Alcuin

Deacon, and Abbot of Tours
20 May

Rabanus Maurus and Alcuin [nicknamed ‘Albinus’] before St Martin of Tours

Alcuin (Ealhwine) was born about 730 near York into a noble family related to Willibrord (the first missionary to the Netherlands). He was educated at the cathedral school in York under Archbishop Ecgbert, a pupil of Bede. He thus inherited the best traditions of learning and zeal of the early English Church. After ordination as a deacon in 770, he became head of the York school. Following a meeting in 781 with Charlemagne in Pavia (Italy), he was persuaded to become Charlemagne’s ‘prime minister’, with special responsibility for the revival of education and learning in the Frankish dominions.

Alcuin returned to Northumbria, his beloved home, in 790, but Charlemagne persuaded him to come to the Continent once again to take part in doctrinal controversies then raging. In 796 he was named Abbot of Tours, where he died on 19 May 804, and was buried in the church of St Martin. (He is commemorated on 20 May because St Dunstan already occupied the 19th.)

Alcuin’s many preserved letters reveal him to have been a man of learning, charm, and integrity. In his direction of Charlemagne’s Palace School at Aachen, he transmitted to the Franks the classical learning that had been preserved in the Isles. Schools were revived in cathedrals and monasteries, and manuscripts of both pagan and Christian writings of antiquity were collated and copied in the reformed hand known as ‘Carolingian’ after Charlemagne, still the model for Roman minuscule letters to this day. Alcuin made his own contributions to the store of knowledge: works on grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics, and well as theological treatises, scriptural commentaries, and poetry.

Alcuin is represented in the Hymnal by ‘Eternal light, shine in my heart’ [465–466], a hymn by Christopher Idle based upon a prayer of Alcuin’s as given in Daily Prayer, a collection edited by Eric Milner-White and George Briggs.

The collect for Alcuin:

Almighty God, who in a rude and barbarous age didst raise up thy deacon Alcuin to rekindle the light of learning: Illumine our minds, we pray thee, that amid the uncertainties and confusions of our own time we may show forth thine eternal truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord...

Dame Julian of Norwich

8 May

Julian as depicted in the church of SS Andrew and Mary, Langham, Norfolk

JULIAN of Norwich (ca. 1342—ca. 1416) was an English anchoress and mystic. When she was thirty years old, she was gravely ill and was in fact given the last rites. Suddenly, however, on the seventh day, (‘the yeere of our Lord, a thousand three hundreth lxxiij, the xiiijth [some MSS give the viijth] daie of Maie’) all pain left her, and she had fifteen visions, or ‘showings’, of the Passion. These brought her great peace and joy. ‘From that time I desired oftentimes to learn what was our Lord’s meaning,’ she said, ‘and fifteen years after I was answered in ghostly understanding: “Wouldst thou learn the Lord’s meaning in this thing? Learn it well. Love was his meaning. Who showed it thee? Love. What showed he thee? Love. Wherefore showed it he? For Love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt learn and know more in the same.” Thus it was I learned that Love was our Lord’s meaning.’

Julian had long desired three gifts from God: ‘the mind of his passion, bodily sickness in youth, and three wounds – of contrition, of compassion, of will-full longing toward God’. Her illness brought her the first two wounds, which then passed from her mind. The third, ‘will-full longing’ (divinely inspired longing), never left her. She became an anchoress soon after her recovery from illness, walled up (during a Mass for the Dead, as was the custom) in a room attached to the Church of St Julian at Norwich, from which she took her name. Though little else is known of her life, there is evidence that she was known as a mystic and spiritual counselor and was frequently visited by clerics and laics, including the famous mystic Margery Kempe. Kempe says of Julian: ‘This anchoress was expert in knowledge of our Lord and could give good counsel. I spent much time with her talking of the love of our Lord Jesus Christ.’

Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love comprise the earliest surviving text authored in English by a woman. Dictated to a scribe, as Julian was ‘a simple creature that cowde no letter’ – though clearly with considerable command of the scriptures and theology (Norwich was a large town with important institutions of learning) and showing great insight – the Revelations were later transmitted by Brigittine and Benedictine nuns living in exile in France; first printed in 1670, the text was not well known until the twentieth century. Julian’s emphasis on God’s love, which can be read as tending toward a theology of universal salvation, and her description of God as mother – both all the more remarkable given the mainstream theology of her time – have resonated with many in the modern world.

She is included in this weblog not because she wrote hymns, but because two passages extracted from her writings are found as Canticles in Enriching Our Worship, the Episcopal Church’s official collection of supplemental liturgical materials. They are given here with the original passages as they appear in the Sloane MS (S1) of ca. 1650.


Canticle R
A Song of True Motherhood

God chose to be our mother in all things *
     and so made the foundation of his work,
     most humbly and most pure, in the Virgin’s womb.
God, the perfect wisdom of all, *
     arrayed himself in this humble place.
Christ came in our poor flesh *
     to share a mother’s care.
Our mothers bear us for pain and for death; *
     our true mother, Jesus, bears us for joy and endless life.
Christ carried us within him in love and travail, *
     until the full time of his passion.
And when all was completed and he had carried us so for joy, *
     still all this could not satisfy the power of his wonderful love.
All that we owe is redeemed in truly loving God, *
     for the love of Christ works in us;
     Christ is the one whom we love.

Chapter LX.

...Our kynd Moder, our gracious Moder – for He wold al holy become our Moder in al thyng – He toke the ground of His werke full low and ful myldely in the maydens womb. And that He shewid in the first where he browte that meke mayde aforn the eye of myn understondyng in the simple statur as she was whan she conceivid.

That is to sey, our hey God is sovereyn wisdom of all. In this low place, He rayhid [arrayed] Him and dyte Him ful redy in our pore flesh, Himselfe to don the service and the office of Moderhede in all thyng. The Moders service is nerest, redyest, and sekirest, for it is most of trueth. This office ne myte ne couthe ne never non don to the full but He alone. We wetyn that all our Moders beryng is us to peyne and to deyeng. And what is that but our very Moder Jesus? He, al love,  beryth us to joye and to endles lyving. Blissid mot He be. Thus He susteynith us within Himselfe in love and traveled into the full tyme that He wold suffre the sharpist throwes and the grevousest peynes that ever were or ever shall be, and dyed at the last. And whan He had don, and so born us to bliss, yet myte not al this makyn aseth [satisfaction] to His mervelous love, and that shewid He in these hey over-passing wordes of love: If I myte suffre more, I wold suffre more. He myte no more dyen, but He wold not stynten of werkyng. Wherfore than Him behovyth to fedyn us, for the dereworthy love of moderhede hath made Him dettor to us. The Moder may geven hir child soken her mylke, but our pretious Moder Jesus, He may fedyn us with Himselfe, and doith full curtesly and full tenderly with the blissid sacrament that is pretious fode of very lif. 

And with al the swete sacraments He susteynith us ful mercifully and graciously. And so ment He in this blissid word wher that He seid, I it am that Holy Church prechith the and techith the. That is to sey, all the helth and lif of sacraments, al the vertue and grace of my word, all that godness that is ordeynid in Holy Church for the, I it am. The moder may leyn the child tenderly to her brest, but our tender Moder Jesus, He may homely leden us into His blissid brest be His swete open syde and shewyn therin party of the Godhede and the joyes of Hevyn with gostly sekirnes of endless bliss. And that He shewid in the tenth, gevyng the same understondyng in this swete word wher He seith, Lo, how I lovid the, behold[ing] into His syde, enjoy[ing]. 

This fair, lovely word Modir, it is so swete and so kynd of the self that it may ne verily be seid of none but of Him and to hir that is very Moder of Hym and of all. To the properte of Moderhede longyth kinde love, wisdam, and knowing, and it is good; for thow it be so that our bodily forthbrynging be but litil, low, and simple in regard of our gostly forthbringing, yet it is He that doth it in the creatures be whom that it is done. The kynde, Loveand Moder that wote and knowith the nede of hir child, she kepith it ful tenderly as the kind and condition of moderhede will. And as it wexith in age, she chongith hir werking but not hir love. And whan it is waxen of more age, she suffrid that it be bristinid [broken, burst, shattered] in brekyng downe of vices to makyn the child to receivyn virtues and graces. This werkyng with al that be fair and good, our Lord doith it in hem be whom it is done. Thus He is our Moder in kynde be the werkyng of grace in the lower parte for love of the heyer parte, and He will that we know it. For He will have al our love festynyd to Him. And in this I saw that all our dett that we owen, be Gods biddyng, be faderhede and Moderhede, for Gods faderhede and Moderhede is fulfillid in trew lovyng of God, which blissid love Christ werkyth in us; and this was shewid in all, and namly in the hey plentiuous words wher He seith, I it am  that thou lovest. 

Canticle S
A Song of Our True Nature

Christ revealed our frailty and our falling, *
     our trespasses and our humiliations.
Christ also revealed his blessed power, *
     his blessed wisdom and love.
He protects us as tenderly and as sweetly when we are in greatest need; *
     he raises us in spirit
     and turns everything to glory and joy without ending.
God is the ground and the substance, the very essence of nature; *
     God is the true father and mother of natures.
We are all bound to God by nature, *
     and we are all bound to God by grace.
And this grace is for all the world, *
     because it is our precious mother, Christ.
For this fair nature was prepared by Christ
for the honor and nobility of all, *
     and for the joy and bliss of salvation.

Chapter LXII.

For in that tyme He shewid our frelte and our fallyngs, our brekyngs and our nowtyngs, our dispits and our outcastings, and all our wo so ferforth as methowte it myght fallen in this life. And therwith He shewid His blissid myte, His blissid wisdam, His blissid love, that He kepyth us in this tyme as tenderly and as swetely to His worship and as sekirly to our salvation, as He doith whan we are in most solace and comfort. And therto He resysith us gostly and heyly in Hevyn, and turnith it al to His worship and to our joye withoute end. For His love suffrith us never to lose tyme. And all this is of the kind goodnes of God be the werkyng of grace. 

God is kynde in His being; that is to sey, that goodnes that is kind, it is God. He is the ground, He is the substance, He is the same thing that is kindhede; and He is very fader and very Moder of kinde; and all kindes that He hath made to flowen out of Him to werkyn His will, it shall be restorid and browte ageyn into Him be the salvation of man throw the werking of grace.

For of all kyndes that He hath set in dyvers creatures be parte, in man is all the hole – in fulhede and in vertue, in fairhede and in goodhede, in rialtie and nobley, in al manner of solemnite of pretioushede and worshipp. Here may we sen that we arn al bound to God for kinde, and we arn al bound to God for grace. Here may we sen us nedith not gretly to seken fer out to knowen sundry kindes, but to Holy Church, into our Moder brest, that is to sey, into our owen soule wher our Lord wonnyth; and ther shall we fynde all; now, in feith and in understondyng, and after, verily in Himselfe, clerely, in bliss. But no man ne woman take this singler to himselfe, for it is not so; it is general. For it is our pretious Criste, and to Him was this fair kind dyte for the worship and noblyth of mannys makyng and for the joye and the bliss of mannys salvation ryte as He saw, wiste, and knew from without begynnyng

The Episcopal Church’s Collect for Julian of Norwich

Lord God, who in thy compassion didst grant to the Lady Julian many revelations of thy nurturing and sustaining love: Move our hearts, like hers, to seek thee above all things, for in giving us thyself thou givest us all; through Jesus Christ our Lord...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Theologian
9 April

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born 4 February 1906 and studied at the Universities of Berlin and Tübingen. A brilliant theologian, he earned the doctorate at the age of 21 with the thesis Sanctorum Communio. Additional study, curacy, and travel took him to Spain, the US, Mexico, Cuba, Italy, and Libya, through all of which he was introduced to struggles against injustice and for ecumenism, which were to become central themes in his life. He was ordained a Lutheran pastor in 1931, at the age of 25, and became a lecturer in systematic theology at his old University of Berlin.

His career necessarily took a sharp turn with the accession of the Nazis to power in 1933, and he was transformed from an academic theologian to a man living out his faith no matter the cost, from a pacifist to one willing to accept the guilt of what was necessary to combat a great evil. From the very beginning of the new regime, Bonhoeffer was a leader in protests against it and against the election or appointment of Nazi-aligned leadership in the established churches in Germany. He was instrumental (even while serving as pastor to two congregations in London, 1933–35) in forming the Confessing Church, set up in opposition to those established churches, and in 1935 was appointed to organize and head a new seminary for the Confessing Church at Finkenwalde (for which he turned down a chance to study non-violent resistance with Gandhi). He described that community in Life Together and later wrote The Cost of Discipleship.

Bonhoeffer became increasingly involved in the political struggle after 1939, when he became a member of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence department that was in fact anti-Nazi. Bonhoeffer considered refuge in the United States, accepting briefly a situation at Union Theological Seminary, where he had previously held a teaching fellowship, but he quickly returned to Germany to continue his resistance work. During this period – with the situation demanding his serious attention to the subject – he worked on his Ethics, which he intended to be his magnum opus but which remained unfinished at his death.

It was instead to be his ‘Letters and papers from prison’, smuggled out and published posthumously, that were his last will and testament, for Bonhoeffer was arrested and imprisoned in 1943. After a 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life failed, documents were discovered linking Bonhoeffer to the conspiracy, and he was taken to the concentration camp at Buchenwald, then to Flossenbürg. On Sunday, 8 April 1945, just as he concluded a service, two men came in with the chilling summons, ‘Prisoner Bonhoeffer...come with us.’ He said to another prisoner, ‘This is the end. For me, the beginning of life.’ Bonhoeffer was hanged the next day, 9 April.

Bonhoeffer never had the opportunity to complete a systematic work of theology, so his ideas, which continued to evolve throughout his life, even (perhaps especially) in his last months, have been subject to various interpretations. Nevertheless it seems safe to say that he believed God, via the Incarnation, to be central, active, and indeed even suffering in the world, and that he believed in, and lived, a life of faith that followed suit.

His New Year’s Eve poem written from prison in 1944, ‘Von guten Mächten’, translated by F. Pratt Green as ‘By gracious powers’, appears in the Hymnal at 695/6.

The Episcopal Church’s Collect for Bonhoeffer’s commemoration:

Gracious God, the Beyond in the midst of our life, thou gavest grace to thy servant Dietrich Bonhoeffer to know and to teach the truth as it is in Jesus Christ, and to bear the cost of following him: Grant that we, strengthened by his teaching and example, may receive thy word and embrace its call with an undivided heart; through Jesus Christ our Savior...

Thos. Ken

Bishop of Bath and Wells
20/21 March

Thomas Ken was born in 1637. He was raised largely by his stepsister and her husband, Izaak Walton, who had an important influence on the boy. Ken’s upbringing during the dour and destructive Commonwealth and relatively freewheeling Restoration years – each with its own sort of irreligion – may have helped instill in him an appreciation for catholic faith and practice and the balance that is so characteristic of the Anglican tradition. In any case, he was known throughout his life as a man of integrity and piety.

His close relationship with the royal family began when he became chaplain to Princess Mary of Orange at The Hague. Ken was appalled at the Prince of Orange’s treatment of his wife, and rebuked him publicly. In 1683, Ken returned to England and became chaplain to Charles II. When Ken was once notified that the King’s mistress, the actress Nell Gwyn, was to be lodged at his house, he refused, saying, ‘a woman of ill-repute ought not to be endured in the house of a clergyman, and especially the King’s chaplain.’ The King, impressed by Ken’s boldness, made Ken the Bishop of Bath and Wells the next year, declaring that none should have the position except ‘the little black fellow that refused his lodging to poor Nelly.’ Ken was known during this period for his great preaching as well as for his concern for the poor, imprisoned, and battle-worn in his diocese.

Ken soon fell afoul of the Crown, however. In 1688, when Charles’s successor, James II, offered toleration to Protestant non-conformists and to Roman Catholics, and, Ken felt, tried to undermine the authority of the Church of England, Ken was one of seven bishops who refused to read this Declaration of Indulgence, and were thus sent to the Tower (the seven were acquitted in the courts and became popular heroes). Furthermore, after the revolution of 1688, Ken, who of course had sworn allegiance to James, felt he could not then declare fealty to William of Orange, who became King William III. As a ‘Non-Juror’, Ken was deprived of his see.

Ken’s status as a Non-Juror troubled him for the rest of his life. He deplored the Non-Juror schism – opposing the consecration of new bishops by Non-Jurors – and after the accession of Queen Anne, he made his peace with the Church of England. Indeed, in his will he wrote, stating the classical Anglican position, ‘As for my Religion, I die in the Holy Catholick and Apostolick Faith, professed by the whole Church, before the disunion of East and West: more particularly I dye in the communion of the Church of England, as it stands distinguished from all Papall and Puritan Innovations, and as it adheres to the doctrine of the Cross.’

Ken was able to live the last twenty years in comfortable retirement in the household of a noble friend, where he wrote several religious works which were immensely popular in the eighteenth century and even influenced the Oxford Movement in the nineteenth. A man of both high churchmanship and deep piety, he characteristically subtitled his Exposition on the Church Catechism ‘The Practice of Divine Love’. His series of hymns on the Festivals of the Church are more remarkable for their influence on others than for their own literary merits, but Ken is known today for two of three hymns (for morning, evening, and midnight) written early in his career for the students of Winchester College, for whom he also wrote a Manual of Prayers.

These hymns, both found in the Hymnal, are

11 ‘Awake, my soul, and with the sun’
43 ‘All praise [originally, Glory] to thee, my God, this night’

both of which end with the doxology ‘Praise God, from whom all blessings flow’.

The Collect for Thomas Ken:

Almighty God, who didst give to thy servant Thomas Ken grace and courage to bear witness to the truth before rulers and kings: Give us also thy strength that, following his example, we may constantly defend what is right, boldly reprove what is evil, and patiently suffer for the truth’s sake; through Jesus Christ our Lord...

St Gregory the Great

Bishop of Rome
12 March

Depiction of St Gregory, inspired by the Holy Spirit, dictating to his scribe
from the Antiphoner of Hartker of St Gallen 

One of only two Popes to have been given the epithet ‘the Great’, Gregory I combined the advantages of a patrician background and political and diplomatic experience (he served as Prefect of Rome and papal ambassador to Constantinople) with gifts of energy, administrative skill, and contemplative insight (he had converted the family villa into a monastery and lived happily as a monk for several years) in a pontificate that sought, in a time of plague, famine, invasions, and difficult relations with the East, to stabilize and unify the Western Church.

He was particularly concerned to evangelize the peoples of Northern Europe, most notably sending a mission led by St Augustine [of Canterbury], prior of the monastery Gregory had founded, to convert the Anglo-Saxons – who two hundred years later, continuing Irish missionary efforts, in fact did much to Christianize their Germanic cousins on the Continent. Gregory also found time to write a great deal, earning him a place as one of the Doctors of the Church.

Gregory’s name is perhaps most often associated with the liturgical chant of the Church, with whose organization and reform he is traditionally credited. He had this to say of the Psalms which form the basis of so much of the liturgy:

By means of the voice of psalmody, directed by the attention of the heart, a way to the heart is prepared for almighty God, so that he may pour into an attentive mind either the mysteries of prophecy or the grace of contemplation.

Sermons on the Prophet Ezekiel, 12

Page from a manuscript of the Sermons on the Prophet Ezekiel


St Gregory the Great is credited in the Hymnal with two Office hymns for Lent:

146/7 Now let us all with one accord
       Ex more docti mystico
152 Kind Maker of the world, O hear
       Audi, benigne conditor

The Collect for St Gregory the Great:

Almighty and merciful God, who didst raise up Gregory of Rome to be a servant of the servants of God, and didst inspire him to send missionaries to preach the Gospel to the English people: Preserve in thy Church the catholic and apostolic faith they taught, that thy people, being fruitful in every good work, may receive the crown of glory that fadeth not away; through Jesus Christ our Lord...

John and Chas. Wesley

Priests
3 March

 

John (left) and Charles Wesley

John was the fifteenth, and Charles the eighteenth, child of Samuel Wesley, Rector of Epworth, Lincolnshire. John was born 17 June 1703, and Charles, 18 December 1707. Both Wesleys were educated at Christ Church, Oxford. It was there that they gathered a few friends to join in strict adherence to the worship and discipline of the Prayer Book, and were thus given the name ‘Methodists’. John was ordained to the priesthood in 1728 and Charles in 1735.

Shortly after their return from a time in the British colony of Georgia, in 1738, they both experienced a sense of conversion at a meeting with a group of Moravians who had a strong influence upon them. John resolved ‘to promote as far as I am able vital practical religion and by the grace of God to beget, preserve, and increase the life of God in the souls of men’, and both, finding a cool reception in the Church of England, entered itinerant ministry. Both Wesleys were indefatigable leaders, riding many thousands of miles on horseback each year, writing and preaching constantly; the movement spread steadily and gradually took on an organization of its own with lay pastors and eventually ‘elders’ whom John ordained uncanonically (against Charles’s wishes). Though both Wesleys remained Anglican clerics until their deaths and wished their movement to take place within the Church they loved, a schism developed after the brothers’ deaths (Charles on 29 March 1788, and John on 2 March 1791) which has tragically not been healed to this day.

Though of course they have had massive influence in many ways upon the religion of the English-speaking world, it is though their hymns – John mainly as translator and editor, Charles as prodigiously prolific author of more than six thousand hymns – that they have touched people most directly. Besides his great facility as a verse-writer, perhaps what makes Charles’s hymns so strong is their ability to encapsulate so much catholic doctrine, contemplative insight (William Law was an important influence), and real religious fervor in a vivid and forthright form appreciable by the common man of the eighteenth and later centuries.

Charles Wesley is represented in the Hymnal by the following – more than any other single writer:

6/7 Christ, whose glory fills the skies
49 Come, let us with our Lord arise
57/8 Lo! he comes, with clouds descending
66 Come, thou long-expected Jesus
87 Hark! the herald angels sing
188/9 Love’s redeeming work is done
213/14 Come away to the skies
300 Glory, love, and praise, and honor
481 Rejoice, the Lord is king!
493 O for a thousand tongues to sing
526 Let saints on earth in concert sing
535 Ye servants of God, your Master proclaim
548 Soldiers of Christ, arise
638/9 Come, O thou traveller unknown
657 Love divine, all loves excelling
699 Jesus, lover of my soul
704 O thou who camest from above

The Episcopal Church’s collect for the Wesleys:

Lord God, who didst inspire thy servants John and Charles Wesley with burning zeal for the sanctification of souls, and didst endow them with eloquence in speech and song: Kindle in thy Church, we beseech thee, such fervor, that those whose faith has cooled may be warmed, and that those who have not known thy Christ may turn to him and be saved; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Geo. Herbert

Priest
27 February

George Herbert was born in 1593, a member of an ancient, wealthy, intellectual and artistic family. He had the benefit of a fine education, and he excelled particularly in music and languages. He had first intended to become a priest, but his academic prowess brought him to the notice of King James I, and he became Public Orator of Cambridge and a Member of Parliament representing his home district of Montgomery in Wales. The one-time promise of a position at court, however, died along with James and other patrons.

His public career over, Herbert returned to his earlier plans and in 1630 was ordained to the priesthood. Archbishop Laud presented him with a living as rector of the parishes of Fugglestone and Bemerton, near Salisbury, in 1630. He died of consumption just three years later, on 1 March 1633.

Herbert was known as a devoted pastor, a man of duty and prayer, qualities which show forth in his famous prose work, A Priest in the Temple: or The Country Parson, which offered advice to clerics. He is even better known today for his devotional poetry, mostly collected in The Temple, which he called  ‘a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could submit mine to the will of Jesus my Master; in whose service I have found perfect freedom.’ His poetry, generally grouped with that of Donne, Marvell, Southwell, etc. – the ‘metaphysical poets’ – influenced Vaughan and Coleridge and has been set by many composers, perhaps most notably Vaughan Williams in the Five Mystical Songs. Herbert is represented in the Hymnal by the following:

382 ‘King of glory, King of peace’
        [‘Praise’]
402/3 ‘Let all the world in every corner sing’
        [‘Antiphon’]
487 ‘Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life’
        [‘The Call’]
592 ‘Teach me, my God and King’
        [‘The Elixir’]

The Episcopal Church’s Collect for George Herbert:

Our God and King, who didst call thy servant George Herbert from the pursuit of worldly honors to be a pastor of souls, a poet, and a priest in thy temple: Give unto us the grace, we beseech thee, joyfully to perform the tasks thou givest us to do, knowing that nothing is menial or common that is done for thy sake; through Jesus Christ our Lord...