Screens and lychgates

There’s a terrific moment at the beginning of the first episode of Don Cupitt’s 1984 T.V. documentary series, The Sea of Faith.

Our hero is standing in an English village square, a sandstone church with its Gothic tower ahead of him, beyond the yew tree. He wants to introduce us to the “mythical, magical, religious” worldview of pre-modernity, to allow us to understand its “sacred organizing power.” He’ll take the cameraman on a journey from outside the lychgate to the church’s high altar, narrating as they go.

I’m at present out in the profane, neutral, public world of the street. But we’re about to cross a frontier. Every arch, gate or doorway symbolises the transition from one world to another. “Lych” means body, and the lychgate was where the corpse rested, waiting to move into its last home. Our space is measured on an abstract, metric space, but these spaces are ordered on a scale of degrees of sacred meaning.

The churchyard is an intermediate place between the worlds, where the dead lie sleeping, waiting for the Lord’s coming.

At the west door of the church, we cross another invisible line, and enter the sacred world. The layman, taking his place in church, becomes part of the same symbolic movement from earth to heaven. He’s a member of a pilgrim community who march toward their destination.

The crucifix above the chancel screen is yet another symbol of the passage from the earthly to the heavenly worlds. It’s through the Cross that people pass from earth to heaven. From now on those who officiate in worship are clad in the white of heaven.

Now it becomes steadily more awesome as we come to the railed-off sanctuary. Rising steps indicate increasing degrees of exultation and holiness. Here are the images of Christ’s Sacrifice: the reserved Sacrament, the very Body of Christ; and the perpetual flame of the sanctuary lamp, which represents the presence of God himself.

He’s a good teacher — he’ll tear all of this down during the course of the series, sometimes quite mercilessly — but his pupils are first to understand this flawed world, from the inside; and so he enchants us, draws us into “the old Christian view of the universe.”

And perhaps he’s too good a teacher. For, as one watches from lockdown this description of the geography of the parish church, one yearns, not for Pascal’s personal, feverish, late-night visions, or for a deeper understanding of Jung’s archetypes, but for solid, public, shared, sacred space, made tangible in sacraments and remembering, lit by mutually-understood signs and symbols, filled with people, bodies, incense and angels.

I want to touch, kneel and hold again; and my hope is that the end of the pandemic will bring with it a heightened valuing of the richly experiential — and so, also, of the parish church.

It’s a passion for liturgy in the flesh, and not a desire to replace it, that makes me want to think more seriously about digital liturgy.

Digital offerings have proliferated during the pandemic, like vernacular New Testaments in the 1530s. But, like Anne Boleyn, the pandemic has accelerated engagement with an emerging cultural reality already born of technological change. And it’s a reality that needs its form of liturgy, its pathways of exultation and holiness.

I want to reflect on this general challenge through reflecting on a modest new thing that I’ve helped to birth these past few months. I’m doing so in part in case some of these reflections are helpful for others engaged in similar new digital ventures; but I also want to contribute to a deeper reflection about the curation of meaningful, experiential, quasi-sacramental digital liturgy.

On Advent Sunday, at 6.30pm, we held our first “Gosber” service. Gosber is the Welsh for Evensong, though the Welsh word has a more antiquated feel to it; and, here, we applied the word, not to a service or office, but to a congregation. And so, at 6.30pm every Sunday, Gosber has “met”, on Zoom.

Using the Welsh language, a service takes place consisting of a gathering rite (responsory, poem, penitential words, absolution, hymn), a scriptural reading, a short sermon, a hymn, prayers, and a closing rite (hymn, responsory, blessing). I lead the service from my house; the hymn accompaniment is played live from our organist’s house, on organ or piano. Apart from readers, only my microphone and one other (for responses) are open; and only the organist’s for the hymns; but we are encouraged to respond and sing where we are. I make some announcements before the service begins; and after it ends, we spend four minutes or so in small groups before a prompt ending. The service is later uploaded to YouTube and Facebook. We have a simple (Mailchimp-hosted) website, and a weekly Mailchimp newsletter (with a short reminder— a “church bell” — sent three hours before the service starts). I upload the text of my sermon on Medium. Postcards containing the text of the poems used during the service have been sent by post to those on our mailing list. We’ve used Justgiving to collect donations. There are, by now, about 35 “in attendance”.

What have I learnt?

(i) “In the round”

Gosber did not exist before online services began on Advent Sunday. Its congregation may never gather in a physical space — and it certainly wasn’t commenced with the intention that it should. It’s a digitally-native enterprise.

From the outset, I’ve therefore been able to be intentional about maintaining the service as something taking place “in the round.” Though I’m pretty obviously officiating, it isn’t a broadcast from my house, and I’m not the minister of a space to which other people are welcomed in. I’ve avoided saying the word “welcome”; I’ve encouraged folk to light a candle where they are. A PowerPoint presentation (though made in the lovelier Apple Keynote software) is displayed using the “share screen” mode for the duration of the service, helping to create a virtual common core that we all access directly.

Even though the service has been uploaded to YouTube and Facebook, and even though we could Facebook Live the proceedings, direct access and participation through joining the Zoom service has been where my energy has been directed; the later uploading feels akin to uploading a sermon text — for the record, not for worship.

In all of this, there is something important about creating a virtual common core for online worship. There is something properly performative and observational about a High Mass or Choral Evensong (while also being richly participatory). I wonder whether this mode of digital worship has more of the character of interacting with an app — of necessity a less immersive experience than worship in a church building (not least because the screen and the sound will compete with a domestic surrounding with its personal, familiar elements and occasional distractions), but somehow strikingly egalitarian in terms of its direct access to the “content.” And simultaneous collegial equidistance is not a bad quality for a worshipping community. Indeed, it has something to it of a monastic office — monks in their stalls, breviary in hand, an intense personal engagement with the liturgy, yet common worship.

(ii) Blessing

I’ve put on a stole to absolve and bless (as well as to preach). I’ve taken the line that, if the Pope can bless efficaciously over a live T.V. broadcast, so can I over Zoom. I’ve also wanted as many of the means of grace as possible to flow through the service, in real ways.

The validity of sacerdotal acts undertaken virtually is an area in need of greater exploration. I feel there’s a stronger case to be made for the efficaciousness of a “live” blessing than the propriety of broadcasting a recorded Mass. In the case of the former, there is active engagement in the moment, an offering of something in relationship, and the possibility of participation. In the case of the latter, I feel almost indecent watching Jesus caught on camera for my viewing pleasure, while also wondering whether there’s anything really there any more — he isn’t watching me. I catch myself stopping myself from genuflecting, and wonder what unvirtuous habits of mind are thus being formed.

(iii) Preaching and pictures

Thanks to my English school-teachers (who introduced me to poetry and forced me to do some public speaking), and despite my angular shyness (hence the forcing), I enjoy preaching. My normal pattern is to do so from a (reasonably poetic and rhetorical) text — I enjoy the authorial craft; but I also enjoy “holding” an audience in a space.

Preaching into silence (with a shared screen hiding the galleried faces) was initially challenging. My sense by now is that poetry, rhetoric and an animated delivery in online preaching for an “in the round” service are less helpful than in a church; it’s ultimately a medium for a Rooseveltian fireside chat.

I try to limit church sermons to 1,200 words. Half that is edging on the over-lengthy online.

I’m still to settle my attitude to use of the PowerPoint presentation during the sermon.

Displaying images can broaden the field of reference easily, add immediacy, and help with concision. Displaying key words can help to convey the sermon’s shape and sections when there are fewer means available to do so rhetorically. I feel as though I’m somehow betraying power of “the word” by augmenting it with slides, by “speaking” to an image rather than about what has been heard. But I sense greater engagement from the congregation when the screen and the speaker work together to illustrate and proclaim.

(iv) Play it again

The ease with which one can look back at one’s own officiating has been helpful.

Asking for feedback and digesting it constructively are among professional life’s most useful habits. But ministerial life offers relatively few opportunities for informed and openly-articulated response to, and reflection upon, ministerial performance — one hopes that congregants are caught up in liturgy and its digesting, not in assessment and supervision; there is still such deference and politeness; pastoral relationships preclude deep exploration of some areas; and there are rarely peers or superiors around and bold enough to offer challenge.

A recording, however, offers an easy way to assess how things came across — to notice hands and voice; pace and sound; the non-officiant’s perspective. We should have more videos shot from the back of Sunday morning services.

(v) And again

Other lessons to have come to the fore are more applicable across congregations, parishes and contexts: (a) fundraising and giving happen when one talks about money and its purpose — when one asks, politely and consistently; (b) it is best, with regard to worship, to do the same thing at the same time to the same level of quality every week, 52 weeks of the year — consistency matters; (c) most services are usually too long, and the intensity of Zoom makes flabbiness more obvious.

An area as yet largely unexplored is the provision of pastoral care and spiritual accompaniment. Does Gosber solidify into a congregation that, as well as worshipping together, naturally requires pastoral ministry? If so, what does it mean to minister in this way, too, digitally — or at least across geographical distances and parochial boundaries?

You’re reading this on a modern-day lychgate — a screen through which you enter other worlds. Some of those worlds need to be sacred; and they will need their liturgists as much as the world of the nave and the chancel.