Flashmob your own liturgy

Dashing this off very quickly, but here are some online resources for putting together your own flashmob services:

BCP Mattins

CW Morning Prayer

BCP Evensong

Compline (Trad language)

Compline (Modern language)

The Oremus Hymnal

St Paul's Evensong at OccupyLSX

I didn't think, when I got up this morning, that I would somehow wind up leading a BCP Evensong at St Paul's Cathedral.

The cathedral has had Occupy LSX, a protest camp, on their doorstep for the past week. Last weekend the Canon Chancellor, Revd Dr Giles Fraser, told the police to leave the protesters alone. As the week has worn on and the tents have stayed up, the cathedral has been operating on a reduced schedule, and on Friday the Dean issued a statement saying it would have to close until further notice.

I have no strong criticism of the cathedral closing to sightseers; there is a point at which keeping things ticking over stops making economic sense, and though I am uncomfortable with entry fees for cathedrals I cannot condemn them without calling into question the legitimacy of thousands of smaller, parish-based fundraising efforts. Fair game.

But a cathedral is more than architecture and establishment. Cathedrals exist to serve the local community, as well as to support parish churches in their work. Their primary task is of public worship, and it is difficult to see how Occupy LSX are a significant threat to that. The supposed health and safety reasons for closure given by the cathedral haven't, to my knowledge, been specified in a way that would allow the protesters to improve matters, and so things have come to a sort of impasse.

Practising the organ this morning I half-joked on Twitter about being tempted to turn up at St Paul's and hold Evensong myself, if they weren't letting people in for services. Then I went back to practising, it being one of those mornings where I felt like I had someone else's fingers and feet, and the choir turned up and we rehearsed, and there was a service and afterwards tea and toast. I checked my phone before heading home and there seemed to be some positive response to the idea of an outdoor Evensong, and I began to think more seriously about it.

I'm accustomed to Evensong services of varying sizes. I knew that without any real idea of who was going to turn up, I wouldn't want to plan anything too complicated.. but there definitely wasn't time to select metrical psalms, so we'd have to do simple Anglican Chant (and hope for enough people who can make sense of it for it to work) or even just said psalms and canticles. I made a few more tentative tweets, putting out feelers to see who else might be interested. I tried to contact both St Paul's, and Occupy LSX, through Twitter, and got no response -- fair enough, both are busy organisations. But people who had been involved in the protest, and various clergy and churchy types online, seemed encouraging, so I decided to go for it.

At 12.12 I tweeted "Right. Evensong at @OccupyLSX outside St Pual's, 3.45 for 4pm. Please bring Parish Psalter & BCP if you have them." From there it was a matter of choosing hymns with words in the public domain and printing them, providing links to those and to the BCP liturgy for the day through the C of E website, making sure I had the readings and the Collect for the 21st Sunday after Trinity to hand, and the sort of low-grade terror at what I was doing that you might expect, complete with wildly beating heart and trembling hands. A lot of people were generally supportive but simply unable to get there due to geography or prior commitments. But people said they would come, and I turned up and they found me. Our numbers were small but mighty, and included an atheist and a Roman Catholic, as a typical Evensong at St Paul's well might! Apparently there had been some sort of praying and singing not too long before my arrival, but the clergyman involved was busy being interviewed by someone with a camera and I had come over all shy, so we decided just to get on with it. We chose an almost-quiet spot outside M&S and did just that.

And it was good. Christ is made the sure foundation was our introit, chosen because I love it and it is a good length, and one or two people did join us as we sang. There was a bit of informal awkwardness going from one bit of the service to the next -- I nearly forgot the psalm, think of it! -- but we chanted psalms and canticles in something resembling unison, and the ferial responses were fairly straightforward. The readings were Ecclesiastes Chapters 11 and 12, and St Paul's 2nd Letter to Timothy, Chapter 2, verses 1-7. One annoying photographer insisted on trying to ask us questions during the service, which I found a bit difficult -- I tried to explain we weren't finished, I think someone else went and talked to him and then came and joined us again. Instead of sermon (the epistle said it all with "The husbandman that laboureth must be first partaker of the fruits.") or anthem we had Guide me, O thou great Jehovah and after the "Prayer for the Clergy and People" (rather apt I thought) and "A Prayer of St Chrysostom" and the Grace we sang O God, our help in ages past and went our respective ways -- some of us to the pub, to slake the thirst after righteousness (I'll get my coat), others off home or to other parts of the protest.

So, that was a pretty strange day. I wonder what tomorrow will bring?

By Popular Request: Gin Sandwich recipes

A while ago on Twitter, in one of those conversations that sometimes happens when I ought to be practising or tidying or some such thing, there was discussion of gin, and taking gin on trains, and so on. In the way of such things it got rather whimsical and somehow, I'm not sure how, ideas for gin sandwiches came up.

I'm pleased to say I have now tried two of the ideas, and they worked beautifully.

The first one is easy: slice cucumbers, soak them in gin, in the refrigerator, overnight. I don't mean "sprinkle some gin on them" I mean "put them in a container and fill it up until the gin covers the cucumbers". Then use these cucumbers in sandwiches, as you would normally use cucumbers. They seem to go very well with herby cream cheese, but I see no reason they couldn't be used with other sandwich ingredients.

The second sandwich idea is to make sloe gin jelly.

To do this I used Oetker's gelatine; it comes in a yellow box and has sachets in it. Each sachet says it will set one pint of liquid.

Mix one sachet of gelatine with about 150mL of hot water. You may need to stir quite a lot to dissolve it all. Add about 300mL gin. Set in the refrigerator for several hours. I had been hoping that the jelly would set hard enough to be sliced, but even with the reduced liquid the alcohol in the gin prevented that happening, so it was a spreadable jelly instead. However, it was very tasty! This works beautifully with good-quality sliced sandwich meat, particularly smoked varieties.

I don't know how long the cucumbers will take to go mushy, but if they don't they shouldn't spoil in any hurry. The jelly ought to stay good for a fair while, too. Basically it's hard for anything with that much alcohol in it to actually go off. Whether they keep depends more on supplies of bread, creamcheese and sliced sandwich meat!

There you have it. Gin sandwiches: the perfect treat when you get back from Evensong too tired to cook properly.

Metrical Psalms for Advent

I want to encourage the use of psalms in liturgy. To this end I have committed to compiling a small booklet of metrical psalms for use this coming Advent (Year B). As with everything else I publish I will release the work under a CC BY-SA licence so that other people can use it, free of charge, without having to bother me for permission.

I aim to have two settings of each of the psalms for the main Sunday morning service, one with a very well-known hymn tune and one perhaps a little less well-known (I might even write something myself). I will include full music, and also a "lead sheet" version with the melody line and chords. The psalms will have an optional refrain, so that they can be sung congregationally (without the refrain) or in the "responsorial" style with the choir/music group/whoever singing the verses, and the congregation joining in with the refrain. I used this method of metrical psalm singing quite successfully in my own parish, St Andrew's Leytonstone, during Lent.

There is a catch, however. Most of the public domain metrical settings of the psalms use language that, at best, is considered archaic. Some of the older settings are quite difficult to understand. While that might be all right for the choir at St Andrew's, where people have a fairly high tolerance for "old-fashioned" language, I do think it might be difficult in other contexts.

To this end I would like some modern metrical settings of the following psalms:

Advent I Psalm 80:1-8,18-20
Advent II Psalm 85:1-2,8-13
Advent III Psalm 126
Advent IV Psalm 89.1-4,19-26
(These are all from RSCM's "Sunday by Sunday", so please tell me if I've got the lectionary wrong...)

It would, of course, make sense to add these translations or paraphrases to Psalter Commons. Some of them have been shortened in order to be a sensible length for congregational worship; that's the lectionary's suggestion, not mine, so please feel free to include a bit more if the text sits better that way.

A modern metrical setting of the Magnificat (listed as an alternative to the psalm on Advent III or Advent IV) would also be useful, but this is not as crucial as there are serviceable settings already available in many hymnals (Timothy Dudley-Smith's "Tell out my soul" is perhaps the best known).

I've promised people I'll have this booklet done by mid-November, so I really, really need the text by the end of October. Do let me know if you'd like to help out.

A bit about why I use the CC licenses I do.

When I write music I release it under a Creative Commons license. I usually use a CC BY-SA license, known as Attribution-ShareAlike. This means people can use it, without first asking me, as long as they give me attribution and any derivative works they make are shared under a similar license. If I am using CC BY-SA then they are free to earn money for derivative works, but since they have to release those works under a similar license they are not going to be in a situation where they have a monopoly on the work. For example, a musician might get paid for recording one of my compositions -- this is a commercial use of the work -- but as they must allow others to use the recording they are not going to end up being the only supplier of it. The CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike ) license is more restrictive, and I rarely use it these days; I believe the drawbacks outweigh the benefits of restricting copyright in that way.

The reason for "giving my music away for free" is something I've been through a number of times, but a short summary is that it is more important to me that the music is heard and used than that I make money from it. People are not queuing up to pay me to write music and the writing I do is little enough, and sufficiently esoteric by mainstream standards (mostly choral music, mostly for use in churches), that I'm unlikely to make much money from it anyway. Like the majority of musicians throughout history, I earn more money from teaching and performing than from composing, publishing or recording. When I do write something, and someone uses it, I'm delighted. It would be great if they could chuck a fiver my way, but a lot of people are in the same boat I am, with little or no sheet music budget, so I'm not going to worry about it too much if they don't.

So, why do I use Creative Commons licenses rather than simply adding a preface to work saying that people are free to use it?

One is that the license information is easier to include on the work itself, so that in the event that it gets separated from the preface my intentions are still clear. (See Christ Has No Body Now On Earth But Ours for an example -- that work is four pages, but it wouldn't have been hard to include the license information on all of them, and anyway one page of it isn't that useful on its own.) This isn't a big deal for short pieces, but if I were to publish, say, a booklet of psalms for Advent, it's quite likely that some people would want to use -- and print -- only one or two pages from it. It makes sense to have licence information on all of them, rather than expecting people to remember where the music came from and come back to find it again.

Another reason is that the people at Creative Commons have done the research to make sure that their copyright statements are legally valid, whereas a simpler text statement may not be considered binding (particularly in areas of international jurisdiction). I've seen lots of plain text copyright statements that aren't absolutely clear whether, for example, an organist playing for a wedding which will be recorded is allowed to use the work if they are being paid. While I'm alive this isn't too bad, as people can contact me (I try to include an e-mail address on most paper copies of my work too), but after I'm dead if there is any lack of clarity people will have to wait seventy years for my work to become public domain. So there's a lot to be said for using a standardised license that others will be able to interpret and which has been formulated by people who understand the full legal implications.

I use a Creative Commons license because I want to give my work away and I want to do it with a minimum of fuss for myself and for others.

Your Commission, Should You Choose to Request It

An experiment:

I would like to write more music, particularly choral music. I would prefer to do this on commission, for a whole bunch of reasons. But my music is not well-known, and so I don't attract attention from people who have serious money to pay for commissions, on the whole. So far, every note I have ever written has been for free.

What if the money for commissions isn't quite so serious?

For £30, I will set up to 50 words of English for SATB, with or without a simple organ or piano accompaniment. I'm willing to do more complex compositions, or simpler ones, or other languages, but please do contact me about it -- Latin is easy, Russian much harder! You can see (and in some cases hear) examples of my other compositions by using the look what I made tag on this blog. That isn't a full list (I'm working on it; processing works that pre-date this blog is another thing that is easily pushed aside!), but it's something.

Your chosen text must be in the public domain, or you must have permission from the appropriate sources for me to set it. The copyright of the finished work will remain with me but I will release it under a CC BY-SA license, meaning that others can use it freely in derivative works, even for commercial purposes, as long as they acknowledge my work and share it similarly. So if you commission a choral work from me, you won't just be contributing to my livelihood, you'll be contributing to a body of publicly available art.

Any takers?

Who do you say that I am?

Who is considered "Christian"? Why do any of us care?

Edward Green wrote an interesting post about the UCCF's Doctrinal Basis, a sort of pseudo-creed which it seems is sometimes used as a litmus test of who is "in" and who is not at university Christian Unions.

Revd Green rightly points out that even the Catechism of the Catholic Church has a broader remit than that, stating that “All who have been justified by faith in Baptism are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers in the Lord by the children of the Catholic Church.” I would agree that this is true, but I shy away from relying on the sacrament of baptism as a way of defining who is Christian, or rather, who is not.

The Salvation Army is one example of a non-sacramental movement that I would find difficult to classify as "not Christian". There are also Christian Quakers, and Christian Unitarians, and all sorts of people from all walks of life who consider themselves Christian in the sense of trying to follow the way of Jesus of Nazareth regardless of not sharing creedal beliefs. There are Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses; I've lived with the former and been friends with the latter and I am not willing to call either group "not Christian" because of their divergences from the creed I give my heart to. Quite frankly, if someone believes in the Flying Spaghetti Monster but also self-identifies as Christian I am willing to consider them Christian.

There are a few reasons I have this attitude. One is that I believe God is ultimately ineffable and limitless. This puts everyone in a bit of a pickle as it's difficult to say anything meaningful about the nature of God without putting limits on God. If God is pink then God cannot be blue, but if God is limitless then God is both pink and blue. So while I am concerned with right belief, I try to sit lightly to it, if you will, remembering that we are all heretics.

Another reason is that the example Jesus set for us, if I am to believe scripture, points toward accepting others and treating them with respect and loving kindness regardless of their religious background. What is the point of my knowing what sort of Christian someone is? So often, this seems to be a case of trying not to associate with the "wrong" sort of people.

Sometimes this is out of a concern for sacramental purity: only baptised, confirmed Christians who have jumped through this hoop and that hoop are welcome at the Lord's table, says the Church. We mustn't "adulterate" the sacrament by allowing anyone who might have the wrong idea to try it for themselves, or by allowing anyone we aren't quite sure about -- sinners, gays, women -- to preside at the Eucharist. I think this is incredibly sad; we are all heretics, remember? and I would say we are also all sinners! But Jesus ate with society's outcasts and died as an outcast himself. He asked people to believe in him, but didn't demand they believed before feeding them. I have better things to do than try to follow obscure rules about who I may or may not eat with.

Sometimes the purity concerns seem to be more along the lines of worry that someone will come along and infect us with wrong belief. I can understand this a little better. If you have a nice comforting belief and someone comes along and questions the premises, then of course it's going to be unnerving. But scary and evil aren't the same thing, and building isolating walls around our faith does two things: it puts the community at risk of stagnation and idiosyncracy, and it gives people leverage over us. Now, I do think that people in community should give one another power; we are accountable to each other, we live together on this interconnected planet where there is only one flesh we can wound. But I don't think that power should extend as far as someone saying "Well, you aren't really Christian if you believe that. You don't belong here."

At Greenbelt, I went to a talk by Mark Vernon on fundamentalisms and boundaries. He described the difference between bounded sets and centred sets by talking about ways of keeping herds of cattle together in Australia. There are basically two strategies: you can build a fence, or you can sink a well. Then in the rest of his talk he went on to talk about how some people seem to need boundaries, how without boundaries we can't define what the church is or isn't and cross those boundaries to reach -- who? Other churches? the "unchurched"? I don't quite remember, to be honest, because for the rest of the talk I was thinking "OK, but what happens if we just sink a well?"

Boundaries make us feel safe, right enough, whether that's to do with purity of thought or purity of sacrament. It's natural enough to want to associate with the "right" kind of people. But dividing the sheep and the goats by doctrinal fences isn't, in the end, for us to do. The wheat and tares are not for us to sort out.

Instead we are told "by their fruits ye shall know them" and "love your neighbour as yourself". I hope that if people classify me as Christian it is not because I go to church to pray, or because I regularly receive Communion, or because I happen to agree with them on matters of doctrine or liturgy. When someone tells me that they are Christian, I consider it a statement of intent, not a statement of adherence to some orthodoxy or another. I am not a theologian and some would say I lack the education to make such assumptions. Nevertheless, I hope that if people classify me as Christian, it is because of my attempts, however frail or flawed the results might be, to live in the world as an example of God's love for the world.