on Richard Forrest Woods – Part 11

This is one of many installments of a biography of mentor and friend Dick Woods. See here for the entire series.

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Life with Dick

During my tenure at St. John the Divine in Houston, we did the Fauré Requiem one Good Friday. Dick had studied the work during his time in Paris with Fauré’s pupil Nadia Boulanger, and he told me that ever since then, he had had a perfect performance of it in his head. But he knew that a perfect performance was not to be had. He knew that he and the choir could only strive for perfection yet never achieve it, but I don’t think he ever gave himself permission to be human. Nowadays, accepting our limitations and simply doing our very best in the presence of God are standard fare in books on church music, but Dick never quite got there on the acceptance-of-our-limitations part.

Dick also had a ‘perfect’ Holy Eucharist in his imagination, from prelude all the way through the liturgy and the postlude, but he was always disappointed week after week when it never was achieved. He was always a little peeved after church. I once asked him how he felt each Sunday after having led hundreds of people in traditional Episcopal liturgy. He thought that was a ridiculous question and sarcastically answered that it made him “feel on top of the world.” Although I still sympathize with him on the elements he accused of marring a perfect Eucharist [and there were always plenty, a few of which included the celebrant using the wrong words or otherwise stumbling over the liturgy, the choir missing a cue, the organ having a cipher, one of us playing a wrong note, the sermon being useless, a microphone not being turned up in time, a small child screaming, an old lady coughing for fifteen minutes before finally leaving the room, the crucifer not holding the cross straight, a candle burning out, etc.], today I would disagree with Dick over this hypothetically perfect – and fully unattainable – Eucharist. I think he was howling at the moon and that it just made him unnecessarily tired.

While composing this biography, as I reflected on Dick’s stated desire for that elusive, perfect Eucharist, I realized that St. John the Divine was actually quite liturgically conservative in those days, just like Dick – perhaps more than he admitted. The clergy and servers took liturgy seriously; their movements and actions were well planned and smoothly executed. With very few exceptions, they were always vested and fully clothed underneath; long-sleeved shirts, ties, dresses, no jeans, no sandals. Celebrants celebrated with all the right words for the most part, usually missing only a word or two when they tried to recite liturgy from memory without having practiced first. Celebrants began Eucharist with the opening acclamation rather than with that most maddeningly human-centered and garden-party-oriented ‘Good morning.’ Even at the announcements following the Peace, rector Larry Hall never said, ‘Good morning.’ Rather, he always welcomed the assembly in the name of Jesus Christ. Neither did he use announcement time following the Peace to read out announcements that were already in print. He underscored the important ones, encouraged everyone to digest the others on their own time, and got back to the liturgy (exceptions noted at the end of this post). Upon reflection on those days, I truly appreciate that rector’s approach to liturgy. Everything was quite proper. Even the contemporary service, then just in its infancy, was faithful to every word of Rite II, with only the music, dress code, and sense of complete propriety relaxed.

Dick and I agreed that ‘Good morning’ betrays an unsettling willingness to interrupt timeless liturgy with temporal tripe. The first words out of the celebrant’s mouth, whether ‘Blessed be God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit,’ or, ‘Good morning!’ will set the tone for the rest of the hour, like it or not. Even the congregation of liturgically rock-solid Rite I Christ Church Cathedral in Houston in those days proved that just about any congregation may eventually go where it is consistently steered. During the 1990s, the Cathedral had gotten a new dean, who was into the ‘good morning’ nonsense. It wasn’t long before he began waiting for a response in kind – and got it. Before you know it, the Cathedral congregation was responding enthusiastically, “Good morning!” to begin Rite I each week, and never batting an eye. They also absorbed without a whimper that dean’s affinity for Rite II, which he not-so-subtly sneaked in the back door by celebrating Holy Baptism as often as possible, thereby forcing Holy Communion into Rite II on those Sundays. Dick would have blown a gasket to see liturgy turned into such a personal playground. Clyde Holloway and Bruce Power at the Cathedral fixed it for themselves by retiring/resigning, and one of them even returned after that dean was gone.

But I digress.

Another example of congregations being willingly misled is in the printing of hymn texts in service leaflets or projected onto screens, diabolical practices that started in the late 1990s in churches everywhere. Hymn texts alone were now printed or projected as some sort of perceived convenience. But musical notation and a multitude of additional information for each hymn were now absent, and congregations everywhere who followed this practice began to regress into the most musically ignorant in modern Christianity.

Dick would have lost his mind at all this, and I nearly have. I have maintained all along that musical ignorance aside, there is little that looks more ridiculous than a white-collar congregation singing sturdy hymns of the faith not from the sturdy repository of music called the hymnal but rather from a flimsy service pamphlet they are going to throw away upon exiting the building.

But I digress again.

Despite the propriety of the liturgy on a general level at St. John’s, the time of announcements following the Peace was often a cringeworthy wild card. We never knew what was coming, whether a small troupe doing a silly Rally Day skit or the Senior Warden singing a stylized rendition of Happy Birthday to the rector. [True story. In 1992, the Senior Warden sang ‘He’s turning 50 in the morning’ to the tune ‘Get me to the church on time.’] Apparently, we musicians were the only ones bothered by that shift in tone during otherwise fairly respectable liturgy. Since the liturgy was so dignified and the shenanigans so base, the contrast was that much more cringeworthy. I often wanted to slip out of the room or crawl under something. And both Dick and I felt extra-conspicuous to be observing all that silliness while vested. We felt like we had shown up at a crawfish boil in tuxedos.

Next time: Dick’s complaints