Holy Week and its Variations

Fr Thesis points us all towards a series of talks Dr Robin ward at our old alma mater St Stephen’s House, Oxford, has been giving over recent days about the development of the liturgies of Holy week, and good value they are too if you like that kind of thing (I’m not surprised Dr ward’s audience in the House Chapel is not a large one: even when I and Fr Thesis were there, one would have to be extraordinarily dedicated to attend the most interesting of talks if you didn’t actually have to). The Father Principal points out that what we tend to think of as extremely venerable ceremonies are in fact often not that old at all (‘going all the way back to 1956’) and have been moved around, reorganised according to different assumptions, and altered to make different points on many occasions before reaching the forms we are familiar with now, either in Anglican Common worship or in the Roman Rite. What a Christian in late-medieval England would have been used to doing was quite different from either the pre-1955 Roman ceremonies or the current ones.

A few days ago, Marion, our former curate, came back to Swanvale Halt for a memorial service and found me at the café opposite the church to snatch a couple of minutes’ conversation. She is now part of a parish in Devon, and told me how good it felt to look through the door of our church ‘where it’s all tidy and orderly’. Her current incumbent has a tendency ‘to make up liturgy as they go along – it’s never the same two times running’.

I can’t find any evidence that I have talked about this before, so I will take this Holy week occasion to admit that, despite my bias against home-made liturgy, I have made up at least two things myself. The first comes on Ascension Day. During Eastertide, the Paschal Candle, the big one carried into church in the darkness of Easter morning to signify the resurrected light of Christ, sits beside the altar, but when Eastertide is over it only comes out for baptisms, and for funerals if you are so inclined. Here there is an ambiguity. Under the modern Roman Rite, the Candle moves to the Baptistery on Pentecost Day; but in the old version it was taken away at the end of Mass on Ascension Day, and not used again until the blessing of the font at the Vigil of Pentecost. One year at Lamford I and Il Rettore had a discussion about this and neither of us could remember for sure which it should be. We decided to move the Candle on Ascension Day, as it made more symbolic sense: Jesus has now returned to heaven and we await the coming of the Spirit. So after communion at the Ascension Day mass and before the final blessing he and I took the Paschal Candle to the back of the church and placed it on its stand beside the font. Once installed at Swanvale Halt I felt something could be made of this and devised a little chant based on the words of Psalm 47 and lifting the first few notes shamelessly from Finzi’s anthem 'God is Gone Up', to accompany the motion. Gratifyingly in Ceremonies of the Liturgical Year I see that Mgr Peter Elliott also suggests transferring the Candle in procession to the final hymn or an appropriate chant, and includes a form for doing so, even though it’s not an official part of the Roman liturgy. Great minds and all that.

The other extra I do at Swanvale Halt will come tomorrow, on Good Friday. When I first became interested in all this as a layperson, I discovered the medieval custom of ‘burying’ the Host at the end of the services of Good Friday, in the Easter Sepulchre many churches had then or some other place, and then ‘resurrecting’ it to great joy and celebration on Easter Day: I also realised this was basically incompatible with the emphasis on the entry of the light which is the focus of the ancient, and the modern, Easter Vigil. Now my predecessor at Swanvale Halt had celebrated Good Friday with a rather formless service including poetry and interaction but no communion or Passion narrative, and I brought back something more like the version of the liturgy I’d known at Lamford. But after communion, you still need some hosts to reserve in case they’re needed, even during the Triduum. There they are on the stripped altar; what to do with them? Here we have two aumbries, the one in the Lady Chapel where the Sacrament is normally reserved, and a secondary one in the north aisle where we keep the oils. I decided to return the remaining Hosts not to the first aumbry whence they’d been brought, but the second, wrapping the ciborium in the corporal that had been spread on the altar for communion. It was a bit like burying the Host in the Easter Sepulchre as medieval Christians would have done, the burial of Jesus being something our modern rites miss out. So the next time I did it, I added some texts, taken from the miserable Psalm 88 (Diamanda Galás’s favourite) and the Troparion of the Burial from the Orthodox liturgy: words put into the mouth of Joseph of Arimathea to address Pilate, ‘Give me that stranger, who all his life had walked as a stranger …’.

I like to think that these two little observances, probably without any parallel across the Church of England, aren’t indulgent stuff I have made up for the sake of making a point, but very practical customs that arise from the existing liturgy and the form of our church building. At least that is what I will tell the bishop, not that he would ever be that interested!