“WASH YOUR OWN FEET”: ON SINGLENESS AND THE DOMESTIC CHURCH
As the pandemic has disrupted our normal ways of gathering in person, many churches have responded by shifting their orientation to the home. This necessity is often framed in very positive terms: we have now been given the tremendous gift of more time to spend with the people who matter most. Christian worship has not ended; it has merely become more local, focused on the life of the Christian family as a kind of church-in-microcosm. Indeed, as the weeks have turned to months, I have been positively inundated with all kinds of helpful resources for how to pray together as a family. Ideas for new family rituals, home liturgies, and daily devotions that assume the presence of multiple people for their coherence fill my inbox and the pages of church blogs. They remind us that Christ is present “wherever two or three are gathered” in his name (Matthew 18:20), and that our domestic worship is therefore just as much the church as a gathering of the wider assembly.
Rarely do these resources offer any real acknowledgement of the fact that a great many of us live alone. Indeed, nearly 30% of American households consist of only one person, and even those who do live as part of a family do not necessarily share a common religious practice as part of their life together.
The two historical precedents often invoked as patterns for this domestic worship are early Christian “house churches” and the worship of Christian households during the Reformation period. Yet any initial similarities between these historical contexts and our own are perhaps more illusory than real. As others have noted, there are a number of stark discontinuities between the early church and our present situation, and early Christian house churches were never gatherings of individual nuclear families. Likewise, the domestic worship of the Reformation era, while perhaps in some ways a more helpful analogue, was the worship of an entire household, not simply a family unit of children and parents.
In many ways, the existence of people who live alone thwarts the best intentions of liturgists who attempt to respond creatively to this new context, given that so much of Christian ritual is explicitly communal in nature. Even rituals that can be translated from a parish context to a domestic one are simply more coherent in the context of a community. Parishes ask people to send in videos of the members of their family passing the peace to one another—sometimes with a note that those who live alone might film themselves sharing the peace with their pets. (No word on what you’re supposed to do if your household does not even include a pet…) Many home liturgies that circulated for Maundy Thursday encouraged people to wash the feet of their family members. Some of these seemed oblivious to the fact that not everyone lives with a family, but others suggested that those who lived alone could simply wash their own feet.
But, of course, washing one’s own feet simply isn’t the same thing at all. Both may be “footwashing,” but the ritual action of washing one’s own feet vs. permitting another to wash one’s feet is a profoundly different action. The ritual logic of each gesture conveys a completely different message. In attempting to make the ritual somehow available to single people, the material element (footwashing) has been extracted from one kind of embodied context and transplanted to another one, in ways that significantly distort the message it previously conveyed. No longer a gesture of permitting oneself to be loved and vulnerable, it becomes instead an act of autonomous self-sufficiency.
It is in this light that I want to consider the question of domestic or “virtual” eucharists. For the moment I would like to sidestep the (admittedly very interesting!) theological question of whether it is possible for a priest to consecrate bread and wine remotely. While this is not permitted by the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer, I am not necessarily entirely closed to the theoretical possibility of remote consecration, with or without the internet as a medium. Increasingly, however, I have come to suspect that this may actually be entirely the wrong question, a red herring that distracts us from an even greater problem.
As I listen to the debates about virtual consecration, it strikes me that they are often basically debates about power. Those who argue in favor of virtual consecration often suggest that to deny it would be to set limits on divine power, as if God could not possibly make something holy unless it was physically touched by priestly hands. Those who argue against this innovation often insist that while of course God can theoretically do anything that God wishes, for us to attempt virtual consecration is really a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of our own power, pretending to do something that we have neither the ability nor the authority to do.
I want to consider a third possibility: that maybe (at least potentially) it is entirely possible to consecrate bread and wine remotely…and that it may nevertheless be a bad idea. After all, any student of ancient and medieval church history can think of any number of things that people have done with validly consecrated hosts that one nevertheless should not do, whether sprinkling them over crops to make them grow, placing them in a bee hive to encourage honey production, or (if you would prefer an example that once had legitimate ecclesiastical sanction!), enclosing them in the altar next to the relics. The question is not always one of valid consecration, but rather of right use.
It is striking to me that nearly all of the more positive accounts I have heard of virtual or domestic eucharists take place within a family context, in which people give the elements to one another and receive them from one another. Even as someone who is skeptical about the possibility of remote consecration, I have nevertheless found many of these stories very moving. If I, however, were to participate in one of these virtual eucharists, my ritual action would necessarily be a completely different one. I would not be receiving, I would be taking. It would still be bread and wine. It might (at least conceivably) even be validly consecrated bread and wine. But what I would be doing with them would be a totally different action, which strikes me as fundamentally at odds with the ritual logic of the eucharist.
Before someone points out the fact that it is common for the celebrant of the eucharist to take communion, I would note that even so, he or she first receives the elements from the laity at the offertory. Mutual giving and receiving form a particular kind of communal pattern, and extracting the bread and wine from that pattern conveys a very different meaning.
I have often heard those who argue for virtual consecration ask, very sincerely, “What harm could there possibly be?” After all, maybe the bread and wine are truly the Body and Blood of Christ, but even if they are not, it’s not as if they are turning into arsenic and hemlock! In a worst case scenario, people are just doing spiritual communion with the help of some material symbols, and that hardly seems a catastrophe. I am not entirely unsympathetic to this line of reasoning, because I have received communion at all kinds of profoundly questionable ecumenical services, where the elements consecrated might be anything from milk and a powdered donut to orange juice and a blueberry muffin. It may shock those who know my liturgical proclivities to know that I have actually never hesitated to receive in these contexts. I do not think that they are “valid eucharists” (meaning that I do not think they are the eucharist according to an Anglican understanding of the eucharist). But that doesn’t mean that they are nothing, or that they must necessarily be something bad.
But if I were asked to take (rather than to receive) bread and wine alone in my own home, I honestly don’t think that I could do that without feeling as if it were almost a kind of sacrilege. And it would not make a difference to me whether they had been remotely consecrated through a phantasm on the screen or whether I got to keep my very own tabernacle of consecrated hosts in my living room. (Truth: I understand all of the reasons why I may not keep the reserved sacrament in my living room, but I have always secretly wanted to do precisely this…) The autonomous self-sufficiency implied in the gesture of taking my own private eucharist for my own personal benefit feels frankly offensive, even more than the suggestion that I should wash my own feet. In some ways I am actually less troubled by the (admittedly deeply misguided) medieval folk practice of sprinkling the eucharist over one’s vegetable garden, since at least that would be a gesture of giving rather than one of consumption.
It is for this reason that I am just as troubled by what is becoming a common practice of parishes handing out pre-consecrated hosts in plastics bags to parishioners who drive by in their cars for them to consume later during the virtual liturgy—and not just because I am a stereotypical millennial who never realized that a driver’s license would one day be a prerequisite for admission to the sacraments and therefore never obtained one! In this case, the bread is unquestionably the Body of Christ, but extracting it from the context of the Christian community, which is also the Body of Christ, in order to autonomously feed it to oneself in one’s own home seems to border on ritual incoherence, with a very different symbolic logic than the gesture of receiving the eucharist in community.
This might seem to suggest that, as long as they had validly consecrated elements, perhaps those whose household worship does include multiple people could indeed share some kind of domestic eucharist without difficulty. Yet even this dynamic is not unproblematic. (Of course, it is already happening in households that include a priest, since many priests have chosen to livestream the eucharist with their own family as the congregation. While this is certainly both sacramentally valid and rubrically licit, as the weeks drag into months, the ongoing practice of representing the church in microcosm with a nuclear family does tend to symbolically reinforce the mistaken belief that the church at its core is an assembly of families rather than of people who are called beyond the bonds of biological kinship and into a different kind of community.) But in addition to those of us who live alone, I am also mindful of those who do not have homes to celebrate a eucharist in at all, or whose homes are places of danger rather than of Christian fellowship. I cannot help remembering the biblical command to “wait for one other” (1 Corinthians 11:33), and I regret that in our current circumstances it seems that we either will not or cannot do so.
As we all begin (perhaps prematurely…) to have conversations about the post-pandemic church, I have been struck by the general enthusiasm that many people seem to have for this new orientation towards the domestic, seeing it not merely as a temporary emergency measure but as the beginning of a paradigm shift. A parallel conversation is happening for me professionally within academia. In these conversations, I often hear enthusiasm for the fact that moving things like worship and education online allows people to be more grounded in their “real” life—i.e. that life that is shared with their spouses and children—and not pulled out of that genuine, vulnerable, “real” life into a more public sphere in which everything is more professional, less personal, and somehow less authentic.
Yet for me, both the church and the university were my real life—the kind of chosen communities that I had felt called to give myself to 24/7, not just for occasional spare hours of time grafted onto some other “real” core of my life, but the communities around which the totality of my life was ordered. The enthusiastic embrace of the digital and the domestic as a better way of gathering that allows us all to prioritize time with our families sometimes honestly leaves me to wonder to what extent the changed landscape that emerges at the end of this will still have a place in it for someone like me at all.
I don’t claim to know what the future holds. But a church that is designed around the domestic worship of the family, and which asks the rest of us to take our own communion, wash our own feet, and pass the peace to ourselves, is honestly not a church that I can imagine myself as part of at all. And for me, that is an even more urgent problem than whether a pixelated image on a screen can confect a valid eucharist.
