The Rev. Steve Costa, (bottom) archdeacon of the Diocese of Hawai’i, during a May 8 meeting urges the Prayer Book, Liturgy and Music committees to support adding Liliʻuokalani of Hawai’i to the church calendar. Also pictured are the Ven. Stannard Baker (top left), chair of the deputies’ committee, and the Rev. Philip Dinwiddie, timekeeper. Photo: Zoom screenshot
[Episcopal News Service] The legislative committees on Prayer Book, Liturgy & Music tackled a weighty agenda during its May 8 meeting, receiving testimony on eight of the 23 resolutions scheduled for a hearing.
Most of the people who signed up to testify addressed resolutions that would add people to the official church calendar. Because the calendar, often known as Lesser Feasts and Fasts, is considered part of the Book of Common Prayer, any changes require action by two consecutive General Conventions.
Resolution C021 would affirm a second reading and place Élie Naud on the calendar. Naud was a French Huguenot who came to New York in the 1700s after spending time as a galley slave. He became a member of Trinity Church, Wall Street, where for 15 years he worked with Black slaves and Native Americans to prepare them for baptism. He later became a member of Église du Saint-Esprit, a French-speaking Episcopal parish in New York, and he also started a school for poor children and the children of slaves.
St. Esprit’s rector, the Rev. Nigel Massey, who has served the church for 30 years, spoke in favor of the resolution. Early in his tenure serving the church, he read a former rector’s history of the parish and was struck by a sentence that has stayed with him ever since: “Our church can claim at least one who in another community would have been canonized as a confessor and missionary, the saintly Élie Naud, slave and servant of slaves.”
Parishioners Wendy Range and Joris Burmann also supported the resolution. Range described how the church annually commemorates Naud’s death on Sept. 7 with prayers in French and English at his grave in the Trinity Church Wall Street’s churchyard. Burmann, who also is a postulant for Holy Orders in the Diocese of New York, said Naud could serve as “an ecumenical bridge” both for individuals and for churches, since many people have been members of other denominations before finding The Episcopal Church
Four people, three from the Diocese of Hawai’i, spoke in favor of A124, which would approve on first reading the addition of Liliʻuokalani of Hawai’i to the calendar. A confirmed member of the Cathedral of St. Andrew in Honolulu, she was queen of the Hawai’ian Kingdom when her government was overthrown in 1893 by forces backed by the U.S. Navy. With her people facing such overwhelming force, she chose not to fight to hold her crown and urged her people to respect her decision. She later was imprisoned.
The Rev. Steve Costa, archdeacon of the Diocese of Hawai’i, said that through her selfless service to her people and her surrender to prevent the deaths of others, “she personified the beloved community long before we even thought of these things.” He also noted that Liliʻuokalani had composed what is known as the Queen’s Prayer, or Ke Aloha o Ka Haku, which still is sung by almost every church in Hawai’i on Sundays.
Two other Hawai’i deputies, Mary Carpenter and Ryan Kusumoto, also spoke in favor, with Carpenter calling Liliʻuokalani “a model of the living native Hawaiian spirit for most of us Indigenous, Pacifica people,” while Kusumoto praised her selflessness in saving her people at the cost of her crown. “She stood down, so her people could stand up,” he said. “If she did not surrender to the American militant colonizers, there may not be native Hawaiians here today.”
House of Deputies Vice President the Rev. Rachel Taber-Hamilton, a member of Shacken First Nation, said that recognizing Liliʻuokalani would be an important part of “the church’s overall commitment to reparation and reconciliation with the Indigenous peoples of every land in which our church had a part in weaponizing theology to justify genocide.”
The commemoration of Howard Thurman, a Black pastor, educator, theologian and civil rights leader, on first reading was proposed in C011 by the Diocese of California and in C012 by the Diocese of Northern California. The two resolutions differ only slightly in their language, and Northern California deputy the Rev. James Richardson spoke in favor of both. The explanation accompanying each one describes well his “biography and influence on the civil rights movement, which was enormous, and the reasons for adding him to the calendar,” Richardson said. He noted that while about 300 people currently are commemorated in The Episcopal Church’s calendar, only about a dozen are African American and fewer still are African American theologians.
Thoma Lipartiani, from the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe, joined the meeting from the Republic of Georgia to support Resolution C020 adding Ilia Chavchavadze of Georgia on first reading. He described Chavchavadze as a public figure, journalist, publisher, writer, poet and human rights activist “who united Georgian society around three cornerstones of our nation – language, homeland, faith.” Chavchavadze was canonized by the Georgian Orthodox Church in 1987, according to information provided with the resolution.
Turning to matters of liturgy, James Frazer, a member of St. Stephen and the Incarnation in Washington D.C., suggested a variety of changes to Resolution A114, which would authorize two expansive language versions of the Book of Common Prayer’s Eucharistic Prayer C. Frazer offered some changes in and reorganization of some proposed wording.
Deputies committee chair the Ven. Stannard Baker of Vermont asked Marty Wheeler Burnett, associate professor of church music and director of chapel music at Virginia Theological Seminary, to speak about two resolutions dealing with hymns and hymn texts – A130 and A131.
Burnett, who also is a member of the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music, said that A130 came out of a 2022 General Convention resolution mandating the commission to examine colonialist, racist, white supremacist, imperialistic and nationalistic language in hymns. Focus groups since then have shown “widespread interest in and need for alternative versions of problematic texts,” she said.
The resolution calls on the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music to develop and for Church Publishing Incorporated to publish a digital collection of alternative versions of hymn texts that congregations could use with permission of the diocesan bishop. Burnett noted that copyrights can be an issue on all hymn texts, and any that the commission would include in this new collection would have permissions secured as needed.
She also spoke in favor of A131, which calls on the commission to develop a new supplement to the Hymnal 1982. “It has been 20 years since The Episcopal Church published a hymnal supplement, and much has happened in 20 years,” she said. “It is time.” Current hymnal supplements are Come Celebrate! (1991) and Wonder, Love, And Praise (1997).
Among the resolutions that drew no testimony were second readings authorizing calendar additions of the consecration of Barbara Harris; Harriet Tubman; Simeon Bachos, the Ethiopian eunuch; and Frederick Howden Jr.
Action will be taken on all these resolutions at a future meeting. They then will be considered by the 81st General Convention when it meets in Louisville, Kentucky, June 23-28.
—Melodie Woerman is a freelance reporter based in Kansas.