‘Do not touch me’: the wisdom of Anglican thresholds

By Stephen Hough. Reposted from The Telegraph.

This past Sunday I went to Westminster Abbey to attend Evensong, their superb choir conducted by James O’Donnell and accompanied by Robert Quinney. Woven between Thomas Cranmer’s matchless words was music of Herbert Howells, William Byrd and a sparkling anthem by Jonathan Dove. If you are visiting London and want a perfect slice of England there’s no better place to go.

The Abbey quire at the end of Evensong.

Evensong hangs on the wall of English life like a old, familiar cloak passed through the generations. Rich with prayer and Scripture, it is nevertheless totally nonthreatening. It is a service into which all can stumble without censure – a rambling old house where everyone can find some corner to sit and think, to listen with half-attention, trailing a few absentminded fingers of faith or doubt in its passing stream.

'Nolle me tangere': Giotto

Bill Tully

He was expressing the no-nonsense wisdom of air travel: “If there is a loss in cabin pressure, oxygen masks will drop down. If you are traveling with a child or someone who needs assistance, strap yours on first and then help the other.”

God knows the Episcopal Church needs some oxygen for itself if it has a prayer of helping anyone else. While we’re not exactly on life support, we are diminished and in danger of becoming what the new bishop of Washington calls “a boutique church.”

I remember repeating the prideful mantra, “We may be statistically small, but we have influence out of proportion to our size-more members of Congress, the Supreme Court, past (and then current) presidents.”

That was when we claimed 3 million members in a nation of 200 million. Now we’re less than 2 million among more than 300 million. The old mantra is laughable.

Though generally theologically progressive, we Episcopalians often envy the largely conservative and evangelical megachurches. While 85 percent of our congregations have fewer than 200 members, megachurches range from several thousand to tens of thousands.

Can we learn from them for our own good? Yes.

But there’s a fundamental difference between our way and their way. To be ignorant of that difference would mean we wouldn’t learn much.

Progressive in doctrine, Episcopalians (and our “mainline Protestant” peers) are often deeply traditional. We’re good at liturgy and music, and at bringing authentic ritual to life’s rites of passage, but we get fussy and downright implacable if someone tries to change our ways. We find acceptance and a sense of grounding in our local congregations-and those are truly good things-and then cling to the Way We’ve Always Done Things until we begin boring people to death, or running them off, and wake up to find ourselves to small to thrive.

The megachurch pastor thought up his idea for a church. Perhaps, like Bill Hybels, who turned a youth group into the granddaddy of all megachurches, Willow Creek, the work was based on tireless research on what people wanted or were missing or had been turned off by in churches.

It will be interesting to see if these new creations can navigate the transition to the second generation, when there well may be people who remember the good old days and want to hold on to them.

Episcopalians are the ultimate and extreme “legacy church.” No matter how committed the local rector is to change, no matter how deft she or he is in managing it, there is a huge and nearly immovable weight of tradition. Some of it is so good that it might- rightly reinterpreted and freshened- be the way forward to real growth in size and health. But it takes a lot of energy. We almost inevitably tilt backward for every step and a half we take forward.

Bishop Budde of Washington is absolutely right about concentrating on the meat and potatoes of local congregational life: worship, music, compelling preaching, education, pastoral care. Taking stands on issues at the national level (where few people pay attention to us any longer) might be satisfying, but we’ve just about spent ourselves doing that.

Even on the issue of homosexuality, where I believe our generous and enlightened thinking and practice are making a signal contribution to society (and to other churches), the real power is seeing people at the local level hear and accept one another honestly, and then move on to the common questions every human being asks. To what Tip O’Neill said about politics, we might add: All religion is local.

That’s what my friend taught me many Christmases ago. Do it here where we are, build up a community so it will be here for the next person through the door, and don’t take my money and send it away. Let me support it where it counts. That’s what leads to growth, and as we learn from history, you either grow, or go.

The Revd William McD. Tully was, from 1994 through January 2012, rector of St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue in New York.

On the quarterdeck.

What Churchill wrote of the morning:

On Sunday morning, August 10, Mr. Roosevelt came aboard H.M.S. Prince of Wales and, with his Staff officers and several hundred representatives of all ranks of the United States Navy and Marines, attended Divine Service on the quarterdeck.

This service was felt by us all to be a deeply moving expression of the unity of faith of our two peoples, and none who took part in it will forget the spectacle presented that sunlit morning on the crowded quarterdeck – the symbolism of the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes draped side by side on the pulpit; the American and British chaplains sharing in the reading of the prayers; the highest naval, military, and air officers of Britain and the United States grouped in one body behind the President and me; the close-packed ranks of British and American sailors, completely intermingled, sharing the same books and joining fervently together in the prayers and hymns familiar to both.

I chose the hymns myself – “For Those in Peril on the Sea” and “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” We ended with “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” which Macaulay reminds us the Ironsides had chanted as they bore John Hampden’s body to the grave.

Every word seemed to stir the heart. It was a great hour to live. Nearly half those who sang were soon to die.

The President with Churchill. Behind them stand (L-R): Admiral King, General Marshall, General Sir John Dill, Admiral Stark, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound.

Cruets, with their phoedeliae.

Phoedelia is the ecclesiastical name for one of the stoppers which accompany the cruets used in the liturgical rites of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches particularly. They are often made of glass and shaped in the form of a cross. They are usually produced in a pair for both the water and wine as elements of the Eucharist.

Herbert Howells drew glory from a well of grief

The Hymnus Paradisi by Herbert Howells is the greatest piece of English choral music, says Simon Heffer – and unutterably moving.

Decently habited: the St Paul's Cathedral Choir.

By Simon Heffer. September 4, 2010. Reposted from The Daily Telegraph.

Seventy-five years ago tomorrow, a nine-year-old boy called Michael Howells died of polio after an illness of less than three days, at the end of what had been a happy family holiday in Gloucestershire. His parents and sister were devastated, as might be expected: for his father, Herbert Howells, then 43 and building a substantial reputation as a composer of sacred music, the blow was particularly crippling. For months he could contemplate no work and did not write a note; it was as if the boy’s death had wiped out the creative impulse within him entirely.

Then his daughter Ursula, later to become one of Britain’s most celebrated actresses, suggested that he write a piece expressing his grief. Howells made a superhuman effort, and did so. He used parts of a requiem mass written shortly before Michael’s illness, but framed them around music raw in its agony and beauty. The result, the Hymnus Paradisi, was finished in 1938 and put away in a drawer. The wound was still open, and the pain too personal for Howells to consider offering the work to the public. There it stayed for more than a decade.

In 1949, the organisers of the following year’s Three Choirs Festival asked Howells if he could provide a work for it. With some diffidence, he showed one of the organisers, Herbert Sumsion, the score of the Hymnus. Sumsion instantly saw the quality of the piece, and that in musical terms it was of a different dimension not just to anything else Howells had done, but to anything most living composers could do. Howells was still reluctant to proceed: so Sumsion called in the biggest gun of all, Vaughan Williams, who insisted that it be performed. It was finally put before the public 12 years after its completion.

I mentioned in this column about a year ago my conviction that the Hymnus is the greatest piece of English choral music ever written. I have heard every note of Elgar’s and Vaughan Williams’s, not to mention Parry, Britten, Walton, Dyson, Bairstow and (from earlier times) Tallis and Purcell. I am well aware of their greatness and, in some cases, creative genius. In many respects, Howells could not match the creativity of many of them; but the Hymnus is exceptional.

I went to a performance of it almost by accident in King’s College Chapel at Cambridge in 1982. Not only had I never heard it, I had never, to my shame, heard of it. There were other works in the concert programme that I wanted to hear; the Hymnus was incidental. What happened to me in the 45 minutes it took to perform the Hymnus echoed accounts I read subsequently of the first performance, which took place in Gloucester Cathedral 60 years ago on Tuesday, the day after the 15th anniversary of Michael Howells’s death. Critics spoke of being overpowered by it, stricken by its intensity and beauty, and unable to get it out of their heads for days afterwards. So it was for me.

The performance I witnessed received an ecstatic ovation, as it deserved; that became an eruption when, at the bidding of the conductor, a small, white-haired man stood up from the front of the choir stalls and waved a walking stick at the audience. It was the composer himself, just short of his 90th birthday. It was the last performance of the Hymnus he ever attended: he died the following February.

It was not only the work that helped him to come to terms with the cruel death of his son; it was the one that made him, relatively late in life, one of the great names in English music. The Hymnus became something of a phenomenon in the early 1950s, with a number of big public performances, and became a staple of the Three Choirs Festival. After Howells’s death, however, it seemed to slip from view: I have not been to a performance since, though there is one in Chichester Cathedral in November that I shall make a point of attending.

It is a difficult work to put on; requiring two soloists, a big orchestra and a choir, it is also expensive. The soprano’s part is exceptionally strenuous and demands a performer of Wagnerian capabilities; it is partly for that reason that some recordings of the work fall short. But above all, one needs a cathedral, or something very much like one. Howells said in his notes on the score that an organ part was optional, but the one recording made without it has a void in its heart: the organ is vital, especially in the second movement, where a great chord turns the mood from darkness in a moment with a majestic burst of light.

Light – lux perpetua – was what the composer sought to discover in writing the piece. It is visible, but there is darkness nearly everywhere. The power of the work is apparent in its opening few bars, which are so laden with sorrow that one wonders how it is going to find the will to go on. Before long sorrow turns to anguish; and the opening motif of loss and suffering recurs later on, whenever it seems the sun might just be breaking through.

Yet this is a mournful work only in parts. There is none of the self-pity that we associate with the expression of grief in other societies; it is borne with fortitude in a very English way, which is, apart from its beautiful sonorities, so much of the Hymnus‘s appeal.

Perhaps the ultimate irony of this most religious of works – from a man who started out as a cathedral organist and made his name writing church music – is that Howells’s own relationship with religion seems to have been far from clear. The abyss into which he sank after Michael’s death suggests that the consolations of the Church were inadequate. Howells certainly had a private life not easily compatible with godliness: he was a habitual womaniser.

The Hymnus sets words from the Latin mass, the Psalms and other religious texts, and relies on some of the classic tropes of devotional music – notably the organ – for its profound effects. Yet it comes over as a rather secular work, dealing more with the realities of a shattering bereavement than with any spiritual exploration that that event might provoke.

For all the expense and effort of mounting a performance, it should be better known and more performed. The enormously interesting archive of the Proms that the BBC has recently put on its website shows that the Hymnus has never been performed at our country’s principal music festival. That, surely, should be addressed. The Hymnus Paradisi is a work of genius whose day has not been, but is yet to come.

However, a positive result is that we can unashamedly quote Martin Luther on this most Anglican of blogs:

“I am not satisfied with those who despise music, as all fanatics do; for music is an endowment and a gift of God, not a gift of other persons. It also drives away the devil and makes people cheerful, one forgets all anger, unchasteness, pride, and other vices. I place music next to theology and give it the highest praise.”

The Pillar of Fire

An introduction to the music of Herbert Howells (1892-1983)

This carven stone sprang into lofty light
From dark foundations; and those Tudor tiles
Coloured by golden glass and Gloucester sunshine
Are patterned black with music.

If you have seen the morning sun rising through the Crécy window in Gloucester Cathedral, you will know something of what it is to accompany the Gloria of the Collegium Regale Evening Canticles on a fine organ in a great and resonant building. Herbert Howells was captivated by what he called “the immemorial sound of voices”; he revered the musical tradition of the English organ-loft; he called the Crécy window “a pillar of fire in my imagination”.

If you have seen the last rays of sunlight quenched by the chilling, towering blackness of an approaching storm, only to blaze down an hour later on glistening tiles and pavements, you will know how so much of his choral music covers the whole emotional gam – ut from agony to ecstasy, brilliance to deepest darkness. In the words of his biographer, the late Christopher Palmer “so often, for Howells, the agony is the ecstasy.”

If you have ever felt that you were born before or after your time, you will understand Herbert Howells’ conviction that somehow his roots belonged to the Tudor period.

And if you have listened to the masters of that great Renaissance period of English music and heard how major and minor harmonies are curiously and wonderfully intermingled, as in Weelkes’s “Arise, O God” or “When David heard”, you will not be surprised to hear the same characteristics in Howells, occasionally to the point of an agonised “false-relation” of major and minor in the same chord which often resolves into an almighty unison.

As Weelkes rejoiced in his great “Hosanna” in the minor key, so is Howells’ “Collegium Regale” Jubilate (Psalm 100) the only one in the cathedral repertoire in which the words “O be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands” et seq., are set in the exultant sunlight and storm of E flat minor.

There are the special moments and phrases which you will make your own, as have I: the veiled, flaring anger of the organ in the last moments of the Gloucester Service “Nunc Dimittis” before the Gloria, the sheer wildness of “…and to be the glory…” in the Nunc Dimittis of the Chichester Service, the inspired autumnal harmonies coalescing as the sure hand of the master craftsman sets Robert Bridges’ “I love all beauteous things” in his eighty-fifth year, the pure delight of the “Hymn to Saint Cecilia”, and that most dramatic of all “Te Deum” endings in the St Mary Redcliffe setting.

St Mary Redcliffe, Hereford, York, Dallas; a real affinity with places and buildings as well as with people is evident in so many of his works, music written with the nature of the building in mind. The monolithic St Paul’s Service is written for Wren’s massive fane as surely as the Westminster Service evokes the high, slender, somehow French interior of the Abbey. And who could hear or perform the Third Rhapsody for Organ without thinking of the young Howells putting pen to paper throughout a sleepless night of fire, explosions and high drama as Zeppelins dropped bombs on York?

Whoever comes to love the works of Howells finds surprises at every turn; his songs, the clavichord pieces, the orchestral works and chamber music – his years of teaching and adjudication illuminate wide-ranging perspectives on a musical career which spanned well over seventy years and remind the present writer especially that there is a musical world beyond the organ-loft! Delight and surprise overtake the listener when soul-stirring modulations and breathtakingly instant key-changes bring a piece surely and magnificently to an end in a key which seemed improbable a few bars previously, and one reads with amazement that, according to Felix Aprahamian, he improvised all his voluntaries when deputising as Organist of St John’s College, Cambridge, during World War II.

Perhaps a certain underlying melancholy disturbs some listeners, as agony and ecstasy or quiet introspection attract others; perhaps only HH could have set “The Summer is Coming” as a deeply-felt lament, but the music is true to Bryan Guinness’s haunting poem as it is to Howells’ acute sense of place. As G.K.Chesterton put it:

For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry
And all their songs are sad.

To what extent the “pillar of fire in his imagination” was fuelled by terrible personal tragedy cannot be known now, but it burnt brightly in him almost to the end; and when the sun prints the words “My soul doth magnify the Lord” in shadows through his memorial window onto the Tudor floor-tiles of Gloucester Cathedral’s Lady Chapel, what epitaph could be more appropriate?

David Page, 1997. Text copied many years ago from the website of St Peter’s Church, Nottingham. David Page was Deputy Organist at St Peter’s from 1982 until 1993.

Jubilate (Collegium Regale)

Magnificat & Nunc dimittis (Gloucester)

Nunc dimittis (Chichester)

I love all beauteous things

Hymn for Saint Cecilia

Te Deum (St Mary Redcliffe)

Magnificat (St Paul’s)

Magnificat & Nunc dimittis (Westminster)

Rhapsody No. 3 for Organ

And Thy Years Shall not Fail – a Christmas Reflection

First of all may I thank the hundreds of people who have contacted me to express sympathy on the death of my brother. I have tried to reply to as many such messages as I can, but it is physically impossible to answer them all in a reasonable time. So may I say to all of you who took the trouble to write, that I am very grateful that you did so, and am comforted by what you said. This applies perhaps most especially to those who wrote to me across great gulfs of disagreement. Civility between opponents is a light in the darkness, a recognition that we are all more united, as humans, than we are divided as supporters of causes or believers in faiths.

I shall once again be travelling during the next few days, so this is my last chance to write here until after the Feast of the Nativity. The Mail on Sunday will not be appearing on Sunday because it is Christmas Day, so there will be no column that week.

This will be a long gap, and during the brief period of peace in the storm of life, which I hope Christmas will be, I thought I would try to explain why for me, and for many others I suspect, this is such a precious season.

Of course, like most children in countries where Christmas is celebrated, I was from my earliest childhood thrilled by the promise of presents, the exhilarating, intoxicating smell of the pine tree in the house, the rich foods and the feeling that this was above all others a special time of year.

I cannot remember (and for the sake of Mr ‘Bunker’ I am sorry about this) ever being particularly enthused about Father Christmas. Perhaps this is the fault of my father, who could be wonderfully unsentimental about his children, forgetting our names even though there were only two of us and he had presumably helped to choose them, referring to us as ‘that boy’ and ‘that wretched boy’ (these titles were interchangeable, depending on our most recent crimes and misdemeanours). There is also a superb passage in my brother’s memoir ‘Hitch-22’ in which he records trying to strike up a conversation with our father one breakfast time. The head of the Hitchens family blasphemed briefly before growling ’It’ll be family prayers next’, and returning to a bloodshot examination of the Daily Telegraph. Many years of shipboard wardroom breakfasts, conducted in grumpy silence as the ship pitched and rolled and the plates slid this way and that, had left him hopelessly unprepared for domesticity. I have no recollection whatever of him attempting to impersonate Father Christmas.

In fact I much preferred the weeks before Christmas, the strange light in the sky (the melodramatic, suspenseful nature of late December English weather is perfectly described in John Masefield’s enchanting book ‘The Box of Delights’), the carol singing, the stirring of the pudding (the Church of England has now abolished ‘Stir-Up Sunday’, in its incessant effort to get rid of everything about the Church that anybody actually likes. The prayer for that day contains an exhortation to ‘Stir up, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people’ and refers to ‘plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works’, and that Sunday, a month before Christmas, was also in many homes the traditional date for stirring of puddings. I have never been sure if this is an accident, or a light-hearted insertion by a jolly Bishop centuries ago).

And, as a boarding school child, there was the long clattering train journey home behind a snorting steam engine (F. Scott Fitzgerald, in one of his short stories¹, don’t ask me which, is the only author I know of who has been able to reproduce the excitement of such a land voyage at this time of year. I suspect he quite liked trains. He is buried, perhaps irrelevantly, perhaps not, in a small graveyard in Rockville, Maryland, very close to the railway line which runs from Washington DC to Chicago, within earshot of the evocative moaning hooters of the huge American locomotives. It was only when I visited his modest tomb that I realised that his full name was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, and that he had been called after the author of the US national anthem).

So for me the season is one of darkness illuminated with carols sung by lamplight, the sun low in the sky, and a promise, never entirely fulfilled on the day itself, of something wonderful to come. That sticks, when all else falls away.

It is only more recently, when it has become (as it wasn’t in my childhood home, though we got plenty of religion at school) an occasion for churchgoing that I have been captivated by the extraordinary, disturbing beauty of the Collect, Epistle and Gospel for ‘the Birth-day of Christ, commonly called Christmas Day’ as prescribed in the Church of England’s 1662 Book of Common Prayer. If you are really fortunate, you may be able to find a church where these passages are read at midnight on Christmas Eve. Listen carefully, if you do. It may not be long before this lovely ceremony is entirely stamped out by modernising fanatics. You could be one of the last to hear it.

The Gospel is the soaring, fiery declaration from the opening of St John’s Gospel – ending with ‘and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of his father, full of grace and truth’.

But the Epistle, that of St Paul to the Hebrews, borrows from something much older, the 102nd Psalm, when it draws itself up at the end to declare this promise: ‘And thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands. They shall perish: but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment: and as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail’.

Now, I know there are plenty of readers here who find this sort of thing meaningless or actively repellent, and who could not imagine themselves taking it seriously or taking part in the ceremony which follows.

But I ask them, at this season, to set aside their scorn and their reductionist belief that the universe is no more than the sum of its parts. And to try reading these words out loud with an open mind and seeing if their poetry does not catch them somewhere deep inside. The dead are very present in our minds at Christmas (as A.S. Byatt rightly remarks in the extraordinary quartet of books that begins with ‘the Virgin in the Garden’ ) and the past so close around us that you can almost touch it. There is no moment at which the fierce, all-consuming passage of time is felt so clearly.

Is everything that is gone lost forever? Or does it continue to exist in eternity? Well, as with all things, you may choose. But if you choose to hope that our small, squabbling lives have some greater meaning and purpose than we can at first see, then the words ‘Thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail’ seem to me to be so full of meaning (and themselves so very old that their mere survival is in itself astonishing) that they are enough to make anyone tremble.

Well, that’s it. I think Christmas is a religious festival, and pointless without religion. But I wish you all, even the unbelievers, a peaceful and blessed Nativity, safe and warm amid the blast and tumult of our tottering civilisation.

^{1. I believe that Hitchens is thinking of the following passage, which falls near the end of The Great Gatsby. I have always loved it as well:}

One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid them a hasty good-by. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-that’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: “Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?” and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

That’s my Middle West — not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all — Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 136–37.