'To Cherish the Life of the World'

"We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water," reads the baptismal service in the 1979 prayer book. "Over it the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation."

Although the reference to Noah's story is stressed by the early church fathers, a modern bishop nonetheless declared to the Subcommittee for the Revision of the Book of Common Prayer that "nobody believes that in this day and age."

"Anthropologists do!" chimed in scientist Margaret Mead, and thus, more than four decades after realizing fame for her Coming of Age in Samoa and manifold studies of initiatory rites, she began her spirited consultations interwoven with the group's work for the next six years, 1967-73, missing but one meeting.

"She made a vivid impression right away, little and dumpy, with her forked walking stick," the distinguished monk-scholar the Rev. Bonnell Spencer, OHC, was to tell Mrs. Mead's probing biographer, Jane Howard, of the first day the anthropologist came to General Seminary in New York from her office at the American Museum of Natural History.

"A good ritual is very like a natural language," Mrs. Mead informed the World Council of Churches, on which she represented the Episcopal Church. "[It] has been spoken for a very long time by very many different kinds of people, geniuses and dullards, old people on the verge of dying and children just learning to speak, men and women, good people and bad people, farmers, scholars and fishermen."

Ritual, she went on, is "a language that carries overtones of very old meanings and the possibilities of new meanings...[and] must be old, otherwise it is not polished ... otherwise it cannot reflect the play of many men's imaginations ... otherwise it will not be fully available to everyone born within the tradition."

It was apparent to all of her 20 or so sub-committee colleagues that even though she was called in as an anthropologist, the group she most enthusiastically seemed to be representing was the laity. Although opposed to the ordination of women at first light, she later said that "men have so damaged the priesthood that women are needed to repair it."

Mrs. Mead's molding of the liturgy stemmed from an Anglo-Catholic status that dated back to her friendship with a rector's daughter and her subsequent baptism at age 10 when, she felt, she "needed an anchorage." A devotee of the King James Bible and a regular churchgoer wherever she was teaching or lecturing, she especially observed the finer parts of ceremonial in her own parishes, St. Luke-in-the-Fields and, upon moving uptown, St. Matthew's-and-St. Timothy's - and, year after year on Good Friday, St. Mary the Virgin.

She received her last communion from an old friend, the Rev. Austin Ford, who came from Atlanta to see her at New York Hospital. She died there, Nov. 15, 1978, and is buried in the churchyard of Trinity Church, Buckingham, Pa., where she was baptized and first married. A gravestone inscription, chosen by her only child, carries a recurrent, reassuring phrase that runs through many of the anthropologist's books and papers, "To cherish the life of the world."

The Rev. James B. Simpson is TLC's Washington correspondent.