The worship of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit is the center, the focus and the life-blood of our life as a congregation and of our lives as individual members thereof.  The worship of the Anglican Catholic Church is rooted in the worship of the ancient Church and anticipates, and provides a foretaste of, that heavenly worship so dramatically set forth the Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine (the Theologian).  It is richly informed by the medieval developments of the ancient liturgy, by the apt contributions of Thomas Cranmer and others in The Book of Common Prayer (1549),  by the post-Tridentine refinements of the Roman Liturgy that were incorporated in The Anglican Missal, and by the fruits of the hard-won victories of Anglo-Catholic worship that followed the nineteenth century Oxford Movement (candles on the altar, the eastward position, Eucharistic vestments, the mixed chalice, the use of incense and the reserved sacrament.)   This historic liturgy seeks to preserve the dignity, the beauty, and the sense of the holy that is often missing in contemporary liturgies. The language of our liturgy is not colloquial, its music is not hip, and it seeks to speak not to the emotions but the soul.  It seeks to preserve all that is best in our great and long liturgical and musical heritage, not to reinvent it or to marry the spirit of the present age.  This does not make it irrelevant to our day and times, but rather deeply relevant.   [Picture taken from La Sainte Bible (Paris: Editions Lidis, 1973), vol. 3, p. 125.]