Singing Drivel

There are seven hundred twenty numbered hymns in The Hymnal 1982, though in practice the number is somewhat lower, due to multiple tunes and certain songs unsuited to ordinary hymn singing (e.g. the rounds). So let's say that the actual number is more like the six hundred that the 1940 hymnal contained. In actual practice no parish uses them all: some are just duds, and the office hymns simply see little use as people don't do those services much, and there are all the unsingable new tunes. But a lot of them simply do not reflect the taste of whoever sets up the liturgy. And the warhorses that people want to hear over and over leave less room for others. Our organist comes from outside the Anglican tradition, and she frequently asks me whether the congregation knows a certain hymn. I've at least looked at every single one, if not sung them all. (You can hear one of a few marathon trips through the lot here.) THe truth is that our parish, for several reasons, works with a relatively small subset of the entirety: if we use as many as half the total in a three year lectionary cycle, I'd be quite surprised. I suspect the number is closer to a third, probably less. Pne opf those reasons is that we also have a band, so that half the hymn slots are taken up by their songs.

But on top of this the new rector likes to put in music from the various supplements. We have enough Wonder Love and Praise copies to put them in the pews, though we haven't bothered to in years. Mostly what we sing from there are "contemporary" RC music warhorses, and it's always the same few. We also have Lift Every Voice and Sing for music from the black church tradition. Again we don't range widely through it.

But I haven't kept up with the progression of supplements, and lately we've been getting ones with newly written material. Occasionally there is a winner among these: "Mary Heard the Angel's Message" is a good text with a good melody. More typically the music is marginally tolerable, but the text is, well, bad.

Especially they tend towards the precious. Writing your own version of the Benedicite is always a risky business, especially when St. Francis almost certainly did a better job (and got it set twice n the hymnal at that: "All Creatures of Our God and King", which everyone sings, and "Most High Omnipotent Good Lord", which nobody does). You are already at peril of getting the treatment C. F. Alexander got at the hands of Monty Python:

All things dull and ugly
All creatures short and squat
All things rude and nasty
The Lord God made the lot.

And that leads to one of the hymnal duds: "Earth and All Stars", which most likely got in on the strength of a good tune and a reasonably good first verse. After that, it goes steeply downhill, what with the "loud humming cellos" and "loud boiling test tubes", and again there's that problem that parody is all too easy:

Vermin and pests,
Loud gnawing termites,
Sing to the Lord a new song;
Insects and bugs,
Loud stinging hornets,
Sing to the Lord a new song.

(I have more where that came from.) This peril has not however dissuaded others from trying thigs along the same line. So this past Sunday we got "God of the Sparrow" by Jaroslav Vadja, who as it happens has an entry in the hymnal: "Now the Silence, Now the Peace"; it makes for a nice solo during communion but which s not terribly practical for congregational singing. This "new" hymn (it actually dates from the late 1980s and appears in the 1989 UMC hymnal) at least has verses and a singable if not great tune, has the same kind of structure as "Earth and All Stars": each verse is the same except with different nouns filled in the blanks. And I'm sorry, Mr. Vadja, but on top of the problem of easy parody, the langauge is stilted and contrived. And yes, the parody. If "how does the creature say awe" brings to my not-inclined-to-reverence mind the point in the first George of the Jungle movie where the narrator is arguing with the characters about the "aaaw" they are experiencing seeing Ape Mountain for the first time, the urge to stick in random words is nearly irresistable. As it is, I kept my mouth shut and tried to think of other things.

Look, I know about writing hymns: it isn't easy, especially when you're trying to say something "new". I've tended to write my own texts, if only to escape copyright issues, but it is also difficult to find good material because the field is so heavily plowed and because so much of it is, well, sentimental tripe. There's a reason why most of the 400s from the 1940 hymnal didn't make the cut for 1982: they represent a Victorian piety and sentimentality which just didn't survive two world wars and then the sixties, at least not in my church.Mostly mine are assembled from BCP and scriptural material, which also helps me avoid theological novelty. I did set one of the Davids Adams's texts, but these are patterned after old Celtic forms (and as it happens, the one I chose also ended up in the New Oxford Easy Anthem Book), but by and large I find way too much recent material to be contrived and precious. And you always the risk of writing bad theology like "Mary Did You Know" (answer: YES! SHE DID!).

And as it stands, everyone knows the hymnal revision process is not going to kick into gear any time soon; but at the same tine, there is the same dissatisfaction with it that one sees with the BCP rites: a loss of nerve in the face of "progressive" social sentiment. Which is not totally bad: I'm plenty happy to sing a hymn written from the Virgin's perspective, if it be well-written and the theology be sound. But at the same time, they could crack the hymnal itself and try something "new" there.

Is There Anything on the Other Hand?

How many Episcopalians does it change a light bulb these days? As many as it takes to form the committee to decide between CFLs and LEDs.

The story from Mark this Sunday, in which the subject of food and dish washing before meals (as prescribed by tradition) is raised, is a terrible temptation to give a Change sermon. After all, it uses the word "traditions"; what more is needed? Well, to start with, the rest of the passage. Once again the RCL reading leaves out a substantial portion of the text, so that of twenty-two verses the congregation hears but thirteen of them. And it isn't as though there is an intervening story or parable in this; they simply cut out first Jesus' condemnation of the pharisees' hypocrisy, and second his statement that what one eats cannot defile. The sense of it is plain, all put together.

But it doesn't have a lot to do with tradition in the church, and especially not within the typical Episcopal parish. This is particularly obvious when talked about in the context of the typical tradition (which is to say, story) of tradition (which is to say, custom) in the Episcopal Church. That tale is that we are fixated on the past, and doggedly resist changing anything. So what is that past? Let's start with the current Book of Common Prayer, proposed in 1976 and ratified in 1979. These are printed as two different editions, but as far as the text is concerned, the constitutions and canons dictate that the text of the book itself be identical between the two, because any changes to the book itself requires two GCs to pass. The only difference between the two is the word "proposed" on the title page and that the certification page has different text and has a copyright notice in the 1976 book.

I was sixteen when the proposed book came out, midway through high school. People born that year are approaching forty, so that except for a few retrograde parishes (and the various Anglo-Catholics) these relative youngsters have never had the opportunity to experience the "old" prayer book. It would not at all surprise me that very few Episcopalians my age remember doing the 1928 rite week in and week out; 1979 has in many places become the de facto "old prayer book" since Enriching Our Worship came out in 1997. And while I've heard of struggles in which altar guilds supposedly nailed altars to the wall and otherwise impeded the March of Liturgical Progress, I regard them as strictly legendary. Episcopal priests perhaps do not enjoy the same absolute freedom to apply the wrecking ball to the furnishings that Roman priests apparently do, but I have yet to come upon a parish where the transition to 1979 Rite II wasn't accomplished with all due haste. And the transition to a post-1979 liturgy is in very many already accomplished, so that if a 1976 book survives in a pew somewhere (which I doubt, considering the condition of my copy) it's because so many parishes use a liturgy from a leaflet which is more or less that of 1979, but might come from EoW or from who knows exactly where.

And it comes down to this, anyway: what goes on in the liturgy these days is a contest between traditions. The differences between EoW and all previous BCPs trace back to notions which were current in academia back when I was in college, if not somewhat earlier. They are barely younger than the BCP, and they come from a mixture of radical theological and secular ideas and movements. "Change" comes down to picking which tradition to follow, an issue to which scripture speaks. "Tradition" is used in a lot of senses in the New Testament, as it covers the transmission of stories and teachings of all sorts. The difference is that when you look at these in the large there is a consistent distinction between good and bad tradition: the latter to be shunned, the former to be clung to.

There's a better than even chance that any preacher my age or older who talks about tradition is going to mention Fiddler on the Roof. But mark well Tevye's three monologues when asked to yield on his daughter's desired marriages: twice he does yield, but on the third time, he states, "there's nothing on the other hand!" Scripture forbids his daughter's marriage to Chava's goyisch suitor, and thus Teyve refuses to consent.

TRECing the Seminary

Surely everyone who follows matters in the Episcopal Church is aware of the struggle at General Theological Seminary. The dean has said things which in retrospect should not have been said, but more disturbingly has unilaterally made changes to the life of the seminary which have elicited objection from faculty and alumni alike. A protest in the form of a work stoppage on the part of most of the faculty has been met with a weasel-worded firing of the lot. The trustees have offered "reconciliation" in a form condescending and imperial while standing firmly behind the dean.

It is ironic that the one official seminary of a liberal church should be at the forefront of the move to reduce university faculty to peonage. Consider the direction that the TREC committee reports have taken, however, and contemplate their proposals to consolidate powers and reduce checks on those powers. This is how they want our seminaries to be run, and this is how they want the church to be run.

TREC's concern for getting things done is in plain conflict with the way church governance is set up to impede that. Voting by orders, consents to episcopal elections, the requirement to approve changes to the liturgy in successive general conventions: these are all mechanisms which slow change in the cause of greater review and consensus. Everything TREC has proposed about changing governance is in the cause of allowing action the face of objections. There's something almost Randian in their faith in forceful management, as though the Very Rev. Howard Roark and the Rt. Rev. John Galt are going to save the church once they have all those impediments to their free reign removed.

Those of us who still remember know this to be the antithesis of Anglican praxis, which of old tended indeed toward the anarchic, yet still grounded in a stubborn, charitable, practical center. We still have yet to see an ecclesiology or missiology expressed from TREC, whose language is rooted in business management. They seem to have no idea of what the business of the church might be, and indeed this amnesia seems to be a disease so widespread at the upper levels of the church as to nearly doom us. To me (and to my young adult children) it seems stupidly obvious that if the business of the church has no religious object, then there is no reason to be involved in its business, and no reason to attend to a pale non-worship of the oft-renamed god of the upper middle class intelligentsia.

It all keeps coming back to recollection and repentance. I do not know the circumstances or the precise substance of the dean's remarks, and to some very large degree I do not care. What I do care about is the mentality where he comes in to unilaterally upend the spiritual life of the place to no clear purpose. I do not care whether he is empowered to do so (and there is plenty of complaint that this is not how this is done in academia, anywhere); appeal to the raw exercise of power is not something I find in the New Testament. It of the same destructive ilk as the currently fashionable theory about how the interim is supposed to come into the parish and shake things up so as to make it easier for the new rector to impose his regime on things. My experience after four of these transitions is that more humble respect of the traditions and character of the parish would result in a stronger congregation instead of one weakened by the dispersal that is the result of such deliberate disruption and disregard. I have to think the same holds true for our seminaries, but more so; reducing them each to theological and liturgical Laodiceas is the road to having their graduates spewed from the mouth of anyone seeking the savor of Godly spiritual food.

No, what needs to be done is to remember what being Anglican entailed, and turn back to it, rather than to look to schemes whose hidden premise appears to be that we need to become less what we are as fast as possible.

TRECing to Calvary: Part 1

I must confess that I have paid exactly no attention to the whole re-imagining the church restructuring project. "Re-imagining" alone is enough to put anyone of even vaguely traditionalist leanings off their feed, with its promise of jargon-laden platitudes. Besides, Anglo-Catholics, and probably most of us central churchers of sufficient age, do not have to re-imagine the church: what we do is recollect the church that was held as an ideal of old.

The emphasis on "re-imagining" instead of recollection (or, heaven forbid, repentance) points at the real difficulty, but Derek Olsen's first thoughts about TREC's first outputs point at the issue from a different direction. He writes:

As a liturgical, sacramental Christian, my main need from the Episcopal Church is a functional worshiping community. Thus, I primarily need:

• A healthy clergy person educated in the teachings of the faith and in the proper conduct of its liturgies
• A sound liturgy with roots in the apostolic and catholic and Anglican tradition shared in common with other worshiping communities

Well, I have the same needs. But as anyone can read here, these expectations aren't being met even now. When I travel, I have to sift parish websites as to whether the priest is going to deliver an orthodox sermon in the context of a prayer book liturgy, and even then it's fairly likely that I will be subjected to some greater or lesser aberration unless the parish makes a point of proclaiming their traditionalism.

What is "re-imagining" likely to do to make this better? I have to think, "less than nothing." If re-imagining doesn't mean repenting of the theological deviance and litigiousness which have characterized the national church of late, then I don't want any part of it. I imagine a church in which its clergy and people stand together each Sunday and unite in stating the Creed without reservation. I imagine a church where I don't have to go over the service leaflet in order to decide whether I will be able to take communion in good conscience. I imagine a church which has the confidence in its liturgy and music to not change everything for fear of offending some unnameable person. I imagine a church that can speak truth to liberal as well as conservative power. I imagine a church whose preachers can speak knowledgeably and confidently from Anglican tradition. But I don't imagine that I'm going to get that any time soon, except through benign neglect.

And that doesn't even begin to address the structural questions. Susan Snooks has, in a series of blog posts, stepped up to the financial consequences of the suggestion to reduce the national church asking to 10%; in her concluding post she describes the proposal as "utterly unrealistic" and brushes up against many of the other ideas being floated along the way. For example, she mentions the notions that the number of delegates per diocese be reduced and that retired bishops be taken out of the voting in their house. Well, OK, and she points out that neither of these proposals would save much, nor would they reduce the unwieldiness of GC. So what would they do? Well, she raises as a question the likely consequence: it would be easier to push innovations through GC because smaller margins would be needed in the Deputies. One must also assume that part of the reason to unseat the retiree bishops is to reduce their ability to slow change, not they they are effective in that wise now.

Excessive inertia is part of the church's problem, but it isn't church structures that cause that. The real inertia is how we are stuck in a certain 1970s mindset, which I will discuss in the second post.

Change and the Passive Voice

Over at the Daily Episcopalian we have another one of those vague paeans to Dealing With Change that get on my nerves so. The problem that I always see in talk about Change is exemplified by the title of the piece: "Change Happens". Well, in church change usually doesn't just "happen". There is far too much talk of change in the passive voice, when most of the time what we come upon is people changing things. Sure, some processes produce change over time whether we do anything about them or not, but those who make changes need to accept responsibility for doing so and not talk about what they've done as if it were inexorable and uncaused.

Societal and church changes do not flow over us like lava from the earth or waves from the sea. Progress (or ruin, if you don't like it) in the church and the world is not something that happens; it's what we do. It is not inarguable and irresistible; it is what we will to do. To take two examples from the article: there is no way in which the sexual revolution was not brought about by people deciding to do things differently, under a whole range of influences. It isn't something that just happened; it's something we did. Copulating indiscriminately and aborting the results, divorcing our spouses one after the other: they didn't just happen, but were things people decided to do, and did. Likewise, we changed the liturgy, we retranslated the bible, we decided to look differently at stewardship and activism.

Or to be more pointed about it: people in positions of power changed things. Talk about Change in the liturgy is particularly questionable in the mouths of clerics, given that the words are worked out by church committees and then voted on by General Convention, and then adopted or ignored or altered again by the priest in charge. The liturgy didn't just change; indeed, unless services were interrupted by power outages or meteorite strikes or gunfire from passing cars, there is no sense in which the liturgy was not changed by those who direct it. But we keep getting people in power who talk as if they had nothing to do with it.

We are more subtle than they were in Eden: Adam blamed Eve, and Eve blamed the serpent, but we can lay the blame on the universe, on time itself. Nobody decided to erase God the Father from the liturgy; it just changed. Nobody decided we should invite the unbaptized to take communion; it just changed. And we can lay the blame on a world we have disavowed any responsibility for making, and to whom we enslave ourselves because, after all, change is irresistible.

It is time for us to repent of vague talk about Change, which is all too often intended as an anesthetic to deaden the cries of complaint over the rector's latest fancy. Yes, some people resist any change, but others hate any stability. Humans, in their contradictory nature, need both stability and novelty. We need to address both on their merits, and not shrug off the responsibility for choosing either.

No Man's Prayer Book Is Safe

...while General Convention is in session. At least, that's the risk offered by one resolution, as Bishop Martins sees it. The offender is A059, which fixes an oversight in the authorization for use of the Revised Common Lectionary. Now theoretically putting everyone on a different lectionary should have gone through the prayer book revision process, which requires an absolute minimum of two GCs to put a change through. The problem is that when they authorized the change to the new lectionary, they forgot about the lessons for the proper liturgies, so that Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, and Holy Week are still only authorized to use the 1979 readings. Well, OK, so they're proposing to spot fix this this GC. Well, as the Bishop observes, once this has been done for this, it's probably available to do for anything. So (to take his example) they could rewrite the marriage rite on the spot. And therefore the BCP could change pretty much every three years, instead of every forty years or so, as in the past. Also, being able to spot-"fix" the text makes attempting changes all that more inviting. And then it's a "Lord" here, a "Father" there, a "sin" in another place, and pretty soon those of us with some attachment to the 1979 book find ourselves stuck with the Enriching Our Worship tripe. We have all these people claiming that we are bound by worship, not doctrine; but of course there's a lot of doctrine in the BCP. And what better way to become even more unbound than we are in today's "what's a rubric" free-wheeling days than to simply change the book constantly. I'm with the bishop. What we don't need is yet another way to slip change into our worship.

Do Nothing, the Musical

Robert Hendrickson has alerted us to the publication of the hymnal revision survey results. And as he notes, one of the results that jumps out right away is that among the laity, almost 50% of those under 30 actively oppose revision. But this needs to be seen in context of a general lay resistance to revision, and the lack of active support for same. Looking at the age group populations again (Table 4 in the report), no age group shows more that 28% support for revision; the lowest expression of opposition is among the 40 year olds, of who "only" 44% are against revision.

I don't feel the need to go over the lay statistics in detail, except to note that the only groups where there is something approaching balance between opposition and support is in the black and native American subgroups. Most other lay results are unsurprising, though there is a strong positive correlation between parish size and opposition that one might not have expected. The clergy results, however, have some very surprising results. Working age clergy tend to favor revision, except for the under thirty set, who not only have some of the strongest opposition, but who are also the least neutral by far: 8% as compared with around 25% for most subgroups. There is a strong difference between the sexes here, with female clergy showing near 50% support (as opposed to the men, who lean towards opposition). Black and Latino clergy also show quite strong support for revision, the latter quite in contrast to the Latino laity.

The music directors patterns are odd: the biggest opposition is shown by those in their 30s, the most support by those in their 40s. They are more supportive of revision, but not to the degree of the clergy. Things get interesting again, however, in the usage statistics. Here there is a hidden problem in that the question was asked of the laity, who are probably unaware that there are almost always some hymns which organists prefer to play out of the 1940 hymnal, so usage of that is probably understated. Nevertheless the picture is clear that the 1982 hymnal remains the standard, with some supplemental use of LEVAS and WL&P (the "black" and "contemporary" books respectively). The survey of utility similarly comes out in favor of 1982; the survey analysis also notes that the clergy are much more negative about 1940 than the laity are.

I'm not sure how to interpret the stylistic results, because it's not entirely clear what the categories mean. Nonetheless, it is clear that most people want a "traditional" service, and most people get it too. One of the surprises here is the preference for sung psalms, which are also more common than I would have guessed. Again, the clergy come off as the most change-minded, and not surprisingly, they are the ones who like chant the most.

One quite surprising result is found in Table 50, where across the board there is a very strong preference expressed for singing as opposed to listening. Every group showed at least a 55% positive response. Another sign of our lack of "what's happening now" is the extremely strong preference for a physical hymnal in the form of a book.

And there's quite a bit more, of greater or lesser interest (for example, there is an extremely pressing need to come up with something for Province IX, where the existing Spanish language supplement is greatly disliked and is little used). However, after saying, "well, we need to think about changing anyway", the report admits the obvious: the support for revision among the laity simply isn't there. And it's also clear, as Hendrickson points out, that the conventional clerical view, that we need to change everything to get the young people into the church, is not borne out by the data.

Finally, I would personally observe that the liturgical output of the SCLM, as we see it in the blue book, does not give me a good feeling about how they would handle hymnal revision. On the contrary, it shows that they have tin ears, not to mention their propensity towards questionable theological novelties. It's best that we stick with what we have, and fortunately it looks as though, on this issue at least, the evidence is in favor of stability.

Do Nothing!

Permit me to be the next one to join the bandwagon behind Jason Ballard's cry for General Convention to do nothing. I can hardly do otherwise given how much of what Ballard says in support of this call to inaction. And besides, if you've been reading my comments on the various liturgical proposals being presented, you'll know that three of the four I categorically object to, and the fourth I have lots of issues with.

It's one thing for the national church to pass self-gratifying resolutions supporting this or that progressive political cause. These resolutions don't help the church, it seems to me, because the people who might join us for our politics are already members. They annoy a lot of the membership, either because of their contrary political commitments, or because there are a few of out there who don't have those sorts of commitments in the first place. But messing with the religion itself: that's terribly destructive. What needs to happen is that the people who have differences with fundamental tenets need to resolve them either by being instructed by the church, or by going elsewhere and cresting their own institutions. (And if they feel they have to take buildings with them, then let them.) The current practice of co-opting church institutions to teach against against it ought not to be tolerated.

And really, constant reconsideration of basic stuff needs to end. It creates a climate in which heresy becomes the norm and orthodoxy is at best tolerated as an aberration, and is in practice actively discouraged. It's too often the case that someone who exerts the first prerogative of orthodox tradition, objection to change, is told that any objection to change is to be dismissed, that change itself is virtuous. In every other context, this is nonsense: some change is good, and some change is bad, and the good should be embraced, and judgement should be based on the merits, not on simply some need for unspecified change. It's really all about power: priests and rectors have power to dictate arbitrary change, and laypeople can do naught but complain. And complaining laymen are dismissed as stick-in-the-muds or fuddy-duddies or fundamentalist troglodytes. In a functional church, social structures within the clerisy, and failing that church discipline serve to rein in untoward change. These plainly do not function in the Episcopal Church, and indeed, church structures are seen as ways to amplify the urge to arbitrary change. So it's best that these structures do nothing at all then that they keep at it.

So I echo the call: General Convention should pass a sane budget, not the one that has been proposed, ratify a few episcopal elections if necessary, and then should go home.