A Year of Grace , livre ebook

Hymns Ancient & Modern - David Hoyle

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105 pages

English

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Description

Most of us think that theology is what you do if you haven't got a life. But theology is in fact all about life and how we live it as God's people. Using the familiar pattern of the church year, David Hoyle explores the building blocks of Christian theology, and what each one means for how we live.

Sujets

Religion

Christianisme

Spiritual Growth

Christian Living

Philosophie et théologie

Informations

Publié par	Hymns Ancient & Modern
Date de parution	29 mars 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781786220356
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0780€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

© David Hoyle 2019
First published in 2019 by the Canterbury Press Norwich
Editorial office
3rd Floor, Invicta House
108–114 Golden Lane
London ec 1 y 0 tg , UK
www.canterburypress.co.uk
Canterbury Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd
(a registered charity)

Hymns Ancient & Modern® is a registered trademark of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd
13A Hellesdon Park Road, Norwich, Norfolk nr 6 5 dr , UK
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, Canterbury Press.
The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the Author of this Work
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
978-1-78622-033-2
Typeset by Manila Typesetting Company
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd

For Katy.
With love.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
W. B. Yeats

Contents
Preface
Do This
1 Advent: Giving the future back to God
2 Christmas: Telling the wrong story
3 Epiphany: Looking at the stars
4 Candlemas: Great expectations
5 Ash Wednesday: Risking forgiveness
6 Annunciation: Ordinary and extraordinary
7 Palm Sunday: Winners and losers
8 Good Friday: Not waving, not drowning
9 Easter Eve: That was the end
10 Easter: Not a new story, but a better explanation
11 Ascension: A risen and ascended life
12 Pentecost
13 Trinity
14 Ordinary Time
15 All Saints
16 All Souls
17 The Year of Grace
18 Believing in the Church
19 Telling the Story
20 A Year of Belief
Acknowledgements of Sources

Preface
This book had its beginnings while I was on sabbatical leave and a guest in Peterhouse, in Cambridge. I am grateful to the Governing Body of the College for their generous hospitality and particularly thank the Master, Professor Adrian Dixon, for the welcome and kindness he extended throughout my stay. My colleagues in Bristol have (again) been very patient with me as I gave time to writing and the cathedral congregation kindly put up with me thinking aloud in some of my sermons. Without the help of Sarah Morris, who looks after my diary, I would never have crossed the finishing line. Stephen Hampton read the text and saved me from error. I hope he was compensated, a little, by the enjoyment he had in pointing the error out. Particular thanks go to Tom Clammer, sometime Precentor of Salisbury, who brought the eye of a liturgist and scholar to the text. His insights were invaluable, and some of them are incorporated in the text. Mistakes that remain are all my own.
Christine Smith at the Canterbury Press has been a model of patience and a constant encouragement. Her colleagues have been a delight to work with.
Janet graciously continues to put up with my preoccupations and a particularly trying tendency to seek out, and then explain, ecclesiastical detail on each and every holiday. Mike kept me cheerful. This book, though, is dedicated to Katy, who wondered if it would ever be finished.
The truth is, there is still some way to go.
David Hoyle
December 2018
O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae, et sol iustitiae:
veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris et umbra mortis.
O dawn of the east, brightness of light eternal, and sun of justice:
come, and enlighten those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.

Do This
As a boy, I stayed occasionally with my grandparents, in their quiet and ordered house near the Fylde coast, in Lancashire. They were kind, but not at all sure what to do with me. There were long hours when I entertained myself, discovering that nearly all the books were large, and serious, and short of pictures. There was however, curiously, a bound collection of Punch , 20 volumes, published in the 1920s. Each volume had a theme. Nearly 100 years on, they sound very dated: Mr Punch in London Town , Mr Punch Goes Motoring . I can name check the titles because these books sit on my shelves now, and they can still transport me back to Wrea Green, more than 50 years ago. It was there that I found a cartoon of a well-dressed woman struggling to find the correct collect and readings in her Book of Common Prayer . ‘Which Sunday is it?’ she whispers, as the service begins. Her husband looks like a man who devoutly wishes he were somewhere else. Distracted, he replies, ‘The Second Sunday after Ascot.’
Only later, when I started going to church myself, could I make any sense of this cartoon. I grew up knowing nothing about Epiphany, the Sunday next before Easter, or the Sundays after Trinity. When I started putting that right, I joined a generation of Anglicans who had problems that Punch never knew, as I juggled one new service book after another. I worked my way through Series Two , Series Three , and The Alternative Service Book , watching the books get bigger, as my choices grew. By 1980, I had acquired a calendar of readings that demanded that I know not just which Sunday it was, but whether it was Year One or Year Two . Now, I navigate Common Worship and I have a whole library of texts to use. I have to pause now and again, and remind myself that at 10 a.m. this morning we will use the readings for the Fourth Sunday of Epiphany, but at 8 a.m. another congregation will be told that this is the Third Sunday after Epiphany.
Years into this liturgical revision, I heard Robert Runcie lament over an unintended consequence of all this change. He was well aware that new forms of worship gave us good things to enjoy, but he was still sorry that he no longer knew the Eucharistic Prayer by heart. Sunday by Sunday, the texts varied and now he had to read it more than he could pray it. More recently, Michael Perham, then Bishop of Gloucester, told a clergy conference that we had become weighed down with all our new texts (some of which he had written). A priest stands at an altar and greets the congregation with the words, ‘The Lord be with you’. It is a good beginning; the trouble is, no one looks up. Everyone is staring at the book, or at a distant screen, straining for the next cue. We are, more than ever, people of the book , but the book is no longer the Bible, it is the liturgy, a pamphlet handed out at the door, or perhaps even an image thrown up on a screen.
Now, I work in a cathedral where we are ever eager to make this year even more interesting and memorable than last. We thumb the pages of Common Worship and devise ever better ways of observing Advent, Epiphany and Easter. So, just in case you come to doubt it, I will set down here my gratitude for all the riches that liturgical revision has given us; three cheers for Common Worship . Even so, like Robert Runcie, I am allowed to note and regret some unintended consequences. We have choices we did not have, but choices can be challenging and you have to know this from that . At the beginning of each and every day, at Morning Prayer, I encounter one of the awkward outcomes of all our options. As a parish priest, I quite often prayed alone. In cathedrals, you can reliably expect people to come to say Morning Prayer with you. Not just clergy colleagues, but a faithful little congregation tipping up day by day, and quite often a fair smattering of visitors. We should be pleased. We are pleased, but we are also back in the world of that Punch cartoon. To follow Morning Prayer, we need to know the day of the week, the season of the year, and ideally, also to be clear whether or not today happens to be a saint’s day. It also helps not to be colour blind, as you skip from one blue, yellow or green, beribboned page, to another. To get through this service, you need a guide. So, we have produced one. Even so, the officiant still needs to issue the odd instruction. When I was first ordained (and we were all getting used to another new service book) I can remember a colleague standing at the altar and saying, ‘As our Lord taught us, on page one hundred and fifty, we say together . . .’ We try not to do that in the cathedral, but we still plunge, daily, into commentary and stage management. It is not just that we have to bury our eyes in the book that I mind; it is more the fact that prayer becomes such a fussy activity of turning pages and knowing the rules. Either it is something that only the initiated can manage, a closely guarded secret full of knowing glances and grimaces; or it is littered with instructions. Either way, what this kind of worship really demonstrates is the need to be in the know . We have made Morning Prayer something you have to master. We have turned it into a possession. Doing that, we have managed to get things precisely the wrong way round. On occasional trips to London I sometimes say Morning Prayer at the Royal Foundation of St Katharine in Limehouse. As I try to work out what it is we are doing I see a splendid text carved into the floor (a quotation from St Augustine): ‘We do not come to God by navigation, but by love.’ Quite.
Just a little too often we have turned Christian worship into an encounter with a book, the struggle to find our place. This book, this little study of the Christian year, is written because I believe we have only got that half right. We do indeed go to church to find our place. That is exactly what we do. To find our place, however, we should not have o