They often turn up at churches, charismatic, with a touch of
grandiosity. You will have met the characters that might carry with them the
perfume of alcohol and the aroma of smoke. They tell you a story which often is
complex with tragedy and sometimes homelessness and they might one the money
for their prescriptions. I wonder if the people who knew his parents put Jesus
in that category. He makes it easy for them. “I don’t care,” he says. “You only understand me if my parent, God
wants you to understand.” Still, he goes on explaining.
Martha Spong tells of spending an hour in her office with a
tattooed guy in a leather cowboy hat who wanted the church to give away some
money, but only by his rules. Most ministers would have had lunch with men in
neckties who wanted the same thing. I have been guilty of wanting to go along
with the latter and hoping the former will leave and never come back, because I
am thinking, “I know his family. I know his odd and terrible story. What can
he possibly have to tell me that matters?”
Martha Spong also told the story of how a ‘Leather
Cowboy Hat’ showed up at church one night at 6: 00 p.m. She was alone in
the building, and when you find yourself in that situation you try to exit quickly,
excusing yourself with a meeting or work to finish. Excuses that have a ring of
truth to them. Yes, it’s sensible not to meet with people when you
are alone in the building. But if you are like me then you feel guilty. I’m
not sure I would have put those in neckties off that way. Forgive my cynicism,
my sense that I know it all, and my anxiety and fear when people who show up at
the back door do so unannounced with an important message. Then I began to
think that I hope it wasn’t you this time. I hope it wasn’t
you.
Have you ever sat in a monastery chapel to good profit of
your soul, contemplating the chapel fixtures and fittings, especially the
aumbry with its light above or maybe a monstrance enclosing a pale host?
Sacramental objects teach me to see sacramentally and add to my Protestant thinking on many things. I hope and pray many things can bring me depth and closeness with God. In the Anglican and Roman Catholic denominations we hope and pray that the Sacristans, altar guild
members, and priests handle chalices and fair linens as an almost remedial
lesson in caring for ordinary things. Architects create beautiful orderly
spaces of worship to open people’s hearts to beauty in a disorderly world.
Devout men and women eat the bread of Holy Communion in
order to help awaken their consciousness to recognising the bread of life
everywhere. If God lived in a tabernacle in a church only, I would never leave
church. Liturgy lets me linger with the thought of God’s presence, then
pushes me out the door with the insistent dismissal to seek and recognise God
elsewhere, that is, in the places most difficult to perceive Divine Love. When
I’m
weary, I come back to renew the process, each worship time and Eucharist giving me, hopefully, a
deeper and wider insight into the next adventure.
And so, liturgy at
its best simulates deep play— like a child testing a hypothesis,
letting imagination extend freely into possibility, the pretending a world you
might, with maturity, make real. What if this host is so sacred, it can
be touched only with great respect and delicacy? What if it contains the
universe and reveals the union of the sacred and the divine, of interconnected,
inseparable matter? What if there were really a universal bread of life that
satisfied hunger and a drink that quenched thirst? What if everybody on earth
is this host— so sacred, so loved, so revered? What if the whole earth is
sacred, the way we play Communion? And what if we lived as if that were so?
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