A Welsh poem, Y Gair (“The Word”), by the late Euros Bowen, a priest from the industrial valleys of South Wales, begins with a memorable phrase evoking the laying of the table for the Eucharist with what he calls a “carefree carefulness”, di-bryder bryder in Welsh.

This unanxious attention to what is in front of us is part of how we establish sacramental worship as a place of hospitality. Before anything else happens, the bread and the wine are placed on the clean linen that covers the table, and the invitation is issued. That’s where we begin, and we go back there, says Bowen, whenever we want to “prevent the word of grace becoming an ideology about Christ”. “Ideology” is not only a scheme imposed on the phenomena of experience, but a scheme that is imposed by somebody – by some power, some authority that seeks to present itself as legitimate, as credible, as obvious, as beyond challenge. Ideology, we might say, is how powerful people tell us that their power is the way things have to be. And what we can miss is that the people telling us what the world has to be like tend to be people who have a substantial interest in the world being as it is.

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