Attention: the Servers’ Art

by Alice Willington

“Oh, no, it’s the long boring bit now.”

This thought, surfacing in Eucharist services just after the Peace, became a well trodden neural pathway in my childhood and teenage years. Sometimes we attended a church where the Rector always chose the longest form of the Eucharistic Prayer in the Scottish Liturgy 1982, and he always said it very slowly and inserted very long pauses, during which we were supposed to be having deep spiritual experiences. To make matters worse, the Scottish Liturgy 1982 is a small slim volume, which could not conceal whichever Daphne du Maurier or Jilly Cooper book I would rather have been reading.

That this thought has quietened down over the last fifteen years says much for the assorted clergy of St Mary’s. But the Eucharist remained a dry experience until I began serving at the altar in September 2020. Without any big revelations or dramatic moments, the Eucharist has become much richer for me. It has become a way of paying attention to others and to God, primarily through my body rather than my head or heart. What I wear, how and when I sit and rise, how I hold the vessels and elements and pass them to others, how I receive them back, how I share tasks with the other servers: all these matter because each action I take is an interaction with another. Paying attention leads to interactions characterised by care, love and good humour. Gradually, my head and heart have followed where my body went first; a gradual awakening to a fuller understanding of communion and the way the whole congregation participates. The attention has a defined beginning and an end: in the Vestry before the service, once everyone is robed, there is the gradual quietening into collective prayer, and at the end, there is a further prayer before we break into talking. I am now much better at settling into an attentive calm way of being.

In particular, I have begun to comprehend the hugeness of the words “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world”. During the Agnus Dei at St Mary’s, the silver vessels holding the elements are directly below the Martyrs’ Memorial in the server’s line of sight. The server looks both at Christ and at the names of humans who experienced extreme suffering at the hands of others. 

I am not particularly brilliant at serving. I can be a chatterbox at the wrong moment, I get distracted by watching the congregation and the antics of small children, I’ll always forget something. The care we take with hand sanitiser, now fully incorporated into the choreography of the Eucharist, will always remind me of Monty Python’s Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. But perfection and big spiritual revelations are not required for serving– the only thing that is required is attention.  Come and join us!