Two Important Essays Brought To Mind By Recent Conversations with Low Church Friends

As I've enjoyed more than a couple conversations recently with younger men coming out of lower churches to embrace more traditional understandings of liturgy, and as I have also had the occasion recently of watching long-time Episcopalians/Anglicans sliding into lower and lower forms of "accessible" worship, I thought I'd post a couple of important essays here which have helped me understand and appreciate some of the more opaque but fundamental aspects of our Anglican way of praising God.

It can be so easy to abandon that which we don't understand.  Similarly, it can be so difficult to be enthusiastic and evangelical about things which aren't obvious and immediately grasped.

Both of these fairly well-known essays have been and continue to be very helpful and formative for me, not just in their immediate subject matter, which is poetry in the first case and women's ordination in the second, but in the more general understanding or view of the world which they present.  You don't need to be a literary critic or be set against women's ordination to gain valuable insights from these writings.

The first, and most instructive for me, is T.S. Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent.  In summary, it concerns itself with poets caught between the tension of writing in innovative vs traditional styles.  It's much more than that of course, so you'll have to read it yourself.  If literature is not your thing, I recommend replacing "poet" with "Anglican" and "poetry" with "faith and worship" to make for a more relevant reading.

Here's your teaser:

To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first course is inadmissible, the second is an important experience of youth, and the third is a pleasant and highly desirable supplement. The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe—the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind—is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen. That this development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist, any improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of view of the psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end based upon a complication in economics and machinery. But the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show.

Some one said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know.

The second essay is C.S. Lewis' essay Priestesses in the Church.  It was written way back in 1948 but could have been written yesterday.  Again, you may or may not agree with his points about women in the priesthood--I tend to agree with Lewis--but what you will find is one of the most concise and well-articulated explanations of exactly what it means to be a Christian with a body in time and space, countering those Christians we have nowadays who are content to know and worship God in their minds or emotions only, as if God were merely a website or streaming media.

See if any of this sounds out-of-date to you:

The innovators are really implying that sex is something superficial, irrelevant to the spiritual life. To say that men and women are equally eligible for a certain profession is to say that for the purposes of that profession their sex is irrelevant. We are, within that context, treating both as neuters.

As the State grows more like a hive or an ant-hill it needs an increasing number of workers who can be treated as neuters. This may be inevitable for our secular life. But in our Christian life we must return to reality. There we are not homogeneous units, but different and complementary organs of a mystical body. Lady Nunburnholme has claimed that the equality of men and women is a Christian principle. I do not remember the text in scripture nor the Fathers, nor Hooker, nor the Prayer Book which asserts it; but that is not here my point. The point is that unless "equal" means "interchangeable", equality makes nothing for the priesthood of women. And the kind of equality which implies that the equals are interchangeable (like counters or identical machines) is, among humans, a legal fiction. It may be a useful legal fiction. But in church we turn our back on fictions. One of the ends for which sex was created was to symbolize to us the hidden things of God. One of the functions of human marriage is to express the nature of the union between Christ and the Church. We have no authority to take the living and semitive figures which God has painted on the canvas of our nature and shift them about as if they were mere geometrical figures.

So there ya go.  If you get nothing more out of these essays, you'll feel more English and probably a little smarter for having read two of the last century's most celebrated British wordsmiths anyway (both Anglican, of course).  Enjoy.