Bishops' Blog

Open Communion

A psalm for the fifth day at Morning Prayer is the 26^th, which includes these lines:

“Give judgment for me, O Lord, for in have lived with integrity;/ I have trusted in the Lord and never faltered….

I will wash my hands in innocence, O Lord,/ that I may go in procession round your altar.* (vv.1,6)

I admire the Psalmist’s self-confidence, but I do not share it! My spiritual life has lots of faltering, and if innocence is the basis on which I approach the altar, my Sunday mornings will be freer than they now are. Who then is the ‘I’ who can say these words?

The answer is the ‘George’ who lives based on the forgiveness Christ has won for us, the one clothed in His righteousness. The only one who hasn’t faltered is Christ. So when we read psalms with these stringent requirements of holiness we are at once daunted and emboldened. There is after all a reason that in his parables Jesus had such an emphasis on decisiveness and chutzpah.

Somewhat lost amidst other matters at General Convention was a call for a renewed debate about ‘open communion.’ This phrase refers to offering communion to the unbaptized. The argument on its behalf is a serious one: isn’t our faith based on sheer grace, unmerited gift? What claim do we have over our unchurched neighbor? Aren’t we all equally creatures of God, made in His image? Yes, indeed.

But we should at this point listen once more to those verses of the psalm. As we listen, we need to be honest with ourselves. We are indeed equal, equally unable to approach the throne of unalloyed holiness, truth, and love on our own. After the seraphim sing the words ‘holy, holy, holy’ we sing in the Eucharist, Isaiah says “woe is me, I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell amidst a people of unclean lips…” (Isaiah 6). We all need to be brought to this altar; we need what St. Athanasius imagined as an asbestos vest before the fire of God’s love. If we are to go there, we need to be Christ’s own, which means we need baptism and then the Christian life of grace. What is open is Christ’s offer to every human being of that grace.

The debate about open communion is valuable because it clarifies the most basic matters in our faith. It also, implicitly, gives us our marching orders. The unbaptized and the baptized seem alike to us in part because we as a church have not always assumed the latter needed earnestly to be taught and formed on the basis of who they now really are in Jesus Christ. The answer is not lowering the bar of receiving communion, but rather raising the bar of catechism and spiritual formation.

Peace, GRS+

Signs of God

This blog entry is in the form of a book report: I have recently completed Peter Leithart’s, Traces of the Trinity: Signs of God in Creation and Human Experience and I commend it to you.

Leithart thinks about his experience of a number of things such as language, time, music, and romantic relationships. What he sees is what he calls ‘mutual penetration’ or ‘mutual indwelling.’ (Here he reminds me of the Anglo-Catholic novelist Charles Williams, who is worth looking up). When you consider things deeply, the elements or persons are neither indivisibly one, nor are they separate and isolated. The mother and the fetus - they are separate and yet their lives are intertwined. Lovers come to see their life as inter-penetrated, and this is just what the marriage service affirms. The past is in our present in our memories, and you cannot separate one from another. Music is everywhere in us, and we feel our lives for a moment inside the music. Notes occupy the same ‘space’ at once in a chord. A story contains the world it tells about, but the world has stories in it. Leithart says each is like a Mobius strip where two things are interfolded into each other. We parents are not our children, but heaven knows we indwell their struggles. Each of these things is ‘within you and without you’, all at the same time. This state of affairs is not a misunderstanding to be ironed out, but a mystery to be noticed and pondered.

Leithart goes on to say that each of these intimate mysteries of our lives trace, a whisper, a reminder of the One who created them all, who is Father, Son, and Spirit, three and one, indwelling each other is a sense far fuller than we can experience in these human dimensions.      

But the author is not naïve. He is not saying that you could just look at parents and children, or lovers, or time, or music, and figure out that there is a God who is one and three! The revelation has to come first. But once you know of it, then the complexity and mystery of the world make better sense. God leaves, as it were, traces of His nature in His creation. Read this book, and the complex, both/and-ness of the world is illumined, and along the way our faith is strengthened as well.

GRS+