Real Presence

The approach of Christmas is about concerts and nativities, but it's also about taking communion to members of the Church who won't be able to make it any time over the season itself. It's strange that this is more a Thing in some parishes than others; I once spoke to a priest who looked after two rural Oxfordshire parishes with completely different traditions, the one where there were lots of home communicants, and the other where they assumed that being brought the Sacrament in their own surroundings was a certain prelude to death. At his training parish in the mid-1980s, Il Rettore was once charged with taking communion to 14 people in one day, and surviving that without derangement was quite an achievement. Here in Swanvale Halt, my illustrious 1970s predecessor Fr Edward introduced the Roman Catholic practice of communion being taken to home communicants by lay ministers directly after the Sunday mass, an ideal long since gone by the wayside, and now it's almost invariably me visiting a fluctuating group of souls. 

So yesterday found me visiting two homes with two people in each, and today I've seen five more in four visits. Tomorrow I'll call on Sarah who has just been discharged from hospital. It's helped me feel that I've been doing something worthwhile on a day which began with looking for my keys and grappling with an unco-operative photocopier. I suppose delivering Lemsip tablets to Mad Trevor also counts as 'worthwhile', though his insistence that he has flu is undermined by the fact that he insists it every other week. 

Seven home communions over three days isn't twice that in one, and I don't know how I'd react to that: I probably wouldn't want to do it every week, either. But curiously it doesn't seem wearying (any more than I already was weary) or tedious. Each encounter, which has exactly the same shape, feels different. It involves a different person or persons in specific surroundings, each with a special history of their own that they bring to that moment. Tomorrow we begin the great celebration of the Incarnation, so the presence of the Christ in each unique individual is part of the point. The Sacrament brings him together with them. This is the best way I can imagine of making it real.