Choral Evensong on Armistice Day

There’s a performance which has been running non-stop for more than three hundred years in some of the most theatrical buildings throughout the world. Its essential script and structure has remained virtually unaltered in that time. It invariably includes ancient poetry dating back as far as the late bronze-age set to some of the most beautiful choral music from the renaissance period up to the present day. Its form encourages active participation from an audience congregated in the most beautiful of settings- and it doesn’t cost a penny. Despite its ancient origins, (the roots of the service come from the early monastic tradition) Choral Evensong seems as relevant to the great concerns of the day as ever. This one will no doubt run and run and indeed such is its continuing popularity that it has been broadcast at least once a week on BBC Radio 3 since 1927.

On Armistice Day this year, the broadcast came from my Diocesan Cathedral, Chichester, although I didn’t catch up with it till the following Sunday when it was repeated at 4 pm. Now I must be honest and confess that this was virtually my first, albeit vicarious, experience of Choral Evensong but I listened to the service partly because it came from Chichester and also since I am becoming increasingly aware of the rich heritage of traditional Anglican forms of worship as I approach fifty. As an artist, and specifically a man of the theatre, I can recognize the irresistible dramatic force of rituals such as these. Acts of worship at their best are like great theatre in so far as they confront us with the reality of the human condition and yet enable us to transcend it, or at least see ourselves in the context of a bigger picture. Recently the news has been full of tragic stories of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Last week the Prime Minister was lambasted by a distraught mother because he wrote what appeared to be a hastily scrawled letter of condolence in which he misspelled her dead son’s name. The government is being hounded by the media for its alleged failure to properly equip and thus protect its troops. Bitter arguments rage back and forth about the rights and wrongs of this war to the point where we are almost at each other’s throats and have forgotten how and why the war in Afghanistan began. It seems our society badly needs to regain a more sober perspective on events and perhaps a humbler one.

Well it certainly worked for me last Sunday as I sat on my bed and tuned into Radio Three as the afternoon light began to fade outside. The sound of the choir singing Purcell’s ‘Thou Knowest, Lord, the Secrets of Our Hearts’ for the introit immediately lifted me out of the vague lethargy and distraction of a typical Sunday afternoon spent at home. As the liturgy began, I remembered I had a copy of The Book of Common Prayer and so I could follow the familiar general confession which reminds us that ‘we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep’ and ‘followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.’ (Food for thought indeed!) I was especially struck by the chanting of the psalms which I also managed to follow in my edition of the prayer book. Singing through The Book of Psalms is at the heart of Choral Evensong and goes back to the earliest forms of Christian worship. As I suggested earlier, many of these religious poems were written as early as the end of the Bronze Age and were probably in many cases re-workings of even more ancient Canaanite or Egyptian texts. The psalms remind us that war has been with us since the dawn of civilization and that humanity has from the earliest times sought deliverance and hope by reciting prayers and hymns to God or gods with words which remain as poignant as ever: ‘O be thou our help in trouble, for vain is the help of man.’(Psalm 60) The Old Testament reading in the service was from the Book of Micah in which the prophet looks to ‘the last days’ and famously declares: ‘And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.’ (Chapter 4) One of the great things about Evensong is the absence of a sermon and so the full force of ancient prophetic words like this are left to speak for themselves. We are made to wonder at the mysterious authority of such profound utterance. After the reading of the Beatitudes from the Gospel of Matthew which includes Christ’s timely encouragement, ‘blessed are the peacemakers,’ the choir sung an anthem by Maurice Greene based around some verses from Psalm 39: ‘Lord, Let me Know Mine End.’ This beautiful setting by the English composer gently reminds us of our mortality and teaches us to reflect deeply on this reality. How many of the man-made catastrophes throughout the ages such as war erupt when we lose touch with the ground of our being and imagine ourselves as immortal gods? The service concluded with the Hymn, ‘All My Hope on God is Founded.’ Seeing in my copy of the Radio Times that this was coming up, I quickly dug out a hymn book from another room so I could join in with the congregation. Both the music and the words are wonderfully transcendent and full of hope whilst remaining utterly realistic about the perennial failings of every human society. For me and no doubt many others that Sunday, and indeed the previous Armistice Day, this glorious hymn together with the rest of the service put the world to rights, at least for the time being:

Pride of man and earthly glory,
sword and crown betray his trust;
what with care and toil he buildeth,
tower and temple, fall to dust .
but God’s pow’r,
hour by hour,
is my temple and my tower.