Sharing and Not Sharing

Years ago in the Church Times there was a cartoon showing a sour-faced gentleman sat in a pew in church surrounded by barbed wire and all the makings of a small gun emplacement. The caption read, 'Mr Grainger made it very clear that he did not want to share the Peace'.

There was a lady I didn't recognise at the 8am service on Sunday, so naturally I greeted her at the door with a word of welcome; her unsmiling and loud reply was 'Is there a church I can go to in this area where you don't have to do that horrible handshaking thing?' That horrible handshaking thing is the Osculum Pacis, the moment in the mass where the congregation are encouraged to greet one another with the benediction of the peace brought us by the sacrifice of Christ - or at least that's the theory - and it was restored to the Anglican liturgy in the reforms of the late 1960s, so after nearly fifty years it's increasingly hard to avoid. In typically English fashion the practice of actually kissing anyone, or even the elaborate forms of embracing prescribed in the old Western rite, has been whittled away into a shake of the hands. 'If you go to Hornington Parish Church at 8am you will find a service that follows the order of the Book of Common Prayer', I advised, 'and there will be no handshaking there'. 'I find it a bit awkward', said Ms Formerly Aldgate when I related the tale, 'But I would have been more polite about it.'

I find the Peace rather valuable as a point at which we are compelled to turn away from our own individual contemplation of the holy mysteries and bring ourselves consciously into the company of the faithful. I've been to services where I have been given the Peace in the most cursory and offhand manner imaginable, but far more often have had a sense of genuine warmth in the very small and simple gesture of someone wishing me Christ's peace in the undemonstrative way one English human being greets another - even if they don't know me from Adam.