Sarx

The posting of Rick Fabian’s Worship at St Gregory’s continues (by permission of the author and the publisher) with the portion on the communion rites.

E HAVE already sung the Lord’s Prayer to begin the Prayers of the People, and do not repeat it here. R. Taft has argued (at a North American Academy of Liturgy seminar in 1989) that the Lord’s Prayer migrated here, not on account of its reference to feeding, but on account of its petition for forgiveness. Just as those excommunicated for major sins (the Penitents) were anciently restored to communion by the Bishop’s pardon, so regular communicants could ask pardon for their minor offences by repeating the Lord’s Prayer, and then share worthily in the bread and wine. Unfortunately, by undermining the principle that nothing can make us worthy of Christ’s banquet, this innovation begins a long history of devotional confusion. It also overturns the gospels’ order of events, which derives from Jesus’ own teaching and example: in God’s kingdom we are first welcomed, forgiven, and fed; and then we repent and reform our lives — as the Zacchaeus story exemplifies (Luke 19).

Fraction After the people’s Amen to the Great Thanksgiving, the Presider and Deacons distribute the bread and wine into vessels for communion. Following G. Dix’s theory of The Shape of the Liturgy (1945), many modern celebrants highlight this action, called the fraction, as a gesture fraught with meaning. Some lift the bread and break it dramatically, suggesting the Fraction completes the sacrifice of Jesus, broken on the Cross. (One cathedral I visited punctuated this gesture with a banshee shriek from the organ’s Spanish Trumpet stop — I was so startled I sat on my new felt hat!) But a gesture implying that something happens to Christ in the liturgy is just what the sixteenth century Reformers called a “superstition.” The original Fraction was a functional matter of distributing the bread and wine for the Communion — it was the Communion that truly completed the eucharistic sacrifice. So we perform the Fraction plainly. The Presider and assisting presbyters divide up the bread; the deacon divides up the wine, a somewhat more complex job.

More than One Cup! Function determines the number of vessels on the Table. Throughout history as the number of communicants grew, so did the number of communion vessels: in the east, giant patens held the bread (still Ethiopian custom); western medieval churches with tiny sanctuaries piled excess loaves on panniers held by subdeacons squeezed in behind the presider; renaissance reformers replaced their goblet chalices with imposing silver pitchers, to supply the wine communion newly restored to the laity. But the shrinkage of late medieval communions, and the introduction of unleavened bread in the ninth century west, allowed both eastern and western churches to return to a single chalice and paten on the Altar Table — and in the east even a single loaf — accidentally restoring the rabbinical scale likely seen at Jesus’ Last Supper, and clearly assumed by Paul, who makes this one loaf a symbol of the Church’s unity. (1 Corinthians 10:17) Therefore some modern liturgists try to keep this visual symbol by an artifice, confining the extra vessels required offstage until the fraction. But Massey Shepherd protested that Vatican II reformers (of whom he was one) deliberately demoted this symbol, instead honoring practical function as fundamental to ritual. And we abandoned it at St Gregory’s when the congregation crowding around the Altar made it impossibly clumsy. Now all the vessels needed stand on the Table throughout the prayer, covered beforehand and afterward with veils embroidered by the Indian Christians of Kerala; and at Easter and other very crowded services we use a giant Ethiopian wooden paten piled high with many homemade loaves.

At crowded services, as chalices empty we extend the wine by co-mixture, pouring the flagon of consecrated wine into other cups brought half-filled to the table. This ancient practice serves both symbolic unity and speedy distribution for Communion. Should the bread or wine run out, we do not repeat the Great Thanksgiving prayer’s Last Supper narrative, as the American Prayer Book newly directs: the Anglican reformers would have seen magical superstition in such “hocus pocus;” moreover, it contradicts renewal by singling out one paragraph of the prayer as the consecrating moment. Instead, like eastern Christians we drop a fragment of consecrated bread into a fresh chalice, by extension making this wine the Blood of Christ. (And should the consecrated bread run out, we intinct fresh bread to the same end.) The same method serves for delivering communion to the sick. Haghia Sophia made this simple practice standard by the eleventh century for communion from the presanctified gifts, reckoning that sacramental theology allows no distinction between Christ’s Body and Blood. (*) Such elegant thinking solves problems still vexing western reform. As easterners have enjoyed two uninterrupted millennia of lay communion in both species, westerners may learn from them when we can.

During the preparation of the elements, the people sing the Syrian chant “Servant [or Lamb] of God” or an Easter Troparion or other seasonal text. The familiar western text of this Syrian hymn is corrupt. According to C.H. Dodd, 2 Isaiah’s image of the Suffering Servant was mistranslated in John’s gospel from Aramaic, a language that spells “Servant” and “Lamb” alike. Moreover the hymn’s last repetition has been changed peculiarly to fit worship at Rome, where the Peace follows before Communion. We sing the hymn in a more primitive form (”Servant of God, you take away the sins of the world”), invoking 2 Isaiah’s original prophecy, and not altering the last repetition. For wider use, a setting of our music to the more familiar text appears in Church Hymnal Studies V: Congregational Music for Eucharist (1980).

One is Holy Once prepared, the clergy lift the gifts for all to see, turning around to the whole company and inviting them to share: “Holy gifts for holy people.”

The congregation reply, “One is holy, one is Lord: Jesus Christ, to the glory of God our Mothering Father! Amen.”

Many eastern sources begin communion with this dialogue, which I have Englished in expanded gender terms. (An explanation follows here.) Recent American Prayer Book reform introduced the presider’s original line alone in early drafts, whereupon some readers objected — contradicting St Paul — that sinners could not be called holy. So the authors compromised: “The Gifts of God for the People of God.” Yet that objection would hardly have arisen had drafts included the people’s original response, which quotes the Gloria in excelsis, making plain the orthodox sense.

It is tempting to think that eastern usage inspired Cranmer’s queer decision to set the Gloria in excelsis at the end of his eucharistic rite, where it remained in Anglican Prayer Books until the twentieth century. The communion chants Lamb of God and One is Holy, both Syrian in origin, branch off from the Gloria in excelsis, another Syrian hymn which functions as a concluding doxology at Lauds — not the eucharist — in eastern worship. The Sarum rite shows Byzantine liturgy was understood in medieval England, but Cranmer’s knowlege is less clear to us.

My translation here, and other translations used by St Gregory’s composers, reflect our policy to pluralize gender language in every service, rather than restrict it to any one standard. Commenting on the Song of Songs, Gregory Nyssen says the groom’s mother in the biblical poem symbolizes God, since God has no gender, so that a woman represents God as well as a man. Gregory’s exegisis inspired the icon behind our presider’s chair, and the people’s communion response seems an excellent place to speak it aloud. “Mothering Father” echoes clearly the Gloria in excelsis, while giving the feminine image the verb: this has four advantages. Gregory and his fellow Cappadocians insist that God’s actions are all we can know about God. Secondly, despite some other theologians’ faith in nouns and copulas, poets and storytellers know that verbs dominate what people hear. Again, Scripture uses nouns and verbs alike with male images, but verbs more often with female images for God — such as a hen brooding over chicks, or a nurse coaxing an unwilling child to her breast.

Finally,“Mothering Father,” while poetically terse, is also what Paul Tillich called, in Dynamics of Faith (1962), a “broken image:” thanks to cognitive dissonance its limits are self-evident, proof against idolatry. Tillich would likely have seen brokenness, rather than inclusiveness, as the chief virtue in feminist God language today. He called his the “Protestant Principle,” while claiming rightly it was older than Protestantism. Among Gregory Nyssen’s intellectual heirs, Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Ávila composed feminist terms of lasting usefulness with it: “Jesus our Mother,” for one pertinent example. Purer, less dissonant female images bear the virtue of brokenness only temporarily. Once we grow accustomed to them, they will prove as dangerous as patriarchal terms are, and as matriarchal terms have been for other faiths.

To Everyone by Name Returning the gifts to the table, the clergy begin the communion. Following eastern Christian custom, we give the eucharist to each communicant by name. The Presider receives bread and wine from the deacon, (A modified Byzantinism: they would have preferred a cleric of the same order.(*) then communicates the deacon, assisting ministers, and anyone newly baptized or married at this service; then the Presider and deacon carry the bread among the people. Lay ministers follow carrying chalices through the crowd, who pass the cups to each other while the ministers see that the cups reach everyone.

The Chabûrah usually involved small groups, who fit around one dinner table. The host shared one loaf and one cup with his guests, delivering each with his own hands. Paul found this symbol a powerful reminder of church unity (1 Corintians 10:17); yet even in his lifetime churches must have become too crowded to make it practical. Eastern churches can still employ one communion minister, since today few of their laypeople ordinarily communicate; but western Christians can preserve only a vestigial gesture, for example by ordering the Presider to communicate the deacons or lay assistants, who then split up and communicate the rest. And once this unity symbol is broken, there seems little point in restricting the distributorship to some laypeople — thus clericalized — and not others. Especially if other methods are speedier; alas, the Communion is often the slowest part of an understaffed western liturgy. By contrast, our system works swiftly, with the chalices moving in a leap-frog pattern. And our people like this mixture of communion methods— both receiving from a vested “host” and serving one another.

Infants and children receive with the rest, sometimes at their parents’ helpful hands. Thus every Christian receives Christ’s body and blood from another Christian, and so from the Church; and the whole company shares Jesus’ prophetic ministry, welcoming sinners to the table and feeding them.