Texanglican

"... follow the Christ, the King,/ Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King --/ Else, wherefore born?" Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Idylls of the King

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Name: The Rev. Randall Foster
Location: Bedford, Texas, United States

I am a priest serving in the Episcopal diocese of Fort Worth, Texas (Anglican Church in North America, also affiliated temporarily with the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone), as an assisting priest at St. Vincent's Cathedral Church, Bedford, and as chaplain and a teacher of religion and social studies at our Cathedral School. I am also a doctoral student in New Testament and Early Christian Literature at the University of Chicago. I am presently at work on my dissertation, which examines the rhetoric of the correspondence of St. Athanasius of Alexandria.

Thursday, May 26, 2005

More Details on the Clown Eucharist at Trinity Wall Street


The bulletin for the clown Eucharist at Trinity Episcopal Church, Wall Street, NYC, is available here. Have a look. No creed was said (on TRINITY SUNDAY!), but there was open communion for non-Christians. Lovely pictures.

You can WATCH the entire thing here! The service had no spoken words until the closing hymn--it was MIMED, including the lessons, the sermon, and the EUCHARISTIC PRAYER. The circus music needs to be heard to be appreciated, pariticularly in a Gothic church. The thurifer blew bubbles instead of offering incense. The congregation had noise makers. Lord, have mercy.

Thanks to Fr. Chris Cantrell at www.apostolicity.blogspot.com for calling attention to the bulletin on his fine blog. Ron Turner clued me in on the video feed. Thank you, gentlemen.
Posted by Hello

7 Comments:

Blogger The Common Anglican said...

This makes me cry. Litterally I am crying...

~The Common Anglican

1:07 PM  
Anonymous MB said...

You know, I actually found it really boring... much more boring than a usual Eucharist.

1:15 PM  
Anonymous mimi said...

I thought things like this only happens with in the Catholic church. hmmm thanks for sheding some light

6:39 AM  
Blogger texanglican said...

Although there may be a fair amount of silliness and poor aesthetic sensibility present in the worship life of some Roman Catholic parishes, Mimi,I assure you that few (if any) RC parishes can compete with the folly of the "looney left" ECUSA folks!

8:36 AM  
Anonymous MImi said...

You will be surprised there are still pockets around the world but they are not so vocal...

2:59 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Rnady, I have to admit that this makes the fiasco of liturgical dance/slide presentation at the Easter vigil at the UT Neumann Center many years ago look downright tame.

I guess three is a reason Mike and I attend a Methodist church with the motto "Traditional Worship for Contemporary People."

-Becky Jo

3:34 PM  
Anonymous TR said...

While I find myself in agreement with most of the commentary abou the "Clown Eucharist", I am seeing another disturbing trend that leads me to ask the question: How far can one push the envelope?

Traditional Anglican liturgy and music are artistic and faithful works of beauty. Unfortunately, they are done with such a lack of passion and/or explanation ("deconstructed" perhaps), that to the non-churche, we are speaking in a very dull (boring?) code.

While I would certainly NOT condone the extremes of what was done at Trinity/Wall Street, I have found a great deal of resistance to the inclusion of artistic elements, alternative music forms and even elements of passion into the scripture and liturgy readings. It's as if there is a liturgical and/or musical "snobbery" that allows no room for expression that just might create space for the non-churched and yet still be orthodox and theologically sound.

10:13 AM  

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