2nd May ‘They exchanged the glory of God for the image of an ox that eats grass.’ (Ps 106.20): COVID, Chaplains and the Eucharist

 

2^nd May ‘They exchanged the glory of God   for the image of an ox that eats grass.’ (Ps 106.20): COVID, Chaplains and the Eucharist

A week ago, Ben very kindly brought the sacrament from the Children’s Service to me. I kept it in my study until today.

So today, I logged onto Facebook, saw the Area Dean lead the Mass, made the responses, prayed with the faithful, and at the point of Holy Communion I open my silver pyx and consumed the host. The whole experience was profound, moving and received with joy, but, but…

One of the ‘unexpected items’ in the Church’s ‘bagging area’ from the COVID pandemic has been the adoption by churches as traditional as ours of technology, and the live-streaming of services. This has opened for us, and many, new avenues where old friends of the parish have been re-connected, new friends made, and the housebound kept connected. The mission of our church, and others, has been expanded.

However, and it’s a big however, during this past year a lot of nonsense has been spoken from within the Church extolling the virtues of this “new movement of the Spirit”. I have heard much of what would have been dismissed (anathematised) in the early Church as the heresy of Gnosticism, and latterly much resembling those over-privileged customers who shop at Harry Enfield’s I saw you coming profoundly asserting, “Yah, I’m a very spiritual person”.

Naïvely, glass-half-full vicars were (are) claiming that somehow watching a service on a laptop is as good as being there in person. Thus, they ‘exchange the glory of God for an ox that eats hay’.

Even Call the Midwife tonight gets it, as Sister Monica Joan quoted from Article XXV of the Book of Common Prayer: “The Sacraments were not ordained of Christ to be gazed upon, or be carried about, but that we should duly use them.”

This year has reminded me and others of the significance of the incarnation, God being made flesh. The sharing of human nature, all personified in the gathering of the Church, the Body of Christ.

Hence, the conflicting emotions of the live-streamed Mass this morning and the joy of the visit of the Hospital chaplain with the Eucharist on the 15^th of April in the afternoon: the Eucharist divorced from the visceral, physicality of life, is the replacing of the glory of God.

The chaplain listened, bore my burdens, wiped my tears and gave me the panis angelicus. All this happened as machines continued to beep and Velcro on arms was torn.

Here is Eucharist, communion made holy by, and making holy, real life.