We celebrated the Ascension of Christ to Heaven yesterday, Sunday, May 24, concluding Eastertide, the great yearly celebration of the Resurrection. Christ walked the earth for those forty days between Easter and Ascension, giving his disciples proof, even the doubting ones.
And with Christ’s resurrection and ascension comes our resurrection and ascension. I thought about this, gazing at the thick Paschal Candle with the five wounds of Christ carved into the wax. It stood in the chancel, to the left of the altar in our little church of Saint Thomas’.
Saint Thomas’ is of course dedicated to that doubting disciple, the one who had to touch his Lord’s wounds to believe in his resurrection. Do we need to touch his wounds in order to believe?
For belief in Christ’s bodily resurrection from the grave after his death on Good Friday is crucial, central, to living on this earth. I’m one of the lucky, fortunate, blessed ones, I suppose. Belief was easy for me, Lewis’ argument moving from there is a God because there is a moral law, to Christ’s claims to be the Son of God, to the historicity of the Gospel accounts and the behavior of the first Christians. One cannot deny history, and for me, the evidence was, and is, clear.
So I live each day knowing the hours count. I live each day knowing my final destination. I live with God’s presence and I partake of his body and blood, the once doubting Thomas touching wounds with fingers. I too, having been reborn, having been resurrected by belief, am slowly ascending to Heaven, day by day, as I journey through my time on this earth.
Easter to Ascension. A time of great glory. And thanksgiving.
We visited Saint Francis of Assisi Anglican Mission in Danville today.
A small group of faithful Anglicans meet in a converted (no pun intended) Women’s Club on Sundays to pray and celebrate the Eucharist. Using the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, with its liturgy that goes back to the sixteenth century, the simple setting is transformed with the texture and reverence of Elizabethan words and syntax.
As we entered we picked up our hymnals in a box by the door. We sang as the deacon and two acolytes, one holding the crucifix high, one bearing a flaming candle, processed down the center aisle. We prayed together, kneeling on portable cushions. We sat on folding chairs to hear the epistle read. The altar, I knew, would be removed later and stored, for the premises do not belong to the congregation.
But the tabernacle was on the altar, the red candle burning, announcing the Real Presence of Christ. Tall tapers stood at either end of the white draped altar, a substantial crucifix above, reminding us of the real sacrifice of Christ two thousand years ago and once again today. And with sacrifice, comes resurrection and new life. This we knew and believed, and recited thunderously in the Nicene Creed, of one mind, one accord, as the Holy Spirit descended upon us, weaving among us, binding us.
Deacon Brown preached on prayer, for it was Rogation Sunday (from the Latin rogare, to ask), and with thoughtful phrasing explained how prayer was not only our spontaneous words to God, but indeed Psalms are prayer as well, and the liturgy itself is prayer. Prayer is our life, a way of living with God.
We prayed the liturgy and received Christ with all of the solemnity of a grand cathedral as the language of ritual, the poetry of liturgy, ensured a sacred silence before God. Worship. Adoration.
The deacon prayed a benediction from the back of the room and the candles were snuffed out. Soon the chairs would be folded and the books packed away. We rose to greet one another over coffee, to mingle as the Body of Christ, to love.
In this simple setting the Great Liturgy had been offered and we had partaken of eternity.
Saint Francis of Assisi Anglican Mission, 242 Linda Mesa, Danville, California; Sundays: 10:00 Holy Communion
Father Seraphim of Nazareth House, tall, gaunt, long graying beard, preached today. He preached on the Holy Spirit. What is it? he asked. Many are unsure, and that isn’t right, since the Holy Spirit seeks to make all things clear for us. He wore a white cotta over his black robe and I knew his beads were looped at his waist. For Father Seraphim prays, almost, perhaps, unceasingly, as Saint Paul exhorts us to do.
We learned a great deal from Father Seraphim in the last few days. He gave two workshops on prayer, uniting the ways of the East and the West, guiding us on our own prayer journeys. We learned the Jesus prayer, the prayer breathed in and out, that becomes an innate part of each of us. We learned to live in the moment, for that is where God is. And we learned much more from this saintly man.
Father Seraphim speaks in a relaxed manner, with a deep voice that comes, like his prayers, from his breathing, deep from his heart. He laughs at himself, his own foibles, and we laugh with him, thinking they are ours too, which of course, they are. He is a simple man who loves God (the vertical of the Cross) and loves his fellow man (the horizontal of the Cross.) And the Holy Spirit connects us all.
For the Holy Spirit is the bond linking our relationships. He teaches us to love. He prompts, coaches, suggests, leads. He comforts, encourages, strengthens.
In the last few days, as many of us in the Anglican Province of Christ the King joined together in our annual Synod, I knew the Holy Spirit was doing all those things, weaving among us, pulling in the odd strands, making a whole cloth, one of infinite beauty.
Many moments ring in my memory, golden notes, pure tones. One was the sermon preached yesterday, Saturday, at our Eucharistic celebration. The priests of our Diocese had processed down the red carpeted aisle of Saint Peter’s Oakland, the incense swirling before them, the torchbearers holding their flames steady, the crucifer raising the great crucifix over all. We sang, Alleluia, Sing to Jesus, and that we did, our voices soaring, uniting, in this song of love.
Our preacher that Saturday, Father Mautner of St. Stephen’s Oakville in the Napa Valley, climbed to the pulpit and leaned toward us, his voice and eyes on fire. The Exodus was the journey of the Words, the tablets, he tells us. Commandment means word, and the Ten Commandments were the Ten Words of God carved on stone and given to Moses. The tablets were shattered, broken. Christ will be the new broken tablet on the Cross, laid in the tomb, the ark of His testimony, the womb of our salvation. Bread would be broken, the bread that was and is Christ’s Body, broken for us then on the Cross and now as the Host. Just as the tablets had been placed in the Ark of the Covenant, so the Word made flesh, made Host, enters our own bodies, our arks, becoming Words written on our heart. The Testimony, the Words, the Eucharist, is broken, blessed, given. When you receive, our preacher says with a clear urgency, hear the shattering as your hand holds Him, and you become the Ark of the Testimony. Taste and touch and vision – we are arks carrying the Words. Obey, drink, discern, see, know Him. Allow God to write his law on the table of your heart. This is how we add our stories to His Body.
Stunned with the images, I received the Word, the Host, the Body broken for me. I joined the line of my brothers and sisters, linked by the Holy Spirit, and soon to be made one flesh in the Eucharistic Word, the Host.
Two great preachers in two days, two shattering Hosts entering my flesh, uniting me with Christ’s Body, a great blessing indeed.
Gratia Deos
We arrived home earlier in the week to a shipment of my second novel, Offerings! Hooray! I opened a box and pulled out a copy and held it in my hands. Published! Soon we will update the website with cover, press release, excerpt.
I gave thanks to God today for this blessing, this third Sunday after Easter, Easter III, that my little book was in print. And thanks too for a safe trip home. My groggy mind, still jetlagged, was filled with images of Rome’s churches – domes, frescoed apses, vaulted holy space. London too, added to the wealth of image and song, for we visited Farm Street Church last Sunday, a Victorian Gothic church in Mayfair run by the Jesuits. Stained glass, mosaics, Latin liturgy soaring through the aisles, a packed church. A famous church – Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh, many others called it home.
And today I looked about our little church in San Francisco on Sacramento Street, a lovely Romanesque chapel with a simple stone altar, a sweet Madonna in the Gospel corner, a green tiled floor, large bouquets of flowers celebrating the Resurrection of Christ – pinks, oranges, yellows, greens all jostling together. The choir sang gloriously, and our priest preached on the example each of us sets as we go about our lives. We are strangers and pilgrims in this world, Saint Paul explains in his epistle, and folks will judge our faith by our actions. I recalled the early days of the Church and how Christians’ love for one another, and for their neighbor, was a marked change in Roman social mores. Christians buried babies they found that had died from exposure, abandoned outside, unwanted. They nursed the sick. They cared for the poor. These actions eventually founded the great institutions of the West, the hospitals, schools, almshouses, recently so taken for granted. Many Romans remarked on these odd Christian behaviors, and were converted to belief in the simple carpenter from Galilee, the Son of God.
I received the Eucharist, holding the Host in my palm, and thought how Rachelle in Offerings called her palm a crèche when she received, and now each time I receive I remember her words. Indeed, my palm was a crèche and I was thankful, joyously thankful.
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