Into this complex aura of tiredness and freshness, of Belatedness and Promise, of old and new: enter the Last Gospel.

It was, in fact, the occasion of giving a series of talks on the Gospel of John at a clergy retreat in the Canadian Diocese of Fredericton last summer that put me in mind of the Last Gospel. I’ve come to think that the kairos may be ripe to return to the practice of saying it. Full confession: the reading of the Last Gospel is a liturgical custom that I’ve never seen and heard, in Latin or in English, though I’d long read about it as a kind of ritual unicorn from before the conciliar Flood. In its most immediate pre-Vatican II form, the Last Gospel entailed a reading of the first 14 verses of the Gospel of John from the altar after the Mass had formally ended, usually with the assistance of visibly gilded altar cards. In this way, the Catholic faithful gained a deep familiarity with the rhythm and cadences of the Latin prologue — in principio erat Verbum.

There is something delightfully paradoxical about ending a Eucharist, Mass, or Divine Liturgy with the words “In the beginning.” In a time when, as Steiner opines, “we have no more beginnings” — or at least we feel that fresh beginnings are difficult to come by — the reading of the Last Gospel sounds a counter-secular reveille, a morning song of hope. It need not be triumphalistic — and in our Anglican context, how could it be? Nevertheless, is it too jaded or too recondite or even too hopeful to pray for a revival of the Last Gospel throughout the Anglican Communion? Might this not be the very practice that the Spirit has given us for a moment such as ours to pray for a renewal of the Church? To pray that our feelings of Belatedness notwithstanding, the light yet shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it? To declare our belief that Anglicanism — as the whole of Christianity in the Secular Age — is not receiving its Last Rites, but has fallen into something of a “midday swoon,” before its great afternoon muster (as Roman Catholic Theologian Tomáš Halík has put it, in another context)?

If we were to revive the saying of Last Gospel as an exercise in hope, a practical question poses itself — when and where might it be read? To reinsert it at the altar would no doubt send a signal, but might prove too disruptive, as well as imprudent in an age of Prayer Book reform. Given that I’d never heard it read, my first thought was to use it as a narthex prayer with the altar party. Ever since my inculturation in the Anglo-Catholic tradition at Pusey House and the American Biretta Belt, I have (as many priests) closed the Eucharist by privately praying the prayer that begins, “Blessed, praised, worshiped, hallowed, and adored be Jesus Christ on his throne of glory.” I love this prayer, and will no doubt continue to use it. And yet, for some priests of mid-to-low churchmanship, such a prayer may not strike the exactly the right tone. The prologue of St. John’s Gospel offers an alternative that is both Anglo-Catholic (“and the Word became flesh”) and Evangelical — recalling the witness of John the Baptist to the living Word.

As it turns out, my imagined use of the Last Gospel as a choir prayer in the narthex isn’t so far from liturgical history. The paraliturgical recitation of the Gospel prologue has a long history, one that dates back at least as early as the Sarum rite in England. According to Jesuit scholar of liturgy, Fr. Joseph Jungmann, the Fourth Gospel prologue held such popular appeal early on that in some cases it acquired magical or quasi-amuletic power, when intoned or inscribed on ritual objects. Its recitation was from time to time even curtailed, to avoid superstitious appropriation.

At the same time, its ritual power was rightly recognized and put to creative use. In a striking rubric from the Sarum missal, it was to be said by the priest as he recessed from the altar after the Eucharist:

In addition to preserving the lovely Latin word ceroferarius (literally, the “wax[torch]-bearer”), this rubric gives us critical details on how the Johannine prologue was used liturgically. The priest and altar party are instructed to recede in the same order in which they approached the altar. As they do so, the priest “in returning” (“in redeundo”) says the Last Gospel.

In liturgical innovation, it is often prudent to draw inspiration from the past. If we are praying for the renewal of Anglicanism, what better way than to go back to the beginning, in the same order from which we came — not only in the spatial order of the Salisbury Cathedral, but also through the temporal cathedral of centuries — and resume this ancient and revered practice? Such a retrieval would be both ecumenical and particular to our Anglican prayer-book heritage. To pray “in the beginning was the Word” at the end would further embody a posture of faith and hope in a period of Belatedness, a prayer in the same poetic spirit as Anglican convert T.S. Eliot (“in my end is my beginning”), and in the same Holy Spirit as Symeon the New Theologian (949–1042 CE), who writes in his first hymn: “In the end, they shall have a beginning.”

It’s June, school is wrapping up, church programming is coming to a close, and with the flurry of promotions and commencements comes the annual dreaded question: “What are you doing this summer?”

If I’m honest, my first thought is usually “collapsing”; but once I’ve recovered, I usually put together as short and honest a summary of what my wife and I have lined up. As an academic, I’m often embarrassed by the exotic nature of some of the European cities I’ll be visiting — apparently for work, so thus less exotic? Eyes widen and countenances fall, nonetheless. And so, I go to further lengths to make it sound unromantic and tedious. Am I embarrassed to be traveling? Should I be?

This summer, we’ve got an entirely North American schedule, and I’ll admit that I’m feeling a little green at some of the international plans my friends and colleagues have made. I also can’t help but notice how apologetic others sound when we discuss these matters, whether they’re traveling or no. Most humbling are the looks of those for whom our relatively local trips this summer apparently sound extravagant — a reminder that travel, as a hobby or a necessity, always costs something.

In these kinds of conversations, the impulse to compare summer plans is real. And it certainly isn’t helped by social media, which ensures that I’m able to post my travel exploits and feel FOMO that I’m not keeping stride with you. I will be the first to admit that I do love to travel, and that there are many good reasons to do it. So, how do I travel well? And what am I to do when I can’t travel? Is my life therefore diminished and lessened?

Pondering these questions put me in mind of an epistolary treatise on a related subject that I read years ago by the fourth-century theologian Gregory of Nyssa (Epistula 2: On Those Who Make Pilgrimages to Jerusalem). Along with his brother Basil and their friend Gregory Nazianzen, Nyssen is often counted as one of the Cappadocian Fathers — a grouping whose value is now sometimes questioned — who would serve as bishop of Nyssa in Asia Minor. The fourth century, in which he lived, was a century that saw two great ecumenical councils — Nicaea I (325) and Constantinople I (381). It was also an early heyday of pilgrimage and ecclesiastical touring.

As we know from the Pilgrimage of Egeria, both women and men were increasingly drawn to the Holy Land, to experience the liturgies of the Jerusalem church and to see the places where the drama of the Scriptures played out. This desire, to walk “in those holy fields / over whose acres walked those blessed feet” (Henry IV, Pt. 1, I,1.24–25) would remain perennial for Christians and travelers of all sorts — from English kings and crusaders, to Franciscan monks, to the Spanish nobleman Ignatius Loyola, to today’s holiday travelers, secular and religious.

Given the almost universal appeal of travel, and the import of the cult of the saints in Late Antique and Byzantine Christian piety, it is surprising to find Gregory actually arguing against pilgrimage in this letter. Some of Gregory’s worries — such as the necessarily deleterious moral effects of women being helped off their horses by men (Epist. 2.6) — do not concern us anymore; but there is far more to Gregory’s argument against pilgrimage than the contextual particularities of ancient travel technologies. First, there is the mere fact of dislocation from one’s home place, which renders one more distractable. Then, there is the reality that hotels, hostels, and taverns are not necessarily the most wholesome of places — then or now. All things considered, on a spiritual cost-benefit analysis, Gregory strongly urges his readers to hedge their bets and stay at home.

I realize that my publicly championing Gregory’s position could sound insincere. Aren’t I the one who often travels to Europe in the summer? (Full disclosure: I have also visited Jerusalem, when studying Modern Hebrew during grad school.) Isn’t this a case of me getting a taste of my own medicine and feeling how the other half usually lives? Perhaps.

Gregory was open to similar criticism and charges of hypocrisy. In his role as bishop he had gone to Arabia and by invitation came also to speak with the churches in Jerusalem and saw the holy sites. “Why did you not lay down this law for yourself as well?” some asked him. “If there is no gain to the pilgrim according to God for having gone there, why did you undertake such a vain journey yourself? (Epist. 2.11, trans. Silvas).

A fair point, and Gregory feels the touch of it. My point in recommending Gregory’s treatise is thus not to dissuade you from traveling. As Gregory argues, there are very good reasons to change one’s location, both personal and professional. And yet, as any traveler will tell you, one inevitably comes home from a trip both tired and enriched; both invigorated and disoriented; both better and worse off for the living of one’s daily life, once the regular rhythms of term-time or the church programming year recommence. New experiences, sights, sounds, and smells fill the senses; but home friendships will have atrophied, the lawn will need mowing, the cat will have become restless, and the garden will stand in desperate need of weeding.

Gregory thus speaks in good faith when he writes the following:

We knew that [Christ] was made man through the Virgin, before we saw Bethlehem; we believed in his resurrection from the dead, before we saw his memorial-rock; we confessed the truth of his ascension into heaven, without having seen the Mount of Olives. We benefited only this much from our travelling there, that we came to know by comparison that our own places are far holier than those abroad.

Accordingly, “all you who fear the Lord, praise him” (Ps 21:23) in the places where you have your existence. For the changing of one’s place does not bring about any greater nearness to God. No, God will come to you (cf. Exod 20:24) wherever you are, if the abode of your soul is such that the Lord himself comes to dwell within you and walk with you (cf. John 14:23, 2 Cor 6:16). (Epist. 2.15–16, trans. Silvas, adapted)

A medicine of sour grapes? Or the wisdom of a seasoned traveler? I leave it to you, dear readers, to determine for yourselves. In either case, Gregory’s treatise poses questions to all of us, whether we travel or whether we don’t.

First, to those who busy themselves with much travel, even for work or pilgrimage, Gregory bids us ask (and here, I also ask myself): to what end? Why is it that you have made a risky venture of abandoning your little shires and hamlets, villes, towns, fields, and burgs, to try your fortunes on the seas? Are you merely bored or adventure-sick? Or is there something more that is calling you? And, when you do travel, what will be asked of you upon returning home again? How will you have traveled for others?

Second, to those who stay at home, summer in place, and sit at the feet of your usual workaday routine — you have chosen the better part! Your staying is one of the sinews that holds the Church’s broken body together. Your stability is witness to the triunity of God. Lovingly inhabit “your own places,” light a candle on the home altar, contemplate the holy icons, and enjoy the slower pace of things. Pray for those who travel, and recite Gregory’s words often: “The changing of one’s place does not bring about any greater nearness to God. No, God will come to you wherever you are, if the abode of your soul is such that the Lord himself comes to dwell within you and walk with you.”

— Editor.

One of the “fun” things to emerge out of this pandemic is Wordle. Created by Josh Wardle, a Welshman, for his word-loving friends, the game was perhaps from a theological point of view inevitable. As G. M. Hopkins says, each one of us little words of God

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

At some level, then, it might seem that God called Wardle for this purpose. At minimum, Wardle’s Wordle has become a household name in many families, including ours. Most mornings, my wife and I work it over a cup of coffee, and our daughters have become fond of joining in, though they sometimes complain that they don’t have a large enough vocabulary to participate.

And it’s got most of us thinking in unprecedented ways about five-letter words and the whole range of meanings that can emerge in American English when one combines a handful of our twenty-six characters. It’s amazing, really, the variety — how words as obscure as “rebus” (another kind of puzzle) and uncomfortably familiar as “panic” can arise from the same set of alphabetical conditions.

As one becomes more familiar with the game, one inevitably compares it with other word games, which have been staples of human culture for millennia. What is it about us image-bearers that likes “Words with Friends” and other such challenges? And what does Wordle in particular, when compared with other forms of wordsport, tell us about where we are now as a people and a society?

In the beginning was the acrostic — that is, at least, the earliest kind of word game that readily springs to mind (no doubt, students of the Ancient Near East will point out other wordworks in the storehouse of the Akkadian scribes). Psalm 119 is a good example of the Israelite acrostic, in which each of the Hebrew alphabet’s 22 characters introduces eight verses that begin with that same letter, to sound out the author’s fulsome praise of the Torah of Moses. This is not a word game in the classic sense (unless all poems are), but there’s something in the special challenge of working with the limits of a single letter that connects the Psalm to Wordle. For example, in the eight lines beginning with the character kaf, the poet rings the changes of the letter, causing it to introduce several verbs (each word in Hebrew has three main consonants), the conjunctive word “for,” the preposition “like/according to/as,” and the adjective “all.” The seventh line of this section (Ps. 119:87) even has the first two words beginning with kaf (kimǝ‘at killuni), to punctuates the author’s precarious situation (“they almost made an end of me!”). Surely the singer of the psalm rejoices inwardly, or at least gets a little chuckle, at the cleverness with which the author struggles to sound out the limits of human language, turning the kaf this way and that, in a paean to the ineffable God and his quinqueliteral “Torah.”

There are other forms of wordplay in antiquity. The presence of written vowels in Indo-European scripts made possible feats like the famous Latin wordsquare, “sator arepo tenet opera rotas” (“the planter Arepo has wheels as [his] works”). In addition to this sentence being readable forward and backward, these five five-letter words can be stacked in a square  and read horizontally and vertically. Likewise impressive is the Greek palindrome engraved on the baptismal font outside Hagia Sophia (Νίψον ἀνομήματα, μὴ μόναν ὄψιν – nipson anomēmata, mē monan opsin), which gives “wash <your> sins, not only <your> face.” Here, the words for “wash” and “only” consist of five letters but the palindrome only works out perfectly in Greek characters. Clearly, the contemporary fascination with words and their limits is no new phenomenon, but a common feature of human nature and culture across time.

To really understand Wordle, however, one has to reckon with a more recent variety of wordsport: the crossword. This (along with Scrabble and Wheel of Fortune) would seem to be the most important point of comparison for understanding Wardle’s gift. The fact that it was The New York Times that originally introduced Wordle to the world, and has now snapped it up for profit, shows that the American crossword magnate was looking to expand its repertoire and find a new kind of wordgame. The question remains: why?

There are several gains that Wordle makes on the crossword, in both its classical and cryptic varieties. The first is that it is shorter. A “wordle” is a diminutive “little word” (like “chortle” and “chuckle” are diminutive kinds of “laughter”) and promises to be a quick bit of enjoyment. It takes far less time than a traditional crossword, which is often best worked at least two clues at a time. Like many exercise routines, the most effective are those which can always be done, no matter how busy one is. Wordle fits the bill. Secondly, to solve a Wordle doesn’t require any trivial knowledge; one must simply have a rudimentary American English lexicon. Third, Wordle’s six-guess limit lends the puzzle an element of risk and even danger. Finally, the built-in option to share one’s successes and failures easily on social media makes Wordle a form of self-expression in an isolated era.

For all these gains, Wordle also exposes some of our societal illnesses as well. In addition to showing us that we are far too busy (and stressed) for our own good, unlike the traditional crossword, Wordle severs lexemes from their meanings, and turns them into mere alphabetical strings. This feature has made possible the rather crude and barbarous variant, Absurdle, in which a malicious computer opponent generates the most unlikely combinations of letters, using previous human guesses as guides to deception. Thankfully, Mr. Wardle’s Wordle is far less nihilistic: he used only words that his partner Palak Shah would recognize, endowing the game with an interpersonal character that is felt as one plays. Palak’s name, I might mention, has five letters.

In sum, despite its partial severing of the sinew between word and meaning, both of which the traditional and cryptic crossword maintain, in its birth out of a loving relationship and intention for friends, Wordle reminds us that we still have a Word in common — or in Greek, a Logos. English-speaking Christians also know this Word by another five-letter name (it is the dearest Name, above all others). His name, I suppose, will probably not be the answer to this morning’s Wordle or tomorrow’s. But we may think on that name daily as we work the puzzles. And the Christian will confess that, known or unknown, he remains the source of all our words and wordles.

Twenty years from now, scholars of American civil religion — a term which covers everything from the Deism of the founding fathers to the “blood hymns” of the Civil War to the role of professional sports as a major center of personal and psychological allegiance — may well be noting in 2020 the emergence of a new civic goddess: Safety. Most Americans would probably not consider the heightened use of “safety” during the COVID-19 era in such religious terms. Safety had already been gaining prominence as a new cultural value, seen in the phenomenon of “helicopter parenting,” which indicates that people feel less safe now than they did a generation ago. When people say “stay safe” in the COVID-19 era, they generally suppose they mean something like: take reasonable precautions against illness. And yet, the phrase “stay safe” (as well as “I can’t breathe”) provides a good summary of the Zeitgeist of the era in more than a medical sense. Safety as a presumed universal good — in certain ways, the final good of human life — has proved itself capable of limiting public discourse, of restraining economic growth, and has even shaped the expression of Jewish and Christian worship. “Safety,” it seems, is far more than she appears.

Linguists have already noted the rhetorical multi-valence of the phrase “stay safe” in colloquial English. The phrase “stay safe” has evolved, so that it might be used sincerely as a response to a departing loved one going to the grocery store or dismissively to a political enemy with whom constructive dialogue is no longer possible. On this latter score, some have suggested an analogy between “stay safe” and the infamously inscrutable “bless your heart” in the English of the American South. In the rhetorical polyvalence of “stay safe,” we see the emergence of a concept with evolving power, capable of both blessing and cursing.

From a religious perspective, however, Safety’s power to coerce governments, tamper with markets, and close churches for months on end, seems more analogous to the new Roman deities like Providentia Augusta, which emerged in the early imperial period, as Augustus Caesar and his successors sought to reframe Roman civil religion in ways that reflected the increasing centralization of power and the “luckiness” of living during the Pax Romana. Not all who lived under the Julio-Claudians would agree with this assessment. Numbered among these

goddesses was Salus, “safety” or “well-being.” According to Livy, she had a temple on the Quirinal Hill in Rome; numismatic evidence shows that Nero placed her on the reverse of coins bearing his image (see figure 1). In our own times, too, we are witnessing the advent (or perhaps the second coming?) of Sancta Salus, Holy Safety, whose benevolence or perniciousness is likewise not easily discernable.

Safety, it would seem, now claims an allegiance in civic spheres which also approaches the religious. One does not violate the claims or mandates of Safety lightly. If Safety is a moral imperative, it is also a transcendent value. So, alongside the popular cult of Sancta Salus, there is also emerging a series of professional priesthoods. First and foremost is the public health sector, with Dr. Fauci serving as a kind of Aaronic figure. From the beginning, however, economists and business leaders have argued for a rival cult of Economic Safety. This battle, on the wholly secular plain, seems to be far from over.

These new trends in American civil religion pose difficult questions for the Church — particularly with regard to how communities centered upon Word and Sacrament should be gathered. My own state of Wisconsin provides an interesting case in point. Whereas the Roman Catholic church has now made attendance of Sunday masses mandatory again, the majority of mainline Protestant churches have redoubled their commitment to “remote worship.” There are legitimate concerns on both sides of this question. Honor for the lives of the elderly (and others) runs up against the importance of communal gathering, as the early Christians “gathered together before dawn,” even if it should lead to persecution and death.

However one weighs these competing claims, it is worth remembering that all forms of Christianity involve some degree of risk; and thus, the cult of Sancta Salus — which is materialist and preserves biological life at all costs — does not sit easily in the Agora alongside the cult of the Anastasis (or “Resurrection,” which many in St. Paul’s Athens thought to be a new goddess [see Acts 17:18]). The difficulties are complex and will take very intentional theological discernment by the Church’s shepherds. But merely to accept the “safest” solution in every situation is in effect to bow the knee to Safety and exclaim, Ave Salus, spes unica (Hail Safety, our only hope).

I want to be clear that these comments are not meant to support any particular political party. I am interested in the way, in this global-American moment, the Church in particular is having to react to the new religious and political power which Safety holds over a number of domains. Neither — and I stress this very firmly — is this a call for churches to ignore the findings of scientists and other public civic leaders. With COVID cases again on the rise, as we head into the difficult winter months, wanton disregard for such rational prudence cannot be counseled. But neither should the mandates of Safety govern the Church’s theological discernment uncritically. What we need is Holy Wisdom.

The Rev. Dr. Michael B. Cover is associate professor in the Department of Theology at Marquette University.