How to be at Evensong -
When I was a child I was occasionally taken to church by my parents. The service was invariably Mattins, from the Book of Common Prayer, a service very similar to this choral Evensong in its basis structure with scripture readings and the Creed, a psalm and canticles sung by the choir as they have been so beautifully this evening.
As a child I became fascinated by the phrase ‘world without end’ at the end of the Gloria. I couldn’t work out what it meant. Was it this world or another world? And how could anything be without end? Wouldn’t it get rather tedious?
When I was much older I realised that the phrase was meant to contain a hint of mystery. It wasn’t about a world simply going on for ever, it was more pointing at something which cannot really be described in words at all.
The best description for this world-without-endness I have ever come across is in a famous book by the 4th century North African bishop and theologian St Augustine, The City of God. It’s a massive survey of human history showing how the City of God is always coming into existence through time and change, woven into and out of the changes and chances of this fleeting world, always to be discovered, sometimes defeated, but in the end victorious.
Our final end, Augustine says, is to be raised with Christ to new life in that glorious city, that new creation.
These are the words in which he describes our ultimate destiny: ‘There we shall rest and we shall see; we shall see and we shall love, we shall love and we shall praise. That is what shall be, in the end without end’.
I think Augustine is using words to break down our sense that time is simply a procession of one thing after another. ‘World without end’ does not mean an endless extension of what is going on now. If that were what it meant, our response could well be: how unspeakably boring. My seven and eight year old self knew all too well what it meant to be bored. I was certainly bored by Sunday Matins with its interminable psalms and droning sermons. Now here I am droning on myself!
But then I was brought back by this strange phrase at the end of the psalms and the canticles: ‘world without end’. It gave me a sort of frisson, a shiver, a sense of mystery. Like thinking about all the stars in the universe or the ever-changing sea and the tides. Here near the seafront you get a sense of that as light sparkles on the water and the waves come in and out even though our exposure to the sea is quite limited here, to the Solent and not the vast ocean.
Still something of the mystery of stars and ocean brings back to me those words from Augustine: ‘We shall see, and we shall love, said Augustine, we shall love and we shall praise in an end which is no end’.
Going to Mattins as I child I think I began to recognise that if Christian worship is about anything it is about evoking that sense of an end without an end. Of the reality of God just beyond our horizon. And an end which is not so much an end but a breakthrough.
I remember a bishop coming to Westcott House, the college where I used to teach in Cambridge and where the Dean and three of our canons received their theological education – not all with me I hasten to add. The bishop had come to lead a quiet day at the start of the Autumn Term and he began his first talk by saying. ‘If you want to learn to pray you first have to learn to be bored’.
It took a long time before I began to realise that when it comes to the worship of God boredom can be a kind of spiritual detergent, removing the idle wandering thoughts and slowly bringing about a kind of emptiness. And that is where for some of us prayer begins.
Now there are forms of worship which draw you in more quickly, which make you feel at home with a chat and a laugh and a coffee beside you, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Here we have Pompey Sunday where parents and children and anyone else who wants to comes together on Sunday morning to sing and pray in a relaxed atmosphere.
But services like the Mattins I experienced as a child and this Evensong is different. It takes time. It asks us to withdraw a little bit from our everyday projects and concerns, to listen, to attend not to what is at the top of our minds but to the emptiness beneath the surface. This is where we begin to become aware of a different rhythm.
Of scripture speaking to us from the far past, of the depths of Israel’s history, of how God formed a people for himself and trained them in justice and wisdom. Of the teaching of Jesus and his life and death and of the mystery of his resurrection. Jesus warns us that following him can be difficult. ‘Enter through the narrow gate…’ he says. ‘The gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life’. But along with that warning there is also encouragement, ‘Ask and it will be given to you, search and you will find, knock and the door will be opened for you’.
When we come to a service like this, where we are not asked our opinions and not given much to do except to listen and say Amen and sing hymns, it takes time, and practice to realise that we are sitting and standing on the edge of a mystery.
God, the God of glory is present, just beyond our senses, just out of sight and he asks of us nothing except our sometimes feeble attempts to attend.
Because here in our music and our prayers we are trying to attune ourselves to heaven, to that end which is no end. That is why we pray for the world, asking for heaven to break in on this world, to lead us away from conflict and violence to justice and peace. That is why we pray for the sick, because Christ brought healing to the sick and promised to raise the dying into new life.
That is why we confess our sins, because it is our lack of moral imagination which keeps us from the good life to which we are called. All the time we are reminded that our lives are not our own, we are parts of a whole, we are to love our neighbours and to love God. As we think about the creation and how we are to collaborate in living sustainably on earth we need to think not just about physical sustainability but spiritual sustainable. We have received so much through our history. We are the sum of generations of faith and hope and struggle and we have something of infinite worth to pass on to the generations to come.
That, as far as I can tell, is the meaning of Evensong and if any of our choristers or any of the rest of us might just occasionally feel a teeny bit bored, I hope you will find that in getting beyond boredom you will find yourself blessed.
So glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost; the source of everything that was and is and is to come. Our rest and our hope. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end.
Angela Tilby
Canon of Honour Emeritus