On the Move
A reflection on the Advent Procession at Salisbury Cathedral
Almighty God
give us grace to cast away the works of darkness
.......................and put on the armour of light,
.......................now in the time of this mortal life,
.......................in which your Son Jesus Christ
.......................came to us in great humility;
.......................so that, at the last day,
.......................when he shall come again in his glorious majesty
.......................to judge the living and the dead,
.......................we may rise to the life immortal;
.......................through him who is alive and reigns
.......................with you and the Holy Spirit,
.......................one God, world without end. Amen. (Collect for Advent Sunday )
The season of Advent - the four weeks of preparation for Christmas - is a profoundly evocative time which draws on the closing in of the days as winter deepens, and invites us to consider the darkness that pervades our world and often our personal lives and yet finds a glimmer of that divine hope that scatters the darkness from before our path. This year has been very strange for all of us, and desperately challenging and sad for many as we have all had to face the Covid-19 pandemic and its implications for our lives and the lives of those we love. Although Advent is in most years almost entirely subsumed by the rush to Christmas, we may this year particularly find hope and consolation in the Church’s observance of the Advent season as a call to explore the depths of our human experience and to discover something even deeper which gives point and purpose to, and ultimately makes sense of, our being human - namely a sense of God’s love. That is rather a grand - maybe an overblown - way of describing the Church’s keeping of Advent but the point about the Church’s year, driven by the gospel narrative, is that we believe in a God who has entered our human condition, with all its darkness, and by that entering in transformed it - indeed continues to transform it - into something so grace-filled that it leads to perfection. This year above all we need to hear and be grasped by the deeper tones of this holy season.
When Christmas comes with all the humanity of the manger birth, we are often inclined to stay with the sentimentality and the fantasy and the overconsumption that passes for the good life in modern times. Advent plumbs depths of human consciousness and need which our celebration of Christmas all too easily sidesteps.
Part of the mystery of Advent (and its mysteriousness is an important aspect of its rich attraction) is tied up with what Advent actually signifies. Of course the word means ‘coming’ and the coming of Christ, celebrated at Christmas, is anticipated in this
season especially in the stories of John the Baptist and the annunciation to the Virgin Mary. But ‘coming’ has further resonance in the Christian understanding in that it also refers to the second coming of Christ as judge, and the last things (Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell) associated with the second coming are part of the Advent reflection.
These four last things are what, in theological language, is called eschatology. That is what the Advent Collect (above) is referring to when Jesus is described as coming again ‘in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead’ on the last day. This is something towhich nowadays we give scant attention, despite our unflinching affirmation in the Creed that ‘Christ will come again to judge both the living and the dead.’ Should Advent, therefore, be kept as a time of rejoicing and expectation or a time of penitential waiting
and preparation? The question is reflected in our Advent liturgies - we revert for example to the liturgical colour of penitential purple (Sarum blue in Salisbury) and we omit the Gloria from the Mass., but Alleluias abound in our hymns. This is an age-old ambivalence, for the penitential observance of a much longer Advent season beginning on November 11 (Feast of St Martin) or even earlier was the practice of the church in France, Spain and
Germany in the fifth century. But in Rome (rather later in the sixth century) the Advent season started later and comprised only four or five Sundays and was a festive season of preparation for the Feast of the Lord’s Nativity, without penitential character.
When in the eighth century the Frankish Church accepted the Roman liturgy the non-penitential Advent of Rome clashed with the much longer penitential season of the Gallic observance. After a few centuries of vacillation there emerged a final structure of Advent observance that combined features of both traditions, which, with pruning of the season to four weeks, is the tradition we have inherited almost unchanged since the thirteenth century.
The Advent tension between joyful celebration and penitence which we have been considering is a creative tension, which despite the ambivalence can provide depth rather than confusion. Certainly the ceremonies of the church, (using symbol, ritual,
movement and colour, music and silence,) often provide focus and clarity and a level of understanding that words do not. The growing popularity of Advent processions is a case in point, for processions today as in medieval times, even when adorned with gorgeous vestments, start where people are, and help to engage congregations in the drama that is being enacted, establishing common ground. Even when the whole congregation cannot
move in procession because of numbers or restricted space (though such possibilities are certainly worth exploring and not just on Palm Sunday or Corpus Christi) the whole assembly is invited by the movement of the few to an imaginative participation in the action. And few things kindle the imagination more than lighting a single candle in an unlit church. Before any words are spoken we have an understanding of St John’s graphic
image “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."
And immediately our imagination turns to the darkness of our world. Maybe we remember the creation account when the Bible tells us there was only emptiness and everything was null and void, and in the darkness God said ‘Let there be light and there was light.'
The Advent Candle (of similar proportions to the familiar Paschal candle, and which can be painted by some artistic spirit in the congregation in glorious colours and evocative ikons) is lit either at the west end of the church at the beginning of a procession that will move from west to east, or maybe, better, in the centre of the church where all the congregation sitting in darkness can see the candle as it is lit. The Advent Responsory (I look from afar) sung by choir or a smaller schola or by the congregation in a
responsorial form is both a traditional and entirely appropriate response to the lighting of the candle. It is usual for the Christian assembly to be convened, as it were, by some greeting. ‘The Lord be with you’ and its response is the most familiar greeting. My
own sense is that words at this point are unnecessary. The congregation is drawn together and convened by the flickering flame - Christ our Light - and our response is a song., and the Words come later. It may be that brief prayers can be included after the readings in the Procession, though the prayer in the Salisbury Procession is confined to a final recitation of the Collect for Advent Sunday. I like to think that the whole liturgy even
without particular prayers of intercession is an offering of prayer.
Look for the conclusion of Fr. Jeremy's piece tomorrow.
