This chapter explains how the centrality of the sacrament and the reorientation of worship towards the altar were used to give external shape and expression to crucial divisions within the social body of the church. The sacerdotal authority of the clergy was embodied through their role in dispensing the sacraments, and given physical expression in their sole access to the holy of holies beyond the rails. There they administered the sacrament to the laity kneeling at the rails. Division between different sorts of Christian were also expressed in terms of their distance from and access to the sacrament. Here some Laudians espoused an attachment to physical forms of differentiation, expressed through the structure of the church to which, in practice, the church of England did not aspire, but which arguably expressed how Laudians thought about the Christian community and its relation to the church, the clergy and the sacrament.

In the ongoing irresolution between religion and the secular, this chapter looks at the notion of the sacred as something always and already resolved to its counterpart, the profane. In defining the sacred as the opening of the world to its own outside, the chapter explores the reaches of this opening in relation to David Jasper’s Sacred Trilogy. Across Jasper’s texts the sacred opens us to a mystical possibility embodied in spaces both real and imagined – such as desert, body or community – where the ascetic and the aesthetic come together. The chapter shows how this embodiment inhabits or dwells within a liturgical space by looking at liturgy’s “ergon” as cultural and communal poesis, which takes both individual and community to their own outside. This “ergon” is thus also a movement, a traversing with reverent care and a respectful silence towards “the impossible possibility of absolute vision” (Jasper). That vision enfolds together literature, art, religion, philosophy and sacrament in order to make possible within our world an impossibility that opens up our world, an opening that is both discovery and loss, both voice and silence, both all and nothing.