Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
“Lift up your hearts.” “We lift them up unto the Lord.” “Let us give thanks unto our Lord God.” “It is meet and right so to do.” “It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty, that we should at all times, and in all places, give thanks unto thee, O Lord, holy Father, almighty, everlasting God.”
Our bounden duty. I’ve found myself thinking about duty this morning, as I’ve reflected on the dedication of this place. Duty is a word we tend to shy away from on contemporary spiritual scene—it’s way too heavy and negative. In our 1979 prayer book revision, “It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty” of course became “It is right, and a good and joyful thing.” And my experience of worship is often joyful. But not always. And when it isn’t, I still show up, because it’s not always about joy, sometimes it’s simply about offering my bounden duty into the universe.
This chapel was of course dedicated as a monastic chapel from its start. Which means that it was always intended to carry the Daily Prayers of the Church and to celebrate daily the Holy Eucharist. And monastics have always understood, perhaps better than others, that while, yes, we may come to our prayers for joy, or peace, or intimacy with our Beloved—we also come out of duty.
A good synonym would be responsibility. The idea that human beings have a responsibility to offer prayer and praise into the universe, that perhaps somehow our acts of worship are even necessary for the maintenance of the world, is one that the contemporary church has largely lost. But the best of our theology has always understood that prayer and worship are not just for ourselves—for our own personal growth and development, or for getting that spiritual fix we crave. They’re also for the sake of the world.
Fae Malania, in her book The Quantity of a Hazelnut, writes, “That is why the Daily Office of the Church matters so much. This is a prayer we can offer for the merest stranger, for someone we dislike, for a sorrow we haven’t encompassed, a problem we haven’t understood. We can offer it for a world of hungry children our hearts are too small to hold, for the unknown victim of a sin we’ve never even thought of, for peace in a world that fills us with a scared surprise. We can offer it, over and over again, for people we love, and needs we know.
“Saying the formal psalms and prayers, following in obedience the rich and ordered prayer of the entire Church, adding my small voice to its perfect harmony, I turn the whole river of grace towards those for whom I pray. Not I pray for them. Adam, all Man, prays. The whole Church prays. The whole Christ prays. Let me remember to find a little time for this, even if it means taking a little trouble.”
This church was built as a place dedicated to that remembrance, to the carving out of that time, the taking of that trouble. And in doing that work, you hold that possibility alive for all who come here, and for all those who cannot come here. This is a place where the whole Christ prays, or better, a place where we open to the prayer of the whole Christ for the whole Christ.
An online dictionary tells me that dedicate means “to devote to sacred use through solemn rites.” Well what exactly is the sacred use that a church is devoted to? One of my favorite answers is: inefficiency, sacred inefficiency. In a world driven by efficiency, productivity, and profit, the Church opens us to a world that refuses to play by those rules. In her book Things Seen and Unseen, Nora Gallagher writes that the life of the Church “calls into consciousness the existence of a world uninhabited by efficiency, a world filled with the excessiveness of saints, ashes, smoke, and fire; … It tells of journeys and mysteries, things “seen and unseen,” the world of the almost known. It dreams impossibilities…”
This chapel inhabits that world and invites all who come here to dream impossibilities. And in the polarized and contracted landscape we currently inhabit, that is crucial work indeed.
In the 1979 liturgy for the dedication of a church, the bishop prays, “Lord Jesus Christ, make this a temple of your presence and a house of prayer. Be always near us when we seek you in this place. Draw us to you, when we come alone and when we come with others, to find comfort and wisdom, to be supported and strengthened, to rejoice and give thanks. May it be here, Lord Christ, that we are made one with you and with one another, so that our lives are sustained and sanctified for your service.”
May it be here that we are made one with you and with one another. That is also the work to which this place is dedicated—to be a place where we become more conscious of our oneness with God and one another, a place where the marriage of heaven and earth takes place. It’s a place where we cultivate both a vertical relationship with God through the awakening of our inner lives, and a horizontal relationship with God, through relationship with, and worship shared with, our neighbor, which of course forms the two beams of the cross, the vertical and horizontal, which mapped over the human body, intersect in the heart. And so perhaps we can say that a church building is in fact an icon or a sacrament of the heart, that place where we flow into God and God flows into us.
I often have thought of this church in particular as a just such an icon. Every day as the community gathers for Eucharist, we form a circle around the altar, and the two arms of the circle gradually weave into the center, where they receive the Body and Blood of Christ, and are then sent back out into the world. It often seems to me in those moments that this church is actually, in a very real and literal sense, the lungs and heartbeat of the Body of Christ, where we join the breath of the Spirit and the rhythm of God’s own pulse.
Cynthia Bourgeault writes, “Mercy is the life blood that flows through the Mystical Body of Christ.” Well I often imagine that we are all blood cells within the body of Christ, and we come here into this heartbeat, through the Daily Office and the Daily Mass, in order to be oxygenated, infused with fresh mercy, and sent back out into the rest of the Body.
In one of her visions, the 14th century mystic Julian of Norwich saw the blood of Christ flowing copiously throughout all creation. She writes, “The abundance was like the drops of water that fall off the eaves of a house after a great shower of rain, which fall so thick that no man can number them with earthly wit. [...] This showing was alive and active, and hideous and dreadful, and sweet and lovely.”
And then she says, “And then it came to my mind that God has made plenteous waters on earth for our assistance and for our bodily comfort because of the tender love he has for us, but... there is no liquid that is made that it pleases him so well to give us [as his dearworthy blood], for just as it is most plentiful, so it is most precious…
“And the blood is of our own nature, and all beneficently flows over us by the virtue of his precious love... The precious abundance of his dearworthy blood descended down into hell, and burst their bonds and delivered all that were there... the precious abundance of his dearworthy blood flows over all the earth and is quick to wash all creatures from sin...
“The precious abundance of his dearworthy blood ascended up into heaven to the blessed body of our Lord Jesus Christ, and there it is within him, bleeding and praying for us to the Father... and evermore it flows in all heavens rejoicing in the salvation of all humankind that are there and shall be, completing the count that falls short.”
She sees Christ’s blood circulating throughout all the realms—hell, earth, and heaven. As if it is coursing through a great inter-realmic circulatory system, flowing through all the worlds with forgiveness and healing and love. But for blood to flow, it needs a beating heart. Otherwise, it grows cold and stagnant in our veins. And that is what this place does.
Which brings us back to duty. It is our duty as Christians to keep the heart of Christ beating in the world, flowing mercy to all the realms—and we do that by showing up, and lifting up our hearts to God—when it’s joyful, when it’s hurts, and when it’s simply boring. For it is our bounden duty, and the bounden duty of this place to stay true to work to which it was dedicated: a slow and inefficient work that remains as steady as a heartbeat, as necessary as breathing.
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