Copyright: © 2001 Paul F. Bosch.
This document may be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes with credit to the author and mention of the Lift Up Your Hearts web site http://www.worship.ca/ as the source.

It is early Easter morning. A small "house-church" community has gathered at the Gothic arch outside its accustomed place of worship: the former "chapter room" of a former University fraternity house. An enormous paschal candle, lit some hours previous at the Great Vigil of Easter, stands in the archway. The brief Tenth Century Easter drama, the Quem Quaeritis Trope --Find it elsewhere Quem Quaeritis at this website.-- has just ended, and the assembly now follows the actors portraying the Angel and the Three Marys in procession into the worship space, singing "Come, you faithful, raise the strain...".

Many gasp audibly at what greets their eyes as they enter. The ceiling is festooned with loops of multi-coloured paper streamers and curling serpentines; multi-coloured balloons sway in the drafts overhead; the floor is carpeted with confetti and paper flower petals. There is no question that today is "different from every other day."

Paper streamers and balloons and confetti to decorate "the House of the Church"? Even I would agree: It's very "'Sixties." But hey, the Seventh Decade of the Twentieth Century was my era! I loved the 1960's. Faithful readers of these pieces will not be surprised to hear this. The Beatles, the Kingston Trio, the Weavers, the tie-dyes, the fringes, the beads, the paisleys, the "Beat" poets, the Pilgrimage Chapels at Vence and Ronchamp, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko: what an outpouring of creativity! Again: I loved the 'Sixties! See below.

Paraments and banners in Christian worship --and paper streamers and balloons!-- represent a human attempt to enrich and enliven our worship spaces. Colours and textures can teach, as you are perhaps tired of being reminded in these pages.

At least one contemporary church architect surmises that fabric paraments at pulpit or ambo derive from the Jewish tradition of honouring the scrolls of the Torah by providing them with a splendid fabric cover, which was then unwrapped for their reading when the scrolls were placed on the ambo. The familiar fabric "pulpit fall" evolved from this precedent. An ambo Bible will often be provided, as well, with one or two narrow fabric "page markers" in seasonal colours and appropriate textures; it would be salutary if these were actually used to mark the Day's readings, in parishes which have them. (An important Ritual Principle: The best symbols are those which also function.)

Many handsome altars and ambos may not need paraments at all, at least regularly. A "fair linen" should, of course, adorn the Table for the Holy Meal, with a "cere-cloth" underneath. "Cere" is Latin for "wax," and an altar "under-cloth" impregnated with wax was originally intended to prevent wine stains from discolouring the stone or wood of the altar's "mensa" ("table"); I'd settle these days for a heavy-gauge plastic sheet, of the exact dimensions of the mensa, placed under, and thus completely hidden by, the fair linen. In any event, both cere-cloth and fair linen are necessary and indispensable "vesture" for an altar; coloured paraments, such as an antependium or a frontal, are never necessary, but might nevertheless be appropriate and enrich the visual ambiance splendidly.

Not incidentally, I recall speaking with a priest at Coventry Cathedral some years ago. He was remarking on the extraordinary measures that Bishop and staff had felt were necessary in that handsome, but regrettably long and narrow, new building. The "new" Coventry, although cosmetically "modern", is essentially an East-wall, "two room" Gothic Cathedral, with all its attendant architectural (and theological!) problems: See Essays 32 and 33. My friend was maintaining that, in such an enormous space, with such enormous distances between the people and the "high altar," the imagination was taxed to find any excuse to bridge those distances. So for example, preachers often took a position at a portable ambo in the "crossing," to deliver the sermon, ignoring the building's actual pulpit, which was fixed to a chancel arch "fifteen feet above criticism." And the altar candles and altar linens -- Here's the point I'm getting to!-- were actually carried forward during the Offertory procession, along with gifts of bread and wine and money, to be utilized only then to "dress" the altar.

Banners of course can add their distinctive visual chorus of praise to any of the church's services, with the added virtue that, unlike paraments, they're portable. They should, of course, like paraments and vestments, be in the colour of the Day or Season. And they flutter and flap handsomely: still another sensory enrichment. For this reason alone it seems counter-productive, to me, to fasten the bottom edge of a processional banner to its banner pole, with fabric loop or finger, so as to prevent their fluttering and flapping! That flutter and flap are precisely part of the charm of banners! Otherwise, you might as well be carrying a wooden board on your banner pole.

That, in any event, is also a good idea I'd commend to you: a processional icon, mounted on a board, perhaps fitted with little bells along its bottom edge, and carried aloft on a banner pole. Splendid!

And please: No plastic or muslin dust covers, at altar or ambo, during the week --a sure sign that nobody expects anyone actually to use this place for prayer apart from Sunday morning!

That final word about the 'Sixties, promised above: I can recall hearing, more than twenty years ago, an address by a theologian, a Roman Catholic laywoman, that changed my life significantly. She was arguing --I'm not certain if these were her own perceptions, or if she was quoting someone else-- that every great break-through in human history (like the Fall of the Roman Empire, or the Reformation, or the Renaissance) is preceded by two other periods.

A) The first preceding period is one of experimentation and innovation; it can last some months or years, and its effect is to begin to stretch the human imagination, to offer new possibilities, new paradigms, new ways of thinking and perceiving and acting. This first period is radical, even left- wing, socially and politically and theologically.

B) This is followed, almost invariably, by a second period, one of reaction and retrenchment. This period, too, can last some months or years, and it represents a kind of failure of nerve: "Oh, no! We can't allow that! What you're proposing is too scary, too threatening to the old order. We've got to screw down the lid, tighten the ship, return to old verities..." --that kind of thing. This second period is reactionary, even right-wing, socially and politically and theologically.

C) Then, after some months or years, when all that reaction is out of our system, then the New Age breaks through in all its splendour. And --Surprise!-- it looks like A), the first period!

At a pastors' conference a couple of years ago, I was repeating, and endorsing, this A-B-C view of human history in a group of peers, and (I confess it!) somewhat pontificating that the 1960's represent period A. "Look at what went on in the 'Sixties," I was saying: "The Civil Rights movement, the Peace movement, the Womens' movement, Gay Liberation, the Ecology movement, the Second Vatican Council..."

"No," I was saying, "I wouldn't want to endorse everything that happened in the 'Sixties. But, mark my words," I said, wagging my finger in the air, swept up in the grandiloquence of my own pontificating, "when the Kingdom of God comes in its fulness, it will look something like the 'Sixties!"

"Maybe," said a pastor-friend standing nearby, "But not so much paisley."