Christmas Day
...is always a necessary pause. Both of us are too tired really to make much of it, but managed nonethtless to make it to midnight mass last night, at the High Anglican church of All Saints, Margaret Street, just off Oxford Street. We went there last year as well (though I haven't been back since). It's a beautiful church, not particularly old, and not the 'Highest' Anglo catholic church I've ever been to - distinct whispers of Cranmer in the order and language of the liturgy, for instance. But there is a sense of richness in such a church, as if it is a sort of open secret, just off the capital's main commercial thoroughfare.
The sensory elements of Anglo Catholic worship were however all in satisfactory place. Incense, ritual, procession, blessings of crib and congregation; and although a silent (no-organ-music)prologue, with the silence not particularly well-observed by visiting members of the congregation, the singing was beautiful throughout. A small but immensely powerful choir who sang a Poulenc carol with particular verve. I like to sing, and so did the congregation around us - stirring stuff.
I find I don't tend to listen to the liturgy with sustained attention (here or at any other service) but dip into it, like putting my hand into a silvery stream. Sometimes the prayers and phrases and antiphons are startlingly beautiful, all the more so if they make no obvious semantic sense (the less striving for sense the better, to a certain extent, when it comes to articulating spirituality). Here is the Communion Chant:
With an holy worship: the dew of thy birth is of the womb of the morning
I like the transference of images here - womb and dew - and the hints they make towards new starts without unravelling too crassly a sense of mystery in the process. It is arguably what poetry should be doing too. Or, these days, instead of liturgical chant: 'After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption,' said Wallace Stevens.
But sometimes the two seem to be working towards the same end, after all. I opened a recently acquired book on the following quote from Hart Crane's 'The Broken Tower' today, and this seemed, somehow, a fitting quote:
And so it was I entered the broken world
to trace the visionary company of love.
This declaration, together with the chant, seemed to form some sort of serendipitous Christmas star.
The sensory elements of Anglo Catholic worship were however all in satisfactory place. Incense, ritual, procession, blessings of crib and congregation; and although a silent (no-organ-music)prologue, with the silence not particularly well-observed by visiting members of the congregation, the singing was beautiful throughout. A small but immensely powerful choir who sang a Poulenc carol with particular verve. I like to sing, and so did the congregation around us - stirring stuff.
I find I don't tend to listen to the liturgy with sustained attention (here or at any other service) but dip into it, like putting my hand into a silvery stream. Sometimes the prayers and phrases and antiphons are startlingly beautiful, all the more so if they make no obvious semantic sense (the less striving for sense the better, to a certain extent, when it comes to articulating spirituality). Here is the Communion Chant:
With an holy worship: the dew of thy birth is of the womb of the morning
I like the transference of images here - womb and dew - and the hints they make towards new starts without unravelling too crassly a sense of mystery in the process. It is arguably what poetry should be doing too. Or, these days, instead of liturgical chant: 'After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption,' said Wallace Stevens.
But sometimes the two seem to be working towards the same end, after all. I opened a recently acquired book on the following quote from Hart Crane's 'The Broken Tower' today, and this seemed, somehow, a fitting quote:
And so it was I entered the broken world
to trace the visionary company of love.
This declaration, together with the chant, seemed to form some sort of serendipitous Christmas star.
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