Anglicanism today, in its humiliation and fragmentation, can sometimes be fraught with a specter of Belatedness. This is the feeling, personal and communal, of coming to the end of things chronicled so well by a Jewish literary critic, George Steiner, in his Gifford Lectures, Grammars of Creation. Although the book was published 20 years ago (and the lectures begun in 1990), the signs of the times still reflect this atmosphere, as American dioceses undergo missional downsizing (as with Milwaukee, Fond du Lac and Eau Claire becoming the Diocese of Wisconsin), and whole provinces, including the Anglican Church in Canada, profiled in Covenant in August, struggle to maintain their numerical vibrancy. The Church of England is more divided than it has been in recent memory. Globally, various and competing Anglican futures are planned and counter-planned on unprecedented scale. At the same time, Anglicanism continues to show green shoots of growth. Numerous Christians still find their way onto the Canterbury trail, as a hospital for healing, a meaningful meeting place for Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant currents, and indeed, a road to miracles.
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:
| Et sic inclinatione facta, eo ordine, quo prius accesserunt ad altare in principio missæ, sic induti cum ceroferariis et cæteris ministris redeant. Sacerdos vero in redeundo dicat Evangelium: In principio. | And so, the reverence having been made, thus clothed, with the candle bearers and other ministers, let them return in the same order, in which they approached to the altar at the beginning of the mass. But the priest in returning should say the Gospel: In the beginning [John 1:1-14]. |
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.”
If you want to hear it read in its traditional place, go the Church of the Resurrection in Manhattan or St. Timothy’s in Winston-Salem, NC.
Or watch the Masses at Saint Clement’s Philadelphia on YouTube through the parish website s-clements.org (daily and Sundays, archived for posterity or thereabouts!)
The Prayers at the Foot of the Altar should be restored. So many parishes, even those that are otherwise faithful to inclusive Nicene and Chalcedonian orthodoxy, have neither a confession nor even a petition for the forgiveness of sin during the Prayers of the People. Let alone Humble Access. We need to admit our sinful neediness aloud.
Is the Last Gospel necessary? Probably not. But the obsession with the minimum necessary has got us into the situation we are currently in — people hungry to be taught and challenged. The Last Gospel couldn’t hurt!
In some places it was proclaimed in the crossing as the reader faced liturgical north, representing the darkness.
At Christ School (NC) the tradition of the Last Gospel was in place until the liturgical changes that brought about the 1979 BCP. My father, the chaplain, processed to the back of the chapel, and to one side, he faced the acolyte and began “In the beginning….” At “and the Word became flesh” we knelt and the final words were said, we stood and exited the back chapel door. I can easily recite the words to this day. The distance from my face to his was about a foot, eye to eye. I suspect I will see him like this when I cross into larger life.
Thank you, Professor Seitz. This is almost exactly how I’ve begun practicing it, kneeling at the “et verbum caro factum est” (of course in English). Lovely to have your personal reflection.
Christ School was in a tradition of early morning HC after the rung Angelus (7 a.m.), but it was optional. There had to be a server, and the boys were on a rota. Rarely were there more than a handful of attendees.
You could swap and barter if you did not want to serve. I would often be a candidate. It was typically dark, especially in the short months. The service also started with the “I will go unto the altar of God” recitations, a card slid under the carpet with the text for the server.
It is not hard to imagine why this very mediaeval ambiance stays lodged in consciousness. My dad had attended the school himself, during the waning years of WWII. These practices (including non-communicating Mass on Sundays! some of this was simply architectural expedience, as well as theological conviction, and it is hard to understand why at the time it did not seem to matter much).
When I was on the staff at Christ Church, New Haven, in the day, this was also their general practice (though lacking Last Gospel). I’m not sure when the Anglican Missal was set aside. I left there in 1985 and when I came back on the faculty, I think it was no longer in use.
I should add, my dad’s father was professor of liturgics and parish administration at Bexley Hall, Kenyon College. He served a parish in Granville, Ohio, as well. He was in the tradition of (the then popular, in pockets) tractarian movement, which was to be distinguished from the “ritualist” movement in the Biretta Belt.
Christ School had an ascetic, cistercian like feel. It was not “high church vestments and preoccupation with ritual” in the way that would mark the “underground railroad” of high church parishes stretching from Boston to DC in the 60s and 70s (many still in that mode today).
The history of the emerging “diocese” of Western North Carolina is its own fascinating tale. Christ School both existed within certain trends that marked the diocese, and was its own world as well.
Others have well described the Last Gospel as it was used in the various Altar Missals that have been used in the Episcopal Church. The Church of England, in its “Common Worship” series, has made an interesting provision, “The Dismissal Gospel.” The Dismissal Gospel for Christmas is here.
Of course, the responses in the American BCP would be preferred.
Scattered around “Common Worship” and “Times and Seasons,” the CofE has made provision for other seasonal Dismissal Gospels, which could be interest to some.
Returning to the Prologue of Saint John’s Gospel, The Roman Rite, in the “Lectionary for Mass” provides a shorter form for Christmas Day, John 1:1-5, 9-14. If the Last Gospel, or Dismissal Gospel, were something entirely new, this short from might useful in some pastoral situations.