Many of us know John Mason Neale (died 1866, commemorated in BCP 1979 on August 7) as a hymn writer and translator, perhaps the most prolific single contributor to our Episcopal hymnal. So much has changed since (and partly because of) Neale’s brief ministry that it takes patient imagination to recall what controversy surrounded all hiswork,what risks he took to serve the mission to which he felt called, and how much his work took him to the edges of church life.

Early Victorian Anglicans mistrusted hymns. Hymnody had largely been replaced with metrical psalms. Hymns and carols felt to many Anglicans as symptomatic of the dangerous enthusiasms of the Wesleys and their successors, outright non-conformists. Neale fought to introduce beauty and expression of feeling to liturgy. What he accomplished changed the face and feel of Anglicanism. He and those who shared his vision were so effective that today we struggle to go beyond their Gothic norms. Our way forward needs to recall what a threat the Ritualists and neo-Gothicism were to the old “high and dry” staid churchmanship of mid-nineteenth-century Anglicanism.

If we can take in how risky and confrontive Gothic-revival Ritualists were when that work was new, we may find ourselves asking new questions about tradition, culture and mission. Neale introduced colored vestments, altar cloths, flowers, candles and crosses to the stern black and white world of early Victorian liturgy. He wrote and lectured to advocate removing stratifying and distancing symbols like church furniture that represented rank. We take his accomplishments for granted because at least part of what was so profoundly transformative has become stultifying and formulaic.Our best work in renewing congregations and liturgies carries that same potential. The workof bringingnewlife to ancient tradition doesn’t stop, and we would do well to become suspicious of our own settled norms and formulas.

To recall the full dimensions of Neale’s willingness to face controversy, we must recall that not only was he a hymn-writer and liturgist, but in 1854 he founded the Sisters of Saint Margaret as a missionary order of nurses to work with England’s rural poor. Neale startled the Oxford Movement and Ritualist clergy who had founded women’s religious orders ahead of him by asking one of the sisters of the new community to be Mother Superior. Pusey and the first male founders of an Anglican women’s community had kept a strict controlling role as Father Superior. Instead Neale took for himself the role of chaplain, because he believed women should shape their own communities. Similarly Neale insisted that (despite law and custom of the time that regarded women as subject to father or elder brother until marriage made them subject to a husband) that adult women could and should claim religious autonomy in their own vocations and commitments.

Not surprisingly, Neale encouraged the community of St. Margaret to set themselves a standard of professional nursing. The sisters received two months (!) intensive training for their work as primary caregivers to the rural poor, contemporary with Florence Nightingale’s pioneering work training nurses. In fact, Nightingale took St. Margaret’s sisters with her to staff her innovative military hospitals in the Crimea.

Neale’s work with and for the sisters provoked death threats and riots. One of the St. Margaret’s sisters, a respectable young woman and the daughter of an Anglican vicar, died of a disease she contracted from her nursing work with a dying family. When Neale and the community traveled to the sister’s hometown of Lewes for the funeral, her rabidly Protestant father incited amobto break up the funeral and attack Neale and the sisters. London papers explained that the father was understandably outraged since Mr. Neale and the St. Margaret’s community had presumed to allow a woman to join the order against her father’s will.

These glimpses of Neale’s independent vision and courage help make clear how courageous he was as a deeply controversial liturgical reformer. While still studying theology at Cambridge, Neale had helped found the Cambridge Camden Society, dedicated to promoting Ritualist practices like use of altar cross, candles, flowers and colored liturgical vestments in church. All these practices were illegal in England at the time, and when Neale persisted in advocating and practicing such things after ordination, Neale’s bishop inhibited him from exercising any priestly ministry in the diocese and further refused to release him to another diocese. The bishop’s intention was to stop him. He took Neale to court several times because, despite the inhibition, for the remainder of his brief life Neale persisted his unrubrical practices in two chapels that were not under diocesan jurisdiction, the chapel of the St. Margaret’s sisters, and the chapel of Sackville College (an old people’s home) where Neale was warden and under the protection of the Earl de la Warr. Repeated court judgments acknowledged that Neale could preside in these two places, though nowhere else.

We sometimes casually speak of this work under the loose description of Oxford Movement. Keble and other figures in thatmovementwerefriends of Neale’s, but it was his Cambridge friends more than Oxford Movement teachers who gave the church the face we think of as Anglican.

Oxford Tractarians had not addressed questions of ritual practice or aesthetics. TheTractarian effortwasword-centered; they preached and wrote to convince Anglicans to think of ourselves as Catholic and to understand our sacramental life as Catholic. Protestant sensibilities were uneasy, but the English church’s old “high and dry” churchmanship had room for such thinking. And no one was actually advocating changing liturgy or moving furniture. We know that difference and know what provokes anger. Ritualists like Neale went the further step, so it was they who provoked controversy.

Tractarians offered ideas, Ritualists enfleshed ideas to touch people’s experience. Nealewasmarginalizedinthechurch for a Catholic vision of liturgy that dared to shape experience by Catholic practice. Some of us have faced uproar for moving an altar a few feet out from the wall. Ritualists created uproar by arguing for dismantling and reordering eighteenthcentury churches that had been designed or remodeled as preaching halls. They destroyed woodwork and artifacts that were in the way of good liturgy, tearing out cozily warmed box pews where the wealthy enjoyed sitting to listen in comfort to long, rhetorically elevated sermons delivered by clergy in black gown and preaching tabs.

By pamphlets and publications, daring actions and aggressive advocacy, Neale’s Cambridge Camden Society and its successor, the Ecclesiological Society, literally reshaped the church. They were so successful promoting Victorian Gothic-revival church architecture that they defined the worship environment of our Episcopal Church. And remember Neale’s style wasn’t just patient advocacy of change. One night Neale and a handful of eager lay assistants did a guerilla reordering of the cluttered medieval interior of Sackville College chapel.With axes, hammers and crowbars, they removed and destroyed the box pews and replaced them overnight with plain, egalitarian benches.

Ritualists addressed liturgical practice at every level as they worked for enormous change. Because they introduced sensory and irrational objects and actions into liturgy, they were accused of being “aesthetes,” but in the slums of decaying English cities, these Catholic “aesthetes” proudly and gratefully pointed to their success with the same urban poor who had earlier responded to Wesleyan- inspired “sentimentalists.” Like the Wesleyansandother bold, mission-minded Christians, Ritualists saw that it was essential to risk feeling for people to build their faith on experience.

The Ecclesiological Society still exists in England, by the way, and if you visit their website you’ll discover they now work to preserve old church buildings and also to encourage building of new ones that work. Neale’s spirit lives on in the Ecclesiological Society. Knowing his story in its context, it is easy to imagine a modern John Mason Neale among us to take hatchets to the woodwork, altar, altar rails and even his own modified bench pews by which some in our generation rigidly define our Anglican or Episcopalian identity.

The irony is that much of our work as visionary liturgical reformers and renewers must challenge what Neale and the Ritualists for good cultural and missionary reasons created, the English Gothic ideal of church and liturgy. Picture a progression of stony grey pointed arches, blue and red stained-glass windows, a nave ending in steps up to the narrowed path through a divided choir to the distant altar, and beyond it an inaccessible altar hard against the east wall. Picture a priest in Almy’s chasuble standing at that altar with his back to the people raising a flat pure white disk of unleavened bread over his head. Neale fought hard and suffered much to create such churches.

What makes us long for something more primitive, less distant, more tactile and sensory? What were the Ritualists doing? Are they our spiritual ancestors or the ghosts we struggle against? Knowing Neale’s intention and catching what drove his vision needn’t change our longing or make us think the Gothic Revival should remain our norm. I do believe, however, that acknowledging just how norms we workto renew or replacecamefromwork very like our own three, four and five generations ago may challenge us to greater boldness and greater humility as we continue to work to touch people’s experience ofGodin the community’s liturgy. Knowing and understanding our lineage will also help us in our conversation with anyone who believes Episcopal liturgy has “always been done” a particular way. What some of us simplistically and complacently call “traditional Anglicanism” was born of change, vision and a startling sense of mission.

Restored colonial churches in America show what Neale and his colleagues worked so hard to replace. After the great fire of London, in a great burst of creativity Christopher Wren remade Anglicanism’s picture of itself. Wren’s cool, clean classicism had provided a wonderful venue for erudite Enlightenment preaching. White, cream and marble, no images at all, these auditorium churches were a natural, culturally appropriate home to theological rationalism and upper-class Deism.

John Mason Neale and the Ritualists felt a different pull, one that speaks much more strongly to me and perhaps to many of us. In response to industrialized England’s “dark satanic mills,” a cultural upheaval in England killed the confident rationalism of the Enlightenment. The Wesleys had taken on the church’s abandonment of the poor and the upper class’s comfortable investment in the African slave trade. The romantic movement in literature and the beginnings of the arts and crafts movementin design were shaping a new sensibility that valued mystery and feeling over cold logic that had been willing to turn a blind eye to human suffering and evil. Old Gothic ruins (often churches, monasteries and country chapels that Cromwell and the roundheads had vandalized), roofless, open to England’s stormy weather, hinted at darker forces, stronger passions, and a struggle between love and death. People looked again at defaced and weathered carvings and dreamed of a time when community mattered enough that the work of people’s hands (not industrial manufacture) created curves and curlicues, warm, irregular textures, colors, smells and all the creative work of many unique skills and visions working together.

Architecturally and liturgically rebuilding choirs (both the place in the church and the vested group of lay people sharing the leadership of worship) broke the hold of the preacher’s long rational sermons on an Enlightenment God. Hymns, anthems and chant suggested words could carry more power and life than mere logical discourse. Choirs singing, priests in colored vestments, candles, new stained glass where there had been none, all offered a richness and sense of shared action, our meeting the holy in mystery that our thoughts could not encompass or comprehend.

John Mason Neale and the Ritualists worked passionately for a liturgy of the whole person, not just mind and ear, but a community act of sensory, feeling beings who responded to rite, music and the use of space. It takes some imagination and the odd historical reminder to grasp how deeply troubling these innovations were when they were introduced. The feeling of the old controversies can escape us because liturgical scholarship and pastoral, missionary thinking (both of which Neale cared deeply about) have moved on while romantic idealization of the medieval Gothicbecamea voice inAmerica of classism, Anglophilia and conservative nostalgia.

As I was working on this, I learned that in the early days of San Francisco, a wild, culturally mixed boomtown, in 1867, just eighteen years after the Gold Rush and one year after Neale’s death, St. Peter’s Church was founded by a priest who had been forcibly ejected from another Episcopal church for introducing the suspiciously Roman practice of vesting the choir.

Vested choirs may be a culturally inappropriate, liturgically ineffective compromise. If we’re willing to do our homework and ask hard questions, we actually can understand earlier, more participatory periods in the pre-medieval church’s liturgy better than anyone in the nineteenth century could have. But we need more than information, more than historical data. If we are worthy heirs of John Mason Neale, truly teachers and leaders who walk in those footsteps, we will decry our church’s Babylonian captivity and enslavement to buildings that don’t serve liturgy or mission. His whole ministry was committed to creating and renewing spaces and communities for a freer and more vital church. Sometimes it seems as though ours is to make the compromises that allow us to continue to talk about ideals that we don’t expect anyone to see or experience.

A hundred fifty years ago, Neale and the Ritualists did not hesitate to identify the church’s future in a robust engagement with their own Victorian culture. Their love of the Gothic was argued from a particular understanding of church, craftsmanship, the value of work, and the worker, to an interconnected society, a gospel of person and community, and a coherent engagement of concerns for beauty, mystery and justice. The Ritualists’ sense of history made them critics and ministers to a society facing the consequences of industrialization and the spoil of slavery and militarized colonialism. Across Britain, America and Canada, brand-new Gothic-revival churches fit well in communities which boasted brand-new Gothic-revival homes, libraries, city halls and hospitals. With classical rationality seeming bankrupt, romanticism and Gothic Revival came as a breath of fresh air.

Or yeast. The priest we pictured at the elevation, back to the altar is raising a perfectly round, perfectly white disk of bread. Yes, Neale and the Ritualists are also responsible for the unleavened wafers of communion bread with which so manyAnglicanswereraised, though their use of such bread, like other stories in the tradition, is one chapter in a long, twisting history of change. Our bread too tells a story of reformers and liturgists (like us) doing their best, generation by generation, as shifting vision, scholarship and new diagnoses of culture created differing senses of need.

In the earliest years of the church, GodfreyDiekmannandothersargue,communion bread was always the leavened barley bread of the poor. Somewhere on the church’s road to wealth and establishment, liturgical reformers of those first centuries aspired to offer Christ’s body in the more dignified guise of wheat bread, the delicious, finer-textured bread of the privileged. But wheat, rye or barley, in Roman and Byzantine use communion bread East andWestwasalways leavened bread until the time ofCharlemagnein the ninth century.

Alcuin, Charlemagne’s chaplain and a another liturgical reformer, poring over the texts of the gospels and thinking about what he knew of Judaism, suddenly realized that the bread of the first eucharist “must have been” unleavened because the synoptic gospels say the Last Supper was a Passover meal (though they don’t get the details right). Today gospel scholars can still argue pro and con over whether the Last Supper was a Passover meal, but no contemporary liturgical scholars argue that the early church used unleavened bread forcommunion.Theevidence for leavened is too clear: Greek language distinguishes decisively between azymos (unleavened bread) and artos (ordinary leavened bread). The Greek New Testament texts, the Greek Lord’s Prayer and all the ancient Greek liturgies use artos for the bread in eucharistic texts. Alcuin was mistaken. His mistake persisted in the Catholic West until the Reformation. Protestant reformers (including our Anglican reformers) restored the use of leavened bread, and most typically good large quantities of it. (Here my own sympathies are wholly Protestant!)

In the nineteenth century Neale and the Ritualists, the visionary liturgical reformers of their day, looked to tradition to help break the hold of rationalism. They borrowed freely from Roman Catholic tradition to involve the whole person (not just themind)in worship and faith, as they made a new effort to build new ecumenical ties. Anglican Ritualists traveled to the Continent and saw their new friends and colleagues (Roman Catholic clergy) using unleavened wafers. Some Anglicans still had in their churches beautiful medieval eucharistic vessels with tiny patens that had been unusable since the Reformation. Where they dared, our Ritualist predecessors reintroduced Alcuin’s reform: unleavened bread. The Sisters of St. Margaret and other Anglican women’s communities began making communion wafers to help support themselves. In America and Canada the Ritualists’ efforts, spread first through architecture and style, had led even low churchmen into elements of Catholic reform. Gothic buildings and vested choirs could serve Morning Prayer as well as Holy Communion. Where Ritualist sympathies were strong, in the late nineteenth century the rector or vicar might institute an early Sunday morning eucharist that actually happened weekly “for those who wanted that sort of thing.” And often those who wanted that sort of thing were a littlemore tolerant of Romanizing, perhaps even a little drawn to tantalizing surprises like . . . little wafers made by Anglican sisters, embossed with a lamb (or a crucifix!). Some of our parents and grandparents can still remember the parish here or there that was startled when such bread ventured out of an 8 a.m. Holy Communion and into the quarterly or monthly communion Sunday.

With the early days of Associated Parishes and then the beginnings of our textual reforms with the 1967 Liturgy of the Lord’s Supper, reformers in the Episcopal Church began seeing past Protestant origins to the early church’s (and Eastern Orthodox Church’s) use of leavened bread.I remember Alexander Schmemann teaching liturgical theology at General Seminary in the late 1960s and pushing us westerners to hear the serious, humandivine question ofhowcommunionbread tasted. “What does it mean?” he asked with annoyance. “No, taste and see . . . how does it taste?”

I offer this reminder of the original context for our Gothic arches and dry disks of unleavened bread so we can reclaim our lineage and honor our teachers. Weneed their vision and courage and critical eye. May we begin to see that the work of addressing particular culture, current scholarship and missionary opportunity won’t really allow us to create or enshrine a new norm.

From the 1950s through 1979 AP worked to enlist the whole church in creating a new prayer book. That passion was driven by an urgency for mission and a sense of what damage old, forgotten and misunderstood missionary strategy would do in a new culture. After the new book, what did we accomplish in the 1980s and 1990s as we ignored our unresponsive buildings? Our culture moved on, reshaping itself, while our enactment of “new” liturgy continued to mold itself to fit our once radical Victorian Gothic-revival churches. To the outsider and visitor they are powerful signs of irrelevance and obscure self-referential practice. If we are to be faithful to our mission and true disciples and inheritors of brave reformers like John Mason Neale, we must do better.

Donald Schell is Rector of St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, San Francisco, California, and a member of Associated Parishes Council.

-- Originally published in OPEN Fall 2001