Charles Victor on Religion

We live in a world so flooded with information that the powers of rational and spiritual integration are often in danger of dissolving into either vision-less tolerance or blinded bigotry. There is a need for dialogue, reflection, and logic.  The world stands in want of a vision, an equation all-embracing and yet utterly simple.  We must labour, therefore, that the good news is not encumbered with delusions so that all may come and find their own fullness which is nothing else but their dissolution into that one who is love and presence.

The liturgy of the church is the formula for transmitting the gospel, and for developing into that gospel the members of the church, individually and collectively. Liturgy, however, is incarnational, and always encodes not just the gospel, but a particular enculturation of it, a particular dogmatizing of it, a particular approach to it. That encultured, dogmatized approach acts by consistent and repeated application to immerse the church into a comprehensive vision of reality and a logical avenue of growth and maturation.

The celebration of the liturgy is not unlike the application of physical therapy. If the physical therapist deviates from a paced and logical application of a given set of proper treatments and exercises, the result in the patient will undoubtedly be some physical distortion or malfunction.  If liturgy deviates from the paced and logical application of spiritual vision, direction, discernment, and support, the result in the church is spiritual distortion, if not death and decay.

Again, liturgy is like a roadway. If one needs to travel from Oxford to London, one may consult a map and follow a direct and clear course, or one may simply get into a car and drive around in the firm hope that eventually on the maze of roads one will come to the destination.  The maze may indeed offer wonderful views and experiences, but only the choice of a set roadway offers surety of direction. Sound liturgy is a roadway leading from an initial experience of the Holy to maturation and absorption into the Holy. The history of humanity is filled with such roadways, but anyone who sets out on the journey is more than foolish to think there is either time or space to squander on mere wonderful views and enthralling experience when the destination of ages awaits.  The church must offer the way, must mark the way, must stand as the way.  If the church will not do this, the roadway that is the Way, the Truth, and the Life will be, by default, declared relative, and the church will cease to be called a house of spiritual formation and growth, and become another anthropological curiosity.

Contingently, there is a need for a logical pathway, a consistent program, an orthodoxy, a systematic discipline of prayer and progression in prayer. The Anglican Church of Canada acknowledges the need for such a discipline of prayer and belief, and our prayer book is that orthodoxy. The prayer book is, as well, our agreed to and sanctioned discipline of worship representing and reflecting the whole of the Anglican Church of Canada, high, low, and broad. This book is the prescribed exercise for spiritual growth and development. It is the format for public worship. What is outside this book and it companions of alternative and occasional services, is material from the realm of private devotion, material from views and visions deemed unrequired to the singularity of the discipline prescribed.  While many congregations have tolerated the display and use of heterodox devotional material, the heterodox, properly and at best, remains private, devotional, and unworthy of public use in worship, being unapproved and unpublished by this church gathered in solemn assembly. The right to liturgical change and experimentation has always resided in, and has always been acknowledged as residing in,  the church, not merely this group or that, this individual or that. Our common prayer is our common prayer, and not the devotional longings of any one faction or person.

Part of the Anglican Church’s prescribed and sanctioned treatment of souls is the immediacy of the divine in Christ. Our ancestors fought a reformation to enshrine this, to entrench this, to extrude this from the distortions that the emotive devotions of generations had heaped upon it.  When the church prays, all the church prays, for to be church is to be in Christ. Christ is our common life, our common identity, our common name. We may say to one another “pray for me” or “pray with me”, but as all prayer of the church is in and of Christ, no “me” or “you” is ever rightly named, no “me” or “you” per se exists, stands out.  All are immersed in Christ, and our prayer celebrates the singularity in Christ, the commonality of Christ, radically immanent and transcendent. We do not gather and say “Charles, pray for me” or “Mary, pray for us”, but “Let us pray in Christ’s name”, “Holy One, hear us for Christ’s sake”.  God is in Christ; Christ is the fullness and the immediacy of God for us. All in Christ are equal; all in Christ are in one and the same immediate and all-embracing proximity to the Holy One.

We are agreed that to request the prayer of a member of the church on that other shore is not different from requesting the prayer of a member of the church here on earth. Yet, why should we dare to single out and name a member of the church at rest and not a member of the church here at labour? We ought not to so dare. We may thank God for the life and example of a particular individual, we may hold up our care and concern for the well-being of a particular individual, but beyond that, before God the only name we properly give is Jesus Christ, in whom all things and persons are held together, in whom all things and all persons are united in the Spirit of the Holy One. All other names have meaning and existence only in, by, and through that name, the name of our one mediator, our one prayer, our one priest, Jesus, the Christ. If anyone share in the ministry of Christ as mediator, the share is by grace, not by right, by participation in that name, not in one’s own name. Indeed, in our prayer even the revealed name of God is  suppressed, for in Christ the divine and the human are fully met, and we rightly use only that one name inclusive of all others. Further, I would lightly conjecture that if any one individual might be named beside Christ as a medium of the divine presence, a more sure foundation for such an argument might be found by entrenching the communion of saints within the Logos and utilizing a type of communicatio idiomatum. But, even if such a fanciful academic exercise proved valid and acceptable to the church, what would its purpose be? Is Christ not enough? Might it not well be a sorrow in heaven for them that spent their lives offering up their selves to become transparent to the Holy One for the sake of others to now be called upon by others to serve as iconostases for the immediacy of the Holy One?

In our several discussions on the topic, the use of intercessory Marian hymns had been deemed inappropriate in our common public worship. I realize there are some who are inclined to regally dismiss anything that saps of a criticism of our music program. But how can anyone proclaim confidence when the choir sings prayers unsuitable to the logic of our discipline of worship? Song is prayer sung. Prayer, said or sung, must be in accord with the prescribed order set forth by the church as our common prayer, and not with the devotional attitudes or materials of any one individual or group, no matter how fondly held or conceived. I realize the hymn to which I object is found in an English hymnal. I know also that this work has no official status, despite its wide usage among anglo-catholics. But the publication of a doctrinal inadequacy or its wide acceptance does not make it orthodox. I realize that some argue this hymn does not make Mary an intercessor, however, the Vatican and I are (for once!) in agreement—it does. But, without regard to the capacity in which Mary or any other saint in invoked, any hagiolatric word demeans the immediacy of Christ and of God in Christ, grates against the prescribed and agreed discipline of commonality, and blurs the clarity and focus of vision in the soul, the soul we are charged to care for and guide.

Perhaps I am walking on air for I have recently gleaned a report on music submitted to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. I am sorry that I find in it so many words and so little vision or understanding. Censorship in church music is called undesirable because even the music of the Beatles might be for some a pathway to the truth! It is a comfort to know that God is still to be found in all creation and the handiwork of the creative, but there is a great difference between acknowledging the presence and print of the divine in all things and upholding and exercising a single pathway as a communal discipline of spiritual formation, there is a great difference between piety and being a church. I fear to hear the answer the authors of that report would give my hypothetical question regarding the use of Vedic hymns in Sunday worship.

It seems some people approach liturgy and say this bishop or this see has done this, therefore, we have precedent to do the same; this commission has proposed this, therefore, we have a right to act upon it. Many approach the liturgy with creative ideas and say this is merely a minor augmentation. But why then do they bother to seek it? Do they not realize that every change in the discipline and application of worship effects a change in the message, and while a minute change may involve only a minor shift in meaning and vision, under the force of repeated application, the minor may well become the major? Again, many do not recognize the value of the liturgy, the work of the house to which they belong; they do not see the need to forsake all others and be faithful to that work, that discipline. The liturgy belongs to the church, it is a collective, a communal property, not an individual right; and to the extent that one removes oneself from it, one removes oneself from the community and demeans the discipline and work of the community.  Many do not see the liturgy is a work, a labour, an exercise to prepare for bearing the divine into the world and for suffering the impact released in that union. Liturgy is the Christo-centric communal discipline of prayer or it is nothing and less. It is no performance for the sake of the people, no production for the sake of arousing inspiration. If ever it falls to that loss of purpose or order, this institution shall truly die, for whom do we think will remain to hear when we know every theatre has its day, every production its last performance, every emotive fibre its point of saturation to numbness?

We can try to make liturgy culturally relevant. But they who would tread this road will make symbols without comprehending their effects, without understanding that the cure of souls must always be anchored, focused in history and in the pantocrator of history, Christ. We can cling to a liturgical fundamentalism. But they who would thread this path will fail to see it is an escape from the burden of carrying on a mission to an ever changing world, an escape, ultimately, from the task of Christ’s ongoing kenosis. We can open the gates and say anything is acceptable. But they who would tread here are in most severe danger, for this is the path of utter confusion, a tossing of the purpose of discipline in prayer, growth in holiness and spiritual maturation into the wind. If all is a path to the holy, then, ultimately, all shall be lost in a scramble to assert the apotheosis of self over and above the indivisible, ubiquitous, omniscient and eternal presence, as beyond us as within us, rightly called Love, that Holy and Triune Communion in whose image humanity is both made and called forth. We live in an age wherein solutions must be instantaneous, and few are inclined and willing to question the how, why, where, or when of anything that somewhere or somehow seems to work. I wonder how Pelagius would fare today. How many in this church would call his teaching heretical, and how many would laud him an insightful social scientist? How many would question the need for there to be a distinction between the approach toward the individual in psychic therapy and the approach toward humanity in its spiritual formation into the divine for the sake of the world? Yet, if we act on no logical or ordered groundwork, no integrated identity and vision, who are we, and what work can we accomplish?

It strikes me as being very strange that when we gather to discuss sexuality, everyone wants to know what Scripture has to say, everyone wants a clear view of the church’s historical position and present day considerations. Yet, when we come to consider the very acts that make us church, our public and common prayer life, a reality more real, more sacred, more powerful, more vital, than any sex act ever could be, how deeply are we drawn to look at what Scripture has to say, or at what this church in the generations of its wisdom has set down as the way prescribed, the way ordered, the way encoded and defined. The reformation was a struggle to make a simple, clear, and common way for all believers, it sought to free the path of the clutter, the emotional chaos of devotional material that an incomprehensible liturgy necessitated among the masses. Do we today desire clutter, doctrines and devotions that belong to another’s house? Is the social pressure exerted by advertisements for services featuring special lighting effects, massed choirs, and the spectacular use of smoke seducing us into seeking out physical and psychic exhilaration? What confessor would tolerate without challenge such longings and desires in the penitent? What spiritual director would not set firmly the parameters of prayer?

No parish is immune from human imperfection and liturgical temptations. We have an inclination toward publicly celebrating what our common spiritual discipline and wisdom have traditionally delegated, at best, to the private realm. We cannot forget the duty of the church is to provide sound, prescribed spiritual education, support and direction. It is neither duty nor right to even attempt to pamper the emotions and senses with aesthetic experience, with charming devotions, with the exoticism of heterodoxy. Schleiermacher attempted to see the aesthetic and religious experience meld. But we are not philosophers, we are church, and we are given to hold that the religious experience is from God, that it has its own beauty, that it is received in repentance, and that the pathway of that great turning to God is laid out in the sacred word proclaimed and given in the work of our common prayer.

We, as a parish, have made a number of adaptations that some might well argue challenge the logic of common prayer. We have re-ordered parts of services, we customarily omit parts of services, and at Holy Communion we often act as if the Holy is in the bread and wine rather than in the people united in the sharing of them, more in the sign than in that which the sign reveals, teaches, effects. I do not wish to undervalue either the nature of or the need for signs, symbols, rituals, and subliminal means of communication, but let us be discerning, let us be reflective about what they say, and logical about how they are used. The application of the senses in prayer must be grounded in orthodoxy; this is a fundamental rule of prayer. Likewise, not every experience of consolation or elation is of God; this is a fundamental rule of discernment.

I do not question the goodness or the good intentions of them who are fascinated by heterodoxy or of them who are proponents of change. I do not deny the existence of sundry possible disciplines of communal worship, their value, or their truth. I do not uphold our common prayer as the only possible way, merely as our agreed to, accepted, ratified, and common discipline of vision and prayer. When this commonality is altered, it is not illogical that some among us should be bewildered and confused. When this commonality is added to from the programs of other churches, it is not extravagant that some should question where we are going and what next we will introduce. I ask: Does anyone want to be just-plain-Anglican? Is our common prayer so great a task that it matters not? Are our liturgies so deficient that they cannot lead, cannot be used to lead the people to the Holy?

Reportedly, our monastics need something more than our common order provides. They require Vespers. But I find it strange that monastics, having traditionally divided evening prayers into two parts to mark the end of the work day and to mark the time for sleep, now require a third office to augment the service orders the church provides. I am not about to take on the role of critic regarding monasticism, for it, indeed, is a valuable lifestyle. Yet, monasticism is and always has been prey to devotionalism to the detriment of contemplation, a fact as decried by Avila as by Merton. Indeed, the reformation gathered much of its momentum from the need to eradicate the good-intentioned but ill-conceived practices and devotions of the monastically dominated clerical infrastructure. In our own time, Anglican monasticism has in many places swallowed Roman practice whole and entire confusedly believing that what is Roman is catholic. I know of Anglican houses wherein the nineteenth and twentieth century doctrines of Immaculate Conception and Assumption and their related devotions are more fervently received than they are among many present day Roman theologians. Have these monastics and their theological supporters read the prayer book, the articles, the history of the church? Can they logically argue such views and pathways are consistent with our common way? Is obedience no longer a virtue for the monastic? Heterodoxy in an intellectual or academic forum may well be vivifying, but heterodoxy in prayer is disastrous. But why are we presenting a monastic liturgy? We are not a monastery any more than we are a performance hall.

It has been said a cathedral church ought to be a reflection of the see. I ask, how ought a cathedral to make that reflection—quantitatively or qualitatively? Ought not the seat of the bishop to be also the seat of orthodoxy, the seat wherein the worship of the church is in deep focus upon our common discipline? Ought not a cathedral church to be the church that focuses and reflects the standard vision and practice of the whole church? Ought not a cathedral to be the church that shows forth the excellence of the common prayer, rather than the expanse of the personal devotion extant within the communion? When various parishes and organizations within our see come to the cathedral ought there not be celebrated our commonality, our common prayer, rather than the idiosyncrasies of this group or that?

The human spirit cries for prayer, aches for contemplation. The mind thirsts for knowledge and understanding. The heart withers for want of acceptance and love. The world is not at all interested in turning away from God, but the vision of God is being lost to the world in a maze of un-integrated dogmatics and a cloud of irrationalities and sensationalisms. What is our response? Let us not fear to be our own house, let us not build where we have neither foundation nor title. Let us stand firm, open and faithful to what is ours, thanking God for what we have been given, and for the multitude and the diversity of gifts given to others. Let us not give fragments. Let us not fragment what we have to give. Let us not presume to give of our individualities, but of our unity, our community, our commonality, our faith, our hope. Let us keep clear and unencumbered the pathway to Christ, the Christ encountered in the Scripture, and for-us, in our common discipline of spirituality, the Christ living and waiting in humanity for that universal worship and unbridled adoration which is the justice of the ages.

Allow me to begin with the thesis I have provided in another place. Liturgy is a discipline. It is a discipline both in the sense of an organized body of knowledge, and in the sense of a training exercise that develops, molds, and perfects. The liturgy expresses the theology, anthropology, philosophy and the ethics of the church; it presents a vision of God and humanity, and the relationship twixt the two. The liturgy is the communal spiritual exercise; it is a work prescribed for use at regular intervals, and it is the work that carries the subliminal messages the effect the subconscious where the basic attitudes toward life are rehearsed and affirmed. Liturgy does not discuss a topic, it presents a picture, a vision. That vision is intended to pursue the heart, move the will, take hold and root in the depths. God alone dictates the vision. Humanity must find the actions and words to incarnate and transmit that vision. This is no small or easy task. The acts of communal worship must work together as a unified whole, must present a true, logical, comprehensive, and comprehensible statement. Every element, every word, every movement, must be skillfully and properly plied into a voice the heart can hear, into a touch that stills the senses and moves the soul to the joyous and obedient silence that is the essence of adoration, the groundwork of Christo-centricity. Where, therefore, is the unity of message in declaring Christ our only mediator and guide and then singing to Mary to be for us a mediator and guide?

Given a fondness for the study of religion, I appreciate the place given in various religions to the great mediators. Certain schools of Buddhism provide an admirable discipline of worship built around the intercessions of various saints and Bodhisattvas. Hinduism, with its host of gods and mediators, is a treasure house of disciplines and visions of the Holy. But would it be permitted me in the course of divine service to substitute some of my favourite Hindu hymns from the Rig Veda for the prescribed Hebrew hymns from the Book of Psalms, to name the Triune God as Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma? No! I would not be allowed the hymns and names of other disciplines of worship, of other visions of the Holy. I would not be allowed them because they are deemed to be false or demonic, but because they do not qualify for the exercise of worship and the program of spiritual formation that constitute our unique heritage and vision within the Christian family.

I do not deny that the Romans and others are free to use co-mediators and co-intercessors in the spiritual exercises that constitute their own and unique programs of communal spiritual development.  I do not deny that some may find the root of such practice in the idea of the communion of saints, but I  must note that making the communion of saints into a type of ancestor worship, or making a saint, a vessel of God’s grace, into an instrument of spiritual obscurement for the immediacy of grace that exists in and is Christ saps of romance and emotion more than of adoration and reason.  If the idea of the communion of saints has any meaning, the “saints” whose prayers ought to be requested are the saints around us. But, it is always easier to lift up the eyes in some delusion of mystical union than to reach out for communion with one’s neighbours. I cannot but believe that to interject heterodox material into a program of spiritual direction (as established by the sanctioned books and practices of the church) leaves us vulnerable to the charge of spiritual malpractice, a danger that cannot be ignored.

There are some who fear to speak. That attitude does not make for community. There are some to whom such things matter not; they want merely to relax and be washed over with the sights and sounds of beauty. I do not see that attitude in itself as even being within the realm of religion. The enjoyment of musical theatre is not what communal prayer and spiritual exercise are about. Have we descended into making divine service into musical performance? Have we thrown the church’s prescribed theology and discipline of prayer out the window to accommodate the private devotions of the individual?  If we are trying to gather more people to services, would we not better serve our purpose and mission by holding a series of studies or discussions on some relevant topics followed by song and prayer? We are not about the re-creation of antique liturgies, but about the re-creation of lives, lives summoned to newness in a love for-given from eternity. Such re-creation is always formulated and transmitted by the logic of worship, the orthodoxy of the logos.

I cannot comprehend why some clerics, having sworn to uphold the books and doctrines of the Anglican Church of Canada, go off seeking some sort of higher confirmation of their ministry in the names and rituals of another church. Does Rome provide some approbation that our history, crown, parliament, convocation, chapter and synod cannot? I do not understand how such clerics can properly lead, serve, preserve, and pass on a tradition they themselves, at least by omission, disavow. I realize that  some see the rituals of the Roman Church as the epitome of western liturgical practice. I realize that in this century many of the rituals imported by liturgical innovators of the last century have been passed on by schools of theology. I realize this movement claims to have rediscovered the English Church’s historical roots, and I realize that what they actually discovered was the English Church’s southern neighbour. I realize that many Anglicans have simply grown up immersed in certain tolerated practices, and that most people, even people exposed to long stays in academia, do not question the programs responsible for their socialization. I do know that anyone who has read the documents of Trent and the Institutes of Calvin knows The Book of Common Prayer is comfortably closer to the mind of Calvin than to the mind of Rome. I realize that being unable to be faithful to Rome, I made my way to Canterbury. I realize that one who suffers the questions, doubts and guilt that are parcel to such a personal reformation, becomes, to some degree, spiritually and psychologically united to the Reformers and prone to their zeal. I realize, having been schooled by Jesuits in the spirituality of Ignatius, the power existing in Rome’s treasures. I realize, one day having put down Ignatius and taken up Cranmer, the profound spirituality laid out in the liturgies of the Prayer Book. But the point is and ever shall be: you cannot mix metaphors, you cannot randomly mix in the ritual acts, doctrines, and names of another, unless, of course, you dare to be reckless, thoughtless, and uncaring enough to offer babble instead of the Word, spiritual chaos instead of direction, scraps of piety instead of a portal of guidance and grace.

If I have spoken of myself, I have done so because communication is about persons and personalities as much as about ideas; our perceptions, our logic, our thoughts are too intertwined into that speck of history we call self to be honestly examined in pure abstraction. A great deal of history, church and secular, and a great deal of theology and philosophy would be very different had our forebears such a mind.  I fear the people of this house stand in danger of being deprived their heritage, their due of sound guidance, reasoned direction, and worshipful care. There is a great abyss between the care of souls and the craving for the sounds and gestures of beauty. The psalmist does cry “worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness”, but the key word is not beauty, it is holiness. They that would be the servants of holiness must tend to their task. They cannot wander off into some delusion of light and lovely, for the true light and rarest beauty is seldom found where the world would have it. Let Rome have her vespers, her co-mediatrix of all graces. When the sun sets, let it be that in this church our prayer shall always and simply be the joyful worship of God’s Christ, sole mediator and guide, risen and present, immediate and real.