What is the Unchanging Principle? A Discussion of the Eucharistic Ordo in Anglicanism

Anglican Theological Review, Spring 2004 by Bates, J Barrington

If the eucharist is "the entrance of the church into the joy of its Lord,"64 perhaps the ordo is the door at that entrance. Without the door, we might miss the distinction between one space and another. The door provides the border that distinguishes us from God, the "reference point" for our identity.65 Without the door, we could be transformed without knowing it, we might lose sight of the total otherness of God, and we would risk forgetting our responsibility for the stewardship of all that God has given us. To open the door, however, is to enter into joy, so as to be a witness to it in the world; this is indeed the very calling of the church, its essential leitourgia, the sacrament by which it becomes what is already is.66

In this, one can see that ordo is much more than a text.67 Based on the radical implications of the missionary send-off, the ordo becomes a kind of mechanism for achieving-or fully realizing-the identity given us in baptism. If indeed there are two ways specially in which we may see ourselves related to God, identity and difference, the ordo can serve as the gate between us and God, the difference between our identity and God's.68 Austin Farrer once preached that the difference or otherness of God is the place from which religion starts. "If we say we cannot understand such language, the difficulty, of course, is not a difficulty about the sense of the words; the words are plain enough. The difficulty is rather one of imagination."69 The principle may be unchanging, but our understanding of it is not. Perhaps we need to reimagine this very foundational concept of the ordo.

1 William Morris, ed., The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 925.

2 Here quoted from Article 24 of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer Book of the Episcopal Church (1979 Book of Common Prayer, 872).

3 Phoebe Pettingell, from the introduction to Enriching Our Worship, 7 (emphasis added).

4 See 1979 Book of Common Prayer, "The Holy Eucharist: Rite One," 323, 332, 337.

5 Fagerberg, What Is Liturgical Theology? A Study in Methodology (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1992), 178.

6 Fagerberg, What Is, 169.

7 Fagerberg, What Is, 177.

8 Fagerberg, What Is, 170.

9 Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 97.

10 Lathrop, Holy Things, 103.

11 Lathrop, Holy Things, 5.

12 Lathrop, Holy Things, 179.

13 Lathrop, Holy Things, 80.

14 Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1973), 13.

15 Alexander Schmemami, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1988), 14.

16 Alexander Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology (Portland, Me.: Faith Press, 1966), 28.

17 Schmemann, Liturgical Theology, 33, emphasis added.

18 Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, trans. Patrick Madigan and Madeleine Beaumont (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1995), 210.