The Christian Unity Carousel

The big annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity gathering, last Thursday, went pleasantly enough. This time it was at the Anglican pro-Cathedral (where I was once a parishioner a very long time ago). The Anglicans have a good choir, cathedral standard, and that saved the day (not like last year’s miserable flute and organ duet at the German Protestants). Among the formal guests the Catholics (80+% of the Christian population) were inevitably badly outnumbered by the small churches (especially Orthodox, with each nationality counting as a separate church). The Russian representative looked bored (he couldn’t handle Belgian’s quadri-lingualism). The sermon (by a Greek Orthodox) was competent, even if I can’t really remember what he said. The prayers veered at times towards the political (apologizing to the people we have oppressed in the past), inevitable in a Protestant setting, but which jars on Orthodox nerves. The wine afterwards was decent and the sandwiches OK, though  German Protestants served us better last year.

Average age of the congregation was 60+, partly because they do not have family duties, but more, I suspect because the whole ecumenical ‘thing’ is probably over the hill.

This whole ‘desire to share a common cup’ thing is, for all practical purposes, a train that left the station long ago. The Catholics have given communion to non-Catholics on an individual basis for half a century (they did to me, then Anglican, 45 years ago). The Protestants general have ‘open table’, though I suspect very few non-Protestants avail of it. The only barrier that still exists in Christianity is the Orthodox refusal to give communion to non-Orthodox. And other than the symbolism, this doesn’t really affect non-Orthodox Christians in their daily Christian lives, apart than the very occasional Christian husband of a mixed marriage (90% of mixed marriages are Orthodox wife, non-Orthodox husband). You don’t need to take communion to listen to Orthodox music, read Orthodox books or learn Orthodox iconography or talk to spiritually competent Orthodox.  Actually this final barrier probably hurts us Orthodox more by keeping us isolated from the rest of the Christian church.

In many ways, Thursday’s service was as much a celebration of the (de facto) unity that already exists in the Christian ‘Volk’, as a prayer for the (de jure) unity that theologians and politicians seem unable to give us.