"The precious words are all our own": Keble, Newman, and the native piety of the Comfortable Words

In the posts for Monday and Tuesday of this week, attention was drawn to the place of the Comfortable Words in High Church Eucharistic piety, with examples from two members of the Hackney Phalanx, Hugh James Rose and Joshua Watson.  The extracts demonstrate how this aspect of the Prayer Book Communion Office was a recurring theme in High Church piety.

Another example if this is found in Keble's 'Holy Communion' in The Christian Year, itself a fine expression of the pre-1833 High Church tradition.  The poem captures the significance of the Comfortable Words in High Church Eucharistic piety, structured as it is around the four sentences.  Mindful of the examples of Rose and Watson, Keble was here invoking an established characteristic of High Church piety, with its recognition of the evocative quality and affective power of the Comfortable Words:

Who can express the soothing charm,
To feel thy kind upholding arm,

My mother Church?

... The precious words are all our own.

He also draws attention to the Apostolic voices heard in the Comfortable Words - Saint Paul and Saint John - emphasising how the personal narrative of each embodies the assurance of their words.  He describes Saint Paul as "of true Penitents, the chief", and Saint John as "dearest of Thy bosom friends".

Perhaps most striking, however, is Keble's account of the first sentence of the Comfortable Words, "Come unto me ...":

A voice from Mercy's inmost shrine,
The very breath of Love divine.

We can sense here something of why the Comfortable Words have such a role in High Church Eucharistic piety.  They are recognised as particularly stirring up warm devotion as we approach the Sacrament, of calling us to recognise what is set before us in the Supper of the Lord.  In Keble's words:

For now Thy people are allowed 
To scale the mount and pierce the cloud, 
And Faith may feed her eager view 
With wonders Sinai never knew. 

Fresh from th' atoning sacrifice 
The world's Creator bleeding lies. 
That man, His foe, by whom He bled, 
May take Him for his daily bread.

This is an expression of the characteristically High Church idea of the Eucharist as a 'feast upon a sacrifice', which particularly flows from the final sentence of the Comfortable Words, " ... the propitiation for our sins".

It is further testimony to the place of the Comfortable Words in High Church Eucharistic piety that they are also evident in early Tractarian reflection on the Sacrament.  Late in his Anglican period, John Henry Newman concluded a sermon urging more frequent reception of the Sacrament by invoking the Comfortable Words:

"Come unto Me," He says, "all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Rest is better than toil; peace satisfies, and quietness disappoints not. These are sure goods. Such is the calm of the heavenly Jerusalem, which is the mother of us all; and such is their calm worship, the foretaste of heaven, who for a season shut themselves out from the world, and seek Him in invisible Presence, whom they shall hereafter see face to face (PPS VII.11).

Newman turns to the first sentence of the Comfortable Words, knowing its resonance and that it points to the gift and grace of the Sacrament.

We see from the High Church tradition, still influencing the Anglican Newman, that the Comfortable Words shape and enrich a native Eucharistic piety.  What is more, recognition of the evocative quality and affective power of the Comfortable Words underpinned this use of them to fostering Eucharistic piety.  All of which raises the obvious question as to why late 20th Anglican liturgical reformers rejected the Comfortable Words at every opportunity.

Partly it was the desire for 'simplified' rites: in other words, flattened, monochrome rites, with a profound distaste for the rhythms and patterns of 1662, rhythms and patterns of a Eucharistic theology increasingly deemed unfashionable.  The Comfortable Words embodied this theology, proclaiming - in the words of Article XXVIII - that the Eucharist "is a Sacrament of our Redemption by Christ's death": that it is, in the phrase of the High Church tradition, "a feast upon a sacrifice".  As such, the Comfortable Words became distinctly uncomfortable for a liturgical and theological agenda which sought Eucharistic rites with a wider focus than the Lord's atoning sacrifice, and greater emphasis upon the gathered community.

We might push this further and suggest that Comfortable Words were for the Parish Communion movement an especially unwelcome emphasis .  As Michael Ramsey declared in "The Parish Communion":

I miss too often, in these parish Communion services, the due recognition in teaching and atmosphere and choice of hymns, of the awful fact of the one, sufficient sacrifice of our Lord on Calvary.

Rites from which the Comfortable Words have been banished only intensify this weakness.  Happy table fellowship does not require - indeed, is interrupted by - the by proclamation that we partake of the Sacrament to receive the One who "is the propitiation for our sins".

By removing the Comfortable Words, contemporary Anglican liturgies have lost a particularly resonant text, a text deeply rooted in a rich Eucharistic theology, an evocative text speaking warmly to the heart.  Ignoring and rejecting the place of the Comfortable Words in nurturing a Eucharistic piety native to the Anglican tradition, we perhaps should not be surprised in the resulting "lack of meaningfulness and reverent understanding" identified by Ramsey in the Parish Communion.  The gift of the Comfortable Words is another reason to encourage and renew the use of the Communion Office in the classical Prayer Book tradition.

... a gracious voice cry ever so distinctly from the altar, "Come unto Me, and I will refresh you;" and ... it be ever so true that this refreshment is nothing short of life, eternal life (PPS VII.11).