FROM THE BOUNDARY: New year, new dawn – Part two
IS the Christian faith like the criminal law? Does it compel us to do this or that or face dire consequences? Is it about heavenly rewards for being good and rotten punishments for sin? “There is no health in us… SPARE Thou those who confess their faults…” Did Jesus come as another criminal law giver? Or did he come to remove the scales from our eyes to liberate our true nature in the context of one law natural to us, the law of Love? You can’t buy that, love, off a shelf. You can’t love under orders. No, but we can let it flower within us by giving expression to the “governings of our hearts” in compassion, in loving kindness. If we and the world suffer, is it really ‘sinfulness’ for which we call for ‘mercy’ – ‘don’t hit us’ – or is it ‘blindness’ for which we call for liberation, release, from the selves which are not ourselves?
With that in mind, let all our New Year’s hopes become our dawn. Yes, let’s “trumpet in a Galilean morn”. It’s my dawn, and yours. It’s a morn which proclaims what Jesus is in our lives, the law of love in action, the love which comes from within us, from the heart where the Kingdom stands, the heart of Jesus within us. He has no need to come again. He never left us.
It was to insinuate all this that last week I wrote of a Eucharist of the imagination, a Mass with no altar, no chalice, paten, host nor wine. Perhaps it sounded very odd. But think about it. Is it really more difficult to turn air into flesh as wine into blood, or water into wine? They’re all mysteries, aren’t they? (Is a ‘mystery’ in this sense a polite word for ‘magic’?) We know, well we say and believe, that in the Mass we experience Jesus’ real presence. That’s a mystery too. We call it a ‘sacrament’, an outward and visible sign of an interior, spiritual grace. And when we suppose that that’s the product of working with visible, tangible, things, it’s all very comforting. But do we really have to work with tangible things as the sine qua non for spiritual grace, to experience the real presence?
Remember, Jesus’ presence is a multiple presence. He’s present, we say, in his ‘Word’ when the Gospel is read. We say that he presides at the Eucharist in and through his priest. He’s present in the Eucharistic community, those of one body with him. We say we dwell in him and he in us. He’s present whenever two or three are gathered together. In none of these are we talking about a physical presence in a particular place or object. We’re talking about a spiritual and personal presence experienced in our hearts and minds, not our stomachs. It’s a presence unique to each of us – Jesus knows us by our names – yet common to all. The bread and wine at the Eucharist give us the focus for that presence, like two shafts of light in a dark room. But they’re not the presence itself.
What does that presence actually mean? It means we acknowledge the divine source of grace within us, Jesus himself. We just know he’s there. It’s like being in the presence of friends when we read their letters, or by remembering them as when we touch something they’ve given us. It’s like ever feeling that those we’ve loved, now dead, are with us, that they’ve returned to us as the dead do in time. As with Jesus at the synagogue at Nazareth reading from Isaiah, his presence is as real as if we’d said: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” It’s Jesus’ spirit which rests upon and within us. And what that means is that we too are spiritually anointed, commissioned, to preach the Gospel of Love; and that, love, really doesn’t depend on the presence of physical things to give it life. It’s as if “we have seen with our eyes and touched with our hands the bread of life”. And it translates into the Eucharistic prayer: “Unite us in Christ and give us your peace that we may do your work and be his body in the world.” Yes, we too have been commissioned to do his work, to become his hands, to become the ‘presence’ of his love. We don’t have to manufacture it. It’s there within us. Our job is to understand that and live it, and so “heal the broken-hearted”, “preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised” (Luke 4:18). And this, the presence of Jesus within us to awaken us, the real us, to complete the work he has given us to do, is the most wonderful gift of heaven. The Eucharist, the visible sign of hidden grace, helps us understand that. Tangible things prove nothing. Maybe imagination is even more powerful. So yes, in this New Year’s dawn what finer commitment – to the Jesus within, our hands as his – can there possibly be?
Go safely, then – until the next time.
New Year’s resolution, from the boundary: “I’m not going to die because I failed as someone else. I’d rather just succeed at being me” (Margaret Cho).