Homilies

Back to Homilies menu

            After General Synod approved the Book of Alternative Services in 1985, the distinguished church historian Alan Hayes wrote an article entitled “Praying in Two Tongues.”  Language is an endowment which distinguishes human beings from other living creatures.  The ability to speak and to understand those speaking to us is something that even the smartest chimp has not yet achieved. 
            We think of language as a means of communication, but language also has an expressive function, which we see in poetry, where what is said is less important than the way in which it is said.  In Western Christianity this expressive function has been increasingly undervalued, providing the title that John Dourley gave to a chapter in one of his books, “How the West was Lost.” In the onward push towards rationalism, represented by the dominance of technology and the reign of the computer, the power of the imagination is being stifled through fear of the ambiguity of the older stress on the role of the image, whether visual or acoustic. 
            When we come together to worship, we do not do so in order to tell God, in clear and distinct ideas, what God already knows.  We are seeking to hear God’s word to us, and just as the divine word can come to us in the mysterious language of dreams, so too at worship our hearts are touched, like those of the Emmaus disciples, by language which enchants us, through rhythmic and symbolic speech, evoking moments of awe and love which no exhortation can obtain. 
            Islam, which is the fastest growing religion in the world today, is inspired by a sacred scripture written in a language which most of those chanting it or hearing it chanted do not understand.  When the present pope removed the restrictions on the celebration of the Latin Mass, one progressive young woman remarked, “I want to hear Mass sung in a language I don’t understand because too often I don’t like what I hear in English.” 
            The language of our traditional Anglican worship is “understanded of the people,” as the English Reformers required.  But it is not the language of every day, the language by which we communicate to each other.  Thomas Cranmer’s biographer Diarmaid MacCollough believes that the widest aftermath of Cranmer’s life and work is to be found in the realm of language and cultural identity: he had a natural ear for formal prose, for sound and sentence construction. 
            When this language is suppressed, we are rendered speechless, we lose our way of talking of God and to God, and the way in which God speaks to us.  We are like the children in the residential schools who were forbidden to use their native tongue. 
            Small wonder that the former adviser of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Terry Waite, got so fed up with attempts to modernize Anglican worship that he started attending Quaker services.  Patrick Collins, in his book More than Meets the Eye, quotes the following view from the pew: “In the old days, before all the changes, I used to go to Mass and it seemed like prayer, at least most of the time.  Now I go and spend a good deal of time looking at my watch.  It doesn’t seem so holy any more.”
            Here at the Good Shepherd we consider the Book of Common Prayer to be an inalienable part of our Anglican heritage, although we also use the modern rite, when appropriate, as in last week’s wonderful baptismal ceremony.  Today at noon we will have an opportunity to share with each other our thoughts about how we are nourished and supported by our traditional liturgy. 

October 26, 2008

back to top