Making virtual worship real


For most Christians, Holy Week is the high point of the year, with its challenging themes and powerful worship, which invites us to participate in the saving events of Jesus’ last week in Jerusalem. The key note in all the main services is involvement – a kind of mimesis, reliving, and being part of these events, from the palm procession on Palm Sunday, through the evening communion on Maundy Thursday, and the various ways Good Friday is celebrated to the Easter ceremonies, perhaps a vigil service of light overcoming darkness or an early morning greeting of the new world created by Christ’s resurrection.

This year, we shall be deprived of that shared experience, and it is hard to overstate how painful that will be for us. We can share through the internet some of the worship, readings and reflection, but the feeling of being alongside fellow-believers in sharing these great experiences is lacking. In the Jewish Passover, which will be celebrated in Jewish homes on Wednesday evening, the ‘celebrant’ says, “in every generation every Jew should feel as if he himself actually came out of Egypt.” Much the same is true of Christians – who this week, more than in our regular worship, are invited to be “there, when they crucified My Lord…when he rose up from the tomb.”

So how can we compensate? As I said, there is a rich menu of virtual worship – but looking at a screen can feel a poor substitute for sharing with our brothers and sisters. Those who value the sacraments will particularly find an Easter Day without communion hard. As the Book of Common Prayer decreed, “every Parishioner shall communicate at the least three times in the year, of which Easter to be one.” We who are ordained are blessed, in being able to celebrate the sacrament at home, though for us too, the involvement with others will be a loss.

Perhaps we can be encouraged by the experiences of Christians who have been imprisoned, or separated from fellowship by other circumstances, and have found ways of feeling in touch with the worship of the church. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, while working in the desert in China, was unable to celebrate Mass but resolved to offer prayer and praise for the creation around him:
“Since once again, Lord…I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond
these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole world
my altar and on it will offer you all the labours and sufferings of the world…. Over every living thing which is to spring up, to grow, to flower, to ripen during this day, I say again the words: This is my Body.”

In Graham Greene’s novel Monsignor Quixote the old priest, shortly to die, is seen sleep-walking into a church where he begins to say the words of the Latin Mass;  at the point of communion:
“he spoke again: ‘Corpus Domini nostri’, and with no hesitation he took from the invisible paten the invisible Host and his fingers laid nothing on his tongue. Then he raised the invisible chalice and seemed to drink from it.”

Clearly these are very specific actions; we cannot repeat them – but they might suggest ways in which we can engage our imagination, and enter as fully as possible into the worship we do in truth share with countless fellow-believers around the world – whether or not that is mediated by an on-line service. Indeed, it is surely true that no Christian ever prays or worships alone, for we always praise God together with “angels and archangels, and with all the company of heaven.” We are “surrounded by a great crowd of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1.)

Perhaps the challenge we face this Holy Week is to take seriously Jesus’ words to the woman at Jacob’s well:
“a time is coming when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (and not on any particular mountain – John 4:23) We must seek to allow our ‘solitary’ worship to be empowered by the Holy Spirit, in spirit and in truth, and to experience our membership of the communion of saints as something real, not a mere theory.

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