Sarx

Continuing with our serialised posting of Rick Fabian’s Worship at St Gregory’s, with the permission of the author and the publisher.

Transition Between Liturgy of the Word and the Eucharistic Rite During the peace and the transfer of Gifts, Deacons recruit laypeople to close the church’s glass inner doors. This was the signal for the rabbinical Feast of Friends to begin. Students arriving after the doors had closed returned home without joining their rabbi’s supper discussion. Closing the doors creates an intimate atmosphere, encouraging everyone to leave worldly thoughts behind and share single-mindedly in what follows — as the Preface immediately orders. We re-open our doors at Coffee Hour.

By returning to the earliest and simplest Transfer of Gifts at St Gregory’s, we enable the congregation to move smoothly and directly from the emotional warmth of the Kiss of Peace to the Preface (“Lift up your hearts!”) and the Great Thanksgiving.

In 1970, A. Schmemann told me he was convinced this was the best liturgical order, whether or not historical evidence supported it; from R. Taft’s reconstruction I infer this was the effective Byzantine order until the middle ages. (*) So long as the Transfer of Gifts was carried out during the Peace, all but the deacons could ignore it; and even when it developed into a distinct ceremony, its texts at first extended the Preface rite. Thus the earliest accompanying chant, Psalm 24, welcomes the Lord’s majestic arrival; and the Byzantine refrains later composed for the psalm — namely, the Cherubic hymn, the Powers of Heaven hymn, and the Jerusalem refrain familiar around the world today as “Let all mortal flesh keep silence” [Hymn 324] — each imbue that procession with the sense of the Preface: abandon all lowly thoughts, and attend to the divine business at hand! This same sense suffuses the two Byzantine “offertory” refrains added shortly afterward:. Only the last mentions the eucharistic gifts, and it depicts these, too, as gifts we receive, just as we might receive an arriving king.

As the Transfer of Gifts ritual grew, however, it acquired hymns and prayers anticipating the sacrificial content of the Great Thanksgiving prayer, and so acquired the sense of an “offertory.” In the current Roman rite these prayers virtually duplicate the Great Thanksgiving: a redundancy our Prayer Book authors rejected, but many Episcopal clergy have introduced on their own.

Even without that redundancy, however, the current Prayer Book order — Prayers of the People, Peace, Transfer of Gifts, Preface, Great Thanksgiving — sets these two (underlined) emotional climaxes in competition with each other, separated by ceremonial turmoil. In formal parishes the Great Thanksgiving may win this competition; in folksy parishes the Peace wins hands down; and the liturgy loses in both. Restoring the earliest and simplest Transfer of Gifts joins both climaxing moments so that one leads to the next, and the liturgy wins after all.

The Preface The Prayer Book [p. 404] provides the Syrian Preface dialogue from the fourth century Apostolic Constitutions and later Byzantine use, as a variant form — an excellent dialogue, too little used. We include here the Syrian instruction to parents, which we have edited slightly to fit our order of events, together with its response from the people. “Sacrifice of Praise” is the Levitical name for the Thank Offering (tôdah), the oldest Israelite communion offering.

At the Chabûrah, the Feast of Friends, a dialogue between host and diners introduced the climactic blessing of the final cup: during this dialogue the diners recited a blessing from Psalm 113: “Blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth forever more.” The Christian dialogue before the Great Thanksgiving prayer echoes this pattern.(*)

The cantor ends the noisy Peace by announcing the music page, and all the vested party turns to the congregation, crying, “Draw near! Draw near!” One deacon continues with the ancient (and still timely) chant, “Parents, take your children in hand! Let us love one another that we may offer the holy sacrifice in peace.”

(This audio track of the preface dialogue is actually 2 different services edited together: a Sunday morning liturgy – with about 200 present, and a smaller, more intimate service from Saturday night. So you hear two presiders voices during the dialogue, as well as a deacon whose voice cracks.)

The people sing their reply, “A blessing of peace! a sacrifice of praise!” and the Presider blesses the congregation with St Paul’s Trinitarian blessing (2 Corinthians 13:14) making the Cross sign in all directions with the processional cross.

The Blessing Now? Acts 6 implies that the deacons originally took food blessed but not eaten at the common eucharistic meal, and distributed it to the poor. Sometime after the common meal had separated from the eucharist, the bread brought by the people but not chosen for the Great Thanksgiving was still blessed and distributed, only now to those who attended without receiving the eucharistic gifts. From the 5th to the 16th centuries, most laypeople attended the liturgy in this way, except on special occasions; only clergy received the eucharistic bread and wine regularly. Hence the climax of a medieval congregation’s worship was not the Communion, but the Missa or dismissal, when they “came to the bishop’s hand” for a blessing — the conclusion to all public services when he was present — and received the substitute blessed bread. (Byzantine churches still follow that custom, and call the bread antidôron, “substitute gift.”) As this effectively became the people’s communion rite, the blessing dialogue adapted from the Chabûrah appeared at this point, so that the president’s blessing closed the service.

Now that practically everyone in church shares the eucharistic bread and wine, the president’s blessing can return to its original place, as the Prayer Book variant provides [p. 404]. This is by far the best place for it: here it augments rather than competes with the Great Thanksgiving, which follows as the climax of all the blessings and prayers.

Sursum Corda Next the Presider sings, “Lift up your hearts.” A charge of this sort, called the Preface, opened most Roman civic and cultic meetings by instructing the public to present their business there, or depart. R. Taft presented this explanation at a North American Academy of Liturgy seminar in 1984. In the same way a bailiff opens American court sessions crying, “Hear ye! Hear ye! Court is now in session; let all those with business to bring before this court draw near!” Taft concluded that the liturgical Preface is: “Lift up your hearts,” and that this instruction prompted all to raise their hands as well as their hearts, in the classic Christian prayer posture.

Taft’s discovery corrects a hoary misunderstanding about the relation between the Preface and the Great Thanksgiving that immediately follows. Western Great Thanksgiving prayers typically begin with a short, variable part before the Sanctus & Benedictus, then follow with a longer fixed part. Medieval ceremonial finesse favored diffuse variations, and one English missal boasted 281 alternatives for that opening paragraph! (*)

By contrast, the prayer’s long fixed part contains the dramatic Last Supper story and hard-fought sacramental talk: hence reformers since the middle ages — including Cranmer — came to treat it as the essential stuff. These commonsensically misread the label “Preface” as a name for the prayer’s earlier variable part, as though that introduced the more essential fixed part the way an author’s preface introduces a book. Today most textbooks, and all Book of Common Prayer editions, call the Great Thanksgiving’s varying openings “Proper Prefaces.” Whereas conservative Latin liturgical printers, resisting common sense, have kept the “Preface” label’s proper historical place on the page: preceding rather than following the command, “Lift up your hearts,” to which it belongs.

All is Ready The Christian liturgical Preface calls on us to abandon worldly or evil thoughts and raise our hearts and minds to God, so we can share in Christ’s life-giving sacramental supper. Expressing this attitude physically, all raise their hands (and their eyes if they wish, like fourth century Christians) and hold them aloft throughout the Great Thanksgiving that follows. Veils covering the bread and wine to keep insects off are now lifted, and deacons stand by to shoo flies during the prayer.