The problem of sacrament for church in mission

It has already been observed that - somewhat surprisingly - there is little explicit reference to the Eucharist, or sacraments as such, from the practitioners with whom we worked. LJV was based in a Jesuit-run parish, and centred on prayer and Bible reflection, but there was no substantial referencing among the volunteers to their worshipping, liturgical life as Catholics, which, for most, would have centred on the celebration of Sunday Mass. Where reference to Eucharist did occur, it was within the context of a specific Volunteers’ gathering, in which, notably, the Mass was celebrated with particular symbolic reference to the volunteers’ practices (A2, Joint Feedback meeting p2). St. Mary’s was a parish deeply committed to daily celebration of Eucharist; but whilst preaching and hospitality were clearly named as important to members, the sacramental life of the community did not surface as strongly. More striking still is the way in which Housing Justice volunteers, when a connection between Eucharist and their feeding of the homeless was suggested, were resistant to the idea: “You’re not doing it because of the church; you’re doing it because you want to do it?” (E3, Charlotte). The supposed tension between sacrament and mission, the difficulty of relating one to the other, seems born out in these accounts.

What the Accounts of Practice also allow us to see, however, is more detail around why these connections between Eucharist and outreach

Sacrament and sacramentality 173 work might be so difficult to make effectively. Among the Housing Justice volunteers there is, first of all, some sense that attributing their work to something theological or religious somehow undermines it, or holds their motivation in question. In contrast to the guests, the volunteers are hesitant about using faith language (El), in part because of not wanting to be seen as ‘pushing’ faith onto the guests, but also through a sense of being “no better than other people”. It was the human goodness that was affirmed, rather than anything distinctly Christian (El, Sarah). It may be this reluctance to draw on faith language which informs the resistance to the ARCS team’s reflections, which sought to link the feeding of the homeless with the Eucharist, and certainly appears to be the case with the Catholic Parish Focus Group (E3). There is another hint here that it is the very ritual nature of the Eucharist itself which masks the connection between it and the feeding of the homeless. As James points out, “communion always seems rather artificial and detached” from a meal, making links difficult (E3). The final paragraph of this section of the Account of Practice E references a sense that it was the highly ‘sacred’ nature of Eucharist that militates against its begin associated with something as mundane as cooking, washing up and feeding the guests.

What we seem to be observing here is the way in which the ritualisation of sacraments risks their integration with wider Christian life. Sacraments are, in these traditions at least,²¹ properly understood as liturgically celebrated and (for the Catholic traditions especially) effected, but there may be a price to pay if this is the only way in which they are understood, as the rituals risk exhausting sacramental meaning and encounter for participants and making it difficult to speak of and understand the grace and presence of Christ outside the sanctuary. We were reminded of the liberation theologian Segundo, who challenged the ‘success’ of the liturgical movement in the second half of the twentieth century, by highlighting a “pagan insistence on the altar” which took congregations away from work for justice in the world.²²

A different kind of tension between the centrality of Eucharist and the call to mission can be seen in the understanding of the two diocesan teams with which ARCS worked. In the Westminster Agency project (B), the ARCS team felt there was a tension between the vision and heart for evangelisation and the day-to-day demands of sacramental catechesis (B4). On the ground, in parishes, evangelisation might well be theoretically recognised as important, but presentation for sacraments took over all the energies in practice as the “usual context” (B4, Agency Team 4). Catechesis for sacraments, likewise, was generally easier for parishes to accept than adult formation, whose purpose was less clear - presumably because it was not associated with a sacramental ‘end’ (B5, Director). Here, the familiar, even routine practices of liturgical celebration of sacraments seems to pull congregations back from the less certain and troubling demands of mission and evangelisation. A liturgical reading of sacramental life hasthe advantage over the missionary emphasis in that these are things that can be ‘done’; within a broadly Catholic sacramental tradition, the emphasis on sacramental power working ex opere operate»,²³ offers a divine assurance of the presence of God when we simply do certain things in certain ways, with the right intention and people. Our understanding of mission can feel a lot less clear, and is often accompanied by less clearly assured outcomes.

For Portsmouth diocese (F), the sacrament-mission tension is more structurally experienced. A key feature of the renewal process that the diocese was undergoing, and the ARCS team working with, was the coming together of the bishop’s Pastoral Plan and the move toward stewardship as a diocesan characteristic and practice (F, opening narrative). To both of these, the falling number of clergy and the need to cluster parishes was a crucial back-drop, to which the Pastoral Plan offered structural, largely ad intra responses whilst the stewardship vision took (in principle) a more lay-centred, ad extra approach. In fact, as noted in chapter 7 above, the tendency was to interpret stewardship in terms of ecclesial ministry, pulling the missionary back toward the maintaining of the existing church community.²⁴ The Pastoral Plan is clear in asserting the availability of Sunday Mass to all in the community as a fundamental commitment, and in many ways, the urgency of this concern is what shaped the stewardship processes and accompanying learning in the diocese. However, as the diocesan team worked in conversation with the ARCS team the potential for a more missionary account of Eucharist began to open up: “you have become the Body of Christ. You are going out to do the work of Christ” (F5, Diocesan 2). The beginnings of an ad extra theology of sacrament, and of Eucharist in particular, began to emerge.

One learning point considered by the ARCS team, which left a particular impression on me, was the possibility that liturgical sacraments could actually ‘get in the way’ of encountering the grace of Christ’s presence elsewhere. The material discussed here certainly could support such a view, as we remember how the eucharistically centred parish of St. Mary’s could still see itself as “not very Jesus-centred” (C3), and the ‘sacredness’ of the Mass could resist links being made to feeding the homeless (E3). We were reminded of an account given in an earlier piece of theological action research, carried out with a Catholic youth group.²⁵ Arriving late at the youth retreat where Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament was a permanent feature, other than when Mass was being celebrated, a young woman lamented that she had missed Adoration that day, and only made it in time for Mass. This meant, in her own words, that she couldn’t “be with Jesus” until the next day. Here, Jesus’ presence is not only identified with a liturgical event but with a more reified expression of sacrament still, oddly obscuring, rather than enabling, possibilities for encounter with Christ beyond the ritual and highly ecclesiastical. The risk is that the ad intra/ad extra tension in church understanding and life, particularly distorted by the ad intra pull, leads to a disconnection between sacrament and mission - and so the breaking of the coherence of church life at its very

Sacrament and sacramentality 175 heart. In order to learn more constructive lessons of sacrament from the Practices, we needed to receive in fresh ways what they revealed about the ‘sacramental’ beyond the liturgical.