Illustration of Blaxhall church by John Richardson
Comfort food? Robert Ashton visits an Anglican feast
‘Would I find it similarly nourishing?’
An old French proverb says ‘bread and wine start a banquet’. With that thought in mind, I ventured to Blaxhall church to attend the monthly mid-week communion service. For Anglicans, taking the bread and wine is a spiritual banquet, but would I find it similarly nourishing? Although confirmed in my early teens, and an altar server through adolescence, I’d not taken communion for decades. I wondered how much of the service I would remember.
I’d been invited by the churchwarden, who had taken an interest in the book I’d recently written about George Ewart Evans, a Suffolk writer who had lived at Blaxhall in the early 1950s. The book for which he is best remembered, Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay, was published in 1956 but remains in print today. I’d first read it more than fifty years ago, and found it deeply inspiring. Evans wrote about how rural life was changing; I’d married into a farming family and felt part of the landscape that those he wrote about had described.
Evans had described how the church, along with the pub, had been at the heart of village life; Blaxhall church features prominently in his books. In my own I’d interviewed the previous vicar, but now the church was in an interregnum, with a pleasant retired US Air Force chaplain officiating.
When I arrived, the churchwarden invited me to sit in the choir stalls, with the eight or so others in the congregation. Most seemed a good bit older than me, but it was a Tuesday morning, so all the younger people were at work, I thought. They followed the older order of service, so I quickly dropped into its almost-forgotten routine.
I started to think about the words we were reciting, and was struck for the first time by their assumed humility and obedience to what felt like a fairly prescriptive set of beliefs and values. As the focus of the service moved to the altar, and the wafers and wine were prepared, I could sense an eager anticipation among the congregation I did not share.
I had a sense of looming dread. I had recited the prayers with growing unease and felt I would be doing God a huge disservice if I followed the others to the rail and took communion. To me, God is simply not as easy to define or appreciate as Anglicans seem to find it. I remembered something a Friend had said recently, that Quakers are seekers, while others such as Anglicans are believers. Of course in many ways both are believers and both are seekers, but I suspect they start from different points.
Those present politely ignored the fact that I was the only person there who had not taken communion. After the blessing, we moved to the back of the church for coffee and cake. I was shown pictures of the crumbling medieval brickwork of the church tower, and told of the urgent need for £200,000 to repair it. The village has a population of some 300, so this appeared impossible. In that respect at least, Anglicans and Quakers are on the same page!
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