Have This One On Me

"I expect an answer next time we speak!" Dale told me over Zoom this week. Former member of the Swanvale Halt flock, Dale comes from an American Lutheran background and I have been talking to him regularly since the first lockdown. This time we were discussing the resumption of communion being administered to the laity in both kinds, which we suspended nearly two years ago. Nobody doubts it would be preferable to return to giving the wine to the congregation; many of my (even) more Anglo-Catholic colleagues did so long ago. Others have adopted the use of the president intincting the Host before adminstering it, but I've never been able to see how you safely do that without ending up pressing a mushy disc into the communicant's hand. But how we are to go about it? Dale, you see, would be delighted if I plumped for individual communion cups. 

Evangelical Anglican commentators such as Ian Paul, when he has caught breath between agitating for bishops to give up mitres and Anglican churches to stop putting out crib scenes at Christmas, saw the pandemic as a God-given opportunity to promote the use of individual communion cups. But then he went on from there to suggest that it would better to decamp communion services permanently to domestic settings, so perhaps we should leave him to one side. Anyway, the bishops came out with a statement against this particular form of administering the Sacrament in July 2020, which according to some parties was based on a very inadequate legal opinion on the matter dating from 2011; but in October last year they discussed it again, and agreed that there was nothing to be gained by putting the matter to Synod (something generally best avoided in any circumstance) and that they had no intention of telling individual churches what to do. I don't know of any churches in Guildford diocese that have taken this option, but some evangelical churches elsewhere have.

We rightly associate individual communion cups with Nonconformist churches. Until the late 1800s Dissenters were content with common cups like everyone else, but from the 1890s an increasing awareness of the mechanisms of infection led to a movement among Dissenting churches in the northeastern United States to use separate communion vessels for each communicant, and the habit spread as quickly as the sicknesses everyone was afraid of. Asked about the matter in the early 1900s, Archbishop Randall Davidson decided using individual communion cups, were any church to do so, would indeed be legal, and the 1908 Lambeth Conference stated that bishops could authorise their use, though there was no medical case for abandoning the common cup wholesale (if it was all that risky clergy would be endlessly ill from consuming the dregs of the chalice at the end of communion, whereas they are not obviously sicker than anyone else and it would be presumptuous to ascribe this to divine intervention). 

Still, the standard Catholic objections to using separate cups do ring a bit hollow. We administer the bread in separate wafers happily enough, and any argument in favour of sharing a cup would equally apply to sharing a loaf. Any remains left in the cups could be reverently dealt with by collecting them, rinsing them, and then pouring the water with its diluted wine to earth in the same way we do when laundering purificators. No, the core of the problem is elsewhere.

I'm surprised that nobody ever talks much about the psychology of receiving the sacrament.  During lockdown, Marion our then-curate got into a rough debate in the group of Franciscan Tertiaries she belonged to (imagine that!) about the validity of 'remote consecration', in which clergy who refused to consecrate bread and wine over Zoom were accused of 'denying the sacrament' to the laypeople. This is not the mindset of passive, thankful reception, but of the exercise of rights. We come to the altar, into the real presence of the Lord, as recipients of grace. Think about the difference between coming to an altar, kneeling, and having a chalice put to your lips, and on the other hand approaching, standing, taking a small cup, and knocking it back either off to one side, or, worse, back in your seat. This is not the same as having a Host put into your hand which you then eat; it is like coming forward, breaking off a portion of a loaf of bread yourself, and taking it away. It is, psychologically, administering the Sacrament to yourself, rather than having it administered to you; it is claiming your grace from Jesus, rather than accepting it as his gift. This, I suspect, is why Protestants rather warm to it, because it promotes the sense of freedom, choice and independence which is at the heart of the Protestant mindset, one which - I feel constrained to argue - history suggests leads eventually to effective unbelief. I shouldn't think they themselves know that's what's happening, and would resist the case if it was made. 

I can see a Catholic way of using individual communion cups: they would have to be given to the communicant, ideally kneeling if they are able to do so; the Blood consumed there and then, and returned to the minister. Hard to manage, though. Any harder than a chalice? I'm not sure.