In the days of sail every boy and probably every girl was familiar with words like mizzen, shroud and ratline. They also knew all about bit and bridle, pommel and cantle. Today it is parts of a car – cam-shaft, spline and differential – that are part of everybody’s vocabulary. We respect mechanics just as we once respected ostlers and wheel-wrights (with their felloes and spoke-shaves). There is another repository of specialist words used by worshippers that may well not be altogether familiar. Words like Paschal, apse and rubric belong to that repository of quaint terminology peculiar to the Church and to old-fashioned Englishmen like John Betjeman. But these words should not be dismissed out of hand. We need them – and quite often what they stand for.
LITANY
‘Litany’ is one of these words. It is still useful, though it cannot be said to be fashionable in today’s Church. It means prayer, more particularly entreaty, supplication. It is organised intercession and has an incantatory tone that embeds itself in the memory. It makes intercession manageable. (Prayer can become top-heavy with intercession.) It is a word too good to be wasted. The same could be said of its content.
LITURGY
With this word we come to the heart of worship. When we assemble to worship God, do we use words as we use them in conversation face-to-face or on the phone? Or do we follow a script? Is common worship an off-the-cuff expression or is it a form of words bequeathed to us by those who constructed a pattern of depth and substance? Opinions will vary. Attention to form can result in losing the heart of the matter. Renouncing form can lead to shapeless and pedestrian verbiage.
The word ‘liturgy’ means public service. And as with private interpretation (of the Bible) we have to stand on the shoulders of past generations and recognise the special task of a minister of the Word. That is why a Book of Common Prayer and Common Worship have a place in our public worship today.
See ‘A Basic Church Dictionary’ by Tony Meakin (Canterbury Press).
HANS KÜNG
Having read only a sliver of his output over the years, I am hardly in the best position to offer any comment on Hans Küng, the maverick theologian who has just died at the age of 93. However, on the basis that we often make important decisions in life on the basis of inadequate knowledge and that we do the best with what we’ve got, I feel bound to ponder the influence of an independent thinker who caused alarm in the Vatican and made some wonder whether the Reformation really happened at all.
Küng disliked absolutist systems. Like George Orwell, he found Big Brother an unhelpful companion. He went so far as to equate the structures of the Catholic Church in the West with the top-down instinct of Communism. He found himself slighted and banned. Yet he maintained a friendship with the conservative Cardinal Ratzinger and continued his jaunty pursuits as an academic who was looking for more reforms than Vatican 2 had achieved.
‘THINKING ANGLICANS’
From time to time I have pointed in the direction of other blogs. ‘Psephizo’ has good stuff for the browser. ‘Thinking Anglicans’ has this month an illuminating and disconcerting piece by Janet Fife entitled ‘Smyth, Fletcher and Fife’.
‘IGNITE’ IN AUCKLAND
St Paul’s church Auckland, New Zealand, said to be one of the largest churches in Australasia, has a staff of 30 led by the Vicar, Jonny Grant. This month it has a children’s programme with the title ‘Ignite’, running from 19-25 April.
NEO-CLASSICAL IN HOBART
St George’s church, Battery Point, Hobart, Tasmania is a handsome neo-classical building that welcomes sight-seers and other visitors to its Bible studies. The Rector is Victor Shaw.
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