In the last week or so I have been rereading one of my favourite books, A Stranger in Spain by H.V. Morton - he of the In Search of England/Scotland/Ireland/Wales et cetera books. I first came across the account of his Spanish travels (published in 1955) in the school library when I was about thirteen or fourteen. I was quite enchanted by it (and what normal teen-aged boy wouldn't be?) since it was full of wonderful descriptions of black-faced images of Our Blessed Lady wearing bejewelled crowns, and fascinating accounts of things such as the Mozarabic Mass or the dancing of the Seises (complete with castanets) before the altar of Seville Cathedral during high mass on the feast of Corpus Christi. As I say, what normal kiwi boy could resist such delights?
My enthusiasm knew no bounds. Quite soon I was sneaking copies of the Roman Missal and the Book of Common Prayer into the classroom to look at furtively while the masters droned on about such unimportant matters as geography and mathematics. Then one day a certain Mr Skelly (if I remember rightly) wanted to know what I was peering at under my desk. This invasion of my privacy was bad enough, but what followed was as unfortunate as it was extraordinary. When the other boys discovered what I had been looking at, they laughed, not at the teacher, as you might expect, but at me. From that moment on I was a stranger on this earth.
Truthfully however, my enthusiasm was as much to do with history as with religion. I have always been fascinated by the European past, largely because it has been so beautiful. I do not include (of course) the Black Death or the Holy Inquisition as examples of historical loveliness, indeed I am not talking about disasters, man-made or otherwise, at all. I am talking about (to use the most obvious examples I can think of) Chartres Cathedral, Dante's Divina Commedia, Handel's Messiah, Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal Son, and so on ad infinitum. And note, please, that all of these have overtly (indeed essentially) Christian significance.
I loved it all. I remember the day when the music master (one Johannes Giesen) no doubt despairing of knocking an appreciation of sonata form into the heads of a class of resolute philistines, decided to show us a film about Florence under the Medici instead. Almost half a century later I can vividly remember my amazement as I saw the cathedral's belltower and Brunelleschi's dome for the first time. And when school was over for the day I rushed off to the public library to get hold of books on the subject. Illustrated books of course, nothing too taxing. And anyway, who cares what various learned aesthetes have to say about it all? Just look at the pictures, for heaven's sake, look at the pictures.
All this has great importance, not just for me, but for many others as well. We live in a society largely disenchanted with its past. Thus "old" music, "old" prayers, "old" buildings and so on, are often seen as obstacles to faith, rather than (as they have been for so many) the very opposite. Furthermore, our society likes to think of itself as egalitarian. No elitism for us. No organs when we could have guitars, no antiquated vestments when we could have smart and fashionable contemporary dress. And worst of all perhaps, no beautiful liturgical texts drenched in the sanctity of centuries when we could have mere committeespeak instead.
Perhaps in a democratic and egalitarian society we should be content with our much vaunted modernity, but I certainly hope not. Why does our inclusiveness and respect for the rights of the individual leave so many individuals feeling very excluded? Why do I get the impression that we have the liturgical equivalent of two legs good, four legs bad? In the Roman Church at the present time there is a movement sometimes called the Reform of the Reform. Perhaps we Anglicans could do with something similar.
