THIS SERIES for Lent ends this week, looking at what the Church of England expects of its lay members (see previous Faith columns). It starts from the six rules set forth by a committee of the Church Assembly (precursor of the General Synod) 60 years ago. This week, the last rule:6. To come to to the
Easter communion, to many of our Anglican ancestors, was the spiritual equivalent of making up one’s tax return today. It was an annual settling of accounts, a time to settle disputes and to reach a state of charity with one’s neighbour.
The Reformation did little to break the medieval pattern of communion once or twice a year, at Easter or perhaps Christmas. Even in the 19th century, it would have been unusual to receive communion more than once a month, and a “Communion Sunday” was therefore a special event, something to be prepared for well in advance.
It was only in the 20th century that communion displaced morning prayer as the regular Sunday service in many parishes — arguably the biggest change to Anglican worship since the Reformation. To look at Anglican spiritual writings of the 17th-19th centuries is, very often, to be humbled by the amount of preparation that was deemed necessary before receiving the sacrament.
Perhaps it is not surprising that a rule compiled in 1948, before the wider spread of the Parish Communion movement in the 1950s, should seem to be looking back in that direction rather than anticipating the eucharist as the main Sunday service, at which most of those present communicate.
Has this led to a cheapening of the sacrament? Anna Bouverie, heroine of Joanna Trollope’s The Rector’s Wife, muses on how she receives communion too often. One need not be as disaffected from the Church as she is to feel she has a point.
Yet the spiritual economy of communion has radically changed, and the clock could not be turned back without a real feeling of deprivation. Perhaps the solution is not to receive communion less frequently, but to go back to the traditional practice of setting aside Lent and Advent as times of special preparation, where communion is treated with greater seriousness than usual.
It may be the effect of a less leisured age that many of those who attend church at all want to maximise the experience, going for communion rather than just for prayer. But it is surely also to do with a cross-denominational shift in attitudes towards the eucharist in the past few decades.
There has been a move away from potentially divisive questions of how grace is conveyed via the bread and wine itself, and rules about fasting reception, towards an understanding of the sacrament as a symbolic act of unity and fellowship. The effect of this has been to direct attention away from self-examination, and towards collective sociability — hence the real importance of coffee afterwards. As with any party, the very act of turning up betokens good will.
Yet this is often severely tested. Few of those who bring small children to church, or who sit next to those who do, will regularly have the opportunity to engage in sustained prayer directly before communion. The change there has been not in childish behaviour, but in greater tolerance of it; and parents — I write as one myself — can only be grateful.
Yet, with holy communion, as with other services, this can mean that entire congregations are forced to sacrifice the numinous quality of silence. Late-night services are one way round the difficulty — perhaps one reason why they have become popular in recent decades.
The present-day emphasis on providing a friendly environment for young families is in part a pragmatic one: as their numbers have fallen, Anglicans have had to become kinder to their breeding stock.
They have also become kinder to themselves: the word “penitence” in this rule would probably be softened now. Whether it should be is another matter, although, like “mortification”, “austerities”, and, most of all, “discipline”, it has developed a masochistic ring that works against effective evangelisation.
A concept so central to the Christian undertaking cannot be watered down beyond a certain point, however. The time may come when an Anglican Savonarola reclaims the vocabulary of penitence from cards in telephone boxes.
After all, managers in today’s workplace seem to have recognised the effectiveness of a secularised version of penance. In systems of appraisal, the formal obligation to reflect on one’s professional failings, receive admonition, and pledge improvement has never been greater. In this, if in no other way, Anglican lay people could learn from managerial culture.
For some, sacramental confession is the best detox ever. But it has always been a point of tension between different modes of churchmanship, hence the very Anglican way this rule is worded. Multiplied across a parish, it can also be a great deal to ask from incumbents labouring under heavy pastoral and administrative loads.
But a collective act of penitence is, at least, built into the Prayer of Humble Access and its present-day alternatives: “Our hands were unclean, our hearts were unprepared; we were not fit even to eat the crumbs from under your table. . .” To think what one is saying would be a start.
“Love means never having to say you’re sorry” — one of the oddest Hollywood axioms ever — is untrue in secular relationships, let alone religious ones. And, for all the strengths of Evangelicalism, its emphasis on one-off conversion can sometimes imply that love means having to say sorry only once.
Regular formal self-examination, whether as a purely private exercise before God or in preparation for sacramental confession, is not without its dangers, either. These include: perfunctory box-ticking; self-indulgent over-scrupulousness; and abject language, which can be a relief, but should not be revelled in.
Then again, we learn only by doing something regularly, and if we are regularly reminded of forgiveness, it is only fair to match those reminders by thinking how much we need to be forgiven. Whether received once a year or once a week, the eucharist can help us do that.
Dr Alison Shell is a Reader in English at Durham University.
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