Against the sectarian temptation: parish and common prayer

This is not a post concerning Traditionis custodes.   That is a matter for Roman Catholic friends to discuss and debate.  When reading some contributions to this debate, however, I was struck by the following statement from an insightful article in the Church Life Journal:

Many traditionalist Catholics see this liturgical bomb exploding with some very dangerous theological and ecclesio-political shrapnel. Normally North American or European, they see the curtailing or elimination of the pre-conciliar liturgy as a threat to carefully curated socio-cultural traditionalist havens (parishes, schools, social networks, online communities), where the putative rot of “modernity” or “the culture” and the errors or even heresies rampant in the post-conciliar Catholic Church can be held at bay, ideally to be eventually reversed.

Whether or not this accurately describes Roman Catholic communities using the 1962 Missal is for others to determine.  It does, however, rightly identify the contemporary sectarian temptation: the gathering of those who agree on all the hot-button issues, taking the same stances on the culture-war issues in church and state.  

The above description is certainly suggestive of communities which identify with the ecclesial and political Right. The sectarian temptation can, of course, also present itself on the ecclesial and political Left, with a desire for ecclesial communities free of those who are conservative, centre-right, or even moderate on a range of culture-war issues.

Against the sectarian temptation, however, two examples come to mind.  The first is the Save the Parish campaign in the Church of England.  In an article in The Critic, priest and theologian Alison Milbank noted the diversity of the campaign:

We’re like the parish itself in uniting young and old, Telegraph and Guardian readers, heartlands and metropolis, high and low flavours of Anglicanism, all of us nourished in some way by the parochial.

Similarly, last year, the former chair of the Prayer Book Society, Prudence Dailey, pointed to a key reason for the Society's success in encouraging support over recent years for the Prayer Book, particularly amongst younger clergy and laity:

the Prayer Book Society has recognised the need to present itself unambiguously as a single-issue organisation, avoiding involvement in ecclesiastical or theological controversies not directly related to the Book of Common Prayer, in order to build the widest possible constituency of support across the breadth of the Church.

Parish and Prayer Book.  We should not be surprised that these stand against the sectarian temptation for this is part of their very purpose.  The parish church, rooted and grounded in place, seeks the sanctification and blessing of locality and the wider community.  The Prayer Book provides common prayer, for "all the whole Realm", historically common to diverse political and theological allegiances.  Both, in other words, should militate against "carefully curated ... havens" (whether conservative or progressive), being instead experiences of common ground, drawing diverse allegiances and experiences into the Christological centre through prayer, Word, and Sacrament.

Both parish and Prayer Book can be, of course, be employed to serve the ends of "carefully curated ... havens". To do so, however, is to reject their purpose, to rend the parish from place and community, and to make common prayer uncommon worship.  A parish rent asunder from place and community is merely an assembly, not a gathering up into Christ of locality, land, memory, and communal relationships.  As for the Prayer Book used for uncommon worship rather than common prayer, this points away from and minimizes the Christological centre which the Prayer Book serves and embodies, suggesting another centre for the Church's life and witness, another centre which disorders the purpose of Prayer Book and common prayer.

In a cultural context in which partisanship, divisiveness, and the loss of common ground is all too evident, the Church should be nurturing those aspects of its life which enable common ground, which do not conform to the retreat into "carefully curated ... havens" which militate against living "in love and charity with your neighbours" and obscure the truth that God "desires everyone to be saved".  The Anglican commitment to parish and Prayer Book is, then, no quaint or reactionary stance, but a means of offering a deep and refreshing humanism in a sectarian age.