In memoriam: H. Boone Porter January 10, 1923-June 5, 1999

In Memoriam H. Boone Porter

January 10, 1923-june 5, 1999

I first saw Boone Porter in the fall of 1960, my first year of study at the General Seminary and his first year of teaching there, when I was in the small congregation with him at nearby St. Peter's, Chelsea, for a weekday Eucharist shortly before term began. The celebrant had no server, and at the offertory I suppose all of us were wondering what would happen and who would help. But before my own thoughts could be transferred into deeds, there went Professor Boone Porter up to the credence table to do the duties of an acolyte. There was a certain unrehearsed humility, a certain innocence, about the whole incident that I have never forgotten. And my second experience of him was similar. A week later I learned that he was to be my faculty advisor, but before I could go to make contact be himself actually entered my dormitory and came to see me in my room. Such openness to students was hardly known in the General Seminary of those days. And so the pattern continued, as he and his devoted wife Violet invited me and others to dine with them at Thanksgiving or Christmas. And yet this was not any cheap familiarity, for, as I recall, it was Boone Porter who gave me the only grade of B that I made during my seminary years (at least it was a B+). Boone could be academically tough and still be a friend.

Many years later, when I returned to General Seminary as a fledgling member of the faculty in church history (Boone's original field of study), it was Boone Porter who encouraged me to develop a separate full-credit course on Eucharistic celebration, a course known as "the Mass Class" that has been taken by countless students in succeeding years. It was also Boone who preached a rousing sermon on St. Thomas Becket as an example of the courage and willingness to be a martyr for one's belief, in the context of a Sarum Liturgy that I recreated and celebrated with our students at The Cloisters in March of 1970. And since those days, I continued to intersect with his life in numerous relationships, notably on the Boards of the Anglican Theological Review and The Anglican Society, on both of which we shared membership. Serving as president of the latter, I have especially appreciated his contributions and commitment. His son Nicholas, a true priest in the image of his father, I know well from my guest teaching at St. George's College in Jerusalem, where Nicholas served on the bishop's staff. In all these varied relationships, one could always count on Boone to stand for what he thought was true and honest and good for the Church as a whole, rather than just uttering things that would serve his own career advancement or personal ambition. As I remarked in the Introduction to my book Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church (Church Hymnal, 1991), there was an "independent critical acumen" which marked everything that Boone said or wrote or did. He was often an advocate, but never an ideologue. His responses were not programmed nor his reactions always predictable, for he took every issue on its own merits, thought and prayed about whatever the question was, and then gave his own opinion. In these regards as in so many other ways, he was a model and a giant.

Boone Porter's many impressive accomplishments and interests have already been surveyed, more or less, in the several obituaries that have appeared in various places. Suffice it to recall here that he was first of all a priest, and then also an artist, author, scholar, educator, editor, journalist, renewalist, missioner, philanthropist, pastor, and much more, always seeking to synthesize the Church's classical tradition with its contemporary needs and hopes. In the remainder of this present tribute it is my intention, beyond the personal appreciation already given above, to survey his accomplishments in one very limited area, that of Prayer Book revision, which have to my knowledge not yet been named in detail and for which we all have much reason to be thankful. Even here, though, not much more than a summary list can be given. The dust of history will need more time to settle before his contributions can be ranked, if ever, in any approximate order, but there will be little question that some of his most creative years, if not always his happiest, were the decade from 1960 to 1970 when he was serving as General Seminary's first full-time Professor of Liturgics and establishing there the first doctoral program of liturgical studies in the U.S.A. About the same time, he was also serving as a member of the Episcopal Church's Standing Liturgical Commission from 1964 throughout most of the years leading to the General Convention of 1976 and culminating in the revised Book of Common Prayer of 1979. (In that process, at his invitation I served as a minor consultant to his committee that was re-drafting the Rites of Ordination).

Taking the pages of the 1979 book in order, then, Boone Porter was the author or principal drafter of many of its collects and prayers, all three Proper Prefaces of the Lord's Day (emphasizing his favorite themes of creation, resurrection, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit: pp. 344-345), Eucharistic Prayer A of Rite 11, following the Sanctus (pp. 362-363), the acclamations and large final paragraph of Eucharistic Prayer B of Rite 11 (pp. 368-369), the first prayer for the final Blessing of a Marriage (p. 430), the first paragraph of the revised Preface to the Ordinal (p. 510), the Post-Communion Prayer for all three Ordination Rites (pp. 523, 535, 546-547), and the prayer for the Dedication of an Altar (within the service for the Consecration of a Church: p. 574). All this was in addition to his many related publications and the 1988 edition of A Prayer Book for the Arned Forces. Earlier in this year of his death, he recorded in print what he would do differently when the 1979 book is next revised (The Anglican 28:2 [April 1999], 11-14), and back in the summer of 1995 he published a detailed description of how Eucharistic Prayers A and B were constructed (The Anglican_24:3, pp. 7-9).