Eucharist – Mind Journeys

Five senses for Easter – and a Word

The cup and the bread are held up high so we can see and worship. The bread snaps as it is broken. The white circle lands softly in our palm. We caress the cup as it is handed to us. We taste the wafer and the wine, and the rich sweet aroma of the wine greets us as we drink.

Sight, sound, touch, taste and smell: five senses animate us as we come to Holy Communion.

And our five senses together trigger a sixth sense: that of memory. The heart of the ritual of Holy Communion brings vividly to mind all the hundreds, or thousands, of celebrations of the Eucharist that we have been part of. For me, they have been in parishes, in cathedrals, in homes, in school chapels and in the bush – everywhere Christians gather for the Lord’s Supper. Our memory reaches further back through generations of Christians to the night Jesus gave bread and wine as a presage of his death.

The memory of that night, the night he was betrayed, the night before he died, is strong, so strong that the events of the Last Supper reach forward into our time. We re-member Jesus, his disciples and his actions, and it’s as if they are happening here now. The scholars call this phenomenon of re-membering ‘anamnesis’ – the very opposite of amnesia.

There’s a paradox at work here. The Eucharist is focused on the material of bread and wine, and yet its heart is the presence of Jesus with us. This presence is in fact an aching, loving absence that Franciscan friar Fr Thaddée Matura calls An Ardent Absence . Some Christians speak of the Real Presence, others of the memorial meal, but the effect is the same. When we touch the bread, we name it the Body of Christ, but we are not touching the actual body of Jesus; the bread somehow invokes his presence with us.

This is the Easter mystery: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. Jesus Christ is both absent and truly present. Only with the consummation of all things at the end of time will the absence and the presence be drawn together into one ubiquitous and unambiguous presence.

This Easter most of us will miss the Eucharist, the touching, the tasting and smelling, the gazing, the hearing. At best we will have disembodied seeing through the medium of a screen. But in these times of quarantine and physical isolation, the risen Lord is even more closely present to us. The Psalmist affirms,

‘The Lord is near to the broken-hearted
and saves the crushed in spirit. (Psalm 34:18)

And there is one rich gift, a gift of the Risen Word, which binds us all together. Words reach across the screen, whether in text like this, or the words spoken by a priest somewhere streaming the Eucharist. Because of Him who is the Word, these words have the power to hold us, to enfold us, to bring us into the presence of the Risen One.

Christ is risen.
He is risen indeed. Alleluia!

Clare’s Constant Goodness

Clare’s Constant Goodness – A Liturgical Sonnet

Jesus called her to bare wood poverty,
Assisi’s high-born childhood cast aside:
sisters named in equal community,
nobles, handmaids live, and love side by side.

Jesus called her to upright integrity,
her constant goodness a daily friend,
choices crafted with brightest clarity,
look for consequences with loving end.

Core eucharistic regularity –
sharing the cup of wine and blessing bread,
bring to this moment Christ’s life charity,
God’s sacred heart among the sisters spread.

Joy of goodness, riches of poverty,
planned Eucharist: life-giving trinity.

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Ted Witham, Feast of St Clare 2018

Feast of St Clare – readings for Morning Prayer

Psalms 62, 63
Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 2:1-9
Matthew 13:44-51

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Presentation

Bush church of my childhood: see server and priest
In tiny vestry; vestment-chest of oak,
White robes laid out immaculately creased,
Christ’s purity, and his mother’s, evoke.

The albs are bordered in fine crafted lace,
Stole and chasuble crisply ironed and laid,
Emptied of sound, in silence of place
The server hears as his precursors prayed.

Inside the small church a reed organ sounds,
On, into the sanctuary the server leads on,
He bashful bows deep then processes ‘round,
He offers water and wine: the Dreaming’s white swan.

My mother and grandma with pride are stilled;
They watch from the pews the now and the willed.

Malachi 3:1-4, Psalm 84, Luke 2:22-40

In Native American stories, Dragonfly persuades Swan to surrender to the power of the river so that she can, in a state of grace, be taken into the future. (http://www.swansongs.org/who-we-are/swan-mythology/)
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Image courtesy Joe Laufer’s Blog – Memories of a Life Adventure https://burlcohistorian.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/it-takes-a-village-part-ii/

A “plain package” St Francis of Assisi

Augustine Thompson, Francis of Assisi: A New Biography, Cornell University Press (2012), Hardcover, 312 pages, $25 from online retailers.

Reviewed by Ted Witham

Augustine Thompson’s biography is “new” in the obvious sense that it is the last in a long line of biographies of St Francis going back to Paul Sabatier’s 1893 Life. Thompson’s, however, is “new” also in that it aims to go back rigorously to historical sources. This approach is in line with other historians who recently have been sifting through historical records and chipping away at the pious accretions to produce a “plain package” St Francis.

William Hugo, for example, a Capuchin formation director produced in 1996 a “Beginner’s Workbook” Studying the Life of St Francis, which invites novices to evaluate the historicity of early writings. The Melbourne conference in 2009, out of which came Interpreting Francis and Clare of Assisi, was also historical in ambition, using a variety of academic approaches – documentary, art history and so on – to develop a more historical picture of the saints in their world.

These new studies are pushing out the older Lives of St Francis, which were either pious or interpretive: they sought either to show Francis as an exemplar of the Christian life, or they observe St Francis through a particular lens: Jacques Dalarun on Francis and power and Francis and the feminine, and Leonardo Boff on Francis and liberation offer these interpretive visions of Francis.

Augustine Thompson is a Dominican friar, and this gives him an “insider-outsider” perspective. On one hand, he knows what it is to be a friar in an Order with a charismatic founder. On the other hand, he has greater clarity of vision when he writes about Francis than do many Franciscans in their familiarity with their founder.

Fr Thompson tells a plain story of a man who had no agenda and who could articulate no particular vision for the movement that formed and swarmed around him. Thompson’s Francis simply wanted to live the Gospel. Even at the end of his life, Francis is still surprised, Thompson claims, that “the Lord gave me brothers”.

Even poverty, the Franciscan value that many believe to be the base of Francis’s vision, is held up to question by Thompson. There’s no doubt that poverty was a part of Francis’s vision, but Francis, as Thompson emphasises, mentions the Eucharist much more often than poverty. Francis’s devotion to churches and priests is because of the celebration of the Eucharist – all to be venerated because there God comes to earth in a perceptible form.

The central insight for me in this “new” biography was precisely Francis’s lack of a programme. Francis, at least in Thompson’s telling, was a man who simply wanted to live the Gospel, to be radically available for God. This, I suspect, is one of the main reasons for Francis’s ongoing attraction.

Thompson’s book also has its attractions. It is divided into two halves. In the first Thompson tells the story of Francis simply and without frills or academic apparatus of any kind. Then follow a helpful list of the major biographies of Francis since Sabatier’s and a bibliography of documents from the 12^th Century. In the second half of the book, Thompson argues in detail why he has included some details and discarded others as non-historical. These chapters may be mainly for scholars: most of us, I suspect, will be glad to read the first half as a self-standing account of Francis’s life and be refreshed by it.