Word: psalters
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Didn't Liu sense that the service might have something to do with Jesus when he saw the archbishop wearing a cross around his neck as he proceeded down the aisle? Maybe Liu sensed that people came to worship God when the congregation read aloud from the Psalter. How about the Lord's prayer? That one is a dead give away: "Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name...
...typical story. Throughout the English countryside, the small country parishes that were once the bulwark of the Anglican faith are empty and neglected, even though a few indomitable souls like Enderby try to keep them alive. Their exteriors crumbling like the yellowing pages of an old Psalter, England's 10,000 or so picturesque country churches are sad reminders of a vanishing way of life. Except for occasional tourists, few people ever visit them; each year their congregations grow ever smaller. "There hasn't been a wedding here in twelve years," laments one venerable priest who stubbornly refuses...
...lack nothing." The "blame" lies not with T. S. Eliot et al. but with Bishop Miles Coverdale, who wrote the psalm that way in his "Great Bible" of 1539. When Archbishop Cranmer drafted the first Prayer Book in 1549, he used Coverdale's version of the Psalter; that version is still used in British and American Prayer Books. The King James Bible, of course, was not issued until after the Prayer Book...
Somewhat less felicitous is the new Psalter, which can also be used by churches next May. A modernization of the King James translation of the Psalms prepared by a team of Anglican scholars (among them: T. S. Eliot), it suffers from the same kind of drab, bureaucratic writing that mars the New English Bible. In the 23rd Psalm, for example, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want" now reads, "The lord is my shepherd: therefore can I lack nothing...
Gloria Up Front. Introduction of the Psalter and the 1928 revisions is only the first step. Eventually, the church hopes to experiment with even more drastic changes, including a new form for Holy Communion and baptism. The proposed Holy Communion is somewhat closer in structure to the Roman Catholic Mass than the present service; the Gloria, for example, would be recited at the beginning of worship following the Kyrie, instead of after distribution of the consecrated bread and wine. The Anglican liturgical commission that drew up the new services deliberately left the rubrics vague to allow for adaptation...