There is a story that Beethoven once played a newly composed sonata for a friend. When he had finished, the friend asked, What does it mean? Beethoven sat down at the piano and played the sonata all over again.

I feel something of Beethoven's implied disapproval as I stand here trying to talk about hymns. Talking implies reason, logic, thinking—everything we associate with the left side of the brain. Although they include words, hymns are firmly anchored by music to the affective and intuitive dimensions of experience, to the realm of the pre-rational. I don't mean that they are necessarily irrational, although some of them certainly are, but pre-rational, belonging to that shadowy but vital realm of thought that stands behind our logical constructions. Hymns cannot exist without music—can you imagine a liturgy in which we solemnly recited five hymn texts in spoken voice? Nor do they succeed without metaphor, alliteration, rhythm and all the apparatus of language we call poetry. As constructs of music and poetry, whether profoundly simple or highly exalted, they defy the kind of analysis we imply by the question: What does it mean?

Hymns are actually ritual events. They do not really exist in hymn books. They do not consist of paper and ink. Hymn books are only containers for the tradition. Hymns exist when people sing, whether a congregation on Sunday morning, a solitary performer in a Sikh Gurdwara, or myself alone in the shower. A hymn is there for as long as the singing goes on, providing like all rituals do, a bridge of passage from one moment to another, a bridge of passage that is illuminated by the combination of words and poetry to give expression to the significance of the moment. The passage of the moment may be only from one part of the liturgy to another, but it may also be from one state of mind to another—from cynicism to rejoicing, from indifference to repentance, from forgetting to remembering (as on Remembrance Day) from raw grief to healing lament. Hymns grasp the moment and open the way to opportunity beyond it.

Some of the oldest collections of hymns are from the Indian subcontinent. They are called the Vedas. Some of them are hymns of praise, but others are actually ritual formulas to be recited by a priest who is offering sacrifice. Some of the psalms of our tradition are not dissimilar. The earliest description of Christian worship by a non-Christian, the letter of Pliny the Younger to the Emperor Trajan, may imply a parallel understanding of the Eucharist prayer. He said it was the custom of Christians to gather before dawn on a fixed day and to sing a hymn, a carmen, to Christ, as if to a god. Whatever Pliny had been able to discover about the fabric of our worship, the ritual nature of hymns was secured at an early date in our history. Phos hilaron, the hymn to Christ at light, was sung to mark the passage from day to night, and even some of the hymns in the New Testament may have a similar use.

Of course our oldest hymn book is the psalter, which came to us with the rest of the Jewish Bible. If one sifts out some of the wisdom and history psalms, the rest of the collection is about two-thirds praise and one-third lament. I haven't done a detailed count in Common Praise, but I suspect our collection is similar, that roughly two-thirds of our hymns are praise and thanksgiving and one-third are expressions of longing and lament. I think this is a healthy pattern. We are most ourselves, most open to grace when we go beyond ourselves in praise and thanksgiving. This is fundamental to our faith tradition. Our primary act of worship is called Thanksgiving albeit in Greek. On the other hand, there is much to lament—our personal failures, our social hardness of heart, our destruction of the environment, the homelessness of people in our streets and parks. It is appropriate that our hymns capture this dark side of our human condition as well. However, it is also appropriate that, like the psalms of lament, they bend back to praise. The purpose of lament is not self-flagellation but repentance and conversion, and the purpose of conversion is transfiguration. This is one of the passages our hymns invoke.

One of the greatest strengths of hymns as we know them is that they are popular—they belong to the people. When Guru Nanak wanted to promote a religious synthesis beyond the conflicts of Hinduism and Islam and beyond the isolating violence of caste, he led people out into the forest to sit in a circle and sing hymns.

Singing hymns on the eve of the Sabbath is an important feature of Hasidic spirituality. Hymns mobilized the Wesleyan revival, providing people with gut-level access to theology. This popular dimension of hymnody has a dynamic two-way aspect. Hymns are not just an instrument to put ideas into the heads of the unsophisticated. They are a way in which the church as a living community can try out new ideas, new trends and at a popular level.

For example, prayer for the dead almost vanished among Anglicans after the Reformation because of the excesses and superstition of medieval piety. However, after the First World War many people felt a need to express in prayer their continuing love for those they had lost. Long before it would have been possible to insert prayers for those who had died in any Prayer Book, they were tried out, almost experimentally, in hymn collections. I believe it was the presence of such hymns in our 1938 Hymn Book that made it possible to include modest prayers for the dead in our 1962 Prayer Book.

Similarly, Canadian Anglicans were content to sing And now, O Father, mindful of the love, with its setting forth of the sacrifice of Christ, long before they could have contemplated similar words, what we call amamnesis in their Eucharist prayer. It is in this spirit that Common Praise reflects a broader and more inclusive use of images of God, a sharpened sense of justice and responsibility, a deeper commitment to the equality of the human family, a recognition that the kingdom is truly already even if not yet.

It is when we mention justice and responsibility that we have to remember that hymns, however sensitive, are not ends in themselves. The warning of the prophet Amos must not be forgotten. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harp. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an overflowing stream.

Paul said much the same thing when he told the Corinthians that the tongues of mortals and angels without love are only noisy gongs and clanging cymbals—whatever the marks of good hymnody. Hymnody that masks our vocation to kindness, compassion and responsibility is an abomination, or what the liberation theologians would call an ideology. We may, if we are careful, take Amos' stern words as hyperbole, so long as we take them seriously.

In this vein, I note that probably the most poignant reference to a hymn in the whole Bible is a little verse that appears almost unnoticed in Matthew's and Mark's account of the last supper. When they had sung the hymn, it reads, they went out to the Mount of Olives. The hymn in question is presumably the Hallel, Psalms 113–118, which still concludes the Passover meal. It is deeply moving to realize that we probably have the text of the hymn that Jesus and his disciples sang immediately before he went out to the desperation of the garden, to betrayal, to Jim Crow trial and to death. That hymn is full of praise, and trust and blessing.

The dead do not praise the Lord, nor all those who go down into silence; but we will bless the Lord, from this time forth and for evermore.... The Lord watches over the innocent; I was brought very low and he helped me.... How shall I repay the Lord for all the good things he has done for me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord.... I will give thanks to you, for you answered me and have become my salvation.... Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord; we bless you from the house of the Lord.... Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his mercy endures forever.

Between the fellowship of that last meal, itself an activity so characteristic of Jesus and his ministry, and his final engagement with the oppressive powers of religion and state, there is this final gesture and ritual of passage, this pause between resolution and action, which gives focus and definition to all that stands before and after. Ultimately, that is why we sing hymns and, to maintain the living tradition, why we publish hymn books.

A Byzantine church had been built at the entrance to the area. A later structure has succeeded its ruin, but parts of its floor remain with beautiful and intricate mosaics. I used up my time looking at the mosaics, but one of my colleagues ventured further, down to the grassy slope where the miraculous extension of the loaves and fishes is supposed by some to have occurred. There he found a sign that said, No picnics.

I tell this story because it is not uncommon for innovation and reform to result in a new rigidity that quite distorts their intent. Jesus ate and drank across economic, religious, and social boundaries, perhaps even on a dramatically large scale, and a later generation of tidy park-keepers have placed the putative location of his gesture off-limits to those who would eat and drink together.

In the eighth century the Carolingians imported the austere and succinct Roman rite to northern Europe as part of their policy of unification of a new and holy Roman Empire. Local practices, with their variety and ornamentation, were suppressed. But two centuries later when the Roman church had become decadent and the Ottonians sought to restore it from northern models, what came back to Rome was filled with Gallican intrusions, many of which were not cleaned out until the Second Vatican Council in the middle of this century.

Anglicans have not been immune to this pattern. The rubrics of the first Prayer Book of 1549 take for granted the continuation of the eucharist as the principal act of worship on Sundays, but with a communicating congregation of all clergy present and representatives (at least) of the laity. They also infer a return (where necessary) to a full pattern of Sunday morning worship: morning prayer, litany, and a single celebration of the eucharist.

Cranmer had not reckoned with the conservatism of traditional piety. The resistance of many lay people to regular reception of communion for reasons of exaggerated sacramental reverence led to a decline in the frequency of eucharistic celebration where the requisite number of lay participants could not be found. Morning Prayer, intended to be the first movement in a Sunday morning symphony of worship (a model that continues in the East), became in many places the central act of worship by default. The very rules that were meant to enforce both/and became the cause of either/or, leading to a tension that has been a thorn in the Anglican side ever since.

We are ourselves in the midst of a not dissimilar period of liturgical ferment, of which the Book of Alternative Services is only one visible token. As someone who has spent most of his life in that ferment, I cannot help asking what well-founded policies we have embraced that will, in the long run, have bizarre effects.

Some have begun to appear already. In keeping with the spirit of a General Synod resolution adopted in 1971, the Book of Alternative Services was conceived as a guide to a much more flexible approach to liturgy. This was never meant to encourage the notion that the field of liturgy is devoid of valid rules and structure (even if they are not absolute), nor that every point of flexibility must be stretched to the utmost conclusion to which it can be carried, but something like that is in danger of happening. Let me illustrate.

The rubrics in the Book of Alternative Services were intended to foster a concept of the liturgy as a truly corporate act in which there are many roles and functions. This had been true of our first 1549 Prayer Book, but in 1552 the tradition turned in a much more clerical direction in which almost everything was done by the priest with a few congregational responses. The Book of Alternative Services frequently identifies functions that may be performed by a deacon or by lay people as assistants or when conducting a liturgy of the word, and roles such as taking communion to the sick, which had been unnecessarily restricted to clergy. This expansion of functions has, however, been interpreted in some quarters as a mandatory dismantling of traditional church order.

I have twice attended eucharistic celebrations where everything (including the first half of the eucharistic prayer) was performed by vested lay readers. This reduces the role of the ordained leader to magic and the narrative of the last supper to an incantation recited by a wizard. The compilers of the Book of Alternative Services did not intend to undermine church order, just as Alcuin did not intend to subvert the Roman rite. We do not know what time bombs we leave behind.

It is against this background that I renounce the temptation to stand at the end of a millennium and predict where Anglican liturgy will go. Millennial forecasting is futile because the future is bound to bring the unexpected. There is, however, a ray of positive light in all of this. John Keble said, "God never lets us know the result of our actions, and in one way that keeps us humble, and in another it keeps us hopeful." The question is not what will happen? but what goals and guidelines will keep us more or less on track?

First of all, we have to remind ourselves as often as possible that the liturgical movement is essentially a theological movement. It is about the church as a corporate body with a common mission: to illuminate the way to the re-making of humanity in the model of Jesus Christ, his wisdom, his justice, his compassion, his subversion of the accepted values of self-interest, his love.

Insofar as the liturgical movement is reactive, it seeks to correct a piety expressed in individualism rather than sharing, guilt rather than liberation, political stability rather than social transformation. Biblically, the liturgical movement is rooted in the first word of the Lord's Prayer: Our (not My), and the destiny we are called to share together. It is rooted in Acts 2.42 and the notion of people held together by common teaching, by the bonds of social relationship, by the ritual action of sharing bread (at once a gift of creation and the sign of new being), and by common prayer. It is rooted in Ephesians 4.11-13 and the notion of a harmony of different gifts that combine "to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come ... to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ." It is rooted in 1 Peter 2.9-10 and the notion that the nobodies who have chosen to follow the way of Jesus are, in fact, "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people." The liturgical movement is based on the idea that we should fashion our worship so that it will embed this vision within us.

A second goal for our liturgy is to be comprehensive, not only in terms of traditional tensions between conservatives and liberals, evangelicals and catholics, but in terms of different types of human personality and consequently of spiritual need. I find this tension running through myself. I recognize that I am a theologian of community, and yet I am a loner rather than a joiner, happy to be on the edge rather than at the centre of activity. I worry sometimes that we are in danger of creating a church only for extroverts, where more solitary people will feel unwelcome.

St. Benedict, in his Rule, said that an abbot should "so temper all things that the strong may still have something to long after, and the weak may not draw back in alarm." Without attempting to define strong and weak for myself or anyone else, I suggest that this counsel of accommodation is no mere compromise but is a principle of creative dialectics that must be played out in our theology, our worship, in the whole fabric of our pastoral care.

Finally, we must constantly remind ourselves that all our worship is about the reign of God. Our liturgy of the word must always be informed by the teaching ministry of Jesus with its good news for the poor and the broken and its provocative challenge to the established order of ideas and power. Our liturgy of the sacrament must always be informed by Jesus' table fellowship with marginalized and alienated people. I believe this means that we must craft our texts and design our liturgical events so that they open the door to new visions of the reign of God already among us (and not only to our own ready-made visions), so that they set people free rather than restrict and confine, so that they build people up and fan the flame of the God-given goodness that is already in them. These, I believe, are some of the principles that should shape the theological, pastoral, and biblical agendas of our liturgical future. If we are faithful to them, we will not forbid picnics where Jesus fed the multitude.