Peace

Peace

Saturday 8 August 2015

And What If We Lived As If That Were So?



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 dont 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, its sensible not to meet with people when you are alone in the building. But if you are like me then you feel guilty. Im 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 wasnt you this time. I hope it wasnt 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 peoples 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 Gods 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 Im 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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