Time Warps

This week's essay at my favorite Anglican Web site, Anglicans Online (edit: archived at the Wayback Machine), is worth the read:

Some number of years ago, when visiting San Francisco's sprawling Chinatown, at lunch we encountered a tour group from the People's Republic of China. One of our number spoke Chinese well enough to converse with them while we waited for our food to arrive. It was fascinating to learn that the Chinese were visiting San Francisco to look at their own history. They saw the city as a snapshot of Chinese culture, pickled in time, whose residents preserved as much as possible the China of 1850, from which San Francisco had been populated. The visiting Chinese were fascinated by the antique dress, the quaint old customs, and the old-fashioned language. Our most vivid memory of the event was of the visitor who spoke some English remarking 'This little town is more Chinese than China is.'

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The language of Elizabeth I, of 'thee' and 'thou', still remarkably common in US churches, was nowhere to be heard in [an English] church, in the land where she reigned. The liturgical nuances that, for many, define an Anglican liturgy were gone: no chanting, no genuflection, no bells. But by definition this church in the land of the Angles is an Anglican church.