The Revd Professor William Horbury writes: I had the good fortune to be in the same year with the Rt Revd Frank Griswold (Gazette, 24 March) at Oriel College, Oxford. Tall and understatedly well-dressed, often with a bow tie, Frank at first made me think of T. S. Eliot — not in respect of poetry, although Eliot’s lines ran in Frank’s head, but as a cultivated “East Coast” American with deep feeling for Anglican tradition. What I came to appreciate more gradually was his capacity for opening his interests and concerns to others, despite the fact that he was a sensitive man with his share of personal pride. He was also a wit, and a born actor with a sense of theatre. He well knew how to communicate with others. Yet his lifelong ability to do so owed a great deal to their sense that this communication was not superficial. He shared his hopes and fears through a genuine humanity. Much of this comes out in Tracking Down the Holy Ghost (2017).
He would speak of his reading of the Rule of St Benedict aloud to himself during his schooldays, at a time when he was, as he put it in Tracking Down, “the terror of the altar guild” of the school chapel, and a force for punctilious adherence to traditional ceremonial. When we met, he had become, in some contrast with the kind of server that he had been, a disciple of the Liturgical Movement and an enthusiast for the latest at St Séverin, in Paris, then the model for progressive liturgy. I would seek to defend tradition in its different forms. We had endless discussions around this focus. On one side, he was troubled by the seemingly unbridled variety and unresolved tensions of English approaches to the Prayer Book. On another, we would cross the borders between liturgy and scripture.
The continuity between Israel and the Christian church, the validity of typology and allegory, the place of the cult in the origins of biblical literature: all these subjects came into view. They were very much of their time, and also characteristic of the Liturgical Movement in its true breadth. With these things in mind, we visited churches in England and France.
Frank, aided by his love of France and his knowledge of the monastic roots of the Liturgical Movement there and in Belgium and Germany, saw the movement in its full breadth of aim “to recover the intrinsic power of sign, symbol and scripture” so that “liturgy could speak to the heart in a language of sign and symbol” (to quote Tracking Down again). This approach to common prayer was close to his heart, and I believe also, together with his openness of heart and capacity for friendship, a central element of his life as priest, bishop, and teacher.
