Sarx

We continue with the postings from Rick Fabian’s Worship at St Gregory’s, with the permission of the author and the publisher.

Now the Clergy lead the people to the altar area, singing a hymn and marching together in the ancient Tripudium step: three steps forward, one step back. This dance survives in Luxembourg today, where it is still used for the offertory procession at Pentecost, and the Benedictine scholar Godfrey Diekmann taught it to St Gregory’s congregation in 1980. It serves a great many hymns in the Episcopal Hymnbook, including most of those in duple or quadruple meters, and even other meters that provide four downbeats per line. We explain the step quickly, ask all to place a hand on the shoulder of someone ahead of them, sing, and start marching once the hymn is underway.

At the same time, a deacon with incense leads a procession of children bearing the gifts of bread and wine from the kitchen, and sets these on the table, sometimes together with their paintings or cut-outs of the day’s scripture readings. The two processions join in concentric lines, circling the table to the rhythm of sistrums, thurible bells, drums, and processional cross staves striking the floor.

The Transfer of Gifts from sideboard to altar table was originally a homely part of a rabbi’s dinner with his close disciples — a formal but intimate routine called Chabûrah, or Feast of Friends. (This will be discussed further in the section on the Great Thanksgiving that follows.) The students brought gifts of food and placed them on the sideboard; when all had assembled the doors were closed, and one after another the dishes were carried to the table, blessed, and served while the company discussed the scriptures. Christians continued this simple usage for centuries: as their congregations grew, the deacons chose bread and wine from the people’s many offerings on sideboards, and carried these to the table while the people exchanged the Peace. (*)

With the appearance of crowded public church buildings, this simple Transfer of Gifts became a procession with chants and prayers extolling God’s awesome presence and creative bounty toward us, from which we offer gifts of bread and wine. In the east this ritual swelled to a juggernaut dwarfing and finally eclipsing the Entry Procession. On medieval Sundays at Haghia Sophia, 600 clergy marched in the Transfer of Gifts! No weekly liturgy could bear two such extravaganzas, so the more participatory Byzantine Entry Procession atrophied. In Byzantine churches today a mere vestige of the Entry Procession crops up amid the opening hymns and readings, and is called “Little Entrance;” while the title “Great Entrance” now belongs to the Transfer of Gifts that supplanted it.

These two Byzantine processions influenced Anglican worship during the same medieval period, but with a different result. In 1970, I took part in a full re-enactment of the English “Sarum Rite” on which Cranmer largely depended for his Prayer Book. This enactment at the New York Metropolitan Museum Cloisters, under the historical direction of Robert Wright and Boone Porter of the General Theological Seminary, climaxed an international scholarly symposium on The Year 1300. Borrowings from contemporary worship at Haghia Sophia, implied in the Sarum texts, became dramatically prominent when enacted and compared with T. Mathews’ reconstruction of Constantinopolitan worship, published the following year. (*) The enactment also resolved famous puzzles in the Sarum service books, such as the apparent solecism of misusing Byzantine offertory ritual for the Sarum entrance rite.

In fact, medieval English Sarum use adapted contemporary Byzantine ritual ingeniously. At the midpoint of monastic Sunday morning worship, after reciting prime in the chapter house, the abbot and clergy led the monks through the cloister into the church for the eucharist, with deacons carrying the bread and wine sumptuously veiled. Here the Sarum use creatively joined both Byzantine processions for the entry and the transfer of gifts, rather than setting them in competition.

This successful adaptation emerges plainly in a performance following the rubrics but less plainly from the printed mass texts, which begin with this entry chant as western mass books conventionally do. Hence historians have wondered why the English eccentrically put a Byzantine bread-and-wine procession at the start of their service — when in fact Sarum use puts the procession at midpoint, where it parallels the Byzantine order, and from the viewpoint of liturgical economy, surpasses it. Perhaps that is why the Sarum entry chant is not called introit but officium — referring to the office of prime which it concludes — and why it is sung three times, like contemporary Syro-Byzantine refrains for the Transfer of Gifts and other processions (*) rather than twice, like a Latin entry refrain. However ingenious, of course, this arrangement could not survive the 16th century suppression of monastic worship. It remains for modern Anglicans to follow Sarum’s lead by joining east and west in our own innovative way.

Following the speculations of G. Dix, in The Shape of the Liturgy (1945) twentieth century reformers have generally assumed that western tradition highlights the laypeople’s work in supplying the gifts, over the deacons’ work in transferring them: Dix attributes the liturgical east-west split to this single distinction. As a result, up-to-date western liturgies, including most Anglican liturgies, now feature a juggernaut of laypeople (instead of clergy) carrying bread and wine, and prayers acknowledging the people’s labor (instead of God’s bounty) in producing those gifts for the Church’s use. Alas, far from restoring primitive worship, this practice only completes its decadence, as the laypeople chosen to take part are carefully “representative” — one man, one woman, one old, one young, one from each ethnic group — and so effectively clericalized. (What are clergy but representative laypeople?) Moreover, the practice springs from a false historical assumption. C. Buchanan shows, pace Dix, that early western ritual for the gifts matched the early Byzantine, and that both rites’ prayers portrayed our gifts of bread, wine and alms as a small return on God’s gifts to us. (*) Buchanan proposes that the natural place, and the historic Anglican place, for money offerings follows communion: there we give alms in response to all God has already given us in creating and redeeming the world. That is the very argument of the Great Thanksgiving prayer, and of the gospels as well.