But at 8am tomorrow I will have neither someone to
communicate with, nor to say the words of the faithful. I will be in the Red
Room upstairs at my temporary plague altar, there to offer the holy sacrifice,
if by God’s mercy that’s what it will really be. Many of my friends have been
doing this since public worship was suspended, in fact daily in churches which
have that tradition. For them the more urgent argument is whether they can
enter their church buildings to do so. Fr Thesis in Kentish Town points to the
fact that the emergency legislation specifically exempts from the restrictions
on travel ministers of religion on their way to and from places of worship,
whatever the archbishops may have said. He lives right next door to his church
anyway, as do many others. I don’t, and constantly making the journey up and
down the hill when I didn’t absolutely have to would seem to me to be going
against the principle of keeping journeys to a minimum. So I will offer the Eucharist
here.
We know that the eucharist is essentially a corporate act.
Beneath every Solemn High Mass, bedecked with silk and gold and heavy with
incense smoke, lies hidden a meal with wooden platters and rough bread, and within every
incised marble altar stone is the plank table of the Last Supper: no doubt
about that. Looking back to that event, it demands the presence of more than a
single soul. In its very structure it envisages call-and-response from priest
and people; ‘the Lord be with you’ ‘and with your spirit’ (or whatever
variant); ‘lift up your hearts’, ‘We lift them up to the Lord.’
We also know the history of how, in the West, it mutated
into something different; how ordained monks at the great abbeys of the early
Middle Ages (most accounts talk about Cluny in the tenth century; Fr Marian
Szablewski’s thesis Mass without a Congregation, a text I haven’t seen,
apparently pushes the development back to the 7th) began celebrating mass daily
at side chapels in the great church, supposedly but not always with a lay
brother present; how this very minimal form of the eucharist became the norm
most lay people would encounter; how the Reformers attempted to make the
eucharist once more a corporate act involving the people, with very limited
results; and how the Liturgical Movement from the second quarter of the 20th
century onwards championed changes in the forms of worship in both Catholic and
Protestant Churches to recapture the idea of this central act of Christian
liturgy as something the whole of the community of believers did together.
That’s all familiar enough.
That awkward and brilliant monk Gregory Dix acutely wrote
that ‘in extending to the presbyter the liturgical ‘priesthood’ of the bishop
and making him the usual celebrant of the eucharist, the Church has laid upon
him the necessity of fulfilling his ‘liturgy’ regularly and frequently. His
‘liturgy’ is not merely his ‘possibility’, it is the ground of his being in the
Body of Christ.’ Thus, it became felt, priests existed in order to offer the
mass for the salvation of humankind; the more masses, the better, no matter
whether anyone else was there. You can see here the seeds of an attitude I find
ever so slightly present in some of my spikier colleagues (in other dioceses, I
must say), that restrictions to communion motivated by the health emergency –
at first, denying the laity the chalice, and now excluding them completely –
are actually rather salutary, a corrective to any idea that receiving communion
is the right of the attendant laypeople. The ritual changes of the 1900s are to
blame for that, such clergy say, and here’s a chance to push back against them.
It's an outlook whose roots lie in reactionary romanticism, an ideal of Church life that is at odds with where we've been headed for decades.
More positively there is no doubt that priests can use a
solitary mass to enter very deeply into the mystery which is at the heart of
Christian experience, and of which they are the special stewards, in a way
which is seldom possible with all the distractions of a full-scale Sunday
service. Fr Szablewski suggests this was part of the reason why the Cluny-style
‘low mass’ developed in the first place, ‘as the most effective means for their
personal sanctity and a guarantee of salvation’. On his blog, that detached but
sensitive Catholic Fr Anthony Chadwick describes how
I have had the experience of being in the Benedictine Abbey
church at Fontgombault (France) at about 7 in the morning (after Matins and
Lauds) and seeing a priest at each side altar silently offering Mass as if it
were his last. The piety and spirit of prayer are overwhelming in the golden
candle light reflecting on the stone walls of the ancient church.
You can see the power of this; and exemptions from the rule
that a layperson needed to be present for a mass to take place were, and still
are, commonly granted for just that reason of piety, when priests are in
circumstances where the rule is impossible or very hard to observe –
classically, those in mission fields or pars aliena when no other Christians
are very likely to wander along. As Fr Chadwick says, the world is none the worse
for another solitary mass, so why worry overmuch.
But those remain exemptions. We need not resort to the Book
of Common Prayer with its injunction that 'there shall be no celebration of the
Lord’s Supper, except there be a convenient number to communicate with the
Priest', because things have moved on a lot since then; and in any case the
current Roman Catholic Code of Canon Law also insists ‘A priest may not celebrate the eucharistic Sacrifice without the participation of at least one of the faithful, unless there is a good and reasonable cause for doing so’, and if that ‘good and reasonable cause’ was
resorted to over time, the bishop would surely want to know about it. There is
no doubt at all that, no matter how beneficial a solitary mass might be to the
piety of a priest, its very nature mutilates the image of the event, the Last
Supper, into which it is a mystical entrance. It’s all very well to say that
the angels are there, and the souls of the departed, that we are ‘surrounded by
a great crowd of witnesses’, and that people can participate distantly in
spirit from their homes. But to be physically, humanly alone, hearing no other
voice, sensing no other breath than yours, while doing it, is not what the Lord
intended; it is not what He did.
And yet I know that our people want us to celebrate the
eucharist for them: comments made on social media on videos my friends have
posted of themselves celebrating at home, or in church when they’re able to,
and statements people have made to me, demonstrate that enough. The sense of
comfort that there is something normal, something transcending the time and
its trials, and something connected to the very deepest truths of their lives, is
very strong. It is bad enough that I can’t do it in the very place which has
sheltered their prayers, their hopes and fears and sorrows and joys, that place
where God has promised to be present, for a century and threescore years. Not to do it at all would be an appalling deprivation, not for me, but for us.
Gregory Dix concludes The Shape of the Liturgy by stating
that ‘in the eucharist we Christians concentrate our motives and act out our
theory of human living. Mankind are not to be “as Gods” … we are [God’s]
creatures, fallen and redeemed … who by His free love are “made partakers of
the divine nature”’. The eucharist is where we are most truly ourselves, becoming what God
intends us to become. The Supper of the Lord is the right place to bring before
God the fear and the sorrow, the death and the deprivation, so that he can
transfigure it. As a priest, it is that that I am most bound to do, that I
promised to do at my ordination: to bear in my hands before God the
prayer-offering of his people, of which the eucharist is not the only, but is
the exemplary instance. Laypeople, broadly, can do the same; but I promised to
do it, and was surrounded by the promises of the holy Church when I did so. So,
tomorrow, reluctantly and awkwardly, I will stand at the makeshift altar
upstairs, celebrating this wounded rite – a necessary wound, a beloved loss.
May the storm soon pass.
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