The Living Church

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The Living ChurchMay 14, 1995A Literary Succession by EDWARD C. RUTLAND210(20) p. 12-13

A Literary Succession
Windows at St. David's Church, Denton, Texas, honor four saintly persons who contributed in different ways to English literature
by EDWARD C. RUTLAND

Four companion windows in St. David's Church, Denton, Texas, indicate the history and variety of literature and learning in Anglicanism. Pointing, by way of art, to the lives and sacred creativity of the personalities depicted, these windows are best valued in reference to their architectural and civic setting. The city of Denton is the home of two large universities, and the Church of St. David of Wales is one of two Episcopal parishes there that minister to both the business and academic communities.

The story of the windows began when St. David's expanded its facilities in 1985. Its architecture of an English village church was carefully preserved. The new main entrance is a walnut-paneled hallway which serves as a narthex. Through this, the congregation enters to worship, a number of those present usually being college students, some away from home for the first time, some visiting an Episcopal church for the first time.

The ambience of the entryway is both subtle and important, especially because it is an extension of the nave and part of the liturgical setting. Originally a utility area, its four window openings glaringly called for special treatment and provided extraordinary opportunity.

The standard for the four companion windows was set by a window high in the east wall over the altar, a splendid example of stained glass art depicting Christ the King, immediately seen when one enters from the west.

When the idea for the four windows was proposed, enthusiastic and generous donors stepped forward. J. Wippell and Co. of Exeter, England, provided guidance, and in due time transformed the ideas of the select group and the rector's sketches into reality.

Illumination of the paneled hall was a challenge, because the windows are on one side only; thus, this liturgical entrance might be dark and unwelcoming. The Wippell firm solved this problem by giving these richly colored and highly detailed windows a translucence that reminds one of Salisbury Cathedral.

The church already had a "foursome" of windows representing the four gospels, and other windows presenting biblical and theological topics. It was perceived that a unifying theme for the narthex windows lay in the area of hagiology or the doctrine of All Saints. The decision was made to depict Anglicanism's "literary succession," to do this in historical sequence, and to represent four notable (saintly) persons who contributed in different ways to English literature and to Christian understanding. A variety of genre and periods in history are represented in these windows.

St. Hilda of Whitby (614-680) is included because she was both a woman in the decision-making processes of the early church (important in the city which includes the main campus of Texas Woman's University) and because she is a person of literary significance not to be forgotten. She is shown with the pastoral staff of her abbotship and holding a small church, representing her simple monastic settlement and its successful school.

She is noted for her Celtic sympathies but cooperative spirit at the Synod of Whitby (664). And she is appreciated for the literary and spiritual sensitivity with which she sponsored a rustic farmhand named Caedmon. Her encouragement helped him produce for his own Anglo-Saxon people vernacular poetry on Christian themes. Though his poems, done in bardic manner, were mostly lost in antiquity, they place him at the head of the long line of English poets. Honored as a saint according to early Celtic custom, her day in the Christian calendar is Nov. 18.

The Venerable Bede (c. 673-735) said "study, teaching, and writing have always been my delight." Indeed, his writings are wide ranging in subject matter, and vast in number, including 25 words of scriptural commentary, translations, treatises on grammar, poetics and calendar reform, plus biographies and more. He is said to have been the first known writer of English prose, though his vernacular prose texts have been lost.

A hint of his piety may be found in two of his poems set to music in the Episcopal Church's Hymnal 1982. But it is as "the first English historian" that he is generally known. His Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written in Latin, often translated, is still valued by scholars for being authoritative historiography according to 20thcentury criteria.

His attire identifies him as a "monk of Jarrow," as he is often called, for it was there that he did his life's work. But in the 11th century his remains were moved to Durham, and in 1370 were relocated to their present location, now a lovely shrine, in that cathedral. The day of his commemoration has been changed several times; since 1969 it has been May 25.

John Donne (c. 1572-1631) "No man is an island" - with such nautical analogies Donne spoke to the sea-faring people of England when he was dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, London. His writings are daunting if he is not identified at the outset as a multifaceted personality of genuine Renaissance proportions. (In the window he is shown in the garb of period, except that the dean's cassock is of a later date.)

Much is known of him through Izaak Walton's Life, through Ben Johnson's observations, through the erudite and often poetic correspondence which he exchanged with others, through their memorializations of him, but most notably through the autobiographical character of his writings.

To those who through his writings know him and perhaps love him, he is fascinating, exasperating and inspiring. He is a mixture of the sensuous, secular and worldly, and the intellectual, pensive and devotional.

Though in early adulthood a spendthrift who lived in respectable poverty, he was widely traveled and a man of immense learning. In both poetry and prose his language is in the style of the times: figurative, evocative and metaphorical - often in the extreme. His friend Ben Johnson reckoned that, as a result, his writings would perish. Happily T.S. Eliot regarded him as being in the direct current of English poetry. In his polemics he was careful to place himself in the theological mid-road of Anglicanism.

John Donne, priest, is one of the "worthies" added in recent years to the calendar of the prayer book in this country: March 31.

C.S. Lewis - Seven days short of the 65th birthday, and in failing health, C.S. Lewis died quietly at home Nov. 22, 1963. Since his home parish, Holy Trinity, Huntington Quarry, is on the outskirts of Oxford, he often went to confession and communion at the Church of St. Mary Magdalen, a high church parish in the heart of the university city that was the center of Lewis's life. Now, nearly a third of a century afterward, the world knows him better, and loves him more, than in 1963.

He was one of a remarkable group of 20th-century lay people - G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, to name a few. In an age of unfaith, cynicism, moral disorder and strange spiritual searchings, Lewis is read and admired by all sorts and conditions of people - the young, the old, from sacramentalists to fundamentalists, and beyond!

Born an Anglican, Lewis lost his faith during his teen years. In his maturity he knew the other side, the side of unfaith, its viewpoints and arguments. That perspective adds richness to his writings, and charm saving him from pedantry.

Because he popularized serious concepts, Time called him an "amateur theologian." Chad Walsh, in the New York Times Book Review, said Lewis had "the ability to make Christian orthodoxy exciting and fit for the brave rebel." His creed was stated in Mere Christianity: "the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times."

That he was sharply aware of humankind's sinfulness is seen in such works as The Great Divorce. In The Screwtape Letters, he deployed humor to disclose the wiles of the Devil. He wrote straightforward apologetics in The Problem of Pain, a luminous book to be read alongside Letters to Malcolm. And he did a very readable "word study" of biblical terms in The Four Loves.

In Surprised by Joy, he summarizes his experience of joy to his becoming a Christian this way:

"A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water...If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

(He is not included in the calendar in the prayer book.) o


The Rev. Edward C. Rutland is a retired priest of the Diocese of Dallas who resides in Texarkana, Texas.