A talk given by Dr. John Orens at St. Monica and St. James on November 19, 2023

            The parish church of Saint Monica and Saint James has long been a beacon of Catholic faith and worship in this diocese and across the Episcopal Church and the wider Anglican communion. But what is this faith and why is its witness so needed today? The best way to answer these questions is to tell a tale of two cities. Our journey begins in nineteenth-century Boston. Anglo-Catholics were few and far between in the low-church diocese of Massachusetts, and Anglican monks were unheard of. So when monks of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, the Cowley Fathers, opened their church on Bowdoin Street near the top of Beacon Hill, heads turned. The story goes that a mother and her young daughter were making their way up Beacon Hill when they encountered one of these monks. The little girl, startled by the figure in his black cassock, turned to her mother and asked, “What’s that, mommy?” The mother picked up her daughter in her arms, and as she hurried away, she whispered, “That, my dear, is a fanatic.”

            Our journey now takes us to nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., to this very church. The day had come for the Bishop of Maryland—back then the city was in the diocese of Maryland—to consecrate this building, and the bishop refused. Why? Because candles were lit on the altar, and this sort of Catholic ceremonial was something that the bishop would not abide. The only reason for altar candles to be lit, he said, was if the church was so dark that the priest could not see what he was doing. How did the vestry respond? It bricked up the church’s windows so that no light could enter. And so the candles had to be lit, the church was eventually consecrated, and the bishop went home, doubtless grumbling about those fanatics on 8th Street.

            But why were they so fanatical? The answer is that they understood—as do you and I—that Christ is truly present in the sacrament of the altar. Those candles—your candles—are lit for him. And the vestry was determined that the light of Christ would shine in this place, and from this place, to a world in need. It is the vision that has sustained your ministry ever since, and it is a vision with deep roots in our Anglican past.

            We Anglicans have long prided ourselves on the way our Church pursues the via media, the fabled middled way. But all too often this path has been misunderstood as little more than a bland and murky compromise: a little Protestant, a little Catholic, a little bit of whatever. But as you know from your life in this place, the via media is much more. It is a path to the heart of things, a path to a holy and life changing mystery, a path illumined by a sacramental vision of humanity and divinity. Ponder the words of Richard Hooker, the greatest of Elizabethan theologians and the father of Anglican theology. In his day, Protestants and Roman Catholics were arguing furiously about the eucharist. Was Christ present in the elements on the altar or was he not? If he was, how was he present? To these questions, Hooker answered: “What these elements are in themselves, it skilleth not. It is enough that for me who receives them, they are the Body and Blood of Christ.” Hooker does not say that it’s this or that. Nor does he say, take it or leave it, whatever. Instead he tells us, “It is real, it is true, I have seen, I have tasted. Behold the Lamb of God.”

            This vision of life filled with sacramental wonder flourished in the century that followed. The seventeenth century was the age of the Caroline Divines, pastors, poets, and theologians like John Donne, George Herbert, and Lancelot Andrewes who restored the outward and visible signs of Catholic faith: beautifully adorned altars, eucharistic vestments, and yes, lit candles. But more important, they restored the three marks of inward and spiritual grace that form the foundation of what we now call Anglo-Catholicism. The first is reverent sacramental worship. Second, flowing from this, is reverent sacramental mission to those in need. Lancelot Andrewes put it this way: “The breaking of bread in the Sacrament is not to be severed from the other breaking of bread to the hungry. Just as Christ communicated himself to us, so we communicate ourselves to our poor brethren, thus a perfect communion.” And the third mark? It lies in the poetry. From Donne and Herbert, to T. S. Eliot, to Rowan Williams, poetry is woven deep into our spirituality and our theology, offering us the allusive language that alone can do justice to the wonder that we see and the mystery into which we live.

            Here is the vision glorious, this mission glorious; gifts that are unspeakably precious and yet unspeakably fragile. Their beauty is so supernal, the interplay between worship and wonder so subtle, and the call on our lives so insistent, that there have always been those Anglicans who have tried to turn  vision and mission into something more manageable, more sensible, less mysterious; all of which plays into the perennial Anglican temptation to settle into a religion if genteel respectability. It brings to mind a story about a nineteenth-century bishop of New York who, when asked if it were possible to be saved outside of the Episcopal Church, replied, “Perhaps, but a gentleman would never consider it.”

            Fortunately, the Church has never lacked men and women to recall it to its faith. And over the past two centuries no call has been more momentous for the Church at large, and for this parish in particular, than the summons that came from the small group of Oxford scholars that we know as the Tractarians. It is to the Catholic revival to which their summons gave birth that this parish owes its existence. Bur what was the Oxford Movement about, what was its animating vision. Like the Caroline divines, theirs was a vision at once sacramental, missionary, and poetic, only more so. To put it another way, they sounded three themes that form the enduring melody of this church.

            The first of these is the tangible reality of sacramental grace, which is to say that the simplest of things—a splash of water, a piece of bread and a sip of wine—convey and accomplish exactly what we say they will. New birth, union with Christ, the very presence of Christ’s body and blood, these are not things we merely remember or vaguely hope for. They are a present reality. And this leads wonderfully and gloriously to the second theme of the Catholic revival: the community—the profound humanity—of sacramental grace. This is most visible in the Church, a sacred organism whose apostolic authority is rooted in the shared ministry of the whole body of the faithful. But notice that this body encompasses the whole human condition: young and old, rich and poor, the educated, the ignorant, and even the most profoundly disabled among us. So it is that the community of grace must be a missionary community. The Tractarians called on their contemporaries—they call on us—to serve those flung to the margins of society, not only from a sense of moral obligation, but because, like us, the destitute and the forgotten bear the image of Christ. In a sermon he gave nearly two hundred years ago, the great Tractarian theologian, Edward Bouverie Pusey, observed pointedly, “The law can make it a crime to ask alms in the name of Jesus. It cannot do away with the presence of Jesus”; words as relevant today as they were when they were first spoken.

            The tangible reality of sacramental grace, the unspeakable humanity of sacramental grace: what could be more beautiful? How, then, can we express that beauty if not through words and images and acts of beauty? Here we find the third theme, the theme you that sounds every time you enter your sanctuary: the sheer beauty of sacramental grace. Like the Caroline Divines, the Tractarians saw the mystery of God mirrored in the beauty of nature. They recalled the Church to the beauty of reverent worship. Indeed, it is is no small measure because of their vision that we worship in buildings as candlelit and mysterious as yours.

            Mystery and mission, beauty and holiness, matter and spirit, compassion and community: bind them together and you have an explosive mixture, So it is no surprise that when the Catholic revival escaped the confines of the university and made its way into parishes like this across the Anglican world, explosion after explosion followed, the most dramatic and the most scandalous of which was the ceremonial revolution. The Tractarians had been careful to adhere to the simple liturgical practices of their day. But once ensconced in parishes, their ritualist offspring threw caution to the winds. In the words of one satirical observer, “There were chasubles white with the sign of the yoke; copes, capes, birettas, and volumes of smoke.” Nowhere was there more smoke than in the slum parishes to which many Anglo-Catholic clergy flocked, and where they served their poor parishioners with heroic selflessness in what I think we can only call an explosion of missionary zeal. They tended to their parishioners’ tangible bodies as well as to their souls, speaking out against the sweatshop owners and slumlords who exploited them. We are sometimes told that we must choose between prayer and mission, or that prayer and mission have nothing to do with the messy world of politics. But as Frances Perkins understood, this is not Anglo-Catholic. Sacramental grace is inseparable. It encompasses worship, justice, beauty, and joy.

            The Tractarians wee an austere lot, and joy is not a virtue we usually associate with them. But their successors, including you and me, have been far more ebullient. Our ritualist forebears saw God sacramentally present on the stage, in the music hall where ballerinas danced in flesh-colored tights, and in the pub. When Stewart Headlam, the most bohemian priest of them all, was asked if he thought that Saint Paul would have gone to a music hall, he replied, “I do not know what Saint Paul would have done. But I know that our Lord would have gone and taken his blessed mother with him.” Is it any wonder that some respectable church folk found this vision shocking. Is it any wonder that it endured? And now this radical vision is ours..

            If you asked me to sum all of this up, I think that I could do so in three words from George Herbert’s poem, “Prayer”: “heaven in ordinarie.” Ordinary bread and wine, ordinary men and women, ordinary everyday joys and sorrows. Our task, our mission, is to reveal heaven in ordinarie, and to share heaven in ordinarie. Several years ago, a young woman was murdered not far from this church. And on Corpus Christi, the feast of the Blessed Sacrament, the clergy and people of this congregation processed with the sacrament to the place where she was murdered. The body of Christ, the body of that young woman: behold the Lamb of God. That’s what it’s all about.

            I began with a tale of two cities. Let me conclude with a third. One Sunday, when my wife and I were in London, we decided to worship in one of the beautiful churches designed by Christopher Wren that dot the City, London’s financial district. We knew that not many people lived there, and we knew that church attendance throughout the United Kingdom was very low. But still, we were shocked to find only a dozen or so people scattered in the pews of the spacious baroque interior. The preacher that morning was an elderly bishop. He made his way into the pulpit, looked out at the tiny congregation, and began to speak in a voice so garbled that he might as well have speaking in Welsh. When the service was over, the verger, who could see that we were confused, tried to cheer us up. “Don’t you mind the bishop none,” he said. “‘He has a speech impediment and no one has understood him for years.”

            Bishops sometimes do have speech impediments; this parish has not. From its founding, through its re-founding as the church of Saint Monica and Saint James, it has spoken clearly, faithfully, and prophetically. May you continue to do so in the years to come. This community, this diocese, the Episcopal Church, and the Anglican communion around the world need you to keep those candles lit.