I woke up on New Year's Day with this tune in my head, the solution to a puzzle I'd been working on for a few days.
This year, our congregation is doing the important work of discerning the place and extent in our liturgy for expansive language. If you don't wanna click away, here's a primer: You'll likely have noticed that most of our language for God--the first person of the Trinity, that is, the creator/director/protector of the universe--is decidedly masculine. Meanwhile we, or at least many of us, don't actually have any deeply-held beliefs that God is male. The first person of the Trinity isn't even human, after all, and every facet of "fatherhood" that we apply in that metaphor is something that mothers do as well.
It's all a bit of harmless fun, until you realize that Christian conceptions of God have influenced society just as much as society ever influenced that metaphorical language in the first place. As Mary Daly famously wrote, "If God is male, then the male is God." There's a vicious cycle there, and we're nowhere close to escaping it as a capital-C Church.
Anyway, much has been said by other people about this, and so there are plenty of places to read it. Let's just say that I'm on Team We Can Do Better. But as we tinker with liturgy--and there are entire guidelines on this as the national Episcopal Church does some of the same work--it's very important that we retain the sacred quality of the Book of Common Prayer. So here's why I'm quite proud of this Gloria: Just as in that 2017 Agnus Dei, my Romantic influences shine through. This is essentially a dressed-down lied. The result is a kind of timelessness that eases any potential shock from the language.
And as for that language, well, after a month of singing it, no one in the congregation ever mentioned that they noticed a change. Where this text diverges from the familiar words of the Gloria, it flies in familiar phrases from scripture and from other prayers we do in various parts of the year:
- The first set of arpeggios borrow "holy, mighty, and immortal" from the Trisagion, and "thanks and praise" from the beginning of our Eucharistic prayers.
- The middle section that's addressed to Jesus replaces the "right hand of the father" bit with a request to intercede for us.
- The return to the A melody identifies Jesus as "worthy to be praised." We could stick with "you alone are the Lord" there--Jesus is still quite canonically male--but we've already called him that!
I'm proud to have contributed this piece to the liturgy at St. John's, and happy to continue with the work our liturgical task force has been doing. It's early days for the widespread and enthusiastic adoption of expansive language, but as the kids say, I'm here for it.