At Greenbelt this weekend with Stephen. Having a good time - though muddy. This morning was communion service. This is high point of the festival from the perspective of organisers indicated by the fact that they close down all other activities to encourage people to go.
It is a big event held at the main stage. I have not always enjoyed it in past. Large numbers require organisation and skill at creating 'communion' with one another in large crowd. The use of name 'eucharist' indicates a particular idea. Not in itself an issue but one indicator of the implicit Anglicanism of the festival despite the participation in various ways by others from other traditions.
This year the theme was 'An Elemental Eucharist' making connections with 'fire', 'wind' 'water', 'earth'. Suggestion in advertisng programme is that it would be different from what happens in churches and there would be no sermon, and people would be moving around.
I did not go - though observed from a distance. Danger of advertisng that something is different or creative is that you invite critique on that - the creativity and the performance. Also puts pressure on the organisers like those on the guy who had to arrange the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games have to deliver!
Obervations: there was an attempt to include too many things and other symbols in an act that has its own central symbols that push us to the core Jesus with the potential of past, present, future, communal re-membering.
Furthermore while advertised as 'multi-voiced' this was yet a fundamentally controlled 'liturgy' by a number of voices. This is like thinking that there is great participation in a church because you have a worship leader who does stuff along with the 'minister' where in fact what you now have is one or two controlling voices with the views and opinions and genuine responses of the people struggling to break through.
I also don't get the - we are having no sermon thing as an idea of radicalism when and where the controlling liturgists fundamentally are doing what a sermon at communion can - help people find a common way in to this event rather than simply an individual participation.
I would like these big communions to pull back - trust the actual 'elemental event' which is not found in the creativity of the performance or the surrounding liturgy but in human people gathering around breaking bread and poured out wine trying to make sense of what it now means for them to be responding ever anew to the Jesus past present and future who is revealling his self now in this group of people.
I was not there, how do I know what it was really like, how can I judge as an observor rather than participant. I am a Scot, not an Anglican and might not get some of this. I am guilty as charged. Guilty - but exercisng my freedom not to have to agree to all that goes on and hopeful that for all who participated it worked for them.
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