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Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof, but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed.
Matthew 8:8

In the Roman Catholic Mass, at the priest’s communion, the Roman centurion’s confession of faith appears with the change of a single word.  Before consuming the host, the priest says, “Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof, but speak the word only, and my soul shall be healed.” 
            Recently, however, there has been another significant change: the words “my soul shall be healed” have been changed to “I shall be healed.”  Soul has been replaced by the vertical pronoun, the ego. 
            Nowadays soul is clearly out of fashion.  This is the culmination of a development which has been taking place during the second millennium of the Christian era and has resulted in a myth of rationality which excludes the soul, just as it excludes the divine. 
            It is disturbing to see the church’s complicity in this development.  When the liturgical movement began with the celebration of the restored Easter Vigil in the crypt of the abbey church of Maria Laach in the Rhineland, it promised spiritual renewal for a war-weary world. 
            But in 1975, when the new liturgy approved by Vatican II was firmly in place, Rembert Weakland, then the Abbot Primate of the Order of St. Benedict, wrote an article which warned about a worm in the apple of the liturgical movement.  That worm was rationalism.  Weakland wrote: “There is a tendency to equate the nonrational with the irrational and thus to empty the liturgy of a sense of the mysterious.” 
            If rationalism within the Roman Catholic Church can be epitomized by the substitution of “ego” for “soul,” at the priest’s communion, in the Anglican Church it is epitomized by the disdain for the Book of Common Prayer, the crowning achievement of the English Reformation and the bond of unity between churches of the Anglican Communion for 400 years. 
            Ten years after Abbot Weakland’s prophetic warning, the Book of Alternative Services was approved by the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada.  It was heralded with the slogan, “New Rites for a New Age.”  Clearly a Prayer Book which had originated in the 16th century was unusable in the 20th century.  By that logic the plays of Shakespeare should also be considered out of date!
            In rejecting the Prayer Book Anglicanism is rejecting the imagistic world of the Bible, which Thomas Cranmer, with consummate artistry, had transposed into liturgical worship.  Small wonder that the replacement of the Prayer Book was followed, in short order, by a rejection of the authority of scripture itself. 
            It is indeed tragic when the church is unable to recognize the blind spots of the society for which it is supposed to provide spiritual leadership.  The Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung wrote an influential little book entitled Modern Man in Search of a Soul.  Surely this is a quest in which Christian churches ought to be participating. 

January 21, 2007

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