The formal instructions for tonight’s liturgy tell me to preach a homily that sheds light on, “the principal mysteries that are commemorated… namely, the institution of the Holy Eucharist and of the priestly order, and the commandment of the Lord concerning fraternal charity.” That’s a lot to speak to in just a few minutes.
I think we grasp the connection between the Eucharist and the priesthood – no Eucharist, no priesthood. To celebrate the Eucharist is the principal function of the presbyterate.
It is within the context of the Eucharist, sharing equally in the body and blood of our Lord, that we are bonded in fraternal love. And lest the priest presume any privilege, the foot washing that I will perform for disciples of this parish, is to ground me in the humility that makes my pastorate faithful, and to any measure, effective. Yet we are all to take from this the lesson of humility.
But when I come to the Holy Eucharist itself, its profound nature is overwhelming. What to say?
A little while ago I was given a book entitled, Introduction to the Spiritual Life by Louis Bouyer. The person who gave it had intended it for their own spiritual reading, but found it wasn’t what they were looking for. It is a little academic in tone; but I nonetheless decided to read it for Lent.
And I am glad of doing so. Bouyer takes the reader through the depths and across the breadth of the Catholic spiritual tradition. Many fail to appreciate its richness because of the kind of exuberant and dramatic manifestations of spirit seen in other communities, Evangelical and Pentecostal; and so, envy them. It’s important to be recalled to the fact that all we see out there in terms of ecstasies, of slayings in the spirit, there is nothing new at all. The Church has already been there and has centuries of experience and reflection on it.
Important elements of Catholic spirituality are proper meditation and true contemplation – knowing that these, in our Catholic faith, are different, but have an important relationship to each other.
Simply put, we are to meditate; and that means to actively engage God’s word, God’s sacraments, the prayers we utter, the hymns we sing, the ritual we perform. Not to do them mechanically, but to do them with real intention and sense of their meaning. So, we know what it is to mediate upon God’s word; we sit at home, a Bible open in our lap, and we read a verse, then pause and reflect. We ask, what does this mean? And from our own knowledge, from the footnotes, from the internet, and from the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we come to better, perhaps new, understanding of what a verse is telling us. We are to do the same with our worship, which our tradition quite purposely names as “liturgy” – which means “a public work.” We apply our hearts and our minds to understanding what we see and do through the Triduum, and from Sunday to Sunday, with all the days in between, meditating upon the scripture, prayers and ritual of our daily life of faith.
And then, from out of these spirit-guided efforts of ours, by grace, we will have moments of contemplation.
Contemplation is not the same as meditation. At the risk of oversimplifying, it’s passive, at least in comparison to meditation. It calls for a surrender of will, and in a sense, giving up on the idea of finding all the meaning even as we continue to listen, to watch, to enter into the mysteries of our faith in scripture, prayer and worship. We start in meditation, but then we move toward contemplation. Contemplation isn’t so much the fruit of our labors as it is the free gift of God. It happens when, as Bouyer puts it, the soul’s escape from itself.
All our preoccupations and preconceptions, our categories of thought, our imagination’s storehouse of images and ideas that we apply to our thinking about the divine, these all fall away; and God takes us up and shows us something beyond our vision, and speaks to us in words beyond language, and we see the truth of something fully, if only fleetingly, and we are changed.
Saint Paul wrote about being caught up into the third heaven. We think this is what he was talking about.
It was at the Holy Thursday mass, some years ago. A young lady was the lector reading from First Corinthians in which Paul explains how the tradition of the Eucharist was given to him. She began well, accomplishing what all lectors, priests and deacons are to strive for: to not only pronounce the word with clarity, and inflect it with a sense of meaning, but to be a medium of God’s spirit who animates the words and causes them to penetrate into the heart of the listener. This isn’t acting, playing a part, but rather it’s a surrendering to the Word.
She said that very familiar verse, “… on the night he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you…”
And then she paused, looked up, and her eyes were focused on something beyond us all, seeing something we did not see, then she bowed here head, and then… she sobbed. Her body shuddered. A moment passed, and we all, at this point, were in rapt attention, then she lifted her head, swallowed quite visibly and finished the line, “… do this in remembrance of me.”
She apologized to me afterwards, trying to explain herself, but couldn’t quite – she had, briefly gone somewhere else in the spirit. And she had joy in that.
I can’t promise this will happen for you, or for myself. I know that for me, that “letting go and letting God” is always a challenge. I don’t think I am alone in my struggle to surrender to God, to stop wanting him on my terms as pious and prayerful as I may be on such occasions as these. But I do encourage us all to engage the worship of these days, to truly meditate upon what is said, seen, and prayed; spend sometime this evening at the altar of repose where the Blessed Sacrament will be taken at the end of this mass; and then perhaps, we will be guided into a true contemplation of Christ’s sacrifice and God’s love for us; what we find in the Eucharist, and hope to find in ourselves. Would that we might dare to.
Amen.