A week ago, my wife and I (and a bunch of other parishioners) participated in an interfaith meeting at the George R. Brown Convention Center to organize the next stage of assistance for Hurricane Katrina evacuees here in Houston. I’m sure most present were Christians, but I’d be surprised if there weren’t some Jews and Muslims there too.
There was no shared meal, no "communion" as we would normally think of it. There were simply brief, more-or-less nondenominational prayers, and some matter-of-fact mentions of God in the course of the proceedings. We had not come together because we necessarily shared any particular set of detailed doctrinal beliefs; our theological views probably were widely divergent. We were there, instead, in obedience to what Christians and Jews would call the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law.
It was, if you will, a communion of praxis.
Contrast this with a Saturday-morning Eucharist-and-town-meeting I
attended at our parish a few months ago. It was organized by
traditionalists in our area. (I must note that several of the organizers are parish friends whom I admire greatly; they’re fine,
generous Christians whose lives exemplify both love of God and service to others.)
The purpose of this gathering was to rally the orthodox troops. The service was a regular BCP Rite II
service. Pretty much everyone present was an Episcopalian. The
liturgy was familiar; everything was done decently and in order.
But the entire focus of the sermon and of the town
meeting was all about belief, about the damage that we so-called revisionists are
supposedly doing to the Historic Faith by daring to act as though traditionalist theological views might not necessarily be 100% correct.
I would like to think that I’m willing to worship God, and to share table fellowship, with anyone who feels
bound to the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law
(however that’s phrased in different religions). But of the two "services" described above, it’s no contest which one I found more spiritually satisfying.
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