A Liturgy of Comfort

Reflections on the Prayer Book Holy Communion

This term, I have begun offering a weekly service of Holy Communion according to the Canadian Book of Common Prayer 1962 in the gorgeous but little-used chapel on the second floor of McGill’s religious studies building. We celebrate the service in an unashamedly traditional Anglican manner: I am vested in cassock, surplice, tippet, and hood; the service is conducted from the north end of the Holy Table; communicants do indeed ‘draw near with faith’ before the confession of sins, kneeling around the altar for the service of the table proper. The point is not anachronism for anachronism’s sake, of course. Indeed, I will confess to a few innovations in gesture that are unlikely to have featured in 18th c. Holy Communion celebrations, primarily the sign of the cross at the absolution and benediction. Rather, it is to seek to inhabit and be formed by the public worship of God in the mode that was normative for Anglicanism through most of its existence, trusting in the Spirit’s power to work through our tradition, even today, to draw people to God. And after a few months of leading weekly worship, I feel ready to write something on it. This is part an apology (in the old sense of ‘defense’) of the old liturgy, part personal reflection on the experience of leading worship according to the old rite with the old ceremonial, and part suggestions about how to celebrate the rite. What regular celebration has hit home for me is that the dominant affect that this service seeks to instill is not, pace its critics, a sort of despair at sin or overwhelming sense of unworthiness next to the terrifying holy otherness of God. No, the prayer book holy communion is above all a liturgy of comfort, a form of worship which seeks to remind the congregation, in word and sacrament, of the free gift of salvation that they have received in Jesus Christ.

My wife Sarah Killam Crosby and I at the weekly prayerbook Holy Communion, following a service at which I presided and Sarah preached and clerked.

This orientation towards comfort is particularly clear in the second half of the service, when the communicants gather around the Holy Table – that is, the service of communion proper as distinct from the antecommunion. This is hardly an esoteric reading of the service: in the invitation to confession for the communicants, the priest invites the people to “Draw near with faith, and take this holy Sacrament to your comfort.” For me, when I say this, I often gesture towards the bread and wine which have already been set on the table at the offertory, or place my hand on the Holy Table, in an attempt to highlight the meaning of the words that I am saying: the sacrament is a means of comfort. If the priest has used the exhortation beforehand, the people will have just heard before this invitation to confession that Christ has ordained Holy Communion for “our great and endless comfort.” And in our celebration, it is worth repeating that the call to ‘draw near’ is physical as well as spiritual. Before the invitation to confession, the congregation comes out of the nave up to the chancel and kneels before the Holy Table, which is placed altarwise on the east end of the chancel. I have been pleasantly surprised by just how intimate it makes the service feel. There is something profoundly comfortable in gathering together around the table of the Lord to feed together upon his Body and Blood.

The invitation to confession is followed by the general confession, and it is here where critics of the old rite as unnecessarily penitential and gloomy about human capacity will lodge their complaints. To be sure, the language is rather more strident than we may be accustomed to: as the 1662 BCP has it, “we acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness,” “provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us,” “the remembrance of them [i.e., our sins] is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable.” Indeed, perhaps sensitive to this worry, the 1962 Canadian BCP in fact omits the latter two of these quotes, regrettably, to my mind. I will grant that taken in isolation these passages may seem a bit much. But – and this is key! – within the context of the rite, they are not ­in isolation. No! The Law is always followed by the Gospel, confession always followed by absolution. And so it is here! Remember, too, the priest’s words that “Almighty God…have mercy upon you; pardon and deliver you from all your sins; confirm and strengthen you in all goodness; and bring you to everlasting life…” are said in our service not from the altar to people out in the nave, far away. No: I say them to people gathered closely around the altar who have drawn near to receive the Lord’s benefits. I still speak in this moment as a representative of God and by his authority, but somehow the tenor is different, gentler, more tender, when I pronounce the absolution to my fellow Christians assembled around the table.

In the old rite, in something largely omitted from post-liturgical movement Anglican communion services, this Absolution is followed by the “Comfortable Words,” a set of four Scripture passages that emphasize God’s love and mercy given to us in Jesus. They are called comfortable for a reason: the priest’s absolution (or declaration of pardon, if you prefer) is underscored by the very words of God in Scripture, reassuring the people that the forgiveness received is in fact God’s forgiveness! I have been experimenting with the best way to deliver these words, and I’m not entirely sure I’ve settled on a clear preference. But I have been experimenting with leaving the north end of the altar (from which I kneel for confession and then pronounce the absolution) and walking across the chancel in front of the altar while I say them, in much the same way that I do when administering communion. I luxuriate in these verses, saying them somewhat slowly and feelingly. And as I walk across the chancel, I look each communicant in the eye so that I can tell them, individually, the good news conveyed in these verses. I time the recitation of the comfortable words such that I am back at the north end of the altar when the words are finished in order to begin the sursum corda.

This leads us to the eucharistic prayer: the sursum corda, the Sanctus, the prayer of consecration, the prayer of humble access (which the 1662 puts before the prayer of consecration, immediately following the Sanctus and the 1962 puts immediately before the communion). And then we get the communion itself, followed by the Lord’s Prayer and the postcommunion prayer. Again, I am struck by the comfortable intimacy of the rite. The people are gathered close around the Table, able easily to observe my minimal manual actions. I myself neither stand ad orientem, with my body blocking visual access to the elements except at the elevation, or versus populum, with my body framing the elements. I am off to the side; the elements themselves come into focus, not as something far off and forbidding but as God communicating his benefits, his very self, to us in the homely, comfortable elements of bread and wine. Furthermore – and this is particularly important – Cranmer moves the ‘high point’ of the rite from the elevation of the consecrated elements to their reception. This, it seems to me, explains an otherwise curious feature of the old Anglican rite, namely, the placement of the Lord’s Prayer after communion. I have been convinced by my advisor, Torrance Kirby, that this is in fact an absolutely brilliant liturgical move by Cranmer. The adoration of the consecrated host and chalice, exhibited by the priest far off at the altar to the congregants back in the nave, is replaced by the actual reception of the bread and the wine by Christ’s people gathered together around the Table. And so the Lord’s Prayer follows not the elevations at the consecration and the second elevation at the closing doxology, as in the Roman rite, but the actual reception of the sacrament. It’s not that there is no mystery, no awe before God’s tremendous gift of himself in the sacrament: portions of the prayer of humble access, the prayer of consecration, and the postcommunion prayer take care of this. But the rite – and especially its shift of emphasis to the reception proper – does, it seems to me, convey precisely the comfort which the invitation to confession announced as its aim.

This is especially true in the administration of the sacrament itself. At our service, our numbers are small enough that I can say the entire words of administration to each person, rather than (as is often the practice I have observed in larger congregations) splitting up the words among four people. And I have come to so love doing so! I particularly appreciate the ‘for-us-ness’ of the Cranmer’s words of administration, the way they convey the core Protestant emphasis that God has chosen to be unalterably and forever pro nobis in Christ Jesus. Thus the words of the administration of the bread: “The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life: Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith, with thanksgiving.” When I say them, I find myself ever so slightly emphasizing the word ‘thee’, and taking care to look the person to whom I am administering the bread in the eyes as I do so, to try to really hit home that both the sacrament itself and Christ’s death of which it is a memorial are entirely for us, given for our benefit by our gracious savior.

I hasten to add that there is nothing incorrect with ‘The Body of Christ, the bread of heaven’, the words of administration I most commonly hear in Rite II services in the Episcopal Church. But I miss the emphasis that the Body of Christ is given for us, that the Blood of Christ is shed for us, that both Christ’s death on the cross and his gift of the sacrament of his Body and Blood are for us, for our comfort, to be means of our drawing near to him. In fact, the experience of regularly presiding at the 1962 BCP Holy Communion has changed how I administer the sacrament when celebrating according to the contemporary language Canadian Book of Alternative Services. I find myself defaulting not to ‘the Body of Christ, the bread of heaven’ but to another option that the BAS gives: ‘the Body of Christ, given for you…the Blood of Christ, shed for you.’ I still miss the fulness of the prayerbook words of administration, the way that their length allows you to tarry with each communicant and pray for them as you administer the sacrament, the injunction to thankfulness. But it does, I think, enable me to preserve precisely the most comfort-bringing aspect of the prayerbook’s words, the reminder that both Christ’s death and the sacrament by which we remember his death are for us.

As we have seen, the exhortation that the 1662 appoints to be read before the invitation to confession, written by Peter Martyr Vermigli, calls the Lord’s Supper “our great and endless comfort.” What I have found over months of weekly celebration of the 1962 prayerbook rite according to traditional Anglican ritual and ceremonial is that the old rite is carefully designed to convey precisely this truth. Communicants gather together close to the priest and the Table to receive Christ’s benefits via the absolution and comfortable words, the partaking in Christ’s Body and Blood, and the benediction. The Law in the confession is followed by Gospel in the absolution and the comfortable words, in which the people are assured of God’s forgiveness and graciousness to them. The prayer of consecration is not something that happens far off but near at hand; north end celebration places the focus on precisely the humble and ordinary means that Christ uses to feed us with himself. The ‘high point’ of the service is not the elevation – instead, the elevation is explicitly replaced in focus by the reception. The words of administration themselves emphasize the sacrament, and Christ’s redeeming death, as pro nobis, for us, precisely in order to bring us comfort, to reassure us that we belong to Christ.

I love the old service for many reasons. For the beauty of its language, for the sense of connection to Anglicans throughout time and space, for the devotional traditions that the very stability of its language has allowed to flourish. For the way that the hieratic language instills a sense of awe before God as mysterium tremendens. But – somewhat to my surprise – what I have found I am struck most deeply by, and love the most, about the old Holy Communion rite is its focus on comfort. When I come to worship, sick and needing a healer, weary and needing encouragement, sinful and needing forgiveness, dead and needing resurrection, I find a service chock-full of comfortable words, a service whose word and movements seem all perfectly designed to convey to me the good news that God is for me in my gracious savior, Jesus Christ, and that God assures me by his Word and by his sacraments that my sins are forgiven and I am his. Thanks be to God!