Stockbridge — On Sunday, June 15, the Senior Warden of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Stockbridge, which many of my readers may know only as the handsome stone building across from the Red Lion Inn, will announce its new priest-in-charge, or “rector” as Episcopalians are wont to say. This comes less than a year after Grace Church, the merged congregation of St. James Church Great Barrington and St. George’s in Lee, hired a new rector. Since then, Grace Church has established itself more and more as the hippie church of the Berkshires. It is my heartfelt wish that St. Paul’s in Stockbridge, under its new rector, should move in an entirely different direction, to become the proud standardbearer in Berkshire County of the cherished liturgical traditions of the Christian faith.
Many Christians look at low church-attendance, a changing, more tolerant world (though I am even beginning to doubt that) and say, not wrongly, that the Church has got to change. But the most self-evident way of changing things, changing the liturgy, the translation of scripture we read, the prayers we say, and the hymns we sing, despite their centuries old place in the hearts and minds of our ancestors, going back countless generations, could just be the nail in the coffin that buries Christianity forever.
Sometimes the most obvious solution to a problem is not the right one. Sometimes it can actually be more destructive than doing nothing at all. Such is the case of the liturgical reforms in the Church of the past 40 years. Episcopalians, who have a reputation for being liturgically much more conservative than their peers, decided to revise a prayer book that had remained virtually untouched for more than 400 years, and to ditch the King James translation of the bible, much of whose language has become so proverbial that even people who have rarely been in a church are familiar with it. Hardly anyone asked for these changes. It was never the readings of scripture in fine Jacobean English, or the enchanting old hymns from Mediaeval France, Baroque Germany or Victorian England, that kept people away; and, where these things still exist, it is surely not what keeps them away now. It was the entirely reasonable position that a church founded essentially on openness and tolerance needed to become more accepting and more hospitable.
But too many of the reformers of the 1960s and 70s did not understand this at all. The essential contradiction was thrown in to almost embarrassing relief by the Roman Catholic Church, coming out of the Second Vatican Council, when parishes all over the world ditched Gregorian chants and Latin prayers, and ushered in the hallowed estate of the guitar mass, and the canon of third-rate 1970s and 80s pop music, to somehow make us feel closer to God. Yet the Roman Church refused to address those things which may in fact have caused the grievances that drove so many away: The secrecy and corruption of their hierarchy, the blank refusal to invest women with decision-making power, and an untenable and contradictory policy over birth-control, to name just a few. None of these things has been resolved. And yet the answer to the Christian Church’s ever declining position in society, despite all the new aged-music, and newly minted prayers, is more guitars, more bongos, and more trickily hack-written pop songs.
I am happy to report that things are not nearly so bad in my own Church, the Episcopal Church, as in the Roman Catholic Church. Yet we struggle with low church-attendance just as much as any one; and there is a strong temptation, which I can at least understand, that we should embrace the tasteless populism we see around us. This notion of populism, by the way, is altogether separate from that of something of being popular. Almost none of the “reforms” to which I have alluded in this, and my previous article on religion, were popular in the sense that people demanded them. People demanded something entirely different, something which the Church too often failed to give: greater hospitality and inclusiveness, and a turning away from an obsession with sex as somehow the gravest of all sins. Yet though populism, of the sort embraced by some religious reformers of the past half-century, is a top-down enforced ideology, not a down-up grass-roots movement, it somehow stakes a claim to be more in tune with the common man. I find this deeply troubling, as I am quite sure that many of the illiterate peasants who filled Anglican churches of the 16th to 19th centuries would have bristled at any notion that they were elitist for being partial to the hymns they sang, and the prayers they said, merely because they were works of great beauty, and in some cases, astonishing genius, passed down to them over many generations.
Yet this sort of populism is, I am afraid, something Grace Church Great Barrington has adapted full-heartedly. When the St. James Church building was adjudged structurally un-sound back in 2008, and a private party offered to buy and to renovate the church building with the expectation that St. James Church could have the use of the church building for services, senior members of the Church quailed at the prospect of being tenants in someone else’s building. Now, as occupants of the third-rate country club dining room that is the Crissey Farms, behind the Barrington Brewery, members of St James, now Grace Church, actually celebrate the fact that they have no beautiful church building to keep up, dismissing any fondness for their old church buildings as idol-worshipping (I actually heard this in a sermon at the Crissey Farms). This is particularly painful for me personally because my family has a long history in what was St. James Great Barrington. Both my grandfather and great grandmother were longtime members of the choir there, my uncle used to sing as a boy-soprano soloist, and my mother was baptized there. My earliest memories of Church, particularly of the Christmas Eve service, are all from St. James. I am not saying there are not aspects of Grace Church’s ministry about which I am full-heartedly enthusiastic, such as the “Gideon’s Garden” charity vegetable garden at Taft Farms, and Lee Food Pantry, both of which do vital Christian work in our community. But, at least on Sunday mornings, they have embraced a cult of the new that eschews tradition, whether good or bad, and in so doing, laughs at our ancestors who built up a tradition of worship, which was for generations and generations preserved and built upon, until now.
I have an idea. What if St. Paul’s Stockbridge were to become something entirely different? What if it became the one and only Church in Berkshire County that would be proud to say the same prayers its ancestors said for hundreds of years before (which many of its congregants think they say at present but don’t); a church that would be proud to use the same Authorized Version of the Holy Bible (the King James Version) which is almost universally acknowledged to be one of the masterpieces of English prose, and so fundamental to the development of the language that its fabric can be seen in the words we use, and the phrases we turn, almost daily? What if St. Paul’s were to match the loveliness of Stanford White’s charming baptistery and it’s Tiffany stained glass windows with the beauty of Thomas Cranmer’s prayers (and not the re-formulations of a bunch of Anglican higher-ups in the 1970s). What if other churches were to follow St. Paul’s lead? Might not the larger Church actually begin to turn its attention to the things that caused so many to leave? They say the definition of madness is trying the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Well, I appeal to you, my readers who hold the Christian faith; surely it is time for a change.
