First published in Praxis : News of Worship, Volume 71 Autumn 2021 www.praxisworship.org.uk
As a parish priest who moved post in summer 2020 my experience of the Eucharist during the pandemic has varied enormously. There has been a movement between the private and the public, which has echoes for me of the difference between the last supper and the feeding of the 5,000. The last supper in that upper room, prepared for in advance, in private, where everybody’s name is known. The feeding of the 5,000 in public, a bit haphazard, with crowds that really no one can number.
What happened
My first lockdown experience of the sacrament was each Sunday watching an on-screen Eucharist from St Alban’s Abbey with my congregation at Holy Innocents, Kingsbury in the suburbs of North West London. Although it was not our own cathedral I chose St Alban’s as it was nearby and what they provided (a livestream of a sung Eucharist at 10am) fit perfectly with our usual pattern. We joined together on Zoom, watching the service and afterwards having our own prayers, notices and chat. I received the ministry of the team at St Albans along with my congregation. We never knew whether the services were pre-recorded, but hoped and imagined they were live. Watching together on Zoom felt intimate, as we greeted each other before the service and chatted afterwards.
After a few months I began services in church again. A few times I livestreamed the Eucharist with those who were helping lead the service in attendance, with the doors locked. My last Sunday at Holy Innocents happened to fall just after the point where public worship with in-person attendance had become permitted. It was clear however that the number of people we would have been able to allow in church would be very limited. For that last service I decided to keep the pattern of the previous weeks, and stream from within the church, with the churchwardens physically present on behalf of the congregation. I did not want to spend my last Sunday as vicar in a community I loved excluding people or policing social distancing, and promised to come back for a proper farewell when the time was right.
By the time I was licensed to my new church, Christ Church, they were holding Sunday services pretty much as usual without singing. In the next two periods when we suspended pubic worship in church I eventually settled on providing a simple Zoomed ‘spiritual communion’ service from my home each Sunday. It was a service of the word, following the shape of the eucharist with the eucharistic prayer and communion replaced by a time of silence and an ‘Act of Spiritual Communion’ [see box]. There are different versions of this prayer. This one, which was circulated by SCP (the Society of Catholic Priests) at the start of the pandemic, explicitly refers to every altar where the eucharist is being celebrated. This seemed important, connecting together each of us in our homes with the church throughout the world. After Christmas Day I, along with my congregation, next received communion when I presided in church on Palm Sunday. This time we did not have concerns about crowds and were able to move directly from Zoomed spiritual communion to public celebration of the Eucharist just in time to Easter.
Reflection
Long before the pandemic I resolved never to preside at the Eucharist with fewer than two others, as I understand communion to require community. In the pandemic I relaxed my rule because the value of seeing the eucharist celebrated, even online, was so clear. Of course I hated locking those doors behind me. Behind closed doors it was not the sacrament in its fulness, but it was the sacrament. For those watching online, some just a few hundred metres away, it was the sacrament present in their familiar church with the memory of that physical community, the reality of the online community, and the anticipation of a return. The sacramental worship I enabled during lockdown depended on other services which had taken place in person, or were taking place, or would take place in the future.
I knew already that the sacrament needed community, and discovered in the pandemic that there were ways of drawing on community even if we are not gathered in person, each of which can be helped by electronic communication - through memory of past gatherings, present spirit and hopeful anticipation. Through the lockdowns I made decisions that focused on keeping the existing church community connected, and in retrospect this feels like keeping to a ‘last supper’ image of communion. Other groups made decisions that made online worship more publicly available to vast numbers and the communities I led depended on that. I remain intensely grateful for their ministry on which mine clearly depended. Their generosity in making pubic provision enabled the communities I led to hang on.
Eventually I was able to keep my promise and return to my previous church for a farewell service. Over a year after I left, on the first Sunday after most restrictions were lifted, we gathered just as we once had for a Sunday Eucharist. The angel of the lectionary smiled on me as the gospel of the day was the feeding of the 5,000. It felt like an enormous occasion, although the number of people present was closer to 50 than 5,000. For us and, I suspect, for many congregations that were similarly blessed by the lectionary that day, it marked a moment of the eucharistic community being called to move from the private, intimate relationality of the last supper to the public, expansive and generous sign of the 5,000.
An Act of Spiritual Communion
Almighty God,
in union with the faithful at every altar of your Church,
where your blessed body and blood are being offered to the Father,
I desire to offer you praise and thanksgiving.
I present to you my soul and body,
with the earnest wish that I may ever be united to you.
And since I cannot now receive you sacramentally,
I ask you to come spiritually into my heart.
I unite myself to you,
and embrace you with all the affections of my soul.
Let nothing ever separate me from you.
Let me live and die in your love.
Amen.
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