Feast & Fast

Malcolm Guite Reflects on His Ash Wednesday Visit to Nashotah House

The following column first ran on March 3, 2023, in Church Times as an installment of the Rev. Dr. Malcolm Guite’s Poet’s Corner column.

Shrove Tuesday found me in the snowy wastes of Wisconsin, fortunately not out on the wind-swept prairies themselves, or on the frozen lakes, for there was an ice storm moving in for the start of Lent, and I wouldn’t have survived exposure long, even in the tattered old tweed great-coat I was so glad I had brought with me. No, I was warmed and well ensconced in Nashotah House, a little corner of the Midwest that is forever Oxford. This seminary was founded in 1842 and carried the impulse, aesthetics, and theology of the Oxford Movement to what was then a fairly wild frontier. There are still some original wooden buildings that go back to those days, but later in the nineteenth century they built a fine stone chapel in a style that has become known, rather happily, as “Prairie Gothic,” and a lovely cloister which would not be out of place in an Oxford college, however strange it looks, to English eyes, situated by a frozen lake and visited sometimes by stray deer from the woods and occasional flocks of wild turkeys.

I was there to lead an Ash Wednesday retreat, and to preach at a BCP Eucharist, which was liturgically indistinguishable from any 8 o’clock service here, except that the responses were voiced not by an elderly congregation seated as decently far apart from one another as they could manage but by a strong cohort of young seminarians, both men and women, all dressed in their black cassocks and entering into the liturgy with great gusto.

The other interesting thing, which I later discovered from the dean, was that they are drawn, pretty much 50-50, from both the Episcopal Church USA and the Anglican Church in North America. So these two mutually severed branches of the original Anglican family, who are in so many parts of the States scarcely on speaking terms and still suing one another, are here, at least, forming unlikely friendships and in turn being formed together for priestly ministry, something which I take to be a sign of at least a little hope for the future. The suite, just off the cloister, in which they housed me for my stay, is wonderfully named Lambeth West, and on the wall of my bedroom was a glorious photograph of Archbishop Michael Ramsey, his cassock girded with a western belt and wearing a big wide Stetson. He looks completely happy, and I felt that at the moment that photo was taken, an English schoolboy’s cowboy fantasy was being fulfilled.

The morning of Shrove Tuesday was marked, I am glad to say, by pancake races round the cloister, much as I have seen them in Cambridge, a fine sight: fit young people, their cassocks flying, their pancakes flipping, and great roars of encouragement from all the onlookers. The evening had more of an American flavour, themed as Mardi Gras, with that last preLenten meal coming out in steaming bowls of New Orleans-style Jambalaya, washed down with locally brewed beer.

Ash Wednesday, by contrast was a day of complete prayer and fasting, the fast only broken midafternoon by hot cross buns. I was impressed by both the exuberance and the asceticism and particularly by the way they could move seamlessly from the one to the other. For it has always been the Church’s wisdom both that there should be a feast before a fast, and that the long fast of Lent should be followed by the great feast of Easter, for each informs and intensifies the other.

I’m back in Blighty now, but I was glad to have glimpsed something a little deeper and more grounded than the stereotype of a polarised American church and society about which we so often hear.