Archbishop Justin Welby recently used his address to the Church of England’s General Synod to reflect on the Primates’ Meeting. Perhaps surprisingly, his reflection was quite, even if informally and non-exclusively, Catholic. For him, if there is a way forward, it will be liturgical. The liturgy shows us what togetherness really looks like, how structure may prove fruitful, and why we must be patient.
The urgent question is how a divided Anglican Communion may yet discern the Spirit. How and where, to use the archbishop’s language, is “the Truth demonstrated adequately”? First, there can be no reception without communion, and Archbishop Welby began by describing the willingness of the primates to attend a meeting together and the hospitality received at Canterbury. But the real evidence of communion, however strained, occurred in the shared celebration of Word and Sacrament, as well as in the recognition of a common (and ecumenical) tradition embodied in such holy objects as the illuminated Gospels of St. Augustine of Canterbury and the crozier of St. Gregory, and in the ability to see the presence of the Holy Spirit in a figure like Jean Vanier and in a gesture such as foot-washing.
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