Acts of Restraint

Back in the old days, if your church used the English (or even the Roman) Missal, you might have been used to the way the liturgical calendar was organised. The complex system of hierarchies between feast days was mainly intended to determine which prayers should be said, on what day, and in which order. Things are, thankfully, rather simpler in Anglican Common Worship (and in fact in the Roman observance nowadays – there is only ever supposed to be one collect on any occasion rather than a set ordered by the rank of the feasts they commemorate), but even with us the system survives in the form of its Principal Feasts and Holy Days, Festivals, Lesser Festivals, and Commemorations. Individual churches will always have had their own ways of marking these liturgical distinctions which have grown up according to local circumstances – best sets of vestments, or candlesticks that are brought out for special occasions, and the like. That’s only natural, as much a way of meditating on the mystery of Christ as general things like liturgical colours are.

Now Rick our verger is a great blessing, but he does illustrate the law that liturgical custom, left to its own devices, tends to escalate. Not long ago I came out into the Lady Chapel to celebrate a quiet midweek mass to find that, unbeknownst to me, he’d arranged with a relatively new member of the congregation who collects icons to bring in a massive icon of whatever-day-it-was, which was sat on an easel atop a draped table right in the centre of the very modest available space. I have had to stress that extra elements are not introduced into services without me being asked, but Rick does keep forgetting. A few days before Remembrance Day I arrived to find little standard British Legion poppies fixed on all the pillars with blu-tack, and palm crosses coloured green in strategic positions, over doors and on chair-backs – because green is the seasonal colour. They all had to come down, and I had to devise a form of words which expressed the truth ‘this looks rubbish’ in a kindly way. Last Sunday, it being the feast of Christ the King, I realised too late as the 8am mass started that Rick had put the great brass cross and accompanying candlesticks on the old High Altar to mark, as he thought, a special day – but not as special as Christmas and Easter when we usually make use of them. Joy the sacristan took them down later on, replacing them by our standard, simpler ones. 

I despair at having to restrict people’s enthusiasm over such petty matters, but beneath them is the tendency we all have to impose ourselves on our surroundings, and that’s a spiritual business. The point about the rules of managing feasts and observances, complex or simple, is that they provide an agreed way of controlling the worship space, and making sure we all serve them rather than bend it to our own predilections. They are about restraining our self-regard. The church doesn’t belong to us as individuals, no matter how well-meaning we think we are: it is the physical medium by which a community talks to God and God talks to them: lose sight of that, and there's no end to it. From time to time, even I have to remember that, too.