Corpus Christi

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Corpus Christi, Eucharist, incarnate, real presence, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, The Velveteen Rabbit

“Corpus Christi” is a Latin term for “Body of Christ.” It speaks of a mystery and as such is impossible to explain in the world of physical reality. The actual feast was promulgated in the Church in the thirteenth century by Pope Urban IV at the urging of Saint Thomas Aquinas to celebrate the real presence (“body and blood, soul and divinity”) of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. The roots of the feast, however, go back all the way to the meal that Jesus celebrated with his closest associates before his death. We call it “the Last Supper.” Today’s lectionary readings include the testimony of St Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians where he writes:

I received from the Lord what I handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night before he was handed over, took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in in remembrance of me.”

From this testimony has come the doctrine of “the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.” Not just a symbol, Catholic teaching says, but real presence. How are we to interpret such a mystery?

It may seem irreverent to speak of the great mystery of this feast with reference to the story of The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams but somehow it seems to make sense to me today. “What is real?” said the Rabbit to the Skin Horse one day? “Real isn’t how you are made ,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

At the Last Supper, it seems that Jesus was trying to make his friends understand how much he loved them and had tried to teach them the love that God had for them. He wanted to incarnate that love by giving them his whole self. We cannot understand that gift in a brief encounter. It takes a very long time to experience the depth of a love like that – for it to become real. When it does, it can never be taken away and then we realize that we, too, have become a real presence for the world.

The Body of Christ

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be, blesses, blessing, body of Christ, compassion, Corpus Christi, dawn, Entering the Silence, good, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, Thomas Merton

Yesterday I had one of those mornings when waking early turned into an amazing blessing of silence and recognition. I chose to leave my computer packed away and just sat looking out a giant window in New Hampshire at the mid-point of my journey to Wisdom School. (See Saturday’s post). Fortified with the coffee and an invitation to quiet from by ever-hospitable friend, Bill, I spent an hour reflecting on the feast of Corpus Christi (the Body of Christ) as it appeared to me on the calendar, in nature and in my own self as a cell in that universal body of love. Here’s what I scribbled in pencil at one point so that I would recall the experience – a great beginning to this “wisdom week.”

4:15 – First light. The birds were loud and luxurious, reminiscent of Thomas Merton’s words at dawn about God “calling them to ‘BE’ once again.” Moving in and out of sleep to listen. (corpus Christi)

6:05 – Full sun. The breeze makes dappled designs in the room where I sit watching the breeze turn to wind in the excitement of morning. A small chime somewhere outside calls out, “AWAKE!” (corpus Christi)

7:00 – No internet to record the thoughts that have been running across my mind like the ticker-tape of stocks in Times Square, NYC. Mostly song lyrics with pauses for breathing out praise. All is glorious! I am dancing even as I sit and hear inside the words of a prayer of Teresa of Avila made into song by John Michael Talbot. (corpus Christi)

All day long I hear within me: Christ has no body now but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassion on this world; yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body…

Corpus Christi, indeed. So on we go.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Body of Christ

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call to service, Christ's body, Corpus Christi, Eucharist, loaves and fishes, miracle, signs, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

In the Roman Catholic Church, we celebrate today the feast that I grew up knowing as Corpus Christi (the Body of Christ). I had a strange moment as I navigated to the US Catholic Bishops’ website this morning. I must not have been fully awake because when I read the designation of the feast as The  Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ it sounded unfamiliar, full of pomp and ceremony – something I could not identify…until in the next moment I said to myself, “Oh, of course, it’s Corpus Christi Sunday!” and it became something familiar as in my mind’s eye I saw a procession to the Eucharist table, heard the congregation singing, Precious Body, precious Blood, here in bread and wine…punctuated by the repetition of the ministers of the Eucharist repeating to every communicant, “The body of Christ” in the most familiar and profound ritual of our faith.

Next I read the gospel, Luke’s rendition of the feeding of the five thousand (LK 9:11-17) where all sorts of random thoughts – maybe somewhat connected – followed from the text flowing in and out of my mind. Here are some that stuck. First, when the disciples told Jesus to dismiss the crowds after a day of preaching and healing so they  could go somewhere to find food, Jesus said, “Give them something to eat yourselves.” We know the story: they protest because of the huge crowd and the fact that all they have is 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish and the cost to feed them all – even if they found food in or around this deserted place – would be prohibitive. Then follows the miracle where the food is distributed and everyone is fed. Imagine the surprise of the disciples who were doing the distribution! So next I try to think about that moment. It says Jesus looked up to heaven, said the blessing over the bread and fish, broke them, then handed them to the disciples to give out. So did the multiplication happen in the blessing? in the breaking? or did each of the disciples get a basket (where did those come from?) with some tiny morsel of food inside that then became a fullness as they walked among the crowds? Does any of this matter? The point is, it seems, that people were fed. But maybe just as important as that is the fact that the disciples were agents of the feeding even though Jesus had engineered the miracle. Can you imagine Jesus doing the distribution by himself? They would have been there all night or longer!

So what is the message here? Jesus left many signs in an attempt to teach his disciples (and us) how to be in the world. “Give them something to eat yourselves” was a clear directive – and it couldn’t have been easy to manage that in such a crowd – so the call to service is not always easy and never (if truly understood) prestigious but the “endgame” is worth the effort. My last random thought was “You are what you eat.” What we take into our bodies becomes part of us – for better or for worse. What the crowd – including the disciples, I presume – were eating in today’s reading as well as at the Last Supper and what we eat during the Eucharistic liturgy has been transacted into the body of Christ. Thus, we ourselves become Christ’s body as we eat and as we serve in Christ’s name. Just as the disciples could not understand the reality that they were witnessing in the midst of that crowd, our ordinary minds cannot perceive what truly happens each time we eat at Eucharist and go out to act as Christ’s body in the world. But as we wake up to the possibility contained in our actions, as we give ourselves more and more to a generous “becoming” for God in the world, the transformation becomes more evident, more luminous, and the effort is more than worth the gift.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sacred Promise

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Abraham, blood sacrifice, communion, Corpus Christi, covenant, disciples, Exodus, Last Supper, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

Today is one of remembrance of God’s enduring and evolving covenant with us – from the days of Abraham and then during the Exodus (EX 24:3-8) when Moses related his conversation with God to the Israelites in the desert and they exclaimed, “We will do all that the Lord has told us!” At that time the covenant was sealed by a “blood sacrifice” when half the blood of the animal that had been slain was poured over the altar and half sprinkled on the people. With Christ came a new iteration of covenant which Christians see as the fulfillment of what God and Abraham had promised at the beginning of our salvation history. When Jesus took bread and wine at the Last Supper and said to his friends, “This is my body; this is my blood…Whenever you do this, remember me,” (MK 14: 12-26) he gave us a memorial – a way to remember the love that exists between God and humans – in a way that we could celebrate and which would create the community that would spread that love throughout the world.

Today is the celebration of that covenant, the feast of Corpus Christi (the Body of Christ). Lots of wonderful hymns will be sung today, motivating congregations to the remembrance of Christ’s willingness to pour himself out for us, being a model of God’s side of the covenant while also teaching what is possible on the human side. It’s a day to ask ourselves about the level of our own willingness to act as disciples, recognizing the reality that lives in the words we say and sing, according to whatever tradition of the covenant we follow, and living into that reality with all that we are and all that we are becoming.

Bread for the Journey

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bread and wine, communion, Corpus Christi, Israelites, Jesus, John, manna, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

This morning’s readings move through what I have learned to call “salvation history” beginning with the story of God’s gift of “manna” in the desert – the bread that sustained the Israelites as they wandered toward the Promised Land. In the Christian Scriptures, Jesus speaks of himself in John’s gospel as the “bread that has come down from heaven” that will lead us to life. We become, we are told, the true, mystical body of Christ. This is truly a mystery and in our day we are coming to see new and deeper meanings that derive from this truth. Christians speak of the “communion of the body of Christ” celebrated in the ritual of Eucharist and see that communion in the bread and wine that we share in the living memory (anamnesis) of what Jesus did at what we call “the Last Supper” before his death and resurrection. The unity of his body is becoming clearer as we join with others across the Christian spectrum for ecumenical dialog. We find that what joins us is so much more than what separates us so that while we reverence our own tradition, we embrace those all over the world whom we are coming to know as brothers and sisters. It is this sense of unity that impels us further to interfaith dialog where we find the possibility of understanding even beyond the borders of Christianity toward the hope of unity that recognizes all those who journey toward God (however we envision or name God) as our companions.

On this feast of Corpus Christi (the Body of Christ) then, let us pray for one world, a unity of hearts yearning for peace and fellowship that we trust to be possible if we will widen our hearts in the unified embrace of God.