Of Grief and Memory

Katharine's father will have been dead a year this coming September. We just spent a couple of days in Panama City going through some of his things. We passed on the back beach road Coram's restaurant, a place where he would go each morning around five thirty a.m. for coffee. He would smoke cigarettes and spin yarns with the charter boat captains. "What ya'll catching, Joe Ed?" He knew all their names, the names of their boats, about their families, and they loved him. Everyone Rhett knew or met he treated with dignity. It was the way he was.

We passed the Panama City Yacht club (yacht is stretching it a bit) where he used to race sailboats in his younger days; just off shore of the bay, the intra-coastal waterway snaking through the salt marshes of the Gulf coast towards Apalachicola, a route he took often just to get away among the cypress, osprey and oystermen. He was always happy on the water, and with things maritime.

The house is empty now; a few books about old boats, old records and pictures in boxes of lives lived, faded by the persistent salt air. I held an old wristwatch to my ear. It wasn't ticking. Still a faint hint of cigarette smoke in the house. Outside the bird feeders were empty and askew. I marvelled that the birds and waterfowl missed him too. Out on the dock there was still a rope coiled by his hands waiting to be cast or tied by his genius. A seagull wheeled and cawed as an indifferent wind hummed in the water sedge.

Everywhere was his presence, so called forth by memory, a grace beyond reckoning; memories no less true than if he had been standing there with us. He was there because love was there. Eternal life in the present moment engendered by a love that remembers, a love that will never die. We committed his ashes to the deep of St. Andrew Bay. May they exult there come home at last, and may his gracious presence exult with us here and now, wrought by loving memory. Let us forever remember each other, for remembering is a cardinal act of love.

Of Church and Church Going

When we say church what have we said? In the New Testament literature the word for church is eklesia, which literally means "gathered assembly." It comes from the ancient Greek that was used to describe the public assembly that governed the Polis, Plato's vision of a city governing themselves in an order that resembled the order of heaven. In Platonic thought all things in earth bear the form of the ideal in heaven. The Greek way of thinking dominates the first century Near East. Common Greek was the so-called international language of the Mediterranean in literature and in commerce. The Greek academy modeled from Egypt to Persia to Rome was the way people were educated. The early church communities and Synagogues were modeled after the public assemblies envisioned by Greek culture. These were communities that served each other in mutuality, the common good being the guiding light, the common good symbolized by the concept of justice, distributive and restorative justice. Plotinus referred to Plato's Republic first and foremost as an imaginative reflection on justice. Honor and dignity for each member was held up against the shame of slavery and Imperial occupation, so insidious in this world.These were learning communities, communities of intellectual inquiry which sought enlightenment and maturity. The Greek philosophical academy and the eklesia had much in common. They were places, gatherings, that inspired and empowered its people to shape for the better the people of the community gathered, as well as the world around them that they served. These were communities of enlightened change and reform and relevancy.

The post-modern church, some writers argue, is beginning to wake up to this ancient reality. The Church over the centuries in not so small a degree has abdicated its relevancy. It has largely become a private and exclusive organization that has woefully served itself. Our hyper individualistic culture affirms such a church and bids the church to mind its own business, to keep silent about the important matters that face us from generation to generation. To a great degree the church has complied.

Brian McClaren argues that the church might well be waking up to its true calling. The ones that don't he says will surely die. Church, at its heart, is a community of passionate people who bring their questions and opinions and hopes and dreams; their intellect and imagination, their arguments and quandaries, and their love of neighbor into a community that is committed to maturing into the people God intends them to be; an enlightened community that first and foremost serves our neighbor, the stranger, the lost and the least, a community of healers, a community of nonviolence, stewards of this paradise named Earth....a community that shapes with artful intention the world for the better. We celebrate this high call, this high responsibility, as often as we can in beautiful worship, in prayer and praise. Such a life is praiseworthy beyond all reckoning. We nourish each other and encourage each other for the way ahead. We continuously remind ourselves as a gathered people, who in truth we are: We are God's people. And we don't mind our own business. We mind the business of creation; we mind the business of creating with our God the world; reclaiming Eden inch by inch as God would have it. Therefore it is the business of the church to be enlightened citizens going forth into the world, speaking and enacting the truth as best we can, in public, strengthened by our artful gathering...critical mass, we, for the greater good... If we don't...who will?

Of Real Presence

Several All Saintsers have asked me questions about this past Sunday's sermon in which I mentioned the terms transubstantiation and consubstantiation. The former, an early medieval construct in Roman Catholicism, according to The Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms, means that the bread and wine in the Eucharist are "essentially changed" into the body and blood of Christ. The latter is a late medieval understanding of the Eucharist in which the bread and wine remain the same, but that they are conjoined or coexist with the body and blood of Jesus. Both miss the point, and certainly are a far cry from the theological understanding of the Eucharist in the early church.

The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist is found in the community gathered, the assembly of the people of faith; the presence of God in Christ manifest in the commonweal of passionate and imaginative hearts grown wise in the practice of goodness. The celebrant in the Eucharist is in truth the people gathered there. Indeed in the early church every one would have been vested in chasubles (now only worn by priests) as the celebration depended on them. The priest was quite practically the one set aside by the community to preside over this celebration. Someone has to do it, else everyone would be speaking at once. Meals cause us to gather as family. Meals represent our life and labor, and the sacred art of sacrificial hospitality, that nurtures us for the way ahead. Meals are the center of life because they quite literally keep us alive. Meals are something worth celebrating. (If you haven't seen the new movie Julie and Julia, you must)

When the bread and wine are placed on the altar, that is the life and labor of God's people offered for God's blessing of empowerment. They are there also as a symbol of transformation. Bread and wine are the alchemical result of wheat and fruit changed into gracious gifts of nurture. So at the Eucharist we gather with God fully present among us and we offer our life and labor as a means of transformation for ourselves and our world. Our God is a God of change living within the life and labor of God's people become nurture for the hungry and thirsty of our world. Our life blood and the work of our flesh, not unlike the Christ, are taken, blessed and given to God's beloved upon the altar of the world...a gracious table to which all are invited, especially the ones who need this nurture the most. That is why at its heart, the Eucharist is a profound symbol of justice; and where there is justice, so there undeniably is the real presence of God.