The High Churchman Wishes Everyone a Happy and Blessed Oak Apple Day

 

Truly it is a day to be remembered and remembered joyously for it was on this date in 1660 that Charles II of England, son of the blessed martyr Charles I, did on his thirtieth birthday day ride triumphant into London to reestablish the rightful monarchy after the overthrow of the military protectorate of that odious puritan Oliver Cromwell. The fact that I share a birthday with Charles II is, of course, all the more reason for jubilation.

 

High Churchmen everywhere and, given the fact that I am the only High Churchman left, even Anglo-Catholics ought to make merry on this day and thank God above that once there was a time when His Word was heeded and justice was done on this earth. If they will not then they show themselves to be no true Englishmen, but only the rank pretenders and fawning, pseudo-papists they were always taken for.

 

The name Oak Apple Day derives from the oak being a symbol of Royalist solidarity during the sickening protectorate of the damnable, filthy puritan Cromwell. After the Battle of Worchester, in which Charles II unsuccessfully sought to take back the throne of his martyred father from the blessed King’s murderers, Charles was forced to flee as a fugitive. Oliver “Not Worth a Flagon of Puke Puritan” Cromwell offered £1,000 for his capture and decreed, in between bilious, reptilian hisses, that any subject found aiding and abetting the King would be executed for treason. It was here that the Catholics and High Churchmen of the realm, defying the edicts of Satan, came together and truly came into their own. Over the next six weeks, Charles was secreted between various inns, houses, and estates, utilizing many of the hiding places and covert subversive networks that the Catholics of England had been using for the past ninety years. It was while Charles was lodged at Boscobel House and the White Ladies Priory that word came that the Puritan Orcs of the Dark Lord Cromwell were closing in on the estate in their bloodthirsty search for Royalists. The King hid all day in the upper branches of a mighty oak near Boscobel House. A  Parliamentarian soldier even once passed below, Charles later attested, and it is truly amazing to consider that the raw, inhuman, animalish senses of one so bestial did not detect the King there aloft.

 

From there the King was spirited from one locale to another, narrowly escaping rampaging republican wretches many more times, until his eventual escape to France. Charles II never forgot the kindly oak that had hidden and protected him after the Battle of Worchester, however. Nine years later when decency, order and overall High Churchmanship were returned to England upon the Glorious Restoration, Charles II rode through the gates of London, his raiment bedecked with oak boughs and oak apples. Many triumphant Royalists who rushed to meet the returning sovereign were similarly decorated. I myself wear a sprig of oak in my lapel this day. I can go all May 29 without someone wishing me a happy birthday, but I will never allow Oak Apple Day to go uncommemorated.     

 

 

 

The High Churchman’s Summer Reading List

Ah, summer. It is not here yet and for this I am thankful. Spring has been entirely cooperative in that nearly the entire month of May, with a few disgustingly hot intervals, has been blustery, gray, and rainy. The outdoors enthusiasts who so proliferate in my home city all seem depressed and confused and I take every opportunity to laugh at their pain. 

 

The worm will soon turn for me, it always does. Hazes and thunderheads will be banished and Mr. Godforsaken Golden Sun will begin his reign of terror anew. Grown adults will prance about in short pants that early twentieth century mothers would have given little Charlie a right good cuffing for wearing when he was out playing stick ball. Women with nothing to offer the world but their posteriors and mammaries will see to it that the populace has fullest advantage to them. I, of course, will stay inside.

 

To commemorate and to assure a summer spent in the great indoors, few things are better and more prosaic than the summer reading list. I was taken aback to learn that many people compile summer reading with the intention of reading those books in some out-of-doors locale, a beach, for example, which has given rise to the highly objectionable notion of the “beach book”. There are a number of reasons I do not think that books are ideally read on beaches. Sand can get into the pages and compromise the integrity of the binding. The glare of those awful rays will reflect off the white paper, squeezing and straining the eyes.  The most prominent consideration against beach books is that all of the finest beaches I have experienced were windy and boulder strewn, offering few places for respite and reading, leaving one with few options other than, perhaps, to glance down now and again at a pocket volume of Plutarch or Shelley to steel oneself before continuing to trudge onward to the rocky promontory.  

 

My list is as follows

 

The Black Death by Joseph P. Byrne

Sketches by Boz by Charles Dickens

The Great Mortality : an intimate history of the Black Death, the most devastating plague of all time by John Kelly

Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope

The Black Death : natural and human disaster in medieval Europe by Robert S. Gottfried

High Churchmanship in the Church of England, From the Sixteenth Century to the Late Twentieth Century by Kenneth Hylson-Smith

The Black Death in Egypt and England : a comparative study by Stuart J. Borsch

 

I think that that will keep me relatively occupied until the leaves start to turn(leaves, turn. Ha! Never mind).The major move at the end of the summer may rob me of the opportunity to really delve into that last work on the plague but certain sacrifices must be made in the name of family and pragmatism.

 

The High Churchman Had a Really Weird Dream Last Night

Pictured above is the Reverend Dr. Peter Toon, theologian, custodian of the American Society for the Preservation of the Book of Common Prayer, personal hero, sometimes mentor, and the subject of a really weird dream I had last night.

 

I have never personally met Dr. Toon. We have exchanged correspondence over the years and I was always overjoyed to have in my email box missives written by an Oxford graduate and only wished his responses were as effusive and wordy as my original enquiries had been.

 

All the same, he featured prominently in an epic dream I had last night, which I will say has never happened with any other Anglican theologian. In this dream, Dr. Toon and I appeared to be close friends and compatriots something along the line of characters from an eighties buddy cop movie. We were always over at each other’s house eating popcorn, drinking soda-pop, and watching movies. Dr. Toon owned and piloted a massive, neo-Victorian, steam powered airship on which we would fly off to all sorts of distant locales in the interests of collecting rare manuscripts and artifacts pertaining to Anglican history and theology.

 

At one point in the dream, Dr. Toon and I were perched high in the rafters of the National Cathedral in Washington DC looking down at a host of shadowy, post-modernist clergy and laity engaged in denouncing the continued use of the 1928 Prayer Book. He and I repelled down on ropes into their midst and denounced them all with our combined erudition and learning and they were all dumfounded. I too was dumfounded when I awoke, though I must admit that I was left with a feeling of peace and warmth whenever I recollected the dream throughout the day. Something tells me that Dr. Toon would not feel the same way.

 

The High Churchman Explains Himself

 

 

Now then, onto more interesting and enjoyable matters: I feel a bit of explanation and justification is in order as regards my title of High Churchman and my assertion that I am, in all probability, the last of them.

 

High Churchman is, as one could imagine, a designation of religious belief and affiliation. It is also so much more, as this newly launched web log hopes to demonstrate. It is, currently and historically, a term most frequently applied in the context of Anglicanism and any and all religious bodies tracing their origins to the Church of England as it came to be codified between the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.

 

While the terms “high church” and “high churchman” first arose in 17^th century England, they are sill very much in currency in the worldwide Anglican Communion of today, and many modern, mainstream Episcopalians are familiar with them. It is, furthermore, entirely accurate to say that these people haven’t the slightest idea what they are talking about and that when they describe a person or a religious body as being “high church” they do so wrongly. Chances are they have never met a person or been aware of a parish that is truly High Church, because I appear to be, for all intents and purposes, the last one.

 

In order to give a proper picture of what high church actually means and what the High Churchman truly concerns himself with, it would be necessary to launch into a lengthy, dry, heavy-handed historical treatise that I would be only too happy to compose. In the interests of space and continued readership, however, I will have to be content with briefly quoting from one or two dry historical texts. I believe that it is also necessary to stress at this point that this blog is not, in and of itself, concerned with religion or the propagation of any religious perspective. While I am a practicing Christian, I maintain that my status as the Last of the High Churchmen is as much a matter of lifestyle and worldview as it is about my personal and theological convictions, though one may argue that such principals are inseparable. In reading the examples cited below, I ask the reader to deeply consider not so much the spirituality of the kind of religious practitioner described, but more the practical considerations of daily behavior, outlook on life, and relations with one’s fellow man.

 

James Thayer Addison in his The Episcopal Church in the United States 1789-1931 gives a very satisfactory account of high church belief and practice in the English speaking world before the before such things ceased to be understood and used correctly.

 

The High Churchman was not then greatly concerned with ritual, and he was vigorously anti-Roman. As an aid to maintaining the position of his Church, he avoided cooperation with Protestants and played but a small part in promoting the various humanitarian causes of the period.

 

In his description of Anglican/Episcopal church services of the early 19^th century, Addison inspires in me chills of excitement and pangs of longing:

 

The arrangement and the conduct of the services differed from modern practice more extensively than did the actual text of the Prayer Book itself. Nearly all parishes had services both on Sunday morning and on Sunday afternoon, each with its sermon. The morning service generally included not only Morning Prayer but also the Litany and Ante-Communion. Vestments, ornaments, and ritual were all much simpler than they have since become. The minister wore a long surplice without a cassock and usually without a scarf or stole. For the sermon he put off the surplice and donned a black gown… At the altar Churchmen today of whatever type would note an unfamiliar bareness. The priest celebrating the Holy Communion wore no vestments but the surplice and generally stood at the north end of the holy table. On the altar there were no flowers or candles or cross, at most a linen cloth; and the elements were ordinary bread and unmixed wine… Sermons in those days were longer than the modern congregation would tolerate and usually more concerned with doctrine… Perhaps the most notable contrast with the best sermons of our time would be found in the constant reference to Scriptural authority, the frequent quoting of texts, the ponderous formality of the language, and the general want of simplicity and directness.

 

Ah. Ponderous formality of the language, and the general want of simplicity and directness. Was there once truly such a glorious time in which to be a Christian?

 

The high church perspective, then, could be said to be concerned not only with ponderous but restrained modes of worship, but also with ponderous but restrained modes of thought and behavior; rigid formality in all things coupled with a proclivity to overanalyze and overcomplicate matters of spirituality and life in general. Such are the vanguards, banners, and bulwarks from which I shall never be dissuaded and which I shall seek to joyously exemplify in all future entries to this blog.

 

Now that it has been demonstrated to my satisfaction that I am, in fact, a High Churchman, one might ask why it is that I am the Last of the High Churchmen. Aside from the fact that rigidity and ponderousness has experienced a massive downturn in the past century and shows very little hope of being on the rise ever again, there are also to be considered a variety of theological and liturgical movements that overtook the Anglican/Episcopal church in the 19^th century. As I have already indulged myself enough in quoting at length from texts of religious history that only I will ever read, I will attempt to summarize these movements as briefly as possible.

 

There came a time when Anglicans of a “high” persuasion began to believe and worship after a fashion far more reminiscent of Roman Catholicism than classical Anglicanism. The end results were a lot of elaborate but extremely floofy vestments and liturgical actions that also encouraged an often warm, runny, and dangerously enthusiastic attitude towards religion. These came to be known as the Anglo-Catholics. They might have been and still are accused by their detractors of being overly concerned with formality and wholly out of touch with contemporary society, but they had nothing on the older type of High Churchman, who were now known as the “high and dry” and who were fast going extinct and eventually leaving only me behind. Today when people refer to “high church”, what they mean is Anglo-Catholicism, with all of its lace cottas, bejeweled chasubles, Romish-leaning theology, and simpering, closeted homosexuality. It is not my intention to castigate homosexuality here, but more to discourage simpering in closets. I hereby reclaim the title of High Churchman in the hopes of living up to and living by its neglected tenets, discouraging its any further being misused, and making as much noise as possible as I, with it, lapse into obscurity.

The High Churchman Introduces Himself

Hello. My name is A. Morley Jaques and I am the Last of the High Churchmen. I make this claim in all seriousness and do not expect it to be refuted any time soon. It would, perhaps, be best if I were to further qualify and expand upon this assertion, but I realize that it is not yet the time for such matters to be addressed. No, now is the time for introductions.

 

Truth be told, I am getting rather tired of having to write introductions to myself. Most key aspects of me become rather apparent upon any actual meeting and I am not in the habit of pointing out the obvious. Nevertheless, we sojourners in cyberspace are not afforded the simple luxury of being able to see and directly assess any of the other disembodied entities we may encounter. This reality has often left me feeling rather strange and awkward in my attempts to establish any sort of social or intellectual connection. Those personages I meet online may well be idealizations or outright fabrications; they may well only be putting themselves forward in hopes of harassing me or selling me something. I don’t even know why I dwell upon this, but it is, indeed, a notion I cannot escape.

All the same, the author believes himself obligated to give some picture of himself in the hopes of establishing a greater sense of conviviality and trust in his readers. As I have already pointed out, composing yet another autobiographical trifle is a tedious undertaking for me at this time. I shall therefore give forth a previously composed text that serves toward the intended purpose of this entry. It was written only recently and, being rather set in my ways, nothing it enumerates about me has been subject to change. I apologize if this seems a shabby trick to play upon any new readers. All subsequent postings to The Last of the High Churchmen will be wholly original material and, just as the Bard said of his account of The Famous History of the Life of Henry the Eight, All Is True.

I am six feet one inch tall, 140 pounds. Being abnormally thin but not at all slight of build gives me something of a bony, awkward appearance, rather, I sometimes think, like an old, dead, mossy tree. I have exceedingly curly, sand-blond hair which is most often frizzed and shaggy due to infrequent care or cutting. My face, overall, has often reminded me of a friendly, inquisitive dog of the short-nosed variety, like a Boxer or Boston terrier due to my small, somewhat upturned nose and heavy jaw. I have deep set, blue-green eyes, a heavy brow ridge, and a pair of dark, bushy eyebrows that are my favorite physical feature. My arms and hands are long and bony, my legs are exceedingly strong, my feet are huge and white. I have only a few stray hairs on my chest, but my arms and legs are well covered with thick tracts of reddish brown.

 

I have smoked a pipe every day of my life since I was sixteen. If I am able, I will always have a briar or cob pipe clenched in the far side of my jaw, speaking or breathing between puffs. The tips of both of my index fingers are cracked and grey from tamping tobacco and usually black under the nails. I always smell like tobacco, though I don’t notice it. By the end of the day I often have ash and soot around my nose and mouth. I don’t notice this either. I always carry at least two pipes on me, as well as two boxes of matches, pipe cleaners, and two or more tins of tobacco.

 

My clothes are all worn and rumpled and do not fit me very well. All of my trousers are olive-green corduroy and extremely baggy. I cannot find a pair of pants in my size, but do not like belts and so I am always wearing suspenders. I have several pairs and, I will admit, I do try to wear a color that I think matches what else I am wearing. I have tee shirts only as undergarments or to sleep in. I leave my shirt collar open during the summer and button all the way up starting around October. I almost always wear tattered green sweaters and tweed jackets. None of my jackets have elbow patches. I wear my oldest jackets the most and do not remember to put on a newer, fresher one even when going to important meetings or attending church. I like, but seldom wear, neckties. My wife thinks that I should wear argyle sox and so now I do. I have brown leather boots which are rather expensive on account of the size of my feet. I try to buy shoes as little as possible, but attempt to disguise their beaten up, worn down appearance with frequent polishing.

 

I like cold, grey days, log fires, long, meandering walks, and stacks of books. I drink excessive amounts of strong, black tea all the year round. My favorite tobaccos are heavy, thick cut blends that taste and smell like wood smoke. I enjoy eating boiled vegetables and unseasoned meat. I like pie better than cake, my preferred variety being wild berry. I like beer, specifically ale, and try to tell myself that I can drink more of it than I can or should. I enjoy picking my nose, but hope that I manage to avoid it when people are watching.

 

I have more books than I do any thing else. One month out of the year or so I will resolve to get them all shelved and in order, though this does not remain en force for very long. They are in stacks and piles in every room of my house and I am proud to say that I can usually know where any one is at the time. I am not what I would consider a diligent or disciplined reader as I am usually reading three or more books at any one time, often not finishing any one at a stretch. Sometimes when I have to get up early and am too groggy to read, I will stare at them on the shelf or on the table to ease myself into the day. My favorite authors are those of Victorian England or of Classical Antiquity. I have instant and unreasonable respect for writers who employ flowery prose, long sentences, or allusions to Greek and Roman mythology.

I have a strange attraction to fat women. I avoid their company because I will become distracted and fixated by them. There is also the fact that many very often have unpleasant or abrasive personalities. They nevertheless haunt my dreams and my mind often wanders to thoughts of them eating excessive amounts of food or breaking chairs. I have never publicly admitted this.

The first thing that people always seem to notice about me, aside from the fact that I am unusually thin, is my deep, booming voice, which, I am told, is in the Basso profondo range. It can sound alternatively warm and comforting or dramatic and bombastic and has secured me a good deal of work on the stage or on the radio, though I find that I really do dislike performing. I do find great joy in reading Shakespeare or the Bible aloud to myself. I have noticed when I am up late with friends that my voice will gradually change to the point where I sound more raspy than anything else, like any working-class American male who is a heavy smoker.

I am strong, for my size, and have dug ditches and lifted heavy loads for a living more than once in my life. I abhor physical labor and mistrust people who define themselves by it all the same. I have shoveled garbage for eight hours a day, stacked crates, walked twenty miles to a hardware distributor and am ashamed to admit or recollect it.

I am extremely fond of religion and consider myself a Christian. I am uncomfortable with being sentimental or preachy about it and I sometimes wonder if this makes me bad. By creed I am an Anglican. This means that I spend every Sunday and major feast day in the company of old people. I very much wish that I could simply say that I am a member of the Church of England, as that is all that I have ever wanted. Most people would see me as being somewhere between a traditionalist Catholic and an extremely formal Lutheran. When I am bored, I will occupy my mind with liturgical minutiae and obscure events from English church history.

My one greatest flaw, the one from which all of my other flaws derive, is that I do not sleep enough. I have avoided sleep for as long as I can remember. My excuses for this change. It is truly a shame. My fondest memories have been in dreams.