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Alumni/ae Award Acceptance Speech 2004

Vision for Continuing Liturgical Reform
Acceptance speech by Donald Schell, ’71
2004 Distinguished Alumni/æ Award (with Richard Fabian, ’70)
April 19, 2004

I’d like to begin quoting from the Plan for the Mission of St. Gregory of Nyssa, which Rick wrote in 1977 and which, thank God, the diocese of California embraced. It’s an extraordinary document, by the way, one of the treasures on St. Gregory’s website, www.saintgregorys.org.

Christian tradition is the sharing of a journey. Its purpose is not to preserve our experience, but to enrich it with the experience of those before us and beside us who approach our common end from different directions. This is its purpose for individuals, who further their own journey by sharing in the company and common life of the Church. This is also its purpose for each of the churches, whom it guides and quickens by the vision of God in the others. [Richard Fabian, Plan For the Mission of St. Gregory of Nyssa, 1977; http://www.saintgregorys.org/Pages/N_News.html]

This evening’s award commends Rick and me for our “unique” and “pioneering” liturgical work. We set out to be pioneering and GTS helped inspire that. As for “unique,” that’s just the temporary risk of pioneering. Thank God, St. Gregory’s is becoming less unique day by day because Christian tradition is shared work and because the underlying purposes of our re-discoveries and innovations are also shared.

All of us here tonight hope, work and pray for the same possibility — helping people and communities experience new friendship with the God who is breaking down every barrier to compassion and love, therefore also helping people to embrace one another fearlessly.

Godly courage for that embrace comes to us from the experience of the church and ordinary experience of everyone in it (and all the human lives God touches), and it is driven by Desire — and the Divine Darkness or what the anonymous 14th Century English mystic called “Un-knowing.”

The core practice of that embrace is radical hospitality consistent with “this guy [who] welcomes sinners and eats with them,” in the words (and rough idiom) of the accusation leveled against Jesus in the Gospels.

What does that experience, desire, un-knowing, and welcome look like at St. Gregory’s? Listen to how Sara Miles, now our senior warden, wrote the story of finding Jesus’ welcome a dozen years after she left war reporting in El Salvador to come home pregnant with her daughter Katie:

I’d never gone to church in my life until early one winter morning when I walked into the quiet eight o’clock service at St. Gregory’s. I was forty-six and had no earthly reason to be there. I’d never heard a Gospel reading, never said the Lord’s Prayer. I ate the bread. My hands shook when I took the chalice. I drank from it. I came back for a year and a half receiving Communion, flooded with hunger and gratitude. I became a member, then a deacon at the Table, then I set up a free grocery pantry at the church, all so that every week I could be at the same Table, feeding others and being fed.

Baptism didn’t really feel like my idea: it seemed dangerous, I wasn’t ready. I didn’t deserve it. I couldn’t understand or control it. I kept protesting that I still wasn’t really a Christian. Lynn Baird, a priest at St. Gregory’s, told me the only question that I had to answer was there at the beginning of the vows: Do you desire to be baptized?

I wanted new life. Choosing to get pregnant in a war is the closest experience I’ve had to the experience of getting baptized. Sometimes I felt so uplifted by the thought of being special, marked as Christ’s own, that I forgot that I was just one of millions of people making a promise to suffer and to love. God’s covenant, like a growing child, was going to be there for the rest of my time on earth.

Nobody gets baptized alone. I walked out the doors to waters gushing from the rock because beloved friends and total strangers had carried faith for me in the war years when I was unable to feel it. I walked out there because of the people I’d somehow found at St. Gregory’s; because of my missionary grandparents and my atheist parents and Martha, my partner, who taught me how to pray. I walked out because Katie was alive and beautiful, and also because somebody who listened to me had been tortured and murdered.

I was baptized, grateful and undeserving, into the crucifixion of the world. And into living, daily redemption. [Sara Miles, “By Water and by Fire,” God’s Friends, vol. 12, no. 2, August 2001. Complete article is at godsfriends.org/vol12/no2/water-fire.html; see also Donald Schell, “The Font Outside our Walls,” godsfriends.org/vol12/no2/font-outside.html; God’s Friends is the journal of St. Gregory’s Church.]

When we baptized Sara that morning, we were baptizing someone who had been catechized by an honest-to-God martyr. A dozen years before, over long evenings at the Jesuit residence, Ignacio Martin-Baro listened patiently to a p.c. atheist war reporter’s anger at finding so many Christians doing brave, compassionate work with the poor, and he warned her, gently, “Sara, you are becoming a Christian yourself.” Within the year, the Jesuit Martin-Baro was dragged from the residence at the University of El Salvador and brutally killed with his friends, and their housekeeper.

Through the school year of 1969-1970, twenty years before that martyr’s death, Rick Fabian and I, both transfer students to GTS, were both assigned to field ed placements at St. Edward the Martyr on 109th Street in Spanish Harlem. St. Gregory’s was conceived in our loud conversations early Sunday mornings on the 7th Avenue IRT, the empty subway train rattling and jostling us as we talked. I remember those many mornings as one long conversation about the future of the church. How far would the new liturgical reform go? How could we help the church welcome change? Sesame Street, by the way, was also birthed that year in a warehouse across the street from St. Edward’s.

Vision, we agreed, fueled the passion that drove us both, but vision was the problem as well.

People’s hearts and minds are readier to embrace what they’ve seen.

In the thirty-four years since then (including four years of working together at the Episcopal Church at Yale and twenty-four years working together to found and develop St. Gregory’s) Rick and I have been discovering, following, and sharing and practicing vision with a large number of wonderful lay and clergy friends.

Vision is different from skill or a high performance standard. Vision is an impatience to taste and see and live something that’s not there yet. It’s seeing beyond anything we’ve seen. Where does the vision come from?

Rick glimpsed it (unwelcome) as an eager prep school student of Chinese, shaken and disturbed to find Anglican Christians in Taiwan. Why, he wondered, would a Chinese want to be Christian when Chinese can choose Taoism, Confucianism, or Buddhism? During college summers home, he saw a bit more in the blessed ordinariness of daily mass at Holy Cross, Dallas, Texas. At the College of the Resurrection (Mirfield) the monks’ and students’ round of daily prayer and Eucharist, and Benedict Green’s tutoring in New Testament and liturgics helped Rick gather what he’d glimpsed and learned into a desire for fresh liturgical thinking including more music, more silence, and more boldness in preaching than he’d yet seen or knew how to do.

My own vision grew from restlessness with the Evangelical Presbyterianism of my childhood. Many of you share a story like this. It’s paradoxical, because in that community I first felt people’s love for God, first encountered an intimate love of the Bible, and joined their desire to be faithful and know and care for each other. BUT worship as I saw it, and preaching as I heard it bored me. By the grace of God, instead of planning to quit church as soon as I left home, I began imagining it changed. We could worship differently. I could preach in a different way.

Without grace, vision is cruel, a dismissive, critical stance or an unreachable goal that provokes despair. By grace, vision sees what is missing and begins to hope and work for something new. And that takes patience, lots of it; so what began in impatience and even boredom gets transformed — “There is a name for the endurance we must practice until a larger love arrives: it is called suffering.” [Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach, p. 85]

Love, or at least the suffering of desire drives all of us. Thank God for mentors who help us hold focus and steady our patience for the parts that we see clearly and are beyond reach, and who also help keep us looking in the direction of what we don’t yet see. Growing up in church I so wanted to be different, my mother, Nancy Schell, was such a mentor. And love kept me open enough to my beginnings that I had the privilege seventeen years ago to assist the Presbytery of San Jose in ordaining my mother. I’ve still got the Presbytery’s letter temporarily acknowledging the validity of my ordination and inviting me to function as a member of Presbytery for the day. Did you know Presbyterians even talked about the validity of orders?

But back to those Sunday mornings on the IRT. How could grand ideas from Boone Porter’s liturgics class ever break through the routine, cautious practice we saw in parish churches? People were afraid. Only friendship could deliver them from fear. Alexander Schmemann, GTS’s visiting professor of liturgical theology stretched our minds and hope with an affectionate, natural sacramental theology. Talking about Schmemann’s vision on the IRT, Rick and I found we had both been moved by the affectionate, chaotic, participatory quality of Orthodox liturgy. Schmemann told us that the Orthodox were stuck, they were keepers of a glorious liturgical antique bazaar, crammed with treasures. Would we, would our reform, Schmemann hinted, claim from these treasures to make a joyful, affectionate feast for all people? Could our Episcopal Church allow itself such freedom? It would take more than a suggestion or even an invitation. People needed see what we had seen. And they needed to see it close to home.

General Seminary’s encouragement to see with new and renewed vision was stunning. In days of uncertainty and political turmoil and agony, much like today — we were only months or a few years beyond the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and just months before Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia — Robert Wright led us in revelatory re-creations of a millennium of historic liturgies at the Cloisters. This was NOT the Society for Creative Anachronism. We weren’t looking for the esoterica of a lost time, but means of living our church’s liveliest tradition in the ongoing agony of civil rights and the Viet Nam war, and church’s pain and confusion at the beginnings of the women’s movement.

In dark and confusing times so like these since 9/11 (since Afghanistan, since Iraq) everything we saw and heard at General told us that the church’s great Tradition belonged to all of us and that its rediscovery and would could support our intention of living Christian mission with open-hearted faithfulness and bravery.

Let me offer some principles of freedom here. How does this work? First, Christian worship, liturgy, community life are enlivened only when we sustain a creative tension, not choosing between, but embracing both

These seeming opposites have power to create a charged, dynamic environment where we may glimpse how present God is in every moment, moving toward us with infinite holy longing and tenderness. That sounds sexual doesn’t it? Does that make us squirm a bit? Or at least a little uncomfortable?

Just as we approached the preliminary ratification of the Prayer Book we still habitually call “New,” the language of comfort invaded liturgy — I noticed colleagues making uncompassionate invitations like “try this if you’re comfortable...” (How would people who have never tried it before know if they’d be comfortable shaking hands with the person in the pew behind them, or responding to sermon out loud, or singing a capella, or dancing with the whole congregation?). Frightened people (any of us at one time or another) picked up the cue and began offering the non-negotiable conversation stopper. . . “I’m just not comfortable with [whatever new or ancient liturgical practice we might be hearing about] in church.”

Comfort? The charged tensions of liturgy take us beyond comfort and into the presence of God acting.

So, for another principle of freedom, let us shape liturgical action (common action and individual participation) beyond bare text read together or alone. Liturgy isn’t just what we SAY.

Please friends,

Plan to sing together more than we speak together;

Make the assembly place more house than temple;

Offer the clear directions and explanation that make you feel welcome at a good dinner party;

Give people room to move so that the assembly will move the people;

Plan simultaneous action (the norm in most human gatherings; does conversation at dinner stop while someone goes solemnly to the kitchen to get coffee for everyone?);

Put deacons (ordained and lay) in charge to direct and empower the whole people’s participation so the presider may simply pray or teach and otherwise keep silent as God;

Make every action wholly inviting and accessible to the stranger.

These are not rules for unambiguous safety, certainty, or comfort, but principles to shape liturgy so freed people may encounter God’s free embrace. In liturgical practice like this we may experience healing comfort or risky discovery; we may stand naked in our honest skepticism, or we may fall face to the ground in the presence of mystery. In such a space, we embrace our longing for God or at least let up a little on fearing and suppressing it. We will probably see one another in a new way. In such a space, friendship and love can grow. Here we may meet and know Christ who suffered, died and is resurrected for us. Here we find courage to live God’s compassion.

Thanks to the challenge, the vision, the risks we took at General, Rick and I coalesced a single-minded commitment to making something happen in the church. Independently we chose the route of parish work over academic teaching, and independently we chose to pursue parish work without abandoning theory, reflection, learning, and teaching. Creating a context for truthful Christian discourse in liturgy was the clearest speech we could offer. General confirmed for us a passion for making something rather than just imagining or saying it.

General? I mentioned Bob Wright’s liturgies and the nudge from Schmemann. In his sermon at the Memorial Eucharist this morning Rick invoked the life-changing discovery of Gregory of Nyssa. But the chapel here? The culture here? I suspect some ungodly notice of liturgical conformity infected the whole church after the 1979 Prayer Book was official. It was our church’s pact with the devil. “The people are frightened and they’re tired of uncertainty. Tell them change is over. Tell them the new book has the answers. They’ll accept the book if you do.” It wasn’t so, and it didn’t work, but it made clergy, musicians, and lay people who cared about liturgy afraid.

Jesus was a liturgical reformer; in his liturgical practice with his disciples he broke the rubrics.

Our church has passed through a generation of Prayer Book fundamentalism and is entering something richer and more truthful. Inclusive and expansive language, Enriching our Worship, graceful changes of a word here and there have begun to loosen New Prayer Book literalism. Through those couple of decades of widespread retrenchment, Rick and I were carrying forward something we’d learned before that (something that I hope still shapes students at General) stories of patient, suffering love formed us, stories of clergy slowly moving congregations from “Solemn High Morning Prayer” to Eucharist at the main liturgy, stories of clergy weathering conflict to introduce a fully sung liturgy or Eucharistic vestments.

We learned here (all of us I think) in our several ways to be artist or craftsman clergy laboring wherever we are to shape something new and worthier of God’s people, patiently facing conflict and continuing to both love the people and what we hope is God’s vision for congregational and sacramental life. In the words of Alison Kemper, a woman we had the privilege to baptize at Yale and who is now a deacon in the Anglican Church of Canada, “You taught us to do liturgy like our lives depended on it.” Think about that. Our lives do depend on it, don’t they?

General held up the parish Eucharist as our base for evangelization and vessel for formation. Liturgy is means of conversion for some, authentic encounter and dialogue for others. Shared prayer at liturgy puts faithful Practice and Trust ahead of Belief/Opinion. In liturgy we all live the story (with all the metaphor, analogy and un-knowing that story implies).

But liturgy itself doesn’t function metaphorically. In liturgy we touch the people, move them, and empower them to feed each other. We lift our hands and make a joyful noise. We dance, clap our hands, and sing a new song to the Lord. Rick and I have found new means of doing this partly through invention, but much more routinely through patient mining of the Tradition.

Tradition. It’s the life of community, finding and creating something and handing it on. “God has charged the church to gather out of every nation and language, to fill her treasury with things old and new, because the variety of her common life makes her a sign for the peoples of the Day when God will be all in all.”

So,

...the churches hand on tradition, not by imitating or conserving what they have done before, but by sharing their experience with those who do not know it, and accepting the same gift from other Christians in return. By sharing in the universal Christian tradition, the churches offer individual men and women the company and guidance of all Christians on their common journey. Without this sharing they offer only dead habits and failing visions to steer by. There is no Anglican or Roman or Byzantine or Protestant Way to God. There is only the True and Living way, which is Christ, who is all things, and in all things. [Richard Fabian, Plan For the Mission of St. Gregory of Nyssa, 1977 www.saintgregorys.org/Pages/PlanSGN.html]

No one growing up before Vatican II could have imagined what a work we’d all see as Christ’s Spirit renewed Christian liturgy in her many churches, bursting boundaries and drawing us into one. Has the pendulum swung? Does the Spirit long for new boundaries and restored alienation and fear?

No. The work remains the same. Following Jesus, that radical liturgical reformer who has freed us from fear, from sin, and from death, we make our strongest and most compelling welcome to sinners (including everyone here), and we eat with them.

Finally, in the name of Jesus’ Spirit, and therefore honoring community, friendship, and love; I’ll end with some thank you’s:

Thank you Leslie Nipps for nominating us for this award. St. Gregory’s had the privilege of baptizing and forming you. Rick and I hugely proud of you and grateful you have become our colleague. Thank you also, Don Sullivan, dear friend and colleague for your having the same thought as Leslie and also nominating us!

Deep thanks to the Alumni association. This is truly a stunning honor. You have invited us here representing hopes we share for the church’s future mission and vitality; none of us are done with that work. Let us continue the work together. Share it with the next generation; we have new generations, new cultures, and new peoples to invite in.

Thanks to the General Faculty who inspired us and so many more to carry Gospel and theological practice and reflection to parish life. From those teachers, Rick I single out Richard Norris, whom we each count as one of the greatest teachers we’ve known anywhere; it was Norris who introduced us to Gregory of Nyssa.

Rick and I also want to thank Rick’s parents, Gretchen Fabian who’ll read this later in Laguna Niguel, and Bud Fabian, who didn’t live to see this, but would have been delighted and hugely proud to see what came of a decisive gift that moved many more gifts, so our congregation could build a building and throw open its doors.

Thanks to Dr. Harold Schell, my father, a physician of great compassion and integrity who told me that nothing was more important to him than his friends and colleagues finding him trustworthy, and to the Rev. Nancy Schell, my mother and first theological mentor, whose passion to do the work herself ignited after mine, but I still say I follow in her footsteps.

Thanks to the student congregation and board of the Episcopal Church at Yale where Rick and I first developed our approach to liturgy, conversion, formation, and formation; in particular thanks to Jack Zamboni for his voice and steady support when he was an undergraduate there and thanks to Tim Vernon, the musician who showed us what priest and musician can accomplish through real collaboration.

Thanks to the people of St. Gregory’s who have grown with us, loved us, challenged us and encouraged us over twenty-six years,

And finally thanks to Rick’s good friend and my beloved wife Ellen, whose steady support, wisdom and encouragement is, as anyone at St. Gregory’s will tell you, the human rock we count on.

Donald Schell
General Seminary
April 14, 2004