“On most Sundays,” the rector of an Episcopal church told me last summer with a smile, “most of my congregation is pretty staunchly Episcopalian. But every now and then, they’re Baptists and they don’t know it.”
This is what he meant: The Anglican tradition states that during the Eucharist, there is a “real presence” of Jesus Christ. The definition of “presence” is left unclear, probably wisely. Specifying the exact nature of the deity has plunged the world into a whole lot of trouble. It’s a better move, I think, to let everyone think what they think and keep it to themselves. To keep it a little loosey-goosey.
But not too loosey-goosey. What the Eucharist isn’t, according to Anglican doctrine, is a memorial ceremony or some kind of symbolic exercise. That’s what the Baptists and others believe. But what my Episcopal priest friend knows is that a large number of his flock, on some days, don’t really feel that presence either. Maybe they never feel it. Maybe they don’t even know that it’s a central tenet of the Episcopal doctrine.
“They’re closet Baptists,” he told me with a laugh. “I don’t want to be the one to break it to them.”
My friend, the Episcopal priest, would, of course, prefer that the people in the pews know what they’re supposed to believe, but he’s philosophical. The point of the Eucharist, he told me, was that these are God’s office hours. This is when and where He promises to meet you. But like every college professor will tell you, it’s hard to get students to take advantage of office hours. Most weeks they sit alone in their poky little offices, desperate for some enthusiastic undergraduate to drop by to talk about the reading.
“I don’t think they’re unbelievers,” he told me. “I think it’s more a case of sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, depending on the Sunday.” And then he added: “And depending, especially, on what else is going on in their lives.”
This rang true for me. When things aren’t going well or I’m in some kind of painful place, something that’s been happening a lot more often since I reached my late 50s, I have no confusion about what is supposed to be happening during Communion. It’s when everything’s clicking along that I can head to the altar on a Sunday without a thought in my head and be seated again moments later having missed the whole interior experience. There have been Sundays when I spent the entire service, not just the wafer-and-wine part, but the whole thing, organizing my week in my head and planning out a conversation I needed to have with a difficult coworker.
My friend, the priest, takes an indulgent and benevolent view. When we need Him, he tells us, God will be there. And if we make the effort to pay attention to the moment and not, he said, fixing me with a shaming stare, doing our taxes in our minds, we’ll discover He’s there every time we go to meet Him. He’s there even when we’re not looking.
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Of course, the challenge of taking a relaxed and tolerant attitude toward the understanding of church doctrine is that you eventually need to draw the line. My friend told me about a parishioner, someone with a long and deep faith in Jesus Christ, who stopped him breathlessly one Sunday during coffee hour to announce that she had recently read the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, one of the oldest and most important Upanishads in Hindu philosophy. It contains the foundational creation myth of Hinduism, where Atman becomes self-aware, then afraid, then lonely, and divides into two creatures, characterized as male and female, and divides and reproduces itself into all of earthly creation. “I love that so much better than ours,” he told me she trilled to him. “It’s not that sexist rib nonsense, plus it’s so, you know, indigenous. I think it’s the one I’m going to believe from now on.”
What could he say? She’s a pillar of the church, has served on the vestry, and is a regular contributor to the church treasury. But on any given Sunday, this upright New England Episcopalian is often Baptist and occasionally Hindu. Which may not be such a hard thing to carry off.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.