TRADITION AND REVISION IN ASH WEDNESDAY LITURGY
A conversation with a parishioner recently helped my clarify some things about my love for traditional liturgies, as well as my perspective on liturgical revision and how it should be understood. "Why," she asked, "do we use collects that sound so stilted? Why don't congregations just write their own collects each week?" It's a tricky question, because it's a question of values more than of facts. But the way we ended up talking about it is like this: imagine something you've inherited from a great-grandparent, or that was left to you by a dear friend who has died. Imagine the traditions of your culture or region, which have lived long before you were born, and will continue long after our entire generation is gone. Imagine these things like a gift from the past.
Much of the content of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer is an inheritance like this. Some of the collects that seem a bit stiff to modern worshippers date from as early as the fifth century, and many of them predate the first millennium. I think there's value in praying with words that Christians have been praying together for over a thousand years. They're a gift, and the connect us to the broader Church across time and space. That said, discernment is certainly necessary to figure out what it is that we've been given, what condition it has come to us in, and what place it might have in our lives in the present. For example, an antique watch passed down from generation to generation probably doesn't belong in the garbage - but if it cannot be restored to working order, it also probably doesn't belong on your wrist if you're hoping to tell time. Other antiques need replacement not because we need a newer version, but because they are something we have decided we no longer need at all - chamber pots, racist or sexist decorative items, and obscure varieties of cutlery are not in need of repair or updating, but of removal from use. Just because it's old doesn't mean it's good.
And then we have another problem: not everything that's new is good either. One of the reasons that "classic" hymns so often seem superior to contemporary hymnody is not that there was a brilliant poetic spirit alive in the church musicians of the past, but that we have had adequate time to select the excellent hymns from each century from among the less-good ones, over decades of use. Some new furniture is solidly built and will last the ages, and some is mostly particle-board, and you'll be lucky if it holds up for all four years of undergrad. It's impossible to know in advance what will be seem impossibly dated in a generation, but once we realize that a liturgical text cannot stand the test of time, we do its authors no favors by artificially prolonging its use.
All of this reflection on where our liturgy comes from, and on how we ought to think about what we have received from the past, brings me to a few thoughts about the current Ash Wednesday liturgy of the Episcopal Church. Ash Wednesday is an interesting case, because while it has been customary to mark the Ash Wednesday as the first day of Lent in some way since roughly the sixth century, the form of corporate worship for the day, and the implied understanding of the day's significance that goes along with it, has at no point been particularly uniform or fixed. Penitence and an exhortation to the excommunicated to engage in a season of fasting and prayer seems to be the oldest custom, with the use of ashes beginning a few centuries later.
The English reformers removed the imposition of ashes from the service for the day as early as 1549, and Cranmer composed a new collect for the day to focus the minds of the faithful on repentance and awareness of human sinfulness, rather than on fasting and mortality. By 1662, the phrase "Ash Wednesday" is entirely absent from the service for the first day of Lent. In America, the 1892 and 1928 Book of Common Prayers restored both the proper service for the day, and its name as "Ash Wednesday," but not the ashes themselves. The option to impose ashes on Ash Wednesday, along with texts for doing so, did not enter the American prayer book tradition until the current edition in 1979. (The absence of an authorized rite for imposing ashes, of course, did not mean that ashes were never used in Episcopal parishes prior to 1979 - only that the forms were unofficial and largely local in nature.)
In some ways, then, the Ash Wednesday service of 1979 is a return to the practice of the undivided church after centuries away - and in other ways, the service is a brand new creation, departing noticeably from the traditional English and American Anglican forms for observing Ash Wednesday. There now ashes but no commination, and the suffrages and prayers that were used in one form or another from 1549 onward have been replaced by a litany of penitence, written specifically for the 1979 book.
The usefulness of the commination, in all its harshness, and the significance of ashes, glitter or otherwise, are topics of legitimate debate, but ultimately I believe the service strikes an edifying balance between the pre-Reformation language of Lenten fasting and self-denial and the Reformers' emphasis on our profound sinfulness and constant need for repentance and forgiveness. The aspect of the new 1979 service that I find most in need of re-examination is the litany of penitence.
The litany of penitence is not present in "Prayers, Thanksgivings, Litanies," authorized by General Convention in 1967 for trial use, but does appear, with some differences from the final version, in "Services for Trial Use," authorized in 1970. The differences between the 1970 and 1979 versions are few - the 1970 version uses language of "men" to refer to all of humanity, and in the concluding prayer, lacks the absolution of the 1979 version. An entire petition was also added between 1970 and 1979: "Our anger at our own frustration, and our envy of those more fortunate than ourselves, we confess to you, Lord."
While I find the addition of this petition, placed between those repenting for exploitation of others and for intemperate love of worldly goods, to be unfortunate, it is not my primary objection to the litany as one charged with leading others in public worship according to the 1979 book each Ash Wednesday. Instead, the two lines that make me wince each year as I read them are these: "We have been deaf to your call to serve, as Christ served us" and "Accept our repentance, Lord... for our blindness to human need and suffering."
This is an instance, I believe, where revision has served the Church poorly. Rather than freeing an old liturgy from harmful language, it introduces language nowhere present in our Ash Wednesday tradition, calling sighted and hearing worshippers, as well as those who have vision and/or hearing impairments, to speak of blindness and deafness, even metaphorically, as things of which we must repent. And while it is true that the language of blindness is used in Scripture to refer to those who live as if they are unable to perceive the truth of God's action and will, the language of Scripture as a whole provides nuance that uses like that in the litany of penitence lack. In John's Gospel, for example, the fault Jesus finds in his critics is not that they are blind, but that they are unaware of their own limitations. "If you were blind," Jesus tells them, "you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains." Finitude is not a sin, and Christ's rejection of his disciples' assumption that physical blindness reflects moral deficiency is essential as we consider our liturgical language.
But even if Scripture itself did not contain affirmations of the moral neutrality of physical disability, our obligation to love our neighbor as ourselves would be enough to require the choice of other language - when disabled members of the Body of Christ are being harmed and alienated by our liturgical language, no other justification for revision is needed.
The litany of penitence has been taken up by other mainline Protestant traditions in the years since the publication of the 1979 prayer book, and many of them have altered these lines in their editions of the Ash Wednesday service. Without downplaying the truth that we are all fallen and bound to sin, it is possible to choose language that not only respects the dignity of disabled people, but clarifies the theological truth that when we sin, it is "by our own fault, in thought, word and deed." We have chosen not to heed the call to serve as Christ served us. We have ignored human need and suffering, not because we could not have known about it, but because it is more convenient to us to avoid that knowledge.
The project of liturgical revision is weighty, and will take a great deal of time to undertake properly, as we work together to sort through the inheritance of prayer that we have received, discerning together which texts are heirlooms to treasure, and which no longer serve to edify and sanctify the church. But some changes cannot wait, and don't have to wait. It is my deep hope that at General Convention 2021, an amended version of the litany of penitence will be offered by trial use, so we can pray on Ash Wednesday in a way that reflects humanity's equal and shared sinfulness before God without undermining our equal and shared dignity.
