Spiritual Malnutrition in Modern America

I was surprised to hear that Ann Romney had been Episcopalian and converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormon faith) when she met and was dating Mitt.  When I heard that her family was of Welsh background I was particularly curious as while there are some Welsh Anglicans they are fairly rare, the Welsh being mostly evangelicals—Baptists and Wesleyans in particular along with various “free Church” Congregations.  The Anglicans in Wales are usually quite Low Church but high income—the upper crust sort of people.  Working class Welsh—and Mrs. Romney’s grandfather was a miner—are either non-religious or, as I said, evangelicals.  It turns out that Edward Davies, Mrs. Romney’s father, an immigrant, had been raised in the Free Church tradition but was strongly opposed to organized religion.  This may have been due to the heavy and rigidly Calvinist bent of the Welsh Evangelicals which is dour enough to suck all joy and life out of you like one of Harry Potter’s Dementors.  The Davies family rarely went to Church and while Ann identified herself as an Episcopalian, I can’t find any mention of her ever being formally received into or confirmed in the Episcopal Church. 

But it isn’t Ann Romney whom I want to write about today. It is rather the Episcopal Church.  Thinking—until I started to research—that Mrs. Romney had been a cradle Episcopalian I was going to bring up the subject of how the Episcopal Church has been gutted of its membership—dropping 40% of its membership over the last 40 years.  What has caused this loss?

Actually I think the loss is even more dramatic—many of the Episcopalians I know, indeed most, are people who have joined the Church over the last 40 years meaning that the number who have left is even greater than 40%, the converts taking the place of perhaps another 20 or 30%.  An Episcopalian priest friend of mine—who himself is a former Catholic priest—says that about two-thirds of his congregation of 350 members joined the Episcopal Church as adults.  Many of these are, like the priest himself, former Catholics.  They feel more comfortable in the Episcopal Church because they are in second marriages, or they are in gay unions, or they feel emarginated in the Catholic Church because of their support for “liberal” causes.  “Father Joe” said too that there are a number of regular attendees at his parish who still call themselves Catholics but are just more comfortable worshipping in an Episcopal Church because it is more “inclusive” and “welcoming.” 

“Father Joe” said that in addition to converts from Catholicism he has about an equal number of people who have come from other Christian faiths—particularly evangelicals—who are drawn to the Episcopal Church (they say) by the more formal liturgy.  “They like the music—and the language of the Prayer-Book.  These are the ones who are most resistant to liturgical innovations and they love the ‘thees’ and ‘thous’.”  Some of these “pass through the gastro-intestinal tract of the Episcopal Church and into the Roman Catholic Church because they want even more ritual than we can give them, but they tend to become Latin Mass Catholics.  I even know of one or two,” the priest said, “who used the Catholic Church as a changing station for Russian Orthodoxy.  But people on that sort of spiritual journey are generally just restless and not religious.” 

What has caused the exodus from the Episcopal Church?  Liberal Protestantism in general has gone into decline since the heady years of their support for the Civil Rights movement and Anti-War movement of the Vietnam years.  Those were exhilarating times for liberal Protestants in general and Episcopalians in particular.  But the subsequent causes—feminism, abortion rights, gay rights—the Churches have embraced have been much more polarizing.  Yet I think the affinity for the Episcopal (and Presbyterian) Church for liberal agendas doesn’t really answer the question of why their membership has declined.  While a minority of former Episcopalians have either gone into the schismatic Anglican groups such as Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA) or moved to more evangelical Churches, the majority have just stopped going to any Church or attend a church of their choice on a sporadic basis or as need for a funeral or wedding occur.  American society is overall far less churched in 2012 than it was in the Ozzie and Harriet years of the Eisenhower administration. 

I think—and I could be wrong—that another reason that Church attendance and membership has dropped in the mainline denominations, including the Episcopal Church, is that the churches had become little more than a social event.  The preaching is often bland and sufficiently vague to make sure that no one is offended and the liturgy is often the triumph of form over substance.  I think a focus has been lost on the saving work of Christ and how that saving work intersects not with some future afterlife, but with the demands of faithfulness in the here and now world.  This brings me back to one of my theme songs—the lack of substantial spirituality in contemporary American Christianity.  I have written before on this issue as it relates to Catholicism, but I think the problem is much wider.  Anglicanism has a strong spiritual tradition both with the Caroline Divines and the Oxford movement.  Methodism too in Wesley has a strong spiritual heritage that leads the Christian to look honestly at himself and what much change for fidelity to Christ.  I think the various “Bible Churches” and other pseudo-evangelical groups present a distortion of this spirituality—not a willful distortion just a failure to capture the real thing—in the sort of emotional theatrics of mega-church worship and people find their “faith” satisfied even as a child would rather fill-up on Cotton Candy rather than Broccoli and lean meats.  The meat and potato spiritual diet found in Ignatius Loyola or John of the Cross or John Wesley or Teresa of Avila or Lancelot Andrews or Jeremy Taylor requires a discipline that the musical surge and stage lighting of a Joel Osteen or a Pete Wilson or a Brad Powell or a Pat Robertson supplants so that the believer can “feel the feeling” without having to confront the challenge.   The mainline denominations, Catholicism included, needs to get back to its deep spiritual roots and find the sort of faith that sustain contemporary Christians in a post-Christian world. 

Worship: It Is More Blessed to Receive Than to Give

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams presides

over Lessons and Carols in his Cathedral Church

Christmas Eve we drove into town to go to the Cathedral for 4 pm mass.  It wasn’t my idea.  Usually a priest relative says mass here at home for the family but this year an about-to-be-inlaw suggested we join her and her family for the mass where she was to be a Eucharistic Minister at a special “Children’s Liturgy.”  I hate to be a Grinch but children’s liturgies are one of those things that I think are good ideas and bad—or at least painful to sit through—in practice.  And at Christmas it is just—well chaotic.  I will say that the young girl who appeared to have some developmental issues read the Old Testament Lesson and Epistle as well as any adult (including any priest) if not better.  But as huge as the Cathedral is, there were several hundred people standing for lack of seats.  The Lectionary and the Eucharistic Prayer for Children is just a bit too dummied down (at least for me) and on Christmas Eve the kids’ energy level is off the charts.  The Rector too, while he tried to do a good job, was obviously conscious of the time and the whole liturgy had a feeling of being rushed even though it was an hour and twenty minutes.  I am sure a lot of people—especially parents and grandparents of the kids who crowded around the manger for the homily—loved it and fortunately there was (despite what I had been told there would be) no Santa Claus coming in after communion to doff his hat and leave a gift at the manger.  Nevertheless, I left mass feeling I had been through an ordeal rather than celebrated the great mystery of the Incarnation.  That was me; others, I am sure, loved it.  And I have no doubt that God who delights in children more than religious fussiness (if Jesus in the Gospels, especially  Matthew, is to believed) was well pleased.  Nevertheless, I needed something more. 
        After some obligatory (but short) visits to various relatives I made it back to the country town where I spend the holidays and decided to stop in at the local Methodist Church for their Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols service that began at 9 pm.  This is a small hamlet of about fifty houses, with two Protestant Churches.  The Catholic Church was closed two years ago and now is an “outreach center” with food, clothes, and limited medical services for economically stretched families.   I tend to forget how many people in our society, especially in rural America, are still suffering from the economic crash brought on by the twenty-eight years of unsound and immoral fiscal policies (aka “trickle down economics”) that are creating a vacuum where the middle class used to be.  I give credit to the Catholic Diocese here that instead of selling the Church property they maintain it as an outreach station.  There is an ancient tradition for this in the diaconal churches of Rome.  I will have to do a blog entry on that one day.   
     In any event, I settled into a pew in the Methodist Church—a tiny white clapboard building that could hold a hundred people at the most.  There might have been forty people for the service, including the seven member choir (four women, three men), the pastor, and the music director.  It was a lovely simple service.  The music director is a first-rate organist (a little less successful with the piano) and has a phenomenal tenor voice.  He opened the service with a solo of Handel’s “Who can abide the day of his coming?” from the Messiah.  The choir did their best for seven people of somewhat advanced years.  We sang a good variety of carols.  The lessons were the traditional ones for Lessons and Carols and they relayed the story of salvation from Adam to John’s proclamation that “The Word became flesh.”
      It was a pleasant regrouping of spiritual energy after the more frenetic mass.  But, while I have often attended Protestant services, it struck me last evening how different the Catholic and Protestant approach to worship is.  For us Catholics—and I think the Orthodox as well as (though perhaps to a lesser extent) liturgical Protestants (“High-Church” Episcopalians and Lutherans)—liturgy is about “doing” something for God.  I seem to recall that the word “Liturgy” comes from the Greek, leitourgia “The people’s action” implying the exercise of a civic duty towards the gods.  For more “Low-Church” or evangelical Protestants, worship is more about receiving from God than doing—being nourished or fed as they often say.  I am not going to say that one approach is better than the other.  In fact I think we need a balance that integrates our responsibility to offer God worship with God’s anxious care to provide us with his sustenance.  Too often at Mass I think we are into the doing.  Sing this hymn. Recite that prayer.  Stand.  Kneel.  Bow.  Up and Back for Communion. I think Mass too often becomes one-thing-after-another ritual. 
     Sometimes, though, Evangelical style worship can be all feeling and no substance.  A friend of mine who is an Evangelical told me about a Memorial Day Weekend service at his Bible Church in Denver CO.  He said:
“It was so moving.  First they sang The Navy Hymn and everyone who served in the Nave stood up while the choir sang.  Then they sang The Army Hymn (God of our Fathers Whose Almighty Hand) and everyone who served in the Army stood. Next came The Air Force Hymn and all those who had been in the Air Force stood. Then they sang The Marine Hymn, and all who had served in the Marines stood.  And finally, as they raised a forty-foot American flag over the pulpit we all sang America the Beautiful. I was so moved.”    As a Catholic I was somewhat appalled at such a service—not that I am not patriotic but because Jesus was never mentioned.  This was all style and no substance—total emotion and zero Gospel. That is not what we need either.  When I hear Joel Osteen or some other TV preachers I think it is little more than positivism for bible readers and I think our faith is meant to be much more than that.  The Gospel excites me, makes me critique myself and the world around me, calls forth a response from me.  It touches my heart not with an emotional feather but with an energy that calls me to respond.   
      I think we can have worship that both touches the heart and proclaims the Gospel.  I am fortunate that I am able to participate in the prayer life of a local monastic community, joining them most days for both morning and evening prayer.  The calm slow recitation of the psalms, the lesson with the reflective silence afterward, the ability to pray so much of the office from memory or with attentive listening gives a good balance to the higher pitched and more active demands of participation in the Eucharist.  I think that a healthy prayer life needs both sacramental and non-sacramental worship—in addition to solitude and silence for meditation.  Too many Catholics are unaware of prayer beyond the mass and, perhaps, (and especially for us older types) the devotional prayers such as the rosary or the Stations of the Cross.  It is too soon to evaluate the effects of the current revision of the Mass but perhaps what we need it not so much to revise our Eucharistic liturgy as to look at the entire spectrum of prayer, communal and private, and see how we can revitalize spiritual life for the average Catholic.  
      This brings me back to Lessons and Carols.  The service was designed by Edward White Benson, Anglican Bishop of Truro in England in 1880.  Benson went on to become the Archbishop of Canterbury before his death in 1896.  (His youngest son ended up a Catholic Priest.)  Benson looked at the mediocrity of Church life in his day and realized that some creativity was needed in the Church of England to nourish the waning religiosity of the ordinary people.  He modeled Lessons and Carols rather loosely on a Catholic Matins service, substituting carols and hymns for the psalms.  It has gone on to become a Christmas tradition in many parts of the world, a service cherished not only by Anglicans but by Protestants and Catholics alike.  Perhaps today we need some more creativity to make spiritual life come alive for contemporary Christians.  I don’t think the new translation of the Mass does that, in fact I don’t think the Mass, as wonderful as it is,  is enough but needs to be the jewel set into the crown of a life of prayer.  The stiffness of current liturgical practice in the Catholic Church falls short of meeting the spiritual needs of many.  We may need the protein of sacramental ritual but we also need the spiritual carbs of more scripture oriented worship. After all, our faith tells us that it is not so much what we do for God but what God offers us.  We live not by bread (and wine) alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.