As I was saying to the clergy before I was so rudely interrupted by a trip to the hospital, genuflection for many of the folks serving St Stephen’s altar has ceased to be an elegant act of piety and has become a near farcical physical impossibility.
Mercifully, the Church in its wisdom has provided for those of us for whom genuflection has progressed beyond mere mortification of the flesh. It is called “The Sarum Rite,” and this is the rite we have newly adopted at St Stephen’s.
Back in the 19th Century, at the height of the Catholic Revival (the great re-awakening of the Anglican Church), many churches adopted what is known as post-Tridentine usage. It is, in fact, a similar celebration to the one used by the pre-Vatican II Roman Church.
This is rather sad, because they could have done as we have and adopted the more ancient “English” or “Sarum” usage—the mode of celebration used in the ancient British Church.
The man we have primarily to thank for saving our creaking knees is The Rev. Percy Dearmer, (1867✠1936), an Anglican priest and liturgist, whose Parson’s Handbook is still a classic liturgical manual for Anglican clergy. Lay people know him more for his wonderfully thoughtful hymns that feature in our hymnal.
Dearmer also had a strong influence on the music of the church and, with Ralph Vaughan Williams and Martin Shaw, is credited with the revival and spread of traditional and medieval English musical forms.
Dearmer’s liturgical leanings were the product of the late 19th Century debate among advocates of Ritualism in the Church of England.
Although theoretically in agreement about a return to more Catholic forms of worship, High Churchmen argued over whether these forms should be appropriated from post-Tridentine Roman Catholic practices or revived from the traditions of a pre-Reformation “English Use” rite. Dearmer’s views fell very much on the side of the latter.
Dearmer advocated a form of worship that was entirely true to the Book of Common Prayer. It is in fact the usage we have followed here since St Stephen’s was founded back in the early 1980s.
The one difference has been that we have genuflected according to the post-Tridentine tradition, rather than profoundly bowing as the “English” or “Sarum” rite prescribes. The changes in usage at St Stephen’s altar, thus, not only relieve our creaking knees, but also bring our liturgy back into accord with its origins.
Meanwhile, I cannot fully express how glad I am to be back with you all. A hospital stay these days can be a bit like serving time in the Prison of the Fleet or the Marshalsea—ancient English debtors’ prisons.
You don’t get bathed unless your family and friends do it for you. You don’t get fed unless you pick up the telephone and order it from that catering service—a tad difficult to do if, as I was, one is a trifle delirious.
Actually you could judge just how out of touch I was with the mother ship when I told Don Ruthig my MRI was being read by a Priest in Siberia. (Fortunately for me, it was actually read by a thoroughly capable Baltimore MD.)
I should not complain, however. The staff made up for all the material deficiencies. They were uniformly capable, kind, and caring—from the nurses and techs to the cleaners who did their best to clean our rooms. What’s more, they all seemed to share a great sense of humor.
Even so, I was elated to get out —so elated, in fact, that I “over did it.” I celebrated by going across the road to collect the mail. I got to the mailbox without difficulty. Returning, however, was another story—a bridge too far, to be honest.
Anyway, here I am, back fighting fit and large as life, ready to rumble, as they say on the wrestling channel.
This means I am back to two-finger typing and the typing errors that go with it. These typographical mistakes of mine drive some people crazy. I know because they’ve told me so. But try as I might, I seem quite incapable of preventing them.
It is, however, comforting to know that typographical errors are quintessentially Christian. They have afflicted Christian writings from the very earliest days.
I can’t recall whether there is a spelling error in our earliest example of Christian writing: a portion of St. John’s Gospel, which dates back to between AD 90 and AD 125. It is written in Coptic and even though it is only a fragment, it wouldn’t in the least bit surprise me if it didn’t contain at least one spelling error.
Certainly, our oldest almost complete Bible is positively full of them. It is called the Codex Sinaiticus, because it was discovered by the 19th century German Scriptural scholar Professor Konstatin von Tischendorf at St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai.
“Codex” is a Latin word for “book,” as opposed to “scroll.” This codex was copied in the first half of the fourth century, and, despite its venerable age, it is a perfectly horrible example of the copyist’s art.
There are some reported 5,000 serious errors in the New Testament alone, and many thousands more in the Old Testament and Apocrypha.
Why were Christian scribes so bad at their jobs?. The answer is probably lies in the fact that Christian scribes were free people. Most secular scribes were slaves, and those who made an unacceptable number of “typos” faced the uncongenial prospect of being shipped off to certain death in the lead mines.
In any event, Christianity’s rich tradition of typographical error has stayed with us right down to the present day. Indeed, our beloved Anglican liturgy is, in part, shaped by it.
Look at your Prayer Books and you’ll see that no instruction “Let us pray” precedes the opening prayers in the Holy Communion service. Consequently, some folks listen to these prayers standing, while others kneel.
But no matter which practice they follow, each imagines themselves to be strictly in the purest Anglican tradition.
Actually, this liturgical eccentricity is not the product of some profound theological insight. It came into being thanks to a careless 17th century printer, who omitted to set: “Priest: The Lord be with you. Answer: And with thy spirit. Priest: Let us pray.”
It was probably the same careless typesetter who left out the lower case “i” which appeared three times after each stanza of the Kyrie Eleison. Thus:
Lord have mercy upon us. iii
Christ have mercy upon us.iii
Lord have mercy upon us. iii
Those three little “i’s” mean repeat three times. This is how the Anglican Communion comes to use its unique three-fold Kyrie Eleison, while most other branches of the church catholic still use the ancient nine-fold version.
Priests used to be expected to put things right: And some of us do, indeed, invite our congregations to pray at the beginning of the Eucharist and even give the “Salutation” before the Sursum Corda. But as for that long nine-fold Kyrie, most of us figure the Holy Ghost knew what he was doing when the printer dropped those three “i’s.” Never look a gift horse in the mouth. GPH✠
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