What is in Kelvin's Head?

  • Guest Post: At Home Among the Dissenters – John McLuckie

    The Rev John McLuckie is about to return to Scotland following several years working in England. In this guest post he reflects on his experience of the Church of England. Do feel free to respond to what John has written below in the comments and check out his blog at http://justluckie.typepad.com

    On the weekend of the celebrations to mark the Queen’s diamond jubilee, I decided that I wasn’t in the mood for the kind of civic religion I knew I would find in my local Church of England parish so I went to our local Quaker meeting instead. I enjoyed it so much that I have been going there regularly ever since.  I enjoy the silence and the gently mystical instincts of Friends, but also their testimony to simplicity, equality and peacemaking.  As an Anglican priest, this seems like a slightly irresponsible thing to do, but I think that this choice says a lot about how I perceive the differences between the context and ethos of the church in which I was ordained – the Scottish Episcopal Church – and the one I currently belong to – the Church of England.

    In fact, I don’t work for the Church of England but for the NHS as a chaplain in a specialist cancer hospital.  I recognise that this is a privileged position in at least two ways: firstly I feel privileged to work in a place where I can explore matters of the spirit with people who would not normally have anything to do with a church, including people of other world faiths; secondly, I am, in part, able to occupy this position by virtue of the privileged relationship with the state enjoyed by the Church of England.  I have no doubt that this relationship is changing, but am not skilled in the arts of predicting the future so would not dare to hazard a guess as to how it will look in a generation’s time.  What is clear to me is that the C of E takes its public role very seriously and I deeply respect the skill and intelligence with which so many of its members, lay and ordained, interact with society at all its levels, civic, cultural and communal.  However, it is also clear to me that the C of E is not alone in this commitment, even if it does sometimes imagine that it is.  The truth is that there is another story about the place of Christian faith in English life and culture and my sojourn with the Society of Friends gives a clue about it.
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14 responses to “Liturgical sadness”

  1. Robin Avatar
    Robin

    Has anyone else been following the series in ‘The Tablet’ taking the Latin Sunday Collects from the Roman Missal (Ordinary Form), printing alongside them the official English translations and then commenting on the Collects?

    The effect the series has on me is not what was intended. I spend much of my time being puzzled and irritated by the looseness of the translations from the Latin – words and phrases left out, new ideas included, and sometimes translations which are at best a paraphrase.

    The point of mentioning this is that what I’ve seen of the new English translation of the Roman Mass is undoubtedly more faithful to the Latin, which is, after all, the definitive form.

    This will be important to some and, I expect, an irrelevance to others. However, an ecumenical gesture we could make (pause for breathtakingly unpopular suggestion!) would be to incorporate the new relevant parts of the new translation in our own Liturgy. That really *would* show ecumenical goodwill.

    Reply
  2. David |Dah • veed| Avatar
    David |Dah • veed|

    “…the Latin, which is, after all, the definitive form.”

    That is certainly debatable. I fail to see that the purpose of the liturgical reforms of the 70s and 80s which resulted in many new liturgical books for most major denominations and prayer books for Anglicans, was to get us all back to the Latin Mass.

    Rome has pretty much cut the rest of us “free” so to speak, as irredeemable for all the heresies of women’s ordination and now GLBT ordinations and same sex blessings, and I am fine with that. I would not go anywhere near the Tiber, but I share Kelvin’s sense of loss of something we pew sitters shared around the world.

    Reply
  3. Robin Avatar
    Robin

    Just to clarify, when I wrote “…the Latin, which is, after all, the definitive form” I meant that it was the definitive form for Roman Catholics.

    Reply
  4. Ritualist Robert Avatar
    Ritualist Robert

    Vicky wrote: “… it is unlikely new conversion areas such as China would find Latin accessible.”

    A Roman friend of mine who probably would know said to me the other day that the Catholics in China use the Latin mass because they missed out on the reforms of Vatican II. Does anybody know if this is true?

    I went recently to a Latin mass here in Sydney with the same friend and most of the servers and the priest were from Vietnam … and a good deal of the back-to-the-future seminarians one sees at the papist cathedral seem to be Korean … so I am not sure that the formality of the Latin mass, or a more formal English one will put off Asian converts.

    It’s a pity that the ecumenical implications of this translation exercise haven’t been pondered a bit more.

    Reply

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