Ciborium or fancy tin mug?

I haven't really had much time to post on this poor little blog lately, though I do intend to keep it alive.

I thought I ought to relate an incident today which I believe sums up the attitude of a sizable part of the CofE.

Our Parish Church building is under renovation at the moment while the heating is being put in. This has meant the removal of the floorboards, and the covering of many of the precious items in the Church. It also means that our Aumbrey in the Lady Chapel is now inaccessible.

I came into church this morning to lead Mattins and sure enough saw that the sanctuary light (a ghastly 1960's electrical thing with a flickering flame "effect") was off. Of course, this would make one curious as to where the Reserved Sacrament was now being stored. It is of course of a vital importance to a rabid little Anglican Papalist like myself. So I looked around the church ("seek and ye shall find") and eventually found the ciborium stuck in the corner of an old disused sacrarium (only just prevented from falling in the sink) at the back of the church surrounded by a pile of old chairs, chest of draws, a filing cabinet filled with our modern "liturgies". There was no attempt at reverence, no thought for what this receptacle contains even if some folk in the C of E see it (wrongly) as merely symbolic. The attitude speaks volumes.

While I can understand that the Aumbrey had to be rendered inaccessible, the fact that there was no plan to accommodate the Sacramental Presence of the Lord seems incredible. I often come into the church to find the Aumbrey obscured by a display of flowers, or a chair, making the practice of kneeling before the Lord very tricky and usually I have to do some furniture removal if I want to venerate the sacrament.

How typical this seems to be of many a C of E parish. It has become just a Rotary club with ritual (which thus technically means nothing). The Peace is a shambolic free-for-all, the Creed altered, bits of the canon of the Mass missing.

I still wonder why I am a member of the C of E. I've nowhere to run, but I still have some work to do here albeit in a peripatetic and peripheral nature. My vocation in this church, indeed this parish is clear to me, though there are times when I wish there were a credible alternative. I have now not received the Sacrament in my own parish for a year, preferring to go to a neighbouring parish to do so (like this morning), but even the the superficiality and lack of thought and care seems to be infiltrating. It must be a spiritual version of the second law of thermodynamics - religious entropy is increasing.