Charlotte Methuen Women priests have real presence reflections on liturgy and presidency* “Women priests have real presence” proclaims a badge produced by Eng- land’s Movement for the Ordination of Women in the 1980s. The real pres- ence that we are talking about here is not to be related only to the elements of bread and wine, but to the whole community. The reformers suggested that the real presence must be manifested in the body of Christ as incarnated in the presence of the community, so that the change in substance – the transubstan- tiation – wrought by faith is the transubstantiation of the whole community, and not of the elements.1 The question of the real presence in the Eucharist is thus intimately bound up with another: what does it mean for the Holy Spirit to be present in a celebration of the liturgy, for God or for Christ to be a real presence in the Eucharist? And this in turn is bound up with yet another: what does it mean for me, a priest and a woman, to preside at a celebration of the Eucharist? For me as an Anglican, these questions are inevitably and deeply connected with reflections about our use of liturgy. The liturgical tradition has been vitally important to the Anglican church since its inception during the Refor- mation, although it is only in the last seventy years that emphasis has come to be laid upon regular, in the sense of weekly, celebrations of the Eucharist as the main Sunday service. At the same time, another shift has taken place to a focus on the importance of the community: * An earlier version of this article appeared in Dutch as “Gedeelde macht als kracht. De rol van vrouwelijke priesters in de liturgie,” in: Fier 3/1 (Jan/Feb 2000), 4-5. 1 See especially Martin Luther, “Ein Sermon von den hochwirdigen Sacrament des Heiligen Waren Leichnams Christi,” in: Martin Luthers Werke (Böhlau: Weimar 1884), 2, 742-758, esp. 749, and Huldrych Zwingli, “Vorschlag wegen der Bilder und der Messe,” in: Zwinglis sämtliche Werke (Heinsius Nachfolger: Leipzig 1914), 3, 124-126. Compare also Bucer’s emphasis on the congregation as the body of Christ: Von der waren Seelsorge, in: Bucers Deutsche Schriften (Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn: Gütersloh 1964), 103-107. 241 Aus den Ländern From the Countries Des Pays we have lived for centuries with a presumption that the liturgy in whatever tradi- tion is the domain of the ordained clergy, and in recent decades we have had the first tentative beginnings of a recovery of the theological principle that liturgical actions are the work of the whole people of God (leitourgia).2 In my understanding of our tradition, liturgy, whether eucharistic or not, should offer a space in which we, as a community, can focus our individual lives upon God, experience the love of God for each of us, and be touched and inspired3 to live our lives in relationship with God. Liturgy should be a place in which we encounter ourselves and one another in love, as gifted but broken children of God, in which we can indeed encounter the praesentia realis of Christ in the community of faith. There are good reasons why many people – men as well as women – have begun to ask whether such an experience can be possible within traditional forms of the liturgy. In seeking to answer that question, I want here to address two central, albeit interrelated, issues. One is the words, form and intention of the liturgy, and the other is the role of the priest. In much of the Anglican Communion, which includes the Church of England, the Eucharist is celebrated (sometimes reluctantly) in a modern language ver- sion. There is now a great breadth of authorised liturgical forms, most of which can trace their ancestry back to the sixteenth century Book of Common Prayer.4 “Modern language” has not necessarily meant inclusive language, and despite a great deal of improvement, parts of many of these liturgies remain exclusive of women. Thus, in the form of the Nicene Creed authorised for use in the new Common Worship of the Church of England, we are still supposed to affirm that in Christ God was “made man” rather than “made human”; this seems to me both a bad translation of the original Greek and highly inappropriate, given the use of Christ’s maleness as an argument for the exclusion of women from the priesthood of the Church of England.5 On the other hand, the newly authorised liturgies introduce a far broader spectrum of 2 Louis Weil, “Community: The Heart of Worship,” in: Anglican Theological Review (ATR) 82 (2000), 129-147, here 132. This principle is at the heart of Orthodox understandings of liturgy; compare Katerina Karkala-Zorba in this volume, p. 23 3 In the sense also of being filled with the breath/spirit of God. 4 In the Church of England, ordained and accredited lay ministers agree to conduct services only in accordance with the wording and structure of authorised forms, agreed by centrally by General Synod. 5 On the grounds that a woman cannot “represent” the male Christ. 242 Charlotte Methuen Women priests have real presence biblical imagery when speaking of God, moving away from predominantly male, triumphalist terminology and helping us to explore the possibilities of realising, as Janet Morley has put it, “that to examine how and why the femi- nine has been omitted from our ways of addressing God is to discover also what else has been left out.”6 It is still too soon to see how these new liturgies will enrich the life of the community,7 but the expansion of possibilities means that it will be easier to introduce new images while remaining within the range of what is authorised. Preserving this balance, or practising what Elizabeth J. Smith has called the “Art of Accountability”8 is in my view an important consideration precisely because liturgy is an expression not only of the local but also of the wider com- munity. As a local congregation we pray the liturgy together with the wider church. This means that the question of recognising what is a good, valid expression of faith, is not local, and nor is it mine alone. As a priest, it is essen- tial, and not optional, to “acknowledge that the community’s spiritual identity is larger than my own.”9 This is especially true because familiarity with word and form can be vital if liturgy is to act as an effective structure for and spring- board into prayer. Those who are ordained need to recognise that they have “enormous power to enable or disallow liturgical speech,”10 and to realise too that they have enormous power to facilitate or to block the prayers of those who are present. The priest who changes too much can cause just as much exclusion and pain as do those who do nothing to shape the liturgy in accor- dance with the changes within the celebrating community. If the liturgy is to live, it must change, but not arbitrarily, for, as Elizabeth J. Smith comments: A very important thing for liturgically creative spirits to remember is that my delight in innovation may far outstrip your desire to have novelty inflicted upon you in the course of your worship, and my individual expressions of piety may not be conducive to your “Amen.” Especially important for the unadventurous wor- shiper to remember is the fact that every old favourite hymn or prayer was once an innovation. Somewhere in this tension between innovation and continuity, between individuals’ gifts and communities’ needs, lies the fertile ground for growing new 6 Janet Morley, All Desires Known (SPCK: London 21992), xi. 7 Common Worship was authorised for use from the beginning of Advent 2000; at the time of writing, we are only just beginning to explore its possibilities. 8 Elizabeth J. Smith, “Women, Word, and Worship,” in: ATR 82 (2000), 113-128, here 124, but cf. 124-126. 9 Ibid., 125. 10 Ibid. 243 Aus den Ländern From the Countries Des Pays words, new visual images and new body language to take Anglican worship into its next stage of its evolution.11 This is a process in which the whole church must be engaged, on the level of the particular community and of the wider church. Within this process, there is a danger that if a priest chooses to reorder the liturgy simply to suit her own preferences, she/he may be abusing her/his authority. As priests, we are ordained to a complicated relationship of authority and service; we need to reflect on our responsibilities as well as our rights, not only pastorally but liturgically. As a priest I may certainly indicate, but should not impose, my own preferences. Individual style is inevitable and enriching. Individual dom- ination is not. This balance is both delicate and paradoxical; I shall return to it later in the article. Before doing so, I want to raise another issue linked to the question of inclu- sive language: the complex relationship between words and meaning, and thus between terminology and practice. While the use of inclusive language is important, it is also important not to be naïve. An inclusive language by no means presupposes an inclusive praxis. There is a danger that an over-empha- sis on the words can obscure the fact that much of what shapes and makes liturgy is not its words but the act of its “doing,” for “the liturgy is something done not said.”12 An particularly appropriate example of this is the sixteenth- century Anglican prayer of preparation for the Eucharist, the so-called “prayer of humble access,” which asserts that “we are not worthy even to gather up the crumbs under the table.” This is clearly an articulation of a theology which believed, not only that human beings had no right to demand anything of God, but that they were not worthy to be given anything.