: a High Church reflection

A number of commenters on this blog have asked about my occasional expressions of support for the ordination of women to all three orders. With some hesitation, I have decided to post a summary of my own views on this matter. The hesitation is because I have sought on this blog to focus on issues and themes which can unify those who identify with or have respect (grudging or otherwise!) for what we might term 'classical' Anglicanism (the Anglicanism of the Formularies and - yes - of the Old High Church tradition). Some oppose the ordination of women (and I have friends and colleagues who do so, Anglo-Catholic, High Church, and Reformed Evangelical). Some of us support it (again, friends and colleagues covering a wide range of theological traditions). Below, I have organised my thinking around 5 points (needless to say, no reference to Dort is implied). 1. The Declaration for Subscription required of clergy in the Church of Ireland states: (6) I promise to submit ...

How the Old High tradition continued

Charles Gore's 1914 letter to the clergy of his diocese, ' The Basis of Anglican Fellowship ', can be regarded as a classical expression of the Prayer Book Catholic tradition. A key part of the letter - entitled 'Romanizing in the Church of England' - addressed the "Catholic movement", questioning beliefs and practices within it which tended to "a position which makes it very difficult for its extremer representatives to give an intelligible reason why they are not Roman Catholics". Gore provides the outlines of an alternative account and experience of catholicity within Anglicanism, defined by three characteristics. What is particularly interesting about these characteristics is their continuity with the older High Church tradition. Indeed, the central characteristic as set out by Gore was integral to High Church claims over centuries: To accept the Anglican position as valid, in any sense, is to appeal behind the Pope and the authority of t...

'Whether the Lutheran Churches have right Ordinations and perfect succession of Bishops': Jeremy Taylor, 'Episcopacy Asserted', and Lutheran orders

Amidst the bitter controversies over episcopacy in the Three Kingdoms during the early 1640s, controversies which had become war in Scotland in 1637 and then in England in 1642, Jeremy Taylor wrote his Laudian defence of episcopal order, The Sacred Order and Offices of Episcopacy Asserted and Maintained . He proposed in this work that the non-episcopal Reformed churches could have had episcopally-ordered clergy: Those good people might have had order from the bishops of England or the Lutheran churches, if at least they thought our churches catholic and Christian. Leaving aside the reality that, for example, French Protestants would have been placed in an invidious political position if they had done as Taylor proposed, it is the reference to "the Lutheran churches" which is significant. To begin with, a large portion of the Lutheran churches - those in the German lands - were governed by a system of superintendency. It is almost inconceivable that Taylor was not aware of th...

laudable Practice

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