laudable Practice

On this penultimate day of November, and on the cusp of Advent, we draw to a close this short series of posts meditating upon the month of the departed through the words of Jeremy Taylor. In this extract from his sermon at the 1657 funeral of Sir George Dalston, a Cumberland Royalist, Taylor turns to what are, I think, the most significant words in the Prayer Book Order of Burial : I heard a voice from heaven, saying unto me, Write, From henceforth blessed are the dead which die in the Lord: Even so, saith the Spirit, for they rest from their labours. Introduced by Cranmer in BCP 1549, this remained an enduring feature of burial rites in the Prayer Book tradition. Said at the graveside immediately after the committal, it defines the quiet and gentle hope which underpins the Prayer Book's Order of Burial: the faithful departed are now at rest . No post-mortem pains await them. No urgent prayers need be offered for them. We are to carry no fears for them. They are, in Christ, at res...

Each Thanksgiving Day, laudable Practice gives thanks for an aspect of the life and history of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. This year, we turn to the simple, modest ceremonies of early PECUSA worship.  It is, in some ways, a theme particularly appropriate for Thanksgiving Day: modest, quiet, decent ceremonies, after all, echo something of the frugal New England spirit associated with the origins of the day. There was nothing gaudy, loud, or overstated about early Episcopalian ceremonies: minister vested in surplice; kneeling to receive the Sacrament and the sign of the Cross at Baptism; the congregation appropriately kneeling, sitting, standing; a decently attired Lord's Table, with communion rails; quietly plain church buildings consecrated for divine service. In a sermon to the 1786 General Convention, meeting in Philadelphia, William White - the recently consecrated Bishop of Pennsylvania - explained why Prayer Book worship was not defined b...

The rubric introducing the general Confession at the Holy Communion states that both the minister and the communicants are to be "kneeling humbly upon their knees". As John Shepherd notes - in his A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Book of Common Prayer, Volume II (1801) - this is one of only three places in the 1662 rite in which the priest is directed to kneel, emphasising the solemn and corporate nature of the general Confession:  During the whole time of the Priest's officiating at the Communion he is directed to kneel only thrice, at this Confession, at the Collect before the prayer for Consecration, and at the act of receiving. In every other part of the office he is to stand. This was the practice of the ancient Church, and the attitude was probably borrowed from the service of the temple, where the legal sacrifices were offered by the Priest standing. Between the legal and evangelical sacrifice there is the same correspondence that exists between the sha...

From Bishop Bull's sermon ' The Middle State of Happiness or Misery ', an extract which can function as an exposition of the quiet, trusting piety of the Prayer Book Order for the Burial of the Dead, expressed in the invocation of Revelation 14:13 at the graveside, the Lord's Prayer, and the prayer following: Almighty God, with whom do live the  spirits of them that depart hence in the Lord, and with whom the souls of the faithful, after they are delivered from the burden of the flesh, are in joy and felicity ... It is this "place of full security" that Bull sets forth, to our comfort: This discourse is matter of abundant consolation to all good men, when death approacheth them. They are sure, not only of a blessed resurrection at the last day, but of a reception into a very happy place and state in the mean time. They shall be immediately after death put in the possession of paradise, and there rejoice in the certain expectation of a crown of glory, to be bes...

This day being appointed a Fast on our Majesty’s arms against the rebel Americans, I went to Church this morning and read the Prayers appointed for the same. I had as full a congregation present as I have in an afternoon on a Sunday, very few that did not come. Parson Woodforde's diary entry for 13th December 1776 captures something of a feature of Anglican experience over the centuries: civic and national observances often attract a good congregation. Woodforde's words came to mind when recently reading a US Episcopalian critique of such civic and national observances, lamenting the large congregations that services on Independence Day and Thanksgiving Day - what TEC BCP 1979 calls 'National Days' - often attract. This, we are told, represents an enthusiasm for such observances over Christian festivals, contradicting the Christian allegiance to our heavenly homeland, not earthly nations. Against such a view, I think about the parishioners of good Parson Woodforde, gat...

November opened with All Saints' Day, rejoicing with the Communion of Saints in "those unspeakable joys, which thou hast prepared for them that unfeignedly love thee". In mid-November, in these Islands, we had the sombre, emotive observance of Remembrance Sunday. Friends in the United States have just celebrated Thanksgiving, a day with deep cultural resonance, giving thanks unto God "for the fruits of the earth in their season and for the labors of those who harvest them". Next week we will be readying ourselves for Advent. For many of us this will mean the Advent Procession in the darkness of an early December evening. Christmas carol services will also be fast approaching (no matter what the online Anglican/Episcopal 'Advent Police' insist).  It is a liturgically crowded and busy time of year, with feasts and observances rich in meaning. This is precisely why I value Stir-up Sunday and do not observe the 'feast of Christ the King' on the Sunda...

In The Great Exemplar (1649), as Taylor reflects on the Lord's Passion and Death, he provides a discourse entitled 'Of Death, and the due Manner of Preparation to it'. It is appropriate reading for this month of the departed, not least for its reminder that we are always called to be prepared for our death:  And indeed, since all our life we are dying and this minute in which I now write, death divides with me, and hath got the surer part and more certain possession, it is but reasonable that we should always be doing the offices of preparation. Alongside this exhortation to holy living - the "one way of preparing to death" - Taylor also addresses the circumstances of "those days of our last visitation", what the Litany terms "the hour of death". Here he points to the three ministries "at the point of departure", appointed by the Prayer Book : prayer and spiritual counsel, absolution, and reception of the holy Sacrament. While the pr...

Then shall this general Confession be made, in the name of all those that are minded to receive the holy Communion, by one of the Ministers: both he and all the people kneeling humbly upon their knees and saying - BCP 1662 Holy Communion, rubric before the General Confession. In his A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Book of Common Prayer, Volume II (1801), John Shepherd notes the significance of the above rubric produced by the 1662 revision: Till the Restoration the Rubric here stood thus: "Then shall this general confession be made in the name of all those that are minded to receive the Holy Communion, either by one of them, or else by one of the ministers, or by the priest himself, all kneeling humbly on their knees." Does it not hence appear that the confession was made by one only in the name of all? At the Savoy Conference, the Presbyterians requested, that it might be made by the minister only, but at the revision that followed, the Rubric was changed into i...

In his sermon ' The Middle State of Happiness or Misery ', Bishop Bull addressed the Lord's promise to the penitent thief: "Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise". Of particular significance is Bull's obvious reverence for the Jewish context in which the words were spoken and heard, and his quite beautiful description of Jewish piety regarding the relationship between the paradise of the post-mortem state and "the blessed garden". Paradise, that blessed garden: here is the abode of the souls of the righteous after death and before the general resurrection on the last day. That, in Saint Luke's account of the Passion, Our Lord took up the words of Jewish belief and piety regarding the abode of the righteous after death, establishes - as Bull declares - Christian doctrine on the post-mortem state, affirmed also in the Creed's declaration of the Lord's ascension into heaven at the end of the forty days: let us consi...

... ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?  Matthew 16:3 For the most part, the Church of England has reacted to the election of Donald Trump and the UK’s vote to leave the EU (the “Trump-Brexit phenomenon”) by jumping on to the middle-class Establishment bandwagon of outrage and horror. As if set to auto-pilot, the C of E has joined in with those who are decrying the collapse of the liberal consensus and bemoaning a new mood of division in our public life. Bishop Philip North, writing in the Church Times , 1st December 2016 It has, rather predictably, happened again. Anglicans on this side of the Atlantic have interpreted Trump's presidential election victory in apocalyptic terms: the wailing and gnashing of teeth by Anglican clergy on social media has been loud. We might not have been surprised if some had asked for the post-election counselling offered to Guardian staff . This post is not primarily addressed to US readers. Between the...

When Judges were instead of Kings, and Hophni and Phinehas were among the Priests, every man did what was right in his own eyes, but few did what was pleasing in the eyes of the Lord ...  And so Jeremy Taylor begins the Preface of his A Collection of Offices . Published in 1657, when any notion of a restoration of the monarch and episcopacy was not seriously entertained, Taylor was providing liturgical texts to be used in the place of the prohibited Book of Common Prayer: But because things are otherwise in this affair then we had hop'd, and that in very many Churches in stead of the Common Prayer which they use not, every man uses what he pleases, and all men doe not choose well, and where there are so many choosers there is nothing regular ... how much better the Curates of souls may help themselves with these or the like offices, then with their own extempore. In addition to divine service, Curates of souls, of course, also administered the occasional offices. This being so, A ...

It appertaineth to the Office of a Deacon, in the Church where he shall be appointed to serve, to assist the Priest in Divine Service ... When the fifth question at the Ordering of Deacons sets forth the wider duties of the diaconate, William White - in his Commentaries Suited to Occasions of Ordination (1833) - raises the issue of a permanent diaconate as a means of providing for divine service, sermons, and Holy Baptism in communities where it would be impracticable to have an incumbent: But the institution would be still more useful in places in which, because of the small number or the poverty of the people, there can be no permanent provision for a minister devoting his whole time to the service of the sanctuary; an evil, which would be in some measure remedied by the appointment to the deaconship of a proper character, wherever it should offer, with the view not only of his distributing to the poor, but further, for the reading of the Scriptures and discourses, and for baptizin...