Yesterday, a Sunday, I experienced for about an hour what can only be described as untrammelled joy – in church, of all places, you might be surprised to know. It went beyond happiness, although it embodied the vital elements of happiness which, superficial as it may sound, also contains something of the way things are meant to be. All of this is a rather clumsy and roundabout way of describing what happened, not just for me, but for everyone there, yesterday morning between 11am and midday.
I don’t think joy, or even uncomplicated happiness (the kind children experience all too briefly in today’s competitive educational environment) happens by itself. It’s not a mystical experience. It doesn’t descend on you and envelope you in its own cloud of unknowing, to borrow briefly from one of the great unknown writers on mysticism who is thought by some scholars to have been an Anglican priest. It’s more playful. Again, as children are. It compels you to join in the dance, so to speak. It insists on a kind of hidden laughter taking you, and everyone around you, into itself.
Most people would be surprised to learn that this sort of thing can happen in the context of an Anglican Sunday morning church service – not the kind where emotions are whipped up by throbbing music or nerve tingling sermons – but an ordinary Sunday morning Anglican Eucharist. That being said, honesty compels me to admit that the hymn choices (again straight up and down Anglican hymns) were, shall we say, quite rousing. But what made them so? Liturgy alone does not quite cut the mustard when it comes to the engendering of true joy. Something else has to be going on to imbue the hymns and time-worn words with this joy.
I think this ‘something else’ has to do with the assembled company. By that I mean a diverse collection of people who have come together in the confident expectation that something will happen in the context of the service which will bind them more closely to one another, give (if only briefly) a sense that there is more to life than what goes on during the rest of the week and, yes, meet God.
One of the great virtues of the Anglican way of going about public worship (and it has many virtues) is that it gives people permission to encounter God privately, but to do so in the company of people who, even if they don’t know each other, are mutually disposed to love and trust the person sitting next to them in the pew. It is this kind of trust which underpins much of what goes on in good Anglican church services.
Sadly, many people would dismiss all this as not being what going to church ought to be about, as wishy washy and unsound, as not facing up to the challenges of the modern world, as retreating into sentiment etc. etc. They are missing the point.
Surprisingly, it was John Calvin, that 16th century theologian, more often associated with hell fire than with cosy church services, who got the point about Anglicanism, if unintentionally. He wrote that the ‘presence’ of God in any act of worship (he was referring specifically to sacramental presence, but the idea applies to all communal acts of worship undertaken in trust) is made ‘real’ by the collective presence, the will to worship, the common desire (or whatever else you might like to call it) of the priest and the people together. This is what I personally experienced yesterday morning and I would be willing to bet that most of the people present in that church were experiencing it too. It was communion in the fullest sense which, incidentally, also made it Anglican.
The Anglican Church is not a Church. It is a Communion. It is a body of people, a global family, complete with all its fractious differences, but bound together in something that has to do with being under the regard of a loving God[1]. So I would dare to propose that what happens in a good Anglican service (not necessarily a Eucharistic one, incidentally) has something about it which reflects truth.
Here, I sense hackles rising as people instantly jump to the conclusion that I am inferring that only Anglicans know how to do church, or have the right theology. Nothing could be further from my intention. Anglicans have traditionally been at pains to reconcile extremes (for which see the Elizabethan Settlement which was the seminal document of the Church of England and integral to what later became the spirit of the Anglican Communion), to hold things in tension without diluting the essence of the faith.
All of this might seem rather heavy stuff in regard to a Sunday morning Holy Communion service in a small country church. But heavy stuff is needed if the structure which underpins the life of communion (and I use that word cautiously) is to hold in a fragmented society and, sadly, in a Church where the structures that have held everything together for centuries are no longer fit for purpose because they have become atrophied over time. They are too rigid. They lack the flexibility needed to easily adapt to the social and sexual mores of today and to the biblical scholarship needed to meet people in the lives we all actually live.
This rigidity also skews concepts of authority into something that encourages a ‘do as you’re told’ approach to those who hold it. As a result, trust and empathy in top-down authority relationships become harder and harder to maintain and often require more time and personal energy than any one person (especially if they are in a position of authority) can realistically give. Nevertheless, Anglicanism, or the Anglican Communion, has something precious to give to the wider Church if it can hold true in its daily life to a concept of trust that has the space to grow out of a structured communion, beginning with its often unremarkable (in the best sense of the word) Sunday worship.
[1] Passim Rowan Williams
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