Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Corpus Christi - Thursday, June 3, 2021
Almost every Sunday before pandemic time, I used to take communion to our brothers Laurence and Rafael in the nursing home. The way Laurence received communion struck me every time. He would close his eyes, receive the bread onto his palm, and place in gently in his mouth. Then, eyes still shut and head bowed, he waited for a moment in silence.
Then he would pray the anima Christi in a low voice. At the words “O, Good Jesus, hear me. Within your wounds hide me,” his voice took on a timbre of such love and such longing that it brought tears to my eyes almost every week.
I’ve never discussed this experience with Laurence. But I’ve wondered if having essentially fasted from Communion for a whole week sharpened his longing and deepened his gratitude at being able—finally—to receive his Good Jesus in the flesh.
Most of the Church was not able to receive Communion for over a year during the first part of the pandemic. Bishop Dietsche used the metaphor of exile to describe the experience. Once restrictions on in-person worship began to ease, I started to hear stories of people receiving the sacramental Body of Christ for the first time in over a year. As people would tell me these stories, their faces would light up from within and usually tears would fill their and my eyes. The pain of a year’s separation, the joy—the ecstatic joy—of return and reunion.
We here at the Monastery chose a different Eucharistic witness during this time of pandemic. We chose to witness to the abiding, daily presence of Jesus in the bread and the wine. I don’t think that was a wrong choice. But I did notice in myself a longing to fast from the Eucharist as most of the rest of the Church had to fast. There was a part of me that wanted to join the wider Church in its exile.
I recently shared that desire with a guest of ours. He understood where I was coming from. And he also expressed his deep gratitude that we could be a tabernacle, holding onto the sacramental witness of Christ’s Body and Blood while the rest of the Church sojourned in Babylon.
Either way, the contrast of our fullness of our Eucharistic witness here and the barren witness of the Church in exile has highlighted for me the deep dimensions of fullness and emptiness within the Eucharist itself. We need both fullness and emptiness to experience the totality of God’s sacramental and bodily presence among us. We need to feast and we need to fast in order to know the fullness of God’s love for us and all the world.
In her seventh revelation of divine love, Lady Julian offers the following:
[God] revealed to me a supreme spiritual delight in my soul. In this delight I was filled full of everlasting surety, powerfully secured without any painful fear. This sensation was so welcome and spiritual that I was wholly at peace, at ease, and at rest, so that there was nothing upon earth which could have afflicted me.This lasted only for a time, and then I was changed, and abandoned to myself, oppressed and weary of my life and ruing myself, so that I hardly had the patience to go on living. I felt that there was no ease or comfort for me except faith, hope, and love, and truly I felt very little of this. And then presently God gave me again comfort and rest for my soul, delight and security so blessedly and so powerfully that there was no fear, no sorrow, no pain, physical or spiritual, that one could suffer which might have disturbed me. And then again I felt the pain, and then afterwards the delight and the joy, now the one and now the other, again and again and again, I suppose about twenty times. And in the time of joy I could have said with St. Paul: Nothing shall separate me from the love of Christ; and in the pain I could have said with St. Peter: Lord, save me, I am perishing.This vision was shown to teach me to understand that some souls profit by experiencing this, to be comforted at one time, and at another to fail and to be left to themselves. God wishes us to know that he keeps us safe all the time, in sorrow and in joy; and sometimes a man is left to himself for the profit of his soul, although his sin is not always the cause. For in this time I committed no sin for which I ought to have been left to myself, for it was so sudden. Nor did I deserve these feelings of joy, but our Lord gives it freely when he wills, and sometimes he allows us to be in sorrow, and both are one love.Both the sorrow and the joy are one love.
In the reading from Deuteronomy this morning, Moses teaches the Israelites something similar: God humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with the manna […] in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.
Sometimes God hides his face from us in order to stir up our longing. We feel God’s absence so sharply that we call out for relief. Particularly when we have fallen into the slumber of the ordinary routine, or the self-regard of our own obsessions and illusions, we need this sharp jab in the stomach to wake us up to our need of God.
At other times, God feeds us tenderly and sweetly. God reveals his face to us in all its simplicity and beauty, and our whole being is flooded with love for God, for ourselves, and for one another.
In the classic language of Christian spirituality, we might call the former experience desolation and the latter consolation. But Julian would call both of them love. It is for love that God hides his face from us, to stir up our longing. And it is for love that God reveals himself to us and feeds us with himself. And both are one love.
Picking up on this theme of fullness and emptiness, the Founder’s rule reminds us both that we should welcome the appointed times of fasting with joy, seeing in them an opportunity to free ourselves from our own disordered attachments. In so doing, they become for us a spiritual feast. And also that our feasting too must have something of the character of a gracious simplicity that is readily recognized as proper to the monastic life. In other words, feasting and fasting are two dimensions of one love. Fullness and emptiness both have their part.
Strange as it may sound, today’s feast of the Holy Eucharist is not a celebration only of our fullness in God. It is a reminder, too, that we must empty ourselves of whatever is not God. We must allow our hunger for God to be so stirred within us that we allow ourselves to be satisfied with nothing less than our Good Jesus.
It is so easy to see in comfort and fullness the signs of favor or success. To the extent that we are genuinely wearied by the changes and changes of this life, as one of our Compline collects so poetically puts it, we may long for comfort. But monastic life—indeed any Christian life faithfully lived—exists on the knife edge of fragility, where we don’t know what will happen next, whether we will perish or whether we will thrive. That is where faith is born, and it is where faith leads us.
God continually draws us out into the deserts of this world and of our own lives, not to abandon us, but to reveal the fullness of his mercy, to pour down mana from heaven, to teach us with his indwelling Word, to reveal the full glory of his face where there is nothing to distract us from absorption in the holy.
The bread that we break and the cup that we share every day at this altar are a kind of spiritual amuse bouche. They are meant to stoke our hunger for God, even as they satisfy that hunger in part. They are, in the words of our tradition, but a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. The feast at this altar should inspire in us a fast from all that is not God, so that in us feast and fast, too, become one love: the love of God poured out for the world through us who are also, united, the Body of Christ.
Whether we feast or whether we fast, I pray that like our brother Laurence, our love and our longing may be so joined that we can pray to be hidden in the wounds of our Good Jesus. And so with one voice and one love we make our prayer (please join me if you know the words):
(Anima Christi)
Soul of Christ, sanctify me.Body of Christ, save me.Blood of Christ, inebriate me.Passion of Christ, strengthen me.O, Good Jesus, hear me.Within your wounds hide me.From the wicked foe, defend me.Suffer me never to be separated from you.At the hour of my death, call me and bid me come to you,That with your saints I may praise your Name forever. Amen.
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