INSPIRED BY THE BEAUTY OF GODPRAXIS JUNE 2016

For those who love the liturgy, the words in Psalm 2 and again in Psalm 96 have particular appeal - “O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness”. Search your contemporary versions of the scriptures and you will fail to find them. Instead we are invited to “worship the Lord in holy splendour”, which loses something, and Common Worship has kept the traditional translation. Beauty has not been altogether banished, for even the NRSV renders Psalm 27 Verse 4 as

One thing I asked of the Lord, that I will seek after: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in his temple.

It is that verse that has led me to my title this morning, “The Beauty of God”, for here we are in the house of the Lord, a variant on the temple, restored, refreshed, sparkling, proclaiming the beauty of God’s holiness. And it is to the vision of God that I want to recall you, God in all God’s unutterable beauty, sheer holiness, overwhelming loveliness, immeasurable love. I want to do that, not just because this cathedral setting inspires it, but because all who take it upon themselves to offer the Church’s liturgy need constantly to remind themselves what it is above all else that they are seeking to do, in partnership with the Holy Spirit. They are seeking to draw people into a deep sense of the presence and reality of God so that they may indeed behold the beauty of the Lord and worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. If our worship is sometimes flat, occasionally boring, lacks connection, it is very often because people have lost sight of the beauty of God.

So I make little apology that this address is not much directly about what PRAXIS does so well, showing people how to do the liturgy, but about the One whom we are seeking to worship when we do the liturgy. I simply want to talk about God, mainly through some exploration of the scriptures, though also, going a little beyond the scriptures, by celebrating the mystery of the Trinity, that for me is never dry or dusty doctrine, but joy and delight.

Let me begin in Exodus with Moses.

The angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground. (Exodus 3.2-5).

“The place on which you are standing is holy ground.” We have not lost the sense of some spaces as holy ground, places where we have encountered God or encounter God still, places where, as they say, the air is thin, heaven almost tangible. Like Moses and like Jacob before him, such places may be in the open air, no ceiling or roof to get in the way of a ladder laden with angels descending and ascending between earth and heaven. Or we associate them with out of the way chapels, little Saxon and Norman churches hallowed by the centuries or great abbeys now simply heaps of stones. But we may have lost the sense that the place where we worship, week in week out, where we invite other people to worship, week in week out, is holy ground, the place where, if we worship in spirit and in truth, our eyes may, in Isaiah’s words, “see the king in his beauty” (Isaiah 33.17). All the work that has been undertaken here in St Philip’s Cathedral is no more than an aesthetic makeover if there is no sense that this is holy ground. Ironically it is probably people of other faiths who would most instinctively remove the sandals from their feet here sensing holy ground.

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But I have begun with this passage not chiefly to encourage a renewed sense of the house of the Lord as holy ground, but also as a reminder, as we explore the mystery of God, that it is an exercise that must be undertaken with a sense of our unworthiness and our unknowing, trying to find words and pictures that express truths beyond our fragile use of language. All we can hope for is a shaft of light, a hint of glory, a glimpse of beauty. No more than that. We certainly stand barefoot on the holy ground. In a sense we stand stark naked. I love that prayer of Janet Morley (it is the Post Communion Prayer of next Sunday, though we shall use it this afternoon)

O God, whose beauty is beyond our imagining and whose power we cannot comprehend: show us your glory as far as we can grasp it, and shield us from knowing more than we can bear until we may look upon you without fear.

Let me turn with you now to Isaiah 6, the prophet in the temple in the year that King Uzziah died. It is Isaiah’s call to prophetic ministry. but that only comes out of his overwhelming sense of the beauty, the justice, the majesty, the otherness, the awesomeness of God and out of his sense of sin in the light of that revelation of God. But the setting, in which he sees this unutterable beauty, is worship. He is in the temple, he is caught up in worship, the singing puts him in mind of the angels, the incense lifts his prayers to heaven. Listen!

I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings; with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.” The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house was filled with smoke.

If ever Psalm 27 Verse 4 - dwelling in the house of the Lord to behold the beauty of the Lord - finds fulfilment, it is in this passage and it is Isaiah who beholds it. Seen through Christian eyes, the passage, of course, acquires a Trinitarian flavour, with the three-fold “Holy, holy, holy”. We’ll come back to that, but pause for a moment on two truths. The first relates to Isaiah’s sense of unworthiness. “Woe is me! he cries out, “I am lost” - “undone” the old Bible expressed it - for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

What brings people to their senses, what brings people to a deeper and more realistic sense of who they are, is not often (though sometimes) the person who keeps urging them to repent, but the person who helps them towards the vision of God. It is the sheer holiness of God that enables us to see our folly and sin.

There is a wonderful prayer that I think is by William Temple that begins

God, our Judge and Saviour, set before us the vision of your purity, and let us see our sins in the light of your holiness.

Isaiah finds himself under judgement, perhaps knows his need of a Saviour, when he has a vision of God’s purity. It is in the light of God’s holiness that he can see that he is lost. We want people to see Jesus, but that is always an invitation to see through Jesus the beauty and holiness of God that will show them their lost-ness, but also the way to be found. We need to keep holding out the vision that changes lives. And Isaiah’s life was changed, his new life found, because, there within the context of worship, God did a sacramental thing, through the ministry of a seraph touched Isaiah’s mouth with a pair of tongues from the altar, taking away his sin, but giving him a new voice that could respond to God.

The passage goes on, of course, to turn worship into mission.

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”

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Worship and mission are the twin purposes of every church, this cathedral included, though a cathedral has a third purpose, to be the seat of the bishop. Every church a centre of worship and mission. I fear there is a tendency in the contemporary church to attach more importance to mission, and specifically to evangelism, than to worship. It is understandable in the light of the statistics and age profile of church attendance. But the two are not only of equal value; they are more interconnected than some seem to realise. Why does Isaiah respond to the call from God? Why does he, despite his unworthiness, accept a commission? Because he has seen the King, the Lord of hosts, and because the King, the Lord of hosts, has touched him in a sacramental act that has taken away his guilt and sin and equipped him for the mission. Our contemporary emphasis on mission and evangelism will fail if it does not arise out of a renewed sense of the holiness of God, who meets us in worship and touches us with grace.

Let me return now to the thrice holy. The seraphs call to one another and say, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts”. For the Christian, hearing that cry with resonances of the Revelation to John and with the Sanctus of the Eucharist ringing in their ears, here is a song to God in Trinity. It is to that revelation of God in Trinity that I now want to turn. If there is one thing that makes me cross it is those preachers who begin their reluctant sermon on Trinity Sunday with something about it being a difficult day to preach or a puzzling doctrine to expound. Of course at a certain level it is complex. There are theological issues that scholars engage with in trying to give definition to the nature of God. The Athanasian Creed is evidence of that and we should not be slipshod in our theological reflection. But there are simple and beautiful things to say about the Trinity. Let me set before you five of them.

The first is this. The Trinity is indeed a mystery. But it is not the kind of mystery that we need to solve. It is not one we have to explain. It is a mystery we are invited to enter and enjoy. If you are here today you have almost certainly allowed yourself to dwell in this mystery before. It is, isn’t it, like entering a new relationship? There is puzzlement, and there is surprise, but there is also joy, a sense of being drawn deeper. There is energy, there is love. Entering the mystery of the Trinity is like committing yourself to a friend or a lover. If you neglect that relationship or take it for granted, you will lose the joy of the relationship. But come back to it with your eyes open wider and there is new potential for puzzlement, surprise and joy and, wonderfully, you find yourself drawn deeper still. That’s the way I believe it can be for you and me with God, who is Trinity.

The second truth is that although we cannot in this life penetrate to the heart of the mystery, that does not matter; we don’t need to. We simply have to allow ourselves to be drawn in a little way and we immediately meet overwhelming love. And love is not all that we meet. As I have said, we see unutterable beauty. We encounter unimaginable holiness. We witness unexpected intimacy. We are touched by transforming grace. But what we meet first and experience most deeply, if only we can open ourselves - body, mind and spirit, our entire being with its longings - is love.

Bishop John V Taylor, whose chaplain I was more than 30 years ago, used to put it like this and I have never seen it bettered. The Trinity is about “the Father loving the Son, the Son loving the Father, the Spirit the love that flows between them”. It is the life, the love, that was there before the world was made. That’s what the pre-existent logos is all about! It is the life, the love, that was there before Jesus walked the earth: the Father loving the Son, the Son loving the Father, the Spirit the love that flows between them.

W H Vanstone, with whom I had the privilege of working in the Doctrine Commission in the 1980s, expressed it like this in Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense.

In the dynamic relationship within the being of the Trinity, love is already present, already active, already completed and already triumphant: for the love of the Father meets with the perfect response of the Son. Each, one might say, endlessly enriches the other: and this rich and dynamic interrelationship is the being and life of the Spirit.

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It is the love that caused the Father to send the Son. It is the love that came down at Christmas. It is the love that took Jesus to the cross. It is the love that burst the tomb open. It is the love that was poured out on Mary at the annunciation, on Jesus at his baptism, on the church on the day of Pentecost. It is the love that enfolds us from birth to death and beyond. But it has its existence, its reality, in the being of the Trinity.

Third, the creative love is never used up, never drained dry; it is always recreating, always refreshing, and - this is the crucial truth - always overflowing. Within the Trinity there is more love than is needed to sustain its life, more than can be contained. It overflows and runs all over the earth and it enters every human heart that is ready to receive it, taking away the heart of stone. Flowing from the Godhead, from the loving of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, is enough love, and more than enough, to sustain the world God first created out of love and then redeemed by love.

The fourth thing is that we do not have to draw very near this mystery of the Trinity before we find ourselves being beckoned into its life, its love. People have almost made a cliché of the Rublev icon showing the hospitality of Abraham to the three visitors, who at one moment seem to be men, at another angels, and at another God in three persons, under the tree at Mamre. But they have done so because it succeeds in expressing the invitation of the Trinity beautifully and visually. The three persons seem to invite you in to occupy a fourth place, to share their food, their intimacy, their love, their life. In prayer we are being drawn into the divine loving, even when we cannot sense it. In the Eucharist we are being drawn into the divine loving, even when we forget it. Entering the mystery is exactly what God wants us to do. We do not need to hold back or be afraid. For we do not need to be worthy to enter. We need only to be a little vulnerable. God draws us with cords of love.

The fifth, the final thing, is this. It ties in with Isaiah and his commission. The love that draws us in. and never entirely lets us go, nevertheless sends us out, renewed and refreshed by our experience of the beauty, the holiness, the intimacy and the grace, filled with the love, to go with the flow of the love that runs over the earth. Each of us needs always to know that we are deeply loved, even when we mess up and therefore need the love more, and to know ourselves to be channels of love. To every one of us God, who is Trinity, says “Know yourself always deeply loved” and, whenever we are strong enough to hear God adds, “Go with the flow of that love, helping it to reach the margins of the world where people can hardly believe it is love for them.”

Every time in this cathedral a minister begins a service or a sermon with the sign of the cross and the words “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”, they are inviting their hearers to enter into that mystery and there to behold, here in the house of the Lord, the beauty of the Lord. Every time in churches, meetings and house groups all over the world people say together “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all” they are saying something about their relationship that echoes the loving at the heart of God. Every time a president or an intercessor says “In the power of the Spirit and in union with Christ, let us pray to the Father”, he is catching up our intercession into the perpetual loving purposes of the Trinity. Every time the priest looks up to heaven at the altar table and asks the Father to send the Spirit to make the bread for us the body of Christ, she is doing an essentially Trinitarian thing. Every time clergy say “The blessing of God almighty, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit be among you and remain with you” they are calling down that love, that life, of God that creates and redeems and animates. Every such utterance, however often we say it hear it, is awesome, proclaiming the Trinity and beckoning us in.

But now I want to take you to two quite different places.

Let me tell you about Paul Miller. I first met Paul when I went to Derby in 1998. Paul had, years before, been a Japanese prisoner of war. Later he was ordained, served as parish priest and then as a residentiary canon at Derby Cathedral. By the time I knew him Paul

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was in his eightees, retired, but looking after the Chapel of St Mary on the Bridge (another of those little holy places) within the cathedral parish. Paul loved beautiful things. He wasn’t a rich man, but he knew how to make a room beautiful, simply by employing the right piece of fabric, hanging a picture in the right place, choosing the right colours. He loved art. He loved beauty. In some ways he was full of contradictions - a patrician, at ease among the great and the good, who was also a humble priest, a chaplain to the queen and a friend of the poor, an engaging, amusing social being who knew good food and good wine, but who had more than a streak of the ascetic and the hermit about him.

Paul had been taught at prep school by John Betjeman and at the Chelsea School of Art by Graham Sutherland. His eye for beauty found expression in the elegance of his own home, as well as in his careful ordering of the Bridge Chapel. But it was not only the visual arts that touched him deeply. He had a feel for the beauty of words, for poetry, for the scriptures, for the liturgy. His own sermons and addresses were works of art.

I only knew him for a little less than three years before he died. When I preached at his funeral, I took as my text

One thing I have asked of the Lord, which I will require: even that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the fair beauty of the Lord, and to visit his temple.

That of course is the Coverdale Psalter in the Book of Common Prayer. Paul would have risen from the coffin if I had used any other version! For Paul the fair beauty in painting or verse or sculpture or music was always the fair beauty of the Lord.

Why am I telling you all this about a man who worshipped the Lord in the beauty of holiness? Because towards the end of his life he chose to leave behind all the beautiful things that had so entranced him. He recognised the seductiveness of aesthetic beauty. He wanted to let go even of the good things that had been part of his life, so that there could be greater space that could be filled with the love of the Trinity. He let things go, things that had mattered mattered no more. His beautiful home with all its treasures, beauty itself, which he knew was something of a seduction for him, I think even in a way his priesthood which had been so important to him and then even his intellect and imagination. At the end of his life, for all that he had loved light and colour and beauty and even a bit of grandeur, he preferred to wait for God in the dark. “Don’t worry,” he said to me soon before he died, his eyes covered because he could no longer bear the light, “Don’t worry, it is in darkness that new life is created. It is in solitude that we find eternal companionship. It is in silence that we hear the celestial music.”

I learnt from Paul Miller an important lesson, an important one for liturgists to learn, that the beauty of God is not, in the end, about aesthetics. You and I may strive to make this cathedral and all our churches beautiful, investing stone and glass and wood and fabric with power to draw people to God. It is good that we do. But, in the end, the beauty of God is of a different, moral, incomprehensible sort. And both darkness and silence have their place in penetrating a little way into its mystery.

In Genesis there is, at first, darkness over the face of the deep, as the spirit of God sweeps over the face of the waters. Deuteronomy (5.22) tells us that God spoke to Moses and the whole assembly of Israel on the mountain out of the fire, the cloud and the thick darkness and gave them the commandments. John in the Fourth Gospel knew what he was saying when, in a variant from the synoptic evangelists, he recorded that Mary Magdalene went to the tomb while it was still dark. It is not only betrayal that belongs to the darkness. Sometimes it is the setting for God’s mightiest acts. There was darkness at Golgotha from the sixth hour to the ninth hour when God was engaged in the work of salvation. God is light, yet God is also the God who can be found in the dark, the God who is at work in the dark. And our own coming into the world is from the darkness of the womb where we are wonderfully made.

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I was parish priest of St George’s Church, Oakdale, in Poole, a fabulous Liturgical Movement church, built in 1960. Robert Potter was the architect. It reflects the theology of the time. The building is austere and the glass plain, because nothing must detract from the liturgy. It was in the liturgy that there would be colour and its actions and movements a beauty that would draw you in. It was a church flooded in light. Later I was Dean of Derby I had the care of an Enlightenment church. James Gibbs was the architect, he who also designed St Martin in the Fields. Again, as a church of the Enlightenment, plain glass and one vast open space. As you walked through the doors you were met by the God of light, keeping nothing back, allowing you no hidden corners to explore and penetrate. There were both wonderful spaces in which to meet with God. But between the two I served in Norwich Cathedral, with its corners and crannies, its little spaces and its hidden treasures, and a God for whom you had to search and even when you found something there was always more to find, probably in the darkest space as the sun was going down. What does Birmingham Cathedral proclaim about the God of light who can nevertheless be encountered in deep darkness because God will shield us from what we are not yet able to see.

With darkness goes silence. Paul Miller said that it is in darkness that new life is created and in silence that we hear the celestial music. There is that wonderful verse in the Revelation to John where the Lamb opens the seventh seal and there is “silence in heaven for about half an hour”. Why only half an hour I’m not sure, though I do know that silence in our worship for even half a minute would be a blessing in some of the churches I know. Jesus himself knew that sometimes silence speaks more powerfully than words. Jesus, silently writing with his finger on the ground, refusing to condemn the woman caught in the very act of adultery, spoke of the compassion of God. Jesus, silent before Pilate, modelled the long-suffering patience of God. Jesus, to quote Isaiah, “like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth”. Sometimes we will not encounter God in God’s beauty and holiness till we stop, stop looking, stop speaking, stop singing, and simply listen. I loved the rubric I found in the liturgy at St Paul’s Church in Seattle, where at points in the service it simply said, “There is silence and stillness” and there was. I have often used that rubric since and just sometimes, out of the silence and stillness a still small voice.

And now to a final thought, though to speak of the darkness on Golgotha and the silence of the one led to the slaughter house is almost to have made this point.

Isaiah writes (it is such a familiar passage that I will revert to the King James’ version)

Who hath believed our report? And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form or comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. (Isaiah 53.1-3)

The Jesus of the gospels is the most attractive of men, not in a physical sense (we have no description of how he looked), but a bubbling, joyful, winsome man, for whom people dropped everything to follow him, who led them a quite beautiful dance through the towns and cities of Galilee, teaching with authority, healing with power, charismatic and compassionate. Yet the only passage of scripture that speaks of beauty and that we identify with Jesus is that from Isaiah that seems to fit him like a glove, whatever its original meaning. And what Isaiah says is that “there is no beauty that we should desire him”. (The NRSV says, in a more pedestrian way, that there was “nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.”)

Here is another corrective to the picture of God’s holiness that is about glory, majesty and beauty, about angels and archangels, about burning bush and smoke-filled temple. For the Isaiah passage and the gospel writers bring into our minds a broken bleeding dying man - no beauty here that we should desire him - and an instrument of torture stuck up on a hill for one who was numbered among the transgressors. Faced with that

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picture we have either to abandon the language of beauty or to understand it in a quite different way. Christianity has chosen to do the latter. It has chosen to see in the dying man hanging on a cross something extraordinarily beautiful from God. It has chosen to make the instrument of torture a sign of life and peace. It has chosen to make the crown of thorns a garland of glory. It has redefined the beauty of God to see only perfect love flowing from the tree. It is there that our eyes most truly see the King in his beauty.

It is why every church cannot be without its cross or crucifix. It is why, when we sing “Holy, holy, holy” we are only minutes away from saying “who in the same night that he was betrayed”. It is why, when we hold up the beautiful aesthetically pleasing rounded host we immediately break it in pieces, and sing of the Lamb of God, for it is only the broken body that redeems. It is why the Eucharist is at the heart of the Church’s life. We proclaim the strange beauty of the Crucified. And, yes, it has its own beauty. It is not, in the end, at odds with the picture in Isaiah of the God who touches and heals. It is not, in the end, at odd with the vision of the Trinity, loving and inviting, indeed it is the deepest expression of that vision. Yet sometimes this Jesus, the man rejected and acquainted with grief, should challenge us and disturb us. Shock us even. And the worship we devise should challenge, disturb and even shock those who come to share in it. For it is a strange kind of beauty that, as the world sees it, is no beauty at all.

It is John who gives us the Lamb of God. He puts into the mouth of that other John, the Baptist, the memorable exclamation, “Behold, the Lamb of God, the one who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1.29). But it is in the Revelation of John that we see this image of the Lamb, the one who was slaughtered, placed at the heart of heaven. At the heart of heaven Jesus, Lamb of God, bearer of our sins, redeemer of the world.

When the Lamb had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell before the Lamb, each holding a harp and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints . . . Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing, “To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honour and glory and might for ever and ever!” (Rev 5.8,13)

John brings the Crucified Saviour and places him, the Lamb of God, in a setting of beauty, worship and perfection.

But the God of majesty and holiness is never alone, not only because of the Lamb, not only because God is Trinity, but because God is always surrounded, surrounded by those who worship, share the eternal feast, offer their prayers, experience communion. When we speak of heaven more than ever we know the inadequacy of our language and of our imagination. Like John we have to paint pictures and compose songs to try to capture something beautiful about life with God. Liturgy fails if it does not lift us to heaven. Feet on the ground, utterly engaged with the things of the earth, it has to have our hearts in heaven, our hands stretching up to grasp the heel of heaven, conscious that our prayers are merely a feeble attempt to join with angels and saints. Archbishop Cranmer’s translation of Sursum corda. Habemus ad Dominum is not the most accurate. Not so much “We lift them up unto the Lord” as “We have them with Lord”. That’s where we are, or where we should be in worship, with the Lord and with the whole company of heaven. And so it is that the beauty of holiness is always something social; something about the holy God, something about the Lamb who was slain, but always in a company of which we may be part. The communion of saints is part of the doctrine of God.

We need to rekindle in the hearts and minds of all those who lead worship this vision. If they are alive with it, then others will capture it, and liturgy will indeed turn into worship, worship of the Lord in the beauty of holiness. People will see the King in his beauty and lives will be changed.

Michael Perham

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INSPIRED BY THE BEAUTY OF LITURGYPRAXIS JUNE 2016

In the year in which I was ordained priest, 39 years ago, Father Michael Hollings wrote and published a little book called Living Priesthood. I read it in the weeks running up to my ordination and one paragraph struck me so forcibly that I put it in the service sheet for my first celebration of the Eucharist. Whenever I come across it again, which is not very often, I am struck by how well it expresses what I believe about liturgy. Here it is.

Liturgy is living, moving and beautiful . . . Liturgy must be alive. We must not be afraid. The beauty and power the Lord uses through us at the Eucharist demands every effort of mind and heart to make it available for God’s people. As in our own lives we live through the pains and joys of the life of Jesus Christ, we need to find the expression of his saving work in the Eucharist. Then by sharing fully in Passion, Death and Resurrection, we shall feel the forgiveness of God and the union of Holy Communion, which will strengthen us to go out and preach the Good News.

Hollings was writing specifically about the Eucharist and I will say something about the Eucharist later, but I want you to hear those opening sentences much more broadly as a description of the liturgical enterprise and the role of the leader of worship. “Liturgy must be alive. We must not be afraid. The beauty and power the Lord uses through us (in worship) demands every effort of mind and heart to make it available for God’s people.” Sometimes I witness liturgy led by people who don’t seem to have understood that. I see little evidence that they have understood that the task, the privilege, laid upon them demands every effort of mind and heart to make it available for God’s people. That and, of course, the Holy Spirit. Every time we lead the people of God every effort of mind and heart. Liturgy must be alive!

In The New Handbook of Pastoral Liturgy, not so new now, I began with an attempt to define what we mean by liturgy. “Worship,” I wrote is the offering to God of praise, glory and honour in reverence and in love”, but “liturgy is that subtle blend of word, song, movement, gesture and silence that enables the people of God to worship together”. It is not a perfect definition, but I’ve worked with it for quite a long time and I want this afternoon to explore the liturgy through those five constituents - word, song, movement, gesture and silence - though conscious always that what makes the liturgy work is not just those elements, and not even the subtle blending (though that is crucial), but the spirit in which the liturgy is approached, feet on holy ground with a desire to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness and to find ourselves in touch with, and in tune, with heaven. And let me pause for a moment on a phrase I have just used - “the spirit in which the liturgy is approached”. Today’s gathering is about inspiration and it is an important truth that liturgy is alive, to use Hollings’ word, is animated, if the Holy Spirit is at work. All we do with words, music, movement, gesture and silence is of no avail if we are not open to the Holy Spirit, conspiring with the Holy Spirit, animated by the Holy Spirit. Just as Paul speaks of the Spirit turning our groanings into prayer, so also it is the Holy Spirit who turns our liturgy into worship.

I begin with “word”. There are those for whom liturgy is all word. it sometimes felt like that through the years of piloting Common Worship through the General Synod. The words were all that mattered, understandably for they carried the weight of doctrine. Considering that so many of our texts emerge from translations, committees, ecumenical agreements and synodical revisions, it is amazing that they are as good as they are. The Holy Spirit somehow got involved! But I am struck by the fact that some of our best commended texts are ones that did not go through such processes, but were the work of individuals that have found their way into books like Daily Prayer and Times and Seasons without a synodical heavy hand. I confess also to a certain pleasure sometimes at hearing a text in church and thinking “That’s one of mine!”, though it can be spoilt a moment later by the realisation that somebody has altered, allegedly improved, it! I draw the conclusion that we need to give every encouragement to those who are creating new texts. I am reluctant to see any further proliferation of texts solemnly incorporated into official service books and I would be devastated if we lost the core of texts that hold us

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together, but I would like to see a more imaginative approach to the composition of texts to meet the needs of different occasions and particular communities. I have long admired Janet Morley’s work and I am impressed by Steven Shakespeare’s material. I wonder whether the time has come to try again to draw poets into a dialogue about liturgical texts. Poetry and liturgy texts are different art forms. The poet expresses the thoughts of an individual to be spoken, if spoken out loud at all, by a single voice. The liturgical wordsmith tries to express the shared faith of a community in words that will sometimes be spoken by people in chorus. Putting a poet or a novelist on the Liturgical Commission does not solve the matter. But how wonderful it would be if the world of literature and the world of liturgy could feed one another creatively once again.

I want to say something about liturgical language and gender. I’ve recently written something about this for WATCH, of which I am a Vice President. I believe there are two tasks in relation to language and gender. The less radical, but I think equally important, is to reinforce the message that the Church of England first accepted when we published Making Women Visible back in 1988. From that moment onwards we committed ourselves to removing as far as possible words about human beings that were exclusively male. For the period up to 2000 it was a messy business of amending authorised texts as we used them. Since 2000, which is now quite a long time ago, our official texts have been gender-inclusive. We sin against “our neighbour”, not our “fellow men”, no longer is it only men “who honour one another”, Jesus was not so much born “as a man” as “born of woman”, and “humankind” no longer sounds strange. Yet, because the liturgy now has that more inclusive style, people seems sometimes to have forgotten the issue. Churches still use versions of the scriptures that ignore it, people devise and lead intercession prayers that fall back on texts we have jettisoned and hymns and songs are often used without any attempt to modify them. This last is difficult. For myself I would not want to lose texts that defy modification. Later this afternoon we shall sing “Can it be that thou regardest songs of sinful man?” I can’t bring myself to alter Francis Pott’s fine words to the version in Hymns Old and New “Can it be that thou regardest our poor hymnody?” Poor hymnody indeed! But I can cope with that one exclusive line because it is set within the context of a liturgy where everything else eschews that kind of male language in reference to us mortals. What I cannot cope with is services where, apparently unthinkingly, we still sing of “good news to men in all the earth” and hear about men only in the gospel reading. There is an educational task to be done here. Cathedrals, modelling good practice, could take the lead.

There is, of course, a more fundamental issue with which to engage. It is how we speak of God. Perhaps I should have explored something of that this morning. God is beyond gender - we all know that. God is not male any more than God is female. Or, to put it differently as scripture puts it, humankind, male and female, is made in God’s image. I am sure that the time has come when we need to see new texts that affirm the feminine and move into a world where no one thinks it surprising, inappropriate or heretical, to use feminine imagery of God. And it needs to go beyond what the scriptures can deliver, for the scriptures will never get us much beyond motherhood and, for all that “mother” is a helpful antidote to too much “father”, there are other images we need to employ. I am not arguing for additional authorised texts at least at the present time. To be honest any attempt to bring them before the Synod would be more trouble than it is worth. But I believe we should encourage wordsmiths to be bold in creating new texts that speak of God in a way that will help us to shake off the patriarchy that lies not far below the surface of our Church life and liturgy.

I don’t want to argue against myself, but, having pleaded for a new flowering of liturgical texts, and particularly for new texts that explore afresh our image of God, I want now to argue again for common texts. There seemed to be a mood in the Liturgical Commission in the 1990s, with the emergence of Patterns for Worship, and into the new millennium, that, providing we retained a common shape to our liturgy, we need not be too concerned about common texts, except perhaps in relation to doctrinally sensitive areas, such as confessions and absolutions, creeds and Eucharistic prayers. From this followed the proliferation of authorised and commended texts, as found in Patterns for Worship, that meant that, if you chose, you might never use the same material from one Sunday to

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another. Every week there would be a new text or one you hadn’t heard for months. I do wonder whether in creating too many texts we undermined both creativity and commonality. Creativity because, despite reference to “other suitable words”, we had created so many texts that only the most imaginative or sensitive bothered to write their own specific to the occasion. Frankly there isn’t much spontaneity about our worship. Too often the minister has it all written down and almost as often the congregation has text in front of them when they do not need it.

That does concern me, but not as much as the lack of commonality of text. In my (admittedly biased) view one of the best elements of Common Worship has been the set of fifteen double pages of seasonal material - introduction to confession, pre-gospel acclamation, blessing, etc - because they indicated a way of achieving variety through the year, yet staying with a text for sufficient weeks, and returning to it the following year, that it began to find its way into the memory. For I believe that that is what we need for good liturgy - beautiful texts, sufficient variety, some spontaneity, but sufficient familiarity that there can be words that sink into the memory and feed the soul. It is not that we need to undertake a task of memorising, but that over the years by repetition we build almost unconsciously a memory bank that can feed the soul. Feeding the soul is part of what we need if we are to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.

I also believe we shall feed the soul more effectively if we listen to well- articulated words, rather than read them. There is a strange Anglican need to see the text, all the text, all the time. A well-ordered gospel procession moves into the centre of the church, the Book of the Gospels carried high, lighted candles in attendance, alleluias to greet the proclamation of the gospel. Everything about it says “Look and listen”. But what do people do? They bury their heads in a piece of paper on which the text is printed. Later the priest at the altar, by action and gesture draws everyone into the drama of the Lord’s supper. The scene says “Look, listen, pray”. What do people do? Bury their heads once again in the service book or look up high above the table to the words on the screen. It is time for well-established churchgoers to recover their memory and for newcomers to be given minimal text, so they may look, listen, pray and engage. This afternoon at the Eucharist we could probably give you just the words of the hymns and songs and leave the rest to memory. As it is we are at least going to give you only your texts, not the ones spoken by others. Look, listen, pray and engage!

Let me take you now from word to song, and song in this context is intended to encompass all the music of the liturgy, instrumental and vocal, traditional and contemporary, mass setting, motet, anthem, hymn, song, chant and chorus. Whatever is claimed, I’m not sure Augustine did say that “the one who sings prays twice”, nor I am convinced he said that “we are the Easter people and alleluia is our song”, but I value both quotations and I do believe that worship that never breaks into song misses something with huge potential not only to enhance our praise, but also to be in touch with heaven.

It is worth pausing, I think, to reflect on just how counter-culture singing together is in our culture. Not entirely so, of course, and, just when we have seen the decline in church choirs, we have also now seen the emergence of new community choirs. I think there are more people singing that a few years ago, so may be the tide is turning. Nevertheless most people do not sing. Certainly most people do not know the songs we like to sing. Evangelical Christians, and not only Evangelical ones, with their music groups and their “worship leaders”, have created a new musical genre, apparently more popular and accessible than some traditional church music, but it is a church cultural form nevertheless. People in general don’t sing much, except perhaps in the shower. How should we respond to that? Inconsistently! Sometimes we need to recognise that people do not want to sing, do not know the songs and would rather listen to the music, whether “live” music or recorded music. Obviously that applies to some funerals; it might apply to some weddings too. But there may be other occasions too when to listen and to participate by attention to what is heard is the way forward. For every one person who is irritated when they come to a cathedral that they are not allowed to join in, there are two people who are sustained and fed by the music to which they listen.

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Yet counter-cultural is often right and good. it is a matter of knowing when. Singing does bind people together, does create community, does create an atmosphere of praise or prayer. We lose it at our peril. In reality we seem to me to have lost it already to a significant extent in many of our churches, where all we ever sing are hymns and songs. What we don’t sing is the liturgy itself. In too many churches we do not sing the Gloria, though if ever there are words that should sing “Glory to God in the highest” is among them. Or we say the Sanctus, though I cannot imagine the hosts of heaven, heads down in their service-sheet ploughing through a spoken and turgid “Holy, holy, holy” of the sort I sometimes hear. Or we make “alleluia” anything but a song. I even regret the said Creed, for the singing of it turns dry doctrine into doxology. Good liturgy relies on a kind of dialogue between the spoken and the sung. You can over-do it by making short sharp acclamations and invitations into songs, “Glory to you, O Lord” or “Go in the peace of Christ” for instance. You can make people uncomfortable by making so much of the liturgy sung that those who are unfamiliar with the music feel disenfranchised. But where something is obviously a song, let us recover the ability to sing it. The resources are all out there, possibly even the cantor, the one person you need with a decent voice and a bit of musicality. You just need to find that person and let them teach the people to sing again.

I want to turn now to movement and gesture and to treat them together. To do so I want to tell you about St Paul’s Seattle. I’ve only been there once. I was there with Bishop Mary Gray-Reeves. We were on a kind of pilgrimage for the book we wrote together in 2010 entitled The Hospitality of God. It was chiefly about emergent/fresh expression churches and their worship. But St Paul’s Seattle was not one of these, but a congregation of The Episcopal Church, though one with a fairly catholic approach to its liturgy. We describe our visit there in the book. This is part of what we wrote.

At St Paul’s Seattle we experienced most fully the power of shared gesture for building up a sense of the body of Christ and of a community intent on God. When the liturgy began, the congregation stood and turned towards the west where the procession stood ready to enter. There was a sense of gathering and of meeting. When the entrance began, this procession moved through the church, the community turning as it passed them and everyone bowing to the cross as it passed. Before the last verse of the hymn there was an organ interlude; then, as the last verse began, the ministers, now in front of the altar, bowed to the congregation and the congregation bowed back to them.

During the readings we noted how the three ministers behind the altar focused their eyes, quite intently, on the reader throughout the readings. After each reading there followed what the service sheet described as a time of “silence and stillness” and it was indeed that, real stillness with a community silently engaged with the Scriptures for more than a minute.

Later the Peace was given and exchanged, conventionally, gently and warmly. The Offertory Hymn was sung. At the end of this there was a procession of gifts by members of the congregation, carrying real bread and the wine poured into a glass chalice so that it could be seen. The elements were censed simply, slowly and unfussily and the three ministers moved slowly around the altar as the presider honoured the gifts with incense.

In the Eucharistic Prayer there were slow genuflections and elevations at the words of institution, in which the congregation shared. All bowed at the elevations and crossed themselves at the prayer for sanctification.

The Distribution was slow and intentional. All in their places remained standing until it was their time to go up and receive, giving a sense of the prayerful recognition of the presence of the body in the gathered community.

At the end of the liturgy, in the final hymn, again there was an organ interlude before the final verse, at which point the ministers bowed to the congregation and the congregation to the ministers. The procession then moved west to the door, the congregation turning

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as this happened. The presider sang the Dismissal and all responded. People immediately began to move.

You may well be asking what was special about this worship. It was well-ordered Anglican liturgy of a familiar kind, entirely conventional in its shape and text. Yet Bishop Mary and I were both deeply moved by our participation in it, caught off our guard, swept off our feet by it. We experienced powerfully the beauty of the liturgy. Trying to analyse it we identified three related elements that contributed to it being a stunning and unforgettable experience.

First, and foremost, there was a deep spirit of engagement by the whole congregation. They did indeed “carry you in worship”, as their service sheet said, by their prayerfulness and attentiveness. The shared spirituality was almost tangible.

The second element was “performance” and as part of it, very significantly, “pace”. Clearly everything had been carefully choreographed and rehearsed, yet it did not feel stilted or precious; the whole liturgy was a beautiful “dance” in which the performers were entirely caught up. The pace at every point was right, never hurried, just a little slower than in most churches, but always moving the shared experience forward.

The third element was the non-verbal participation by the entire community - the turning west at the beginning and the end, the reverencing of the cross at the entry, the mutual bowing between ministers and congregation - creating a sense of a community engaged in something entirely corporate and significant for them.

Taken together they made for something quite wonderful, deeply authentic and clearly transformative. Why do I so rarely experience that here in the Church of England? I think it is partly that we have become suspicious of words like “performance” and indeed “drama” and “theatre” in relation to the liturgy. Perhaps not in cathedrals, but in most other places. Good liturgy can never be simply performance, drama or theatre, but in a gracious space and with a hope of being in touch with heaven, it can properly be all those things. We know the dangers, where people become obsessed with dressing up and doing things “the right way”, losing sight of the real intention, a sort of unholy play-acting. But the dangers should not make us too fearful to strive for something beautiful for God. “Performance” is a good word in the liturgical context.

I think it is also because we have lost the art of common actions and gestures. You used to see it sometimes in churches that had long had a catholic tradition. Everyone had been well taught, trained, drilled may be. Everyone bowed together, genuflected together, knelt for a blessing as the bishop passed, crossed themselves at the key moments. Again it had its dangers. You could be so focused on the externals that you missed the meaning of it all. Or, if you were a stranger, you could feel uncomfortable not knowing what to do. But it’s gone now, hasn’t it? We all do our own thing or, in many cases, don’t do anything except stand and sit and crouch. The personal devotion has replaced the corporate devotion. The protest against it could be said to be the charismatic raising of the arm in praise. You are more likely to see some common shared practice in that setting now than anywhere else. But my plea is for some return to common gesture and common action, as likely to bind the community together as singing a song.

Just a word more about movement. A procession can be an extraordinary phenomenon. I never understood the kind of processions we sometimes used to have at Evensong when we set off, banners and all, to walk round the church, sometimes in a figure of eight, and then ended up where we started. What did that mean? But I understood what was going on at St Paul’s Seattle, where the processions were about gathering and being sent out. And I understand a procession that begins in one place and leads us to another and thus becomes a kind of pilgrimage, teaching us something about the Christian journey. Cathedrals have lots of opportunity for that. I love it when I can get people out of their seats and around the font at a Baptism or Confirmation. I know why we have a strong instinct about getting up out of our places to move towards the altar table to receive Holy Communion. In a strange way the walk is part of the meaning. Passing the consecrated

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elements down the row seated in your pew is not the same at all. It’s brilliant when a procession takes us outside the building as the liturgy does on Palm Sunday and at Pentecost. But the key thing about any such movement is that it is not a spectator sport. We do not watch the holy ones, the dressed up ones, the well-rehearsed one, doing their thing. We join the holy dressed up ones, every one of us, we walk, we process, may be just occasionally we dance, as if we were on the way to Jerusalem. For indeed we are on our way to the heavenly city. It will not always be as well choreographed as at St Paul’s Seattle, but it can be just as intentional and we will be on our way to the heavenly city.

I spoke this morning about silence. Silence in heaven for about half an hour! I won’t add much more, beyond reiterating its importance if our worship is to be deep and openness to God real. There are different kinds of silence. There is the tuning-in silence that allows us to sense ourselves in God’s presence and beginning to pray. That’s the silence that in the Eucharist is a response to “Let us pray” and is then drawn together in the Collect. There is the reflective silence that goes with the proclaiming of the scriptures. There is the prayerful silence that needs to punctuate Prayers of Intercession if the congregation is to have the space to pray for the things the intercessor is laying out before them and before God. There is the contemplative silence that may be in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament or before an icon. There is the thankful silence after Holy Communion in response to sacramental grace. But all these silences need to be explained and taught if people are to be able to use them profitably and well. If they are taught and then little by little established in the rhythm of worship, the liturgy can be transformed.

The St Paul’s Seattle website puts it really well. It said (it may say still)

A significant part of our worship is punctuation of the liturgy with periods of silence. Our brief, or sometimes lingering, moments of silence focus our attention on the present and what is taking place in the present, rather than to rush to the next thing. We listen, we engage, we reflect, we move on, we stay grounded. These moments of participatory silence are not dead space; they are very much alive. We are a people, who by drenching ourselves in the treasures of the sacraments, draw together in fellowship to contemplate, to be sustained, renewed and inspired, and to worship a loving God.

The subtle blend of word, song, movement, gesture and silence that enable the people of God to worship together. When we take those five seriously and use every effort of heart and mind to shape them into liturgy we make a beautiful gift for God.

In the final section of this presentation I want to focus more strictly on the Eucharist. You may protest that I have apparently been talking about the Eucharist all the time and it is true that my default mode is Eucharistic. But I do believe that nearly everything I have said about word, song, movement, gesture and silence apply much more widely. We have got it wrong if we only give serious consideration to such matters when we are celebrating the sacraments. But now I do want to focus very clearly on the Eucharist.

I am a child of the Liturgical Movement or at least of its flourishing in Anglicanism. Let me take just a few moments to remind you what that movement was all about. It had its beginnings with Dom Prosper Gueranger in the Benedictine community of Solesmes in the middle of the 19th century and was popularised by Dom Lambert Beauduin at Mont Cesar in the early part of the 20th century. It was a monastic movement and its concern was liturgical piety. It wanted people to find their prayer life and their spirituality not in private devotions or even in Ignatian exercises, but in participation in the Eucharist and in the divine office. It was not initially about introducing liturgical reforms, but simply about placing the liturgical life of the Church at the centre of people’s prayer lives. It sought active participation in the holy mysteries and in the public and solemn prayers of the Church. It was picked up by Walter Frere, then a monk at Mirfield, and expounded for Anglicans in his Principles for Liturgical Reform and by Gabriel Hebert, a monk at Kelham, in his seminal works, Liturgy and Society in 1935 and The Parish Communion in 1937. What had been a monastic movement became a parochial movement. From that time the Liturgical Movement began to change the Church of England from a Mattins church into a

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Eucharistic church, something Thomas Cranmer had always intended it to be. Until the Liturgical Movement only the Anglo-Catholics had got the message, but even they had only half got it with their 11 o’clock High Mass without general communion. Suddenly in the middle of the century the Eucharist was becoming the norm, celebrated earlier than 11, followed by breakfast, and with a new level of active participation. It was certainly what most clergy wanted in their parishes, even though it was not always attainable. The Eucharist was not one option on a worship menu. It was the Lord’s own service for the Lord’s own people on the Lord’s own day. But it was still the rite of 1662.

Inevitably in the Church of England, as in the Roman Church, the new emphasis on active participation, as well as the realisation that the traditional liturgy was not equipped to reverse church decline, led to demands for liturgical reform, so much so that I think many now think that that was what the Liturgical Movement was (can we still say “is”?) all about. But that was secondary. The movement, at least in Anglicanism, was about putting the Eucharist back in the centre, making it normative for the people of God week by week. It is in that sense that I know myself to be entirely a child of the Liturgical Movement.

But now I fear it is falling back into being one of the options on the menu. Don’t get me wrong. I am not wanting the Eucharist for everything, but I do believe it has a unique place in our life and is a place of immeasurable grace. This loss of status has a number of causes. First, there is the fact that so many people today have not been confirmed (may be not baptised) and our current discipline expects them to be if they are to be communicants. It has been made to look and perhaps be exclusive. Second, there is a shortage of priests making a Eucharistic celebration in every church each week impossible to deliver. Third, there is a belief that the Eucharist is often long, inaccessible and esoteric. Fourth the majority of those being ordained are coming from an evangelical background where (despite Colin Buchanan, GROW and even PRAXIS) they are less likely to have been steeped in Eucharistic practice. Fifth, perhaps more fundamental, the Liturgical Movement and indeed the Parish Communion did not have long enough to become deeply embedded in the life of the Church before these other factors led to a reverse. In a nutshell it simply did not win sufficient hearts.

Does it matter? I think there are two huge losses and some things we can and should do rather than accept the decline. The first loss is simply in the power of the sacrament to be a meeting place with Jesus, to channel grace, to change lives, and, less spectacularly, to nourish and sustain. As I said this morning it is the place where, more than in other liturgy, we have to look at the cross, face our brokenness and meet our Saviour.

But the other loss is about our identity. I am drawn back to Gregory Dix’s purple passage about the Eucharist in The Shape of the Liturgy, the passage that begins

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need.

He lists some of the circumstances and needs, some of them somewhat esoteric, but he ends like this

And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei - the holy common people of God.

The Eucharist, Dix says, makes, forms the Church, gives us our identity, helps us be what God wants us to become. In more simple terms, by sharing the body we learn how to be the body. Paul got there before Gregory Dix. There is a danger, of course, in a Church that defines its membership too narrowly. Nevertheless without this body talk we can

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seem more like a loose association than a communion of the Holy Spirit. I think that loss harmful indeed.

You may not agree with me. But, supposing you do, what can be done? The first and most important thing to do is to banish exclusivity. One of the things I found fascinating in my study of emergent churches in the United States and fresh expressions in England was how many of them were Eucharistic, sometimes relatively conservative in their ordering of liturgy (though with a deep suspicion of creeds), but always Eucharistic with an open table. I greatly rejoiced when the new legislation went through General Synod to allow children to be among those who distribute Holy Communion. I shall never forget the Eucharist in St Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco where we gathered around the altar in a crowd, with all the children right at the front of the crowd, right around the altar, some on a literal tiptoe of involvement as the priest sung the Eucharistic Prayer, and then these children moved in and out among us distributing the consecrated bread and wine with beautiful reverence. But I also carry in my mind the memory of many Christmases and Easters in Gloucester Cathedral with large numbers of adults coming to the altar rail, dutifully carrying a service book to mark them out as non-communicants, all of them sufficiently trained to know that this was their status. I used to have such difficulty in restraining myself from saying, “Put your hand out! Jesus wants to feed you!”

At very least I believe we need as a church to break the connection between Confirmation and Communion. There is no theological reason for it. Baptism is complete initiation into the Christian life and ought to admit us to every aspect of sacramental life. What a theologically odd place we have created for ourselves, where in some places unconfirmed children may be communicants but in others they may not and an unconfirmed adult nurtured in another Christian tradition may receive Communion in our churches but an unconfirmed adult nurtured in our own church cannot. To all of these we must say, “Welcome, come and eat, Jesus wants to feed you” and, of course, it is happening more and more, but the law has not caught up.

But, of course, the issue is more complex. Admitting all the baptised to the Eucharist is not to create the open table. The open table does not require Baptism as the way in. At St Gregory of Nyssa you have to go round the altar to find the font. It is a deliberate challenge to what we have taken for granted, that it is the font that opens the way to the altar. I think this is a hard issue. In the world of catholic order baptism first, Eucharist follows, is very fundamental and you can turn to Paul in 1 Corinthians 11 for authority that says that only those who “discern the body” should participate and someone wandering in for the first time with little concept of what it is all about is not, in an obvious way, discerning the body. But I have become convinced that we need to administer this rule very gently, by which I mean that when the unbaptised present themselves at the altar we should give them Communion willingly, not reprove them, not tell them the rules, but let them grow, begin to attach themselves to the body and then show them the font, encourage them to be baptised, but with a sensitivity that echoes inclusion not exclusion. An open table where all may be fed - that’s the kind of Eucharist that inspires me.

But then we also need to look at how we celebrate it. It can be too long, too inaccessible, too esoteric. But it need not be. Even within the Common Worship rules and rubrics it need not be long, quite apart from the fact that the liturgy police are unlikely to pounce if we take some liberties. If we work seriously with some of the issues I have talked about in relation to word, song, movement, gesture and silence it can be accessible and sheer joy. If we move the furniture the experience might reach new heights.

The furniture! There is a good deal of talk today about reordering churches. You might at first think people had got the message that the liturgy cannot live without space. But, no, all too often the reordering is about toilets, kitchens and food and drink after the service, rather than about liturgical space. Toilets and kitchens are important and creating more space for community activity is good. but, if our liturgy is to inspire and transform, we must help people to see the need for some reordering of the liturgical space. Moving the altar table two feet forward or removing just enough pews to fit in a nave altar table is

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not enough. Good liturgy needs generous space, the opportunity to gather around, to move together, to look into one another’s faces, to be drawn into the action. As this cathedral illustrates good liturgy calls out for a facelift. It is amazing what a change such a facelift can bring. Of course there are constraints - the cost, the heritage lobbies, the innate conservatism of the community - but our forebears had the energy and courage to reorder their churches to meet their hopes and expectations of worship in their day and we must have the will to do the same if the liturgy, and especially the Eucharist, is to be at its most effective. When altar rails disappear and people find themselves, hands free of books, genuinely gathered around the table, visually engaged, aware of their neighbour, as the Eucharist is celebrated it becomes for them something new, fresh and inclusive. It is beautiful. It inspires.

It is, for a moment, at least on a good day, a little piece of heaven on earth, which brings me back to where I began with the beauty and holiness of God and the liturgy as a fleeting participation in the worship of saints and angels. If people look at the new Eucharistic Prayers in Common Worship, the ones created for the year 2000, they may notice some differences from the earlier ones, A, B and C, and reflect on the varying positions of the epiclesis or the way they handle the language of offering and sacrifice. For me much more significant is how the newer prayers paint a picture of the life of heaven and our participation in the communion of saints.

Look with favour on your people, gather us in your loving arms and bring us with all the saints to feast at your table in heaven.

Gather your people from the ends of the earth to feast with all your saints at the table in your kingdom, where the new creation is brought to perfection in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Bring us at the last with all the saints to the vision of that eternal splendour for which you have created us.

That’s the liturgy that inspires, the liturgy that holds out to us the vision of the eternal splendour, the beauty of God, a sense of the great company who worship with us, the loving arms that invite us in, people from the ends of the earth, to feast at the table.

Michael Perham

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