IN HIS famous peroration — “Was ever another command so obeyed? . . .” in The Shape of the Liturgy, 80 years ago, the Anglo-Catholic liturgical scholar Dom Gregory Dix marvelled at the many circumstances in which, throughout the Church’s history, the faithful had been fed with the Blessed Sacrament. He was not explicitly campaigning for the Parish Communion Movement: indeed, in his Benedictine community at Nashdom, the liturgy was very different from that of most C of E parishes where the Movement was to reach its zenith in the following decades. Its legacy remains not only in those where the main Sunday service is a eucharist, but in the expectation (not requirement) that all those eligible to do so will communicate whenever they attend. It has created a com­municant spirituality that can come up against some­thing quite different when church-planting occurs; and, as the Bishop of Sheffield acknowledges (Feature), the clergy shortage is making sacramental provision a challenge. The suspicion lurks that some leaders of diocesan restructuring view being a weekly communicant as a luxury for a minority.

Professor Andrew Davison reminds us this week not to equate less frequent reception of communion with a lack of reverence: the reverse may be true. But, as Dix indicated, on any day we may find ourselves in need of it. In her new memoir, the young writer Lamorna Ash writes of realising that what she requires is “something hard and bright. Not at the borders of Christianity, but right at its centre,” telling her housemate one Sunday that she wants to receive communion. In a letter to the Church Times two years before her death, a devout laywoman, Monica Ditmas, wrote of her longing to receive while in a care home, recalling how, in solitary confinement during apartheid, the Dean of Johannesburg had presided in his cell with empty hands (Letters, 29 September 2017). Covid arrangements made the point general.

One change in the past 80 years is the decline in confirmations and formal catechesis. Most people may still have some famili­arity with the Lord’s Prayer; but how many of those attracted into our churches by manifold activities have any familiarity with the Lord’s Supper, or will hear our Lord’s teaching on eating his body and drinking his blood? An Evangelical Alliance report suggests that many adult converts are “making some kind of commitment with only a very limited understanding of the gospel”. Theological differences over the sacrament are well known; but the
C of E’s formularies have never played down its importance, with holy baptism, for salvation. Those charged with teaching the faith can build up the Body of Christ by helping both those new to holy communion, and those who first made their way to the altar rail decades ago, to explore the richness of this precious gift.