So, what happens to the church if this is the end of the Eucharist?
Right now we lie in a very uncertain time. Very much thought is directed towards to a mythical time – “after this current crisis is over”. There is a deep desire to get back to normal that exists in both our spoken discourse and our deepest longings. And yet, that notion of getting back to normal is undermined by the oft repeated assertions that things are never going to be the same again. Politicians talk of developing a “new normal” which is a euphemism for “things are never going to go back to what you used to have”.
This is a tough time for the churches. Buildings are closed to the public and different denominations have different rules as to whether even the clergy can enter them to pray. The Eucharist cannot be publicly celebrated in person to person settings. This has unleashed a whole load of creativity as people have shifted their attention to nourishing the church in both online and offline ways.
The depth of this creativity is incredible and isn’t to be underestimated.
Conservative institutions survive and flourish because of their ability to embrace radical change. (Paradoxically, radical institutions often struggle because of their inherent conservatism).
The church has continued to exist through so many generations because of its ability to change. The basic idea – that human beings can know life in all its fullness by orienting their lives around the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ doesn’t change but the means by which the church conveys this idea has changed through the centuries and is changing all the time.
Many Christians would express the view that the way in which the church has been expressing itself probably can’t survive in many places but far fewer would believe that this means that Christianity will die out.
The current Covid-19 crisis does form a particular challenge and is hastening change in a way that no-one expected or predicted.
Theologically, the question that is in my mind is the question of whether this is the end of the Eucharist. Or more specifically, how might my own small corner of the Christian faith survive if the Eucharist can no longer be at the centre of All That We Do.
The idea that the Eucharist might be drawing to an end is almost inconceivable to most people in the church. And yet, types and shadows have their ending as we all know deep down. And we’ve all sung about a time “Lord, when sacraments shall cease” that we “may be one with all your church above”.
Well, sacraments are not quite ceased but not that far away from it either. Clergy have been unable to give the last rites in person in a time of pandemic when to do so would be to bring risk to self and society. Confirmations are not happening. In person confession isn’t possible in most circumstances. Social distancing the sacrament of reconciliation does have its troubles – no-one wants to shout their sins at a priest from 2 metres distance. Marriages can’t happen in church and are severely restricted anywhere else. Ordinations have been postponed. Baptisms are only to be done in extremis. And the online Eucharists, whether from kitchen basilicas or isolated altars in church buildings look both deeply familiar and deeply unfamiliar at the same time.
Much energy has gone into the questions raised by the Eucharist at this time and I expect that to continue but there are deep, deep questions about the other sacramental signs too.
For me, the gathering of a community is intrinsic to the Eucharist and we are all learning rapidly and unexpectedly what is intrinsic to the way we express our faith. Some of the subconscious things are coming to light and we realise when they do so that not everyone’s subconscious presumptions are the same. This is hardly surprising but no less unsettling for so being.
Not for the first time I find myself turning to Dom Gregory Dix’s famous piece about the Eucharist.
Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.
To those who know a little of Christian history probably the most moving of all the reflections it brings is not the thought of the great events and the well–remembered saints, but of those innumerable millions of entirely obscure faithful men and women, every one with his or her own individual hopes and fears and joys and sorrows and loves—and sins and temptations and prayers—once every whit as vivid and alive as mine are now. They have left no slightest trace in this world, not even a name, but have passed to God utterly forgotten by men. Yet each of them once believed and prayed as I believe and pray, and found it hard and grew slack and sinned and repented and fell again. Each of them worshipped at the Eucharist, and found their thoughts wandering and tried again, and felt heavy and unresponsive and yet knew—just as really and pathetically as I do these things. There is a little ill–spelled ill–carved rustic epitaph of the fourth century from Asia Minor:—‘Here sleeps the blessed Chione, who has found Jerusalem for she prayed much’. Not another word is known of Chione, some peasant woman who lived in that vanished world of Christian Anatolia. But how lovely if all that should survive after sixteen centuries were that one had prayed much, so that the neighbours who saw all one’s life were sure one must have found Jerusalem! What did the Sunday Eucharist in her village church every week for a life–time mean to the blessed Chione—and to the millions like her then, and every year since? The sheer stupendous quantity of the love of God which this ever repeated action has drawn from the obscure Christian multitudes through the centuries is in itself an overwhelming thought. (All that going with one to the altar every morning!)
It is because it became embedded deep down in the life of the Christian peoples, colouring all the via vitae of the ordinary man and woman, marking its personal turning-points, marriage, sickness, death and the rest, running through it year by year with the feasts and fasts and the rhythm of the Sundays, that the eucharistic action became inextricably woven into the public history of the Western world. The thought of it is inseparable from its great turning-points also. Pope Leo doing this in the morning before he went out to daunt Attila, on the day that saw the continuity of Europe saved; and another Leo doing this three and a half centuries later when he crowned Charlemagne Roman Emperor, on the day that saw that continuity fulfilled. Or again Alfred wandering defeated by the Danes staying his soul on this, while mediaeval England struggled to be born; and Charles I also, on that morning of his execution when mediaeval England came to its final end. Such things strike the mind with their suggestions of a certain timelessness about the eucharistic action and an independence of its setting, in keeping with the stability in an ever–changing world of the forms of the liturgy themselves. At Constantinople they ‘do this’ yet with the identical words and gestures that they used while the silver trumpets of the Basileus still called across the Bosphorus, in what seems to us now the strange fairy-tale land of the Byzantine empire. In this twentieth century Charles de Foucauld in his hermitage in the Sahara ‘did this’ with the same rite as Cuthbert twelve centuries before in his hermitage on Lindisfarne in the Northern seas. This very morning I did this with a set of texts which has not changed by more than a few syllables since Augustine used those very words at Canterbury on the third Sunday of Easter in the summer after he landed. Yet ‘this’ can still take hold of a man’s life and work with it.
Dom Gregory’s words seem to make nonsense of the idea that we could in any conscience engage in a “fast” from the Eucharist. A fast from the Eucharist is a contradiction in terms.
Reading his words again, I can’t imagine that this is the end of the Eucharist. Or even the beginning of the end.
And yet, what happens to the church if neither therapy nor vaccine can be found in our lifetime?
The church has survived the closure of its buildings from time to time, just as it has endured war, famine and outright persecution. It has also faced people being unable to participate in the Eucharist due to pandemic and plague.
What it hasn’t had to face before is the threat of the Eucharist and the other sacraments being withdrawn and quite rightly withheld from a Christian population which has been nourished, formed and shaped by the Liturgical Movement.
The relationship of those plebs sancta dei that Dom Gregory talks about to the Eucharist has been changed by the expectations of the last 50 years. We’ve been taught to long for the Eucharist as people longing for water in the desert.
What happens now?
For some, things are changing and the same grace and love they have known is being mediated in online forms of one kind or another.
The Eucharist has been taken to every new place and space that human beings have discovered and inhabited. Little wonder that the questions about cyberspace have been emerging for the last decade.
I am not going to rehearse the arguments about the Eucharist being celebrating in a virtually gathered congregation rather than an in-person gathered congregation. However, I would want to assert that this is already happening and smart churches will want to regulate that rather than ban it. Regulation is the way to prevent a free for all, regulation is not something that enables an anything goes spirituality. It feels to me that the church is faced with a choice of regulating clergy to celebrate in new ways or be faced with de-facto lay celebration.
For the record, I’m not in favour of lay presidency at the Eucharist. I believe, for better or worse, in an ordered church. For better or worse, many of us are wedded to the notion that for your own good, you can’t just do what you feel like.
I long to be back at the altar in church and I long to be gathering people around it to celebrate, weep, rejoice and pray.
I still have hope that is going to happen.
I still believe that is what people like me are called to hope for right now even in the face of the challenges of Covid-19 or Covid-20, or Covid-21 or Covid-22 or…
That litany of unknown pandemics in the future may end up shaping our common life in the church just as much as we have been shaped by our experience in the past. The social distancing that we are called to embrace doesn’t mean that we are going back to what we’ve experienced as normal any time soon in church life.
What will happen next?
Here are some questions that I’m currently thinking about.
- Will online-only denominations/provinces/churches appear?
- Will it be God raising them up?
- Why do buildings become even more important when you can’t enter them? (And what does that have to do with the idea of the Holy of Holies of old?)
- Will new sacraments ever be identified by the Christian community? Friendship? Buildings?
- What are the things about the Eucharist that are essential to the experience of grace that it conveys?
- How would Jesus use the internet?
- What would a church look like that was blended from offline and online elements and how might they strengthen one another?
- Will a new liturgical movement appear that does as much work on non-Eucharistic worship as has been done on Eucharistic worship?
- What is good in our current situation that, forged in this furnace, will last for all time?
- What happens when sacraments cease?
37 responses to “Keeping the faith”
It was an inspiring recitation. Following the English translation in the service sheet provided added insight to the life of Mary. All the more so as the cathedral is dedicated to St Mary. You are reminded of Mary every time you walk into the building with the Gwyneth Leech mural over the High Altar.
Kelvin is quite right. The very self-righteous defenders of the Bible (including the ones who trolled a brave young Muslim woman, for days, with the most vile language, and those who did not reprimand them) totally ignored the Biblical instructions for raising concerns with a brother in faith (Matthew 18:15; 2 Tim 23). Very practical instruction too! As anyone who has ever lived in community can verify. Could all these obsessive men *please* stop trying to divide our communities in Glasgow. We will not be divided. At the first sign of trouble we rush out to embrace one another. These abusers have much to repent of, even if *just* standing by while others throw stones.
I HATE it when the wrong tune is picked for a hymn … it is simply an abomination before God.
However, helping people to think about how we share hospitality, welcome and learn from each other is the WAY of God! Blessings on you Kelvin.
Some reasons why this time was different:
1. The other quaran recitations you mentioned happened at Nine Lessons and Carols, or special ecuminical and interfaith events. While 9L&C was originally a modified Evensong, nowadays it’s usually considered a seasonal community musical recitial with a religious tinge, so having a Muslim from the community recite something from their faith would seem natural enough. Civic and interfaith services will likewise naturally include representatives of every faith in the community. By contrast the Eucharist is the central act of Christian worship and people expect to hear ONLY Christian doctrine proclaimed in the Holy Eucharist. In other words, this was the wrong venue for showing hospitality to Muslim neighbors. You did not intend to practice syncretism, but I think the outcome was syncretic despite your good intentions.
2. Post Brexit (and post Trump) British Muslims are now seen as alien invaders rather than fellow members of the community.
3. Because hostility to Muslims is now fashionable, the Express and rest of the gutter press decided that this was a story worth reporting. Since conservative Americans often read the online editions of the British gutter press, the story then went global.
4. Because you are gay and out, your every action is scrutinized for any possible hint of heresy by GAFCON and Co.
Of all these reasons, only reason #1 is a legitimate criticism, but I hope you do think about criticism #1 as well as defending yourself from other, illegitimate criticisms.
Thank you for your comment Whit J – all the more because it is a thoughtful criticism.
I’ve plenty to reflect on about the how and the when we do things like that and I do hear loudly and clearly that many people think this was an inappropriate context. Though of course, I’d be bound to say that some are saying that the Eucharist is precisely the place indeed there are some saying that is what it is for.
I’m not going to get into a back and forth with all the comments on this post and I’m deliberately not letting through things that have already been said but be assured that I’ve heard the criticism and will reflect on it not simply now but over coming months. (I’ve learned a lot about where God is this week that will take a long time to process). I’m grateful for the way you’ve made your point.
I think there is a good deal in what Whit J says, although I am not sure the effect actually was syncretic. I think one does perhaps have to be a regular worshipper at St Mary’s to understand how totally orthodox the worship there is, and how much Jesus is the focus of worship – how utterly unlikely it is that anyone there would make the mistake of thinking he was not revered by the congregation as a whole as very God from very God. It would be impossible for them not to realise that all the clergy there rejoice in this belief. The congregation saw the words of the Qu’ran in an English translation which portrayed that book’s far-from-easy-to-follow account of Islam’s view of the conception of Jesus, in which there was nothing offensive, and heard a very beautiful voice singing in a strange and glorious language. These were clearly indicated to be the beliefs of another faith. We certainly neither saw or heard or understood any insult to the person of Christ. I am sure none was intended, either. Whereas, and this bears repeating, I am totally sure that many of those commenting (not of course by any means all of them, and nobody whose comments are published here) simply wish harm to relationships between the great faiths in Glasgow.
I have spent my whole adult life in dialogue with people of other religious traditions, it has been deeply rewarding. However I feel that what happened at this service was profoundly wrong. When we are truly ourselves we allow other people to be profoundly themselves. The truth of Christianity is not compatible with any other religion. To avoid that incompatibility is to avoid reality. Worship of Jesus is the fountain of our faith the Qu’ran is opposed to that. I love Jesus and therefore cannot conceive of reading the Qu’ran in an act of worship – no problem doing so in other contexts but not in worship. I am profoundly disturbed that you cannot see this Kelvin.
There are so many things aren’t there, not just around this issue which we hold dear in faith and which we can’t see from another perspective?
I can hear and see that people are upset by this and clearly there are many people not upset by it too. And obviously, at least I hope obviously, I love Jesus too.
The trouble with religious questions and the questions that religious people have I think is that so often that our love for our faith can make it impossible to comprehend others who also claim to love the same faith but who take different views about things. We can hear them claim that love but be intellectually unable to process it because it leads them to different conclusions.
I’ve found the same thing to be true in the sexuality debates very frequently though I perceive that to be changing sometimes now. Similarly with other identity issues and some political issues. Israel/Palestine conversations for example often seem to be conducted (when they are conducted at all) by people who seem to behave like ships passing in the night.
I happen to have views about Church Schools which are pretty intransigent and negative. You are one of the few people, no the only person, who ever made me really think there might be a point of view about them other than mine which might have an integrity I could respect. And I’m very grateful for that.
Kelvin, thank you for your reply. I have enormous respect for you. I have no doubt that church schools can be argued against from perfectly respectable positions. Worship of Jesus is simply a different order, it cannot include a reading from the Qu’ran. Worship is one thing, study, dialogue, relationship something else.
I am really grateful to Richard for the phrase “When we are truly ourselves we allow other people to be profoundly themselves” which reflects my experience of interfacing with sincere people of other faiths. Is a Christian Eucharist a place this should happen? I can understand some Christians feeling it is not, but as long as everything was clearly labelled as what it was and the integrity of the liturgy was intact, I can also understand some feeling it is.
Brother Kelvin,
Although I do not agree with allowing the Koran to be read in our Christian churches, I truly appreciated your firm and resolute stand for the deity of Jesus. He is our great God and Savior and I love Him very much. Blessings from Tennessee.
Just as a perhaps amusing point of reference, the 1982 hymnal of the Episcopal church in the USA has “Brightest and best of the STARS” (caps mine) “of the morning,” apparently so as to avoid offending any daughters who might be present, and the two tunes included are “Morning Star” by James Proctor Harding (1850-1911) and “Star in the East” from The Southern Harmony (1835). The Harding tune was also in the 1940 Hymnal, wherein the word “sons” was still used.
I am not clear as to whether the hospitality at St Mary’s anticipates infinite extension of parallel lines between Islam and the Church in Glasgow. Are you planning some opportunities for Glasgow Muslims to understand the Christian faith and prepare for Baptism and the glorious liberty of regeneration by the Holy Spirit? (In whichever order; no axe about that!) As you move around the Glasgow community and meet more Christians of Islamic background, why not invite such to participate in groups for new Muslim enquirers? The testimony of an ex-Muslim can express vibrantly “How I know He lives” (as your SA brethren would sing). You might find not only new hearts from a divine work of grace among your Muslim neighbours but in other neighbours too. Amen. Inshallah!
There are a small number of people in St Mary’s who are converts from Islam to Christianity just as there are a small number of people in local mosques who are converts from Christianity to Islam.
St Mary’s regularly puts on events and courses for people discovering and exploring Christianity. Most living religions do the same thing.