To all clergy who follow the Cafe:

I (along with several others I know) am living proof of this trend. You all are doing a great job already, but I for one could go for more. We love it when the liturgy is chanted. We love incense. We love bells.

So many of us Millennials (I think that's what I am) have spent time in Europe, and just about all of us feel more spiritual there. I think it's because we feel the sense of this when we tour churches, cathedrals, monasteries, castles, etc. even when services aren't going on. Ancient tradition makes us feel spiritual. It helps worship becomes a "thin place."

This sort of high church helps seekers (that's me) connect to the positives of religious history. It also helps soften potential doctrinal issues to allow for continued worship.

Chanting the liturgy helps solve the problem of mundane repetition while still allowing for the meditative benefits of familiarity and repetition.

Everyone loves Christmas and Easter because there's more of this stuff. This is one area where my vote is with Tradition even more than Reason!

And finally, I can't tell you all how happy I am to have found TEC as a spiritual home that fosters this type of worship.

-Grant Chaput

Sounds wonderful.

Solemn High Mass is what hooked us at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in NYC, when we began to attend in the mid-90s. Don't know if it was religion, but it was wonderful theater. Organ, voice, incense, color -- stimulating to most of the senses. We went around telling everyone that this was the way to do church. It helped that the rector, Edgar Wells, had changed his position on women's ordination to full support and ran the parish like window onto the world. We had a young German Lutheran woman as an intern for a year, a delight, and visits from the likes of Richard Holloway, Kenneth Leach, and Victor Stock (when Affirming Catholicism seemed to have a future). Wells was very traditional, but had a trick of presenting doctrine or Gospel by saying, "The Church teaches," or "Scripture says," thereby not raising the question of whether any of it actually happened. He may have believed it, but he left the door open for people at all stages of belief or non-belief. I hope that the church in Lawrence has preaching as open as its Mass is appealing.

By the way, in the photo accompanying the story, the priest isn't waving incense at the congregation -- he's asperging them.

Murdoch Matthew
spouse of Garydasen

Liturgically traditional, social progressive . . . my ideal . . . and I'm unyoung
Pam Alger

I do believe this is one of the ways of the future. I won't say *the* way, of course, as I realize it's not everyone's cup of tea, but I'm all for well-done (and understood) Solemn High Masses!

This GenXer says: "More mass, less mess."

Greg Jones

and this "Generation Jones" -er has been saying/shouting/bellowing/chanting this for the past 27 years, ever since since his conversion.

We may have to wait for the bulk of the boomers to enter the Church Triumphant, if we all last that long...

Liturgically traditional, social progressive . . . my ideal . . . and I'm unyoung

Me too, Pam (though I would say I'm either Young or Unyoung depending on the social cohort I'm compared with. Among Episcopalians, too often the former! ;-/)

However, I'm still a passionate believe in the High - Low - Broad "Big Tent" of Episcopal liturgy. There's something for everyone!

[Whereas being "Socially Progressive" is more often---though not invariably---a question of being True-to-the-Gospel. I have infinitely more in common w/ a Low Church LGBT-affirming Protestant, than a High Church misogynist homophobe (of which there are still too many!). OCICBW.]

JC Fisher

This is no secret. Here in Montreal, one of our `youngest` congregations (in terms of the average age of members) is St. John the Evangelist, which does Solemn High Mass from the 1962 BCP every Sunday. The Cowley Fathers attract large numbers of students to the offices and eucharist at their monastery in Cambridge.

My own history in the church is that I became active in a campus ministry that sang solemn evensong every Sunday during term.

There is an element of the transcendent in the old forms of worship, which appeals to many seekers, and which I find sorely lacking in the modern praise trend.

We may have to wait for the bulk of the boomers to enter the Church Triumphant, if we all last that long...

Please don't blame us boomers. We like this stuff too. It was the priests that took it away from us. We hated the schlock masses and folk messes they forced on us back in our college days because they claimed we were supposed to like this sort of garbage. Try to tell them that and they said that even if we didn't like this manure other "young people" did and they would come. They didn't come. And lots of us left.

I hung in and complained and fought for most of my adult live until finally got sick of the whole thing, left the Church 10 years ago to join the Unchurched, and don't anticipate going back. It isn't just the liturgy: it's the principle of the thing. The liturgy is supposed to the be work of the people, but we were bullied and beaten up so the clergy could get their way.