More than an Order of Words (midweek)

 Deacon Nicholas Ferrar

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

December 1, 2015

More than an order of words….  

Today is the feast day of Nicholas Ferrar.   He was an English businessman and one-time deputy chief of the Virginia Company that founded the English colony in the Americas.   Business reversals and inner turmoil led him in 1624 to renounce what he called “worldliness,” the rat race for money, social prestige, and power.  He and his family moved from London to the village of Little Gidding in Cambridgeshire where they took a former Church, then in use as a barn, restored it for worship, and founded a community of prayer and service to others.  They established a school, an almshouse (a dormitory for homeless and elderly women), and a medical dispensary for the neighborhood. 

The Ferrars were devout Anglicans who loved the Prayer Book and appreciated the Benedictine spirituality behind much of it.  They chanted and said Daily Morning and Evening Prayer in community for 20 years, inviting their neighbors to attend as they chose.  Children in their school memorized the various psalms, and recited them in the Sunday Prayer service, for which they were paid a penny each.   They had the vicar of Great Gidding come to the village to preach once a week, and once a month, to celebrate Holy Communion.    In addition to Morning and Evening Prayer, Nicholas recited the Great Litany once a day, said the “small hour” offices of the mid-morning, mid-afternoon, and middle of the night.  The Community observed all the traditional fasts, including Lent, Advent, Ember Weeks, and Fridays. 

King Charles I recognized the piety and devotion of the Little Gidding Community, making sure that he obtained a copy of the hand-written Gospel Harmony the Community had produced.  His Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, insisted on ordaining Nicholas, who nevertheless insisted “for humility’s sake” that he remain a deacon and not be ordained to the Priesthood.    Nicholas died in 1637 after a short illness.  He died at 1 a.m. on the day after Advent Sunday, the time he usually rose and went to pray.   The Community continued after his death, but was finally destroyed by the Puritans (who also executed Charles I and Laud).  The puritans had for decades been scandalized by the Ferrars, calling them “Protestant monks and nuns.” 

T.S. Elliot named his final canto of the Four Quartets “Little Gidding,” after Ferrar’s community.  In it he describes prayer as a thin place: “intercession” here is an “intersection” between the day-to-day and the timeless:

“…You are here to kneel

Where Prayer has been valid.  And prayer is more

Than an order of words, the conscious occupation

Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

And what the dead have no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead:  the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment

Is England and nowhere.  Never and always.” 

Grace and Peace, 

Fr. Tony+