Dear All,
Another feast day is celebrated tomorrow – the Feast of the Body & Blood of Jesus – or as it more usually called, ‘Corpus Christi’. This feast focusses on the great gift of the Eucharist that Christ gave us at the Last Supper. We have attached some reflections on that gift.
Today we have another of Rutter’s lovely blessings – his ‘Clare Blessing’.
With our love & prayer for you
Extracts from Hugh O’Donnell’s ‘Eucharist & the Living Earth’
As Christians, we believe that the gift of creation and the gift of the Eucharist are inseparable. When the Eucharist becomes detached from its matrix within the created world, it can easily become a ritual without roots. The story of the universe needs to
become our sacred story not just at an intellectual level but in the way that we worship. In essence, this means not only coming to terms with the profound meaning of Eucharist as ‘the washing of the feet’ of the poorest, but of extending that gesture to every living being. In this way, the Christian assembly becomes a community of hope on behalf of all creation.
Real hope is related to the joy and privilege we feel to live in a world that is stupendous. It is not a longing for the ‘next’ world as an escape, but commits us to care for this one. So one community will design an eco building, another will stand by their trees. Others again will commit themselves to a thousand local initiatives in food-production, seed-saving, water-management, waste-reduction, eco-education, seasonal-rituals and fund-raising.
The Eucharist will shine forth in all its radiant mystery not simply when the rubrics are fully observed but when the Eucharist is understood in its widest significance, namely, as expressing Christ’s intention to offer his nourishing presence to the whole of creation, from the fireball event of beginnings to this present. threatened moment of existence.
‘In the Eucharist’, writes Walter Kasper, ‘the world becomes one in praise of the Creator; the world becomes whole’. For him, the Eucharist is always ‘the liturgy of the world’. As Earth cannot stand apart from its atmosphere, its sun and moon and galaxy, it seems entirely correct, if somewhat audacious, to speak of a liturgy of the Milky Way or the Mass of the universe!
By offering up bread and wine, the human community takes the earth in its hands in a gesture of thanksgiving. This ‘gathering into one’ of all reality recalls how Jesus tore down the dividing wall of enmity and established peace; how he removed the old distinctions between Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free, men and women; how all creation will be renewed in Christ (Eph 1:10).
Liturgy is essentially theatre in which the narrative movement of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is brought into play. That is why Eucharist is necessary. It holds the memory for us of who we are and what we are called to be. In the transformation that happens around the altar-table, we and all creation with us, are made whole.
Our presence enlivens the eucharistic play. Our being-in-communion-with-all-creation is addressed. The phrase, ‘take and eat, this is my body given for you’, is intended to resonate, to have multiple meanings as mother love, earth love, Spirit love – love in language, love as sacrament, love in action. Eucharist is dramatic in the way in which the Spirit of world-refreshing, new life is announced and the creation responds.
“A CALL TO COMMITMENT”
by Elsa Tamez
Come! Let us celebrate the supper of our Lord,
Let us all together bake a giant loaf
And together prepare the jars of wine as at the wedding feast in Cana.
Let the daughters not forget the salt
Nor the sons the leaven.
And let us invite many guests:
The lame, the blind, the deaf,
The poor.
Quickly now!
Let us follow the recipe of our Lord,
Let us together knead the dough with our hands
And watch with joy
The rising Bread.
Because today we are celebrating
our commitment to Christ Jesus.
Today we are renewing our commitment
To the kingdom,
And no one shall go hungry away. Amen
AND ARE THE BREAD AND WINE YOUR BODY, LORD?
And are the bread and wine your body, Lord,
blessed and transformed to food which feeds the soul,
so that, substantially, we’re one with you
and broken lives, in union, are made whole?
Come, Holy Spirit, sanctify this tryst
and enter in to make us one with Christ.
And is the total universe held here
– clasped in a web of sacrificial love
whose pulses weave the atom and the sphere
into one tapestry, here and above?
Come, Holy Spirit, sanctify this tryst
and enter in to make us one with Christ.
So frail the symbols, yet in them we see –
through fruit of human labour, bread and wine –
in Christ’s own being, ours in mystery,
bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh entwine:
Come, Holy Spirit, sanctify this tryst
and enter in to make us one with Christ.
Thus we need live no longer to ourselves:
indwelling grace gives power beyond our own;
gifts are unleashed to change the universe
that it attain its end through you alone:
Come, Holy Spirit, sanctify this tryst
and enter in to make us one with Christ.
Ian M. Fraser
Corpus Christi
Evelyn Underhill.
Come, dear Heart!
The fields are white to harvest: come and see
As in a glass the timeless mystery
Of love, whereby we feed
On God, our bread indeed.
Torn by the sickles, see him share the smart
Of travailing Creation: maimed, despised,
Yet by his lovers the more dearly prized
Because for us he lays his beauty down—
Last toll paid by Perfection for our loss!
Trace on these fields his everlasting Cross,
And o’er the stricken sheaves the Immortal Victim’s crown.
From far horizons came a Voice that said,
‘Lo! from the hand of Death take thou thy daily bread.’
Then I, awakening, saw
A splendour burning in the heart of things:
The flame of living love which lights the law
Of mystic death that works the mystic birth.
I knew the patient passion of the earth,
Maternal, everlasting, whence there springs
The Bread of Angels and the life of man.
Now in each blade
I, blind no longer, see
The glory of God’s growth: know it to be
An earnest of the Immemorial Plan.
Yea, I have understood
How all things are one great oblation made:
He on our altars, we on the world’s rood.
Even as this corn,
Earth-born,
We are snatched from the sod;
Reaped, ground to grist,
Crushed and tormented in the Mills of God,
And offered at Life’s hands, a living Eucharist.