Category: Worship

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Mixed thoughts about memorial wreaths and flowers at momuments

I meant to make this post available well ahead of Memorial Day, but that obviously did not happen. There will always be another occasion for wreaths and tributes at monuments, though.

But it wasn’t a national holiday that made me think about this subject originally. I live in Washington D.C., and live near several memorials to foreign luminaries. Embassies and ex-pats will often leave flowers in tribute, so I see a lot of these. And then there are the wreaths and other flowers left at the military memorials. Florists must do well around here.

But not all choices are equally good. Here are some ideas if you intend to leave a wreath or make a floral  presentation at a public monument.

If I had to pick one action, plan for someone to clean up the wreath-remains within a few days. A pile of compost isn’t a tribute.

After that, choose the backing (and if needed, easel) well. The Ukrainian embassy left a wreath for the Schevchenko bicentennial earlier this year — in the context of a national crisis no less — but the flowers were attached to a plastic (think bread wrapper) covered foam hoop. Worse, it was too heavy for the wire easel, and with a slight breeze it toppled over and broke.

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Before it fell apart

…and after

I found it broken I was out walking Daisy the Dog, but it was past re-staging.

Contrast this with a wreath the Slovak embassy left on the birthday of the first Czechoslovak president (and husband of American-born Unitarian, Charlotte Garrigue) Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. The papier mache is stronger, so the wind did not destroy it, and the wooden easel adds dignity.

Before I put it back up
Before I put it back up

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Or do without the easel, and mount the wreath with this tribute to the Madonna of the Trail, in suburban Bethesda. The coated wire provides a backing to hang the wreath. (And now I can imagine where the typical toothmarks of decay on old sandstone monuments comes from…)

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From morning prayer, what can change?

In a recent blog post, I wrote about the difference between historic services of morning prayer and the lived experiences of Sunday morning worship. In particular, I wondered aloud where the sermon, announcements, offering and hymns would be placed. This is not a Unitarian or Universalist problem, but just found in any tradition that has used morning prayer as the principal morning service, either now or in the past.

The solution is finding the suitable position for additional elements.

  • For the sermon, the older solution was to place it after the morning prayer is complete or before the last two prayers. A newer option is to place it after the last reading. (I’ve also seen this in the 1917 Universalist Hymns of the Church, with one reading late in the service.)
  • Placing announcements is a perennial problem; no option is great. At the very beginning, after the creed “place” and after the sermon are three more-common options.
  • Same problem for the offering.
  • Unitarians seemed to use this sequence commonly at the end of a service from what I’ve read
    • Prayers
    • Sometimes a doxology
    • Offertory
    • Announcements
    • Hymn
    • Sermon
    • Sometimes a prayer
    • Hymn
    • A closing sequence, say a benedicton and postlude
  • I’ve seen Universalists use these sequences
    • Hymn
    • Announcements
    • Sermon
    • Prayer
    • Offerings
    • Hymn
    • Benediction
  • or,
    • Prayer
    • Hymn
    • Sermon
    • Announcements
    • Offerings
    • Doxology or hymn
    • Benediction
  • It’s hard to think one sequence is normative.
  • Hymns can frame the sermon, and also come before the sentences (or even replace them) and replace the canticles or psalms.
  • Psalms may be chanted (Universalists and Unitarians did), read as unison or responsively or substituted by an appropriate hymn or (more properly) a paraphrase.
  • Unitarians weren’t bashful about composing responsive psalms, often tightly re-edited for worship, and better euphony in English.
  • Likewise, Unitarians weren’t afraid to remove some of the prayer dialogues, moving seamlessly from praise to prayer. But readings seem to be uniformly announced.
  • Various modern Anglican (Episcopalian) prayer books encourage a seasonal or weekly (for daily prayer) or both cycle for the traditionally fixed options.
  • In appealing to even older traditions, antiphons frame the psalm. I’ve not seen this in Unitarian or Universalist use, probably because they’re a recent (post-1960s) reclamation by Protestants.
  • Another option for ending psalms, in lieu of the Gloria Patri (which Universalists used or left as an option) or the “Now unto the King eternal” is psalm prayers. One for each psalm may be found in the formidable Presbyterian (1993) Book of Common Worship — available here as a large PDF; worth getting — from page 611 onwards.
  • Unitarians and Universalists often drop the Apostles Creed, though not always. Another affirmation or symbol of faith, or a standard of faith like the Beatitudes can take the place.

Until next time…

This is blog post #3,600

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Filling the gaps in the liturgy

If you read the last two (1, 2) blog entries about the Kings Chapel Book of Common Prayer (1785) as compared with the Church of England Book of Common Prayer (1662), you’ll see they have a lot in common.

But maybe you think they have less in common with today’s ordinary Sunday worship service than they ought.

  • Where are the hymns?
  • And where’s the sermon?
  • There’s no place for announcements, which some of you may think this is a good idea.
  • And there’s no collection.

In other words, some of the basic parts but we think of as a normal order of service are missing. Perhaps the only necessary parts!

As it happens, there are places for these, and they were customarily added. In part because a full Sunday service is different than the daily prayers of an individual or small group. Also, because the traditional morning prayer service, is of not quite complete by itself.  It’s stort on intercession, for one.

To be fair, as a main Sunday service, it was often billed as “Morning Prayer and Sermon.” As daily morning prayer was concieved to one of at least fifteen services — seven each morning and evering prayers and Sunday Eucharist) per week. (We already see in the King’s Chapel prayer book, with the incorporation of the Litany with Morning Prayer that is wasn’t likely a daily service.)

This evolution of liturgy is a subtle business. And we’ll consider where the other parts go in the next twe posts on this topic.

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Studying Unitarian and Universalist liturgy: fixing a point of departure

One of the highlights of my childhood was the discovery of fossil known as Lucy. An example of Australopithecus afarensis, Lucy pushed forward our understanding of human origins by pushing back the clock. And from that day to now (when I think about the new version of Cosmos) I’ve come to expect the figure of a forked family tree, and a journey back to some critical node that separates our own path from the ones not taken.

And so it is with this exercise in Unitarian and Universalist liturgies, except that we’re only going back a couple of centuries, not millions of years, and the branches have a habit of lapping back on to themselves at a later point. And the Unitarians and Universalists grow along side of each other, one not eradicating the other. Think song birds, not hominids.

And we don’t have to go to the Rift Valley in eastern Africa, but to Boston. The place is King’s Chapel; the year, 1785.

I choose the first edition of the King’s Chapel prayer book not because King’s Chapel still uses a prayer book (in a later, 1986, edition) or even because it is the best known of the Unitarian or Universalist prayerbook churches, but

  1. because it is the earliest American Unitarian or Universalist prayerbook
  2. because it has a direct inheritance from the 1662 Church of England Book of Common Prayer,
  3. this inheritance is acknowledged, and
  4. because it influenced the production of the first United States Episcopal Church prayer book, in 1789.

We’ll see the parallels between Morning Prayer in the 1662 and 1785 books next, and after that comes the divergence.

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A review of the daily office in 500 words

So many thoughtful and talented people have written so well about the development of the daily office, or the Christian duty of daily prayer, that it’s folly for me to do so in brief. Indeed, you may want to stop here and get a copy of George Guiver’s 2001 Company of Voices: Daily Prayer and the People of God instead.

My job here is to get Unitarian Universalists (and similarly Protestantly reformed sorts) to the doorstep. Inside the house is ninteenth and twentieth century works from our tradition that themselves have roots in the daily office. Together we might make something for the twenty-first.

Christians adopted the practice of praying at different times of the days from Jews, and both made extensive use of psalms. Seven services a day for monks three of which were short and at midday, but we will not be retuning to these. In late antiquity, the peoples’ versions would be twice daily, but mainly praises and prayers, with some other scripture: partipatory and jubilant.

In the eastern Mediterranean, say in the seventh century, these prayers were popular among everyday people, as opposed to the priestly work at the altar. Some of the rhythms and text choices laid down then continue to this day. But the fullest development in the West, with the seven service, came in the monastaries, which may have had hundreds (even more than a thousand) monastics, either women and men. Much liturgical material was written in this period. Additional services, say, for the dead plus commemorations of the saints crept into medieval, monastic practices, greatly complicating it. Outside the monasteries, literate (and wealthy) laypeople might have vernacular, practical works of piety and prayer (called primers) while the travelling Franciscans used a reduced and one-volume service book, aptly called a breviary. Onward development often meant simplification.

In 1549, the Church of England adopted its first prayer book, simplifying and formally compressing the services of (overnight) matins and (pre-dawn) lauds into morning prayer, and (after sunset) vespers and (bedtime) compline into evening prayer. Later, elements from (mid-morning) prime was prepended to morning prayer. In each case, transitions persisted, like the breaks between a rail car. (We will examine the contents of the parts, what happens at the breaks and needed reforms later.)

Ideally, this meant morning prayer (with the litany, a long prayer of intercession with alternating parts between the minister and people three times a week) and evening prayer everyday, and communion after morning prayer on Sundays. In practice, the laity did not welcome communion, relegating it to the margins of piety, and the typical Sunday service become morning prayer, with sermon, the litany, trailing into communion but ending halfway.

Colonial Unitarians and Universalists had simpler worship, with heavy doses of preaching, prayers and singing. (The first denominational hymnal in the United States was Universalist.) The King’s Chapel (Anglican then Unitarian) and the Menzies Raynor (a New York Episcopanian minister turned Universalist) offer early witnesses to the influence of morning prayer for the Sunday service. When mid-nineneeth-century Unitarian and Universalists (the former influenced by James Martieau) adopted service books, they assumed the standards described in the paragraph above, and these practices influenced others that didn’t use the books.

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Archives search: a nicely laid-out order of service

My day at the Andover-Harvard Library archives was running out, so I wanted to see what I could as quickly as possible, including the files related to an ad hoc organization opposed to the creation of the Unitarian Universalist Association, from a minority of Universalists and Unitarians alike.

One of the opposing Unitarian churches was First Church, Boston, and the minister editorialized through orders of service, so these were included in the  file. The controversy aside, I thought it had value as a format.

The order was four pages: one leaf folded, and printed the usual way like a booklet. Since I don’t know the copyright status of the order of services, I won’t post them; it may be legitimate fair use, but the value is in the form (rather than the content) so I may replicate that later. A description will do.

Page one:

  • Name of the church
  • Names and title of the ministers
  • Date and time
  • Outline order of service with dialogues, responses and doxology printed out
  • Name and title of organist

Page two:

  • Responsive reading

Page three:

  • A pastoral meditation (being the anti-consolidation opinion piece), signed with initials
  • Staff list (or on page four)

Page four:

  • Notices, in a mix of one and two columns
  • Staff list and address (or on page three)

Not radical, but a some interesting features.

  • tightly edited notices reduce or eliminate the need for a church newsletter
  • the minister’s meditation provides another avenue for principled and educational communication; I wonder if it was used for pledging?
  • bored with the service? you can read that meditation instead
  • folded backwards, to expose pages 2 and 3, you have a welcome reminder of church to be extracted later in the week from your bag…
  • …or a pleasing representation of the church to share with others
  • one leaf means less paper and less cost, and extras can easily be printed on the fly

Of course, yours would be photocopied or laser printed, rather than job printing. That’s something you couldn’t do in 1959!

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The worship at the church down the street…

It’s 1920, and you’re in a large market town east of the Alleghenies. You’re looking for a church and your options include an Episcopal church and a Unitarian church. (Make it a small city or larger, and you might add the Universalists to this formula.) Ask the rector of St. Alban’s or the minister at First Unitarian if each has much in common with the other, and you would probably be told “no.” Different polity, different theology, different piety. The two have nothing in common.

But if you ask parishioners to describe how worship was worded, you might pick up on more similarities then you would have expected. Yes, Unitarian worship has changed, but so did Episcopalian worship, and in 1920 they were closer in style. These were the days before the Liturgical Movement, so an every-Sunday, main Eucharistic (Communion) service would be unlikely; Morning Prayer (with Sermon) would be more likely, and if it was old-fashioned, it may be followed in an odd rhythm by the Litany and then Ante-Communion; that is, the first half of the Communion service. And the Unitarians would have Morning Prayer and Sermon, by that or another name. A big litany would be an option, and if you’d shown up a generation or two before, even Ante-Communion.

Small-town Universalists, Western “fiddle and lecture” Unitarians and Anglo-Catholic Episcopalians would have fallen outside this spectrum, but Theist and even early Humanist Unitarians appreciated the rhythms and internal logic of Morning Prayer. You ask: so what?

In the next couple of weeks or more, I will blog on:

  • what the contemporary changes Unitarians and Universalists made to common worship styles say about their assumptions then
  • how traces of those forms persist, even in unlikely settings
  • how these forms are based on centuries of developments
  • how these forms can be the basis of lay theological education and mission
  • how movement, habits and artifacts shape worship
  • what adaptations and alterations by those who used those forms (Epiccopalians mainly) say about how these forms might be re-reformed and re-adopted

Should be fun! Thought? Please add them in the comments.