I had a student, some years ago now, who wanted to do a study of the place of green issues in the Anglican liturgical texts. I am sure he expected to find an absence. He soon discovered, however, that because the liturgy had emerged within a largely agricultural society, one that was far closer to nature than we are now, issues associated with nature and the cycle of the year etc. were current in many different elements of the rite. This should not have come as a surprise, but it is also something that I have not really thought about or reflected on as much as perhaps I should.
I have never been overly concerned with climate change and the destruction of biodiversity etc. My priority has always been focused more closely on social justice and human inequality, although I do recognise that the two are intimately related.
When I have thought about writing a three-volume work on the incarnation it is the human, and the social that I have always assumed would be the core of the text. I have always recognised, however, that I needed to start with hierophony, the recognition of God in, and through, the world before speaking of God’s intervention in that world. I had thought that I would start there primarily to dismiss that strand of thinking only to move on to more human, more incarnational, topics.
Going through the liturgy in the traditional Latin rite over the last few days, however, and concentrating particularly on the text (not something I have normally done – not having to concentrate on the words being one of the reasons why the Latin rite appeals) I have been struck by just how much the natural world, and the cosmic, plays within that text.
There is a focus, for example, on materiality – on wood, on oil, on water, on fire, on beeswax and so on – and a recognition of, or more accurately a calling for, the indwelling of the Spirit within the material objects. The great blessings – of oil on Maundy Thursday, or of the fire, the candle and the water on Holy Saturday – places the material substances at the core of the liturgy. And throughout Good Friday there is an emphasis on wood, in all its forms, and more specifically the tree on which Our Saviour hung.
What was more significant, however, in the Holy Saturday liturgy, was the cosmic scale of the events that are unfolding. This is seen specifically in the Exultet. With the repeated statement that ‘this is the night’, and similar statements of repetition and coincidentality throughout the text. The readings begin with creation and the events of the cross, and the resurrection, are consistently placed within the cosmic realm, way beyond the events of those few days in Palestine over two thousand years ago.
Time is central here. We are often told that Christianity introduced a linear time, as opposed to cyclic time of the earlier religions. Eliade places a great deal of emphasis on the condensation of time, such that in ritual the time of now is merged with the time of origins. This is exactly what the Holy Saturday liturgy is doing, freezing time rather than introducing linear time.
Every Mass makes the time of the present and the time of the past, the crucifixion and the last supper, coterminous. The Holy Saturday liturgy takes that out and brings the time of creation, the time of the crucifixion/resurrection, the time of so many other events, and the time of the current liturgy into a moment of stasis, where all time is condensed into one, no past and no future, alpha and omega become one. This is not linear time, this is time as perceived from God’s perspective, where all becomes one, eternity in the blinking of an eye.
Over this weekend four astronauts are also travelling beyond the orbit of the earth and circling around the far side of the moon. They have sent back incredible, although no longer entirely new, images of the earth from space, that wonderful jewel of a planet in the darkness of infinity. What makes that place so special? Why is that place singled out for the incarnation of our God?
It is that question, along with the reflections on time that come from the Holy Saturday liturgy, that lead me now to think that the first part of my trilogy on the incarnation must be more positive, not just a dismissal of hierophony, but a celebration of the cosmic incarnation.
There is far more work to do here, but certainly something to think about…
Martin Stringer Quartet 