Hottest thing since sliced bread?

Annual College of Bishops meeting kicks off with a reflective day, the first half led by Brother Samuel SSF. We contemplate the need to be hungry if we are to be fed, that is to have empty space in our lives (including our diaries). Amazing varieties of fresh bread are possible. Aerated, non-nutritional, sanitized loaves rather obscure the possibilities.

Samuel brought us a poem written by David Scott for Hillfield Friary Families’ Camp:

A Long way from Bread

We have come so far from bread.
Rarely do we hear the clatter of the mill wheel;
see the flour in every cranny,
the shaking down of the sack, the chalk on the door,
the rats, the race, the pool,
baking day, and the old loaves:
cob, cottage, plaited, brick.

We have come so far from bread.
Once the crock said ‘BREAD’
and the bread was what was there,
and the family’s arm went deeper doen each day
to find it, and the crust was favoured.

We have come so far from Bread.
terrifying is the breach between wheat and table,
wheat and bread, bread and what goes for bread.
Loaves now come in regiments, so that loaf
is not the word. Hlaf
is one of the oldest words we have.

I go on about bread
because it was to bread
that jesus trusted
the meaning he had of himself.
It was an honour for the bread
to be the knot in the Lord’s handkerchief
reminding him about himself. So,
O bread, breakable;
O bread, given;
O bread, a blessing;
count yourself lucky bread.

Not that I am against wafers,
especially the ones produced under steam
from some hidden nunnery
with our lord crucified into them.
They are at least unleavened, and fit the hand,
without remainder, but it is still
a long way from bread.
better for each household to have its own bread,
daily, enough and to spare,
dough the size of a rolled towel,
for feeding angels unawares.
Then if the bread is holy,
All that has to do with bread is holy;
Board, knife, cupboard,
So that the gap between all things is closed
In our attention to the bread of the day.’

I know that
“man cannot live on bread alone.”
I say, let us get the bread right.

Intercommunion: finding a way home

Interesting personal coments on Eucharistic exclusion as a tool of ecclesiastical diplomacy. I take Steve Hayes’ useful point about the dangers of Church Consumerism, about which I generally agree with him, but I need to say that Dr Steffensky was coming from somewhere entirely different in Bremen.

Steffensky was emphatically not saying “You should have it because you want it and have a right to choose.” He was starting at the other end, with the nature of the Eucharist, as that which constitutes the Church. To have a category of Christians who are grudgingly acknowledged to be so but excluded from table fellowship is a wrong answer to St Paul’s fundamental question “Is Christ divided?” By his death and resurrection Christ has broken down every dividing wall; then we go and build a few of our own. Steffensky objected to anything that turns unity into a human and institutional achievement, rather than something Christ has made by his death and resurrection. He was trying to take fully seriously the forward-looking and sacramental meaning of Communion. A modern Club mentality was exactly the thing to which he most deeply objected. His ground conviction was that the Eucharist makes the Church, far more than the denomination defines the Eucharist, and that’s why, he would say, real liturgical terrorism is making a holy Sacrament into a weapon in the ongoing historic game of denominational cowboys and Indians — unworthy and destructive behaviour.

I’m reminded of words that struck me years ago, about a correspondence between Henry Westall and the Bishop of London as the Church of England attempted to enforce an insitutional ban on the use of reservation, portable lights [candles accompanying Gospel processions] and Incense, in 1900. Bishop Creighton had said:

I always wonder what horses think about a coachman. I imagine that they think him stupid, unjust, particular about unnecessary trifles, and always checking them needlessly. But his business is to get the coach along without upsetting it. He is on the box and he sees more than anybody else. He is not responsible for the obstacles in the road, and if he could regulate all the traffic, he could make things easy all round. But alas he is limited to the obscure and ignoble duty of steering his own vehicle to the best of his power.

Bishop Mandell Creighton to Henry Westall, 3 April 1900.

‘True, My Lord,’ Mr Westall might have replied, ‘but in a fog the coachman, from his box, sees no further than anyone else can, while the horses (poor unreasoning beasts) can at least feel the solid ground under their feet, and sometimes their instinct will lead them safely home.’

W.Scott, “An ‘advanced’ view of the ‘Church Crisis’,” Nineteenth Century, April 1901, p 692.

The other great discovery of this post and comments has been students at Lampeter are being introduced to Dom Gregory Dix, whose classic Anglo-Catholic view of the Eucharist I have often reflected about ever since I first came across it 30 years ago:

[Jesus] had told his friends to do this henceforward with the new meaning ‘for the anamnesis’ of Him, and they have done it always since.

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 pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuges of fugitives in caves and the 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 fetish because the yams have 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 think 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 hundred 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.

Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, (London 1945), p744.

Liturgical Terrorism or the future?

Fifty years ago, most denominations had some degree of closed communion — people were generally nice about it, but the denomination was the gatekeeper. Since the 1950’s this rather Brethren way of doing Church has largely broken down in the West.

People who are not personally excommunicated are admitted on the basis of baptism, and the whole Church, not the denomination is the medium of the Sacrament. The institutional denomination is only trustee for the Lord, to whom the Sacrament belongs.

In the good old days saying the Lord’s prayer with other Christians was a mortal sin for Roman Catholics, but that was many years ago. Conciliar theology has a structure to support Eucharistic hospitality, which is only offered in certain closely defined circunstances.

In Hanover in 2005, my eyebrows raised as the (now retired) Cardinal Archbishop of Mainz described the current restructions in his denomination as a “thorn in the flesh.”

In Bremen I stayed with a delightful Catholic host, who told me the hot ticket for Saturday morning’s Bible Study was Fullbert Steffensky, Professor Emeritus at Hamburg.

He was now a Lutheran, having started out as a monk of Maria Laach — the place Adenauer found sanctuary from the Nazis in 1934 (though that’s not quite the whole story of the monstery at that time).

The Bible Study considered Genesis 16 and Hagar the slave woman. She is not entirely outside God’s blessing, and we were led into considering the probem of religious absolutism and the inability of some Christians and others to believe God has blessed anyone but their in-group. He leapt straight from there to an incident at the Berlin Kirchentag in 2003, where large crowds had been banned from intercommunion. What right had ecclesiastical authorities to try and deprive the people of God of hope? As I mentally fell off the seat, given the style distance between the presentation and our customary stately Englsh ecumenical quadrille, the preacher continued.

The basis of Communion is the mercy, gift and call of God, not what he scathingly called “die Einheitlichkeit in einigen Sätzendes Bekentnisses. (loosely, “the oneness of a sit-down of acquaintances”) It was pointless for ecclesiastical authorities to say the Church wasn't ready for such a thing, if all they meant was that they weren’t. Now, Ecumenical diplomats, sit down somewhere comfortable and pour a stiff drink, as I quote the published text:

Wir können nicht darauf warten, bis die letzten fußkranken Mitglieder von Kirchenleitungen angekommen sind und das Mahl für erlaubt. (very loosely, “We can’t wait for the last lame duck Church leaders to catch up and join us at the table...”)

Dr Steffensky very much hoped that at future Kirchentage people would just go ahead and eat as the Lord commanded, concluding

Auf Dauer werden die Bischöfe schon fördern, was sie nicht verhindern können. ( loosely, “The Bishops will soon enough require what they can’t prevent.”)

Boooom! Right, my English Ecumenical Chums. This is certainly Provocative stuff that you wouldn't hear in a gathering of 125,000 Christians in England.
Is it “Liturgical Terrorism” or the Future?

Love and Death — and coming alive

Bishop Stephen brought a fabulous love poem to today’s senior staff Eucharist. Reflecting on the physicality of Anglo-Catholic worship, and the propensity to kiss altars, books, even human beings sometimes, this poem somehow made sense of breaking bread — a kind of St John of the Cross thing. The poem is from Carol Ann Duffy’s extended exploration of love’s moods and realities, Rapture.

If I was Dead

If I was dead,
and my bones adrift
like dropped oars
in the deep, turning earth;

or drowned,
and my skull
a listening shell
on the dark ocean bed;

if I was dead,
and my heart
soft mulch
for a red, red rose;

or burned,
and my body
a fistful of grit, thrown
in the face of the wind;

if I was dead,
and my eyes,
blind at the roots of flowers,
wept into nothing,

I swear your love
would raise me
out of my grave,
in my flesh and blood,

like Lazarus;
hungry for this,
and this, and this,
your living kiss.

Carol Ann Duffy, 1955-

And then, precisely timed in the great scheme of things, I noticed a quote from Howard Thurman on Maggi Dawn’s blog:

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who are alive.

Yes!

Round Tabling

I preached last night for the inauguration of Camilla Walton’s ministry as Team Vicar of St Michael’s Beaconsfield. Dom Gregory Dix’s monumental work, The Shape of the Liturgy, continuously in print since 1944, and profoundly influential in the remodeling of Roman Catholic, Anglican and Free Church liturgies in the 60’s and 70’s, was actually written not in Oxford, nor even a monastery, but the vicarage of Saint Michael’s which he had been sent to serve by his community early in the World War II. It was a joy and honour to meet someone who had served mass for Dom Gregory.

Camilla had chosen the Hymn to Love from I Corinthians 13 for her induction, along with Jesus washing his disciples feet in John 13. It reminded me of this poem, that various people last night asked me to put on the blog. I first encountered it from my friend and close colleague Sheila Nunn when she used it as the basis for the design of our Diocesan Convention Eucharist in 2002. I saw Sheila a lot as she was dying of cancer in 2003, and we talked through this poem together, and its implications for the kind of church we have to be, and the kind of bishop I was supposed to be — that had just been announced. I think of it often...

In search of a round table

Concerning the why and how and what and who of ministry,
One image keeps surfacing: A table that is round.
It will take some sawing
To be roundtabled.
Some redefining
And redesigning,
Some redoing and rebirthing
Of narrow long Churching
Can painful be
For people and tables.
It would mean no daising
And throning,
For but one king is there
And he is a foot washer,
At table no less.
And what of narrow long ministers
When they confront
A round table people,
After years of working up the table
To finally sit at its head,
Only to discover
That the table has been turned round?
They must be loved into roundness,
For God has called a People
Not "them and us".
"them and us" are unable
to gather round; for at a round table
there are no sides
and ALL are invited
to wholeness and to food.
At one time
Our narrowing churches
Were built to resemble the Cross
But it does no good
For building to do so,
If lives do not.
Round tabling means
No preferred seating,
No first and last,
No better, and no corners
For the "least of these".
Roundtabling means
Being with,
A part of,
Together and one.
It means room for the Spirit
And gifts
And disturbing profound peace for all.
We can no longer prepare for the past.
To be Church,
And if He calls for other than a round table
We are bound to follow.
Leaving the sawdust
And chips, designs and redesigns
Behind, in search of and in presence of
The Kingdom
That is His and not ours.

Chuck Lathrop

Strangers on a Train

Not quite Babette’s Feast. On my way out for Eucharistic feasting in Chalfont St Peter where the Lord sets up his table for his people in the midst of those that trouble them, the Grand-daddy of all YouTube japes on the real Tube, from a group of North London Art Students. Is this how you do Underground Church?

h/t +Stephen Cotterell