Saturday, June 20, 2015
Corpus Christi June 7 2015
Corpus Christi
June 7 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
Alleluia. You bring forth
bread from the earth, and
wine that makes glad the
human heart. Alleluia, Alleluia.
+ In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
I would
remind you of something, I'm sure I’ve mentioned sometime in the past. The popularly influential Jesuit
paleontologist and visionary theologian, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once found
himself alone in the Gobi desert, without the bread and wine necessary to
celebrate Mass. He invoked the Holy
Spirit on the entire cosmos, in their place.
You can read this meditation in his essay called "Mass on the
World". Although, perhaps, not
entirely orthodox in the small sense of the term, the Eucharistic theology was
entirely orthodox in a larger sense: the Body of Christ realized in the
Eucharistic Liturgy, represents the Transfiguration of the whole world.
O bottomless mystery, and endless paradox! It can be compared to the notion of law and
sin as separation, which we considered on Pentecost: the law is not itself sin,
but in setting us apart the law convicts us of sin, in that it creates in us
the consciousness of separation.
Likewise, the bread and wine that we consecrate are set apart from the
rest of the world, to be made holy, yet, at the same time, they represent the
world. This holiness-as-apartness is for the sake of consecrating the world; it
is necessary to holiness-as-wholeness.
We witness this out-pouring of the Spirit at every Eucharist.
As we invoke the Holy Spirit on our bread and wine, the whole world becomes the
Body of Christ on our altar, every time.
God, through the mouth of the Holy Prophet Joel, said that in latter
days. "I will pour out my Spirit
upon all flesh." This promise is fulfilled
at Pentecost. But the event of the
Tongues in Jerusalem was only the beginning. The fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy
is an ongoing event, the Holy
Spirit’s pouring upon us continues in all time after Pentecost. This is
anything but ordinary time, in the ordinary sense of the word as quotidian
or hum-drum. This time of creation’s drenching in the Holy Spirit is extraordinary to say the least.
"All flesh" means all creation separate from God. All
flesh means creation understood as entropy
and stasis. All
flesh is lifeless matter, tending toward more and more separation. What cosmologists now call "dark
energy" pushes everything apart from everything else, in a struggle with
gravity that seeks to pull it back together.
If dark energy wins, everything continues to get farther apart from
everything else ad infinitum. Every
atom, every particle utterly separate and alone and lifeless. If gravity prevails, everything eventually
collapses into a black hole as in the beginning: the whole universe compacted
into something about the size of a baseball, no complexity or diversity, just a
uniform and incredibly dense plasma, equally lifeless. Either way current cosmology promises us
nothing but death.
The Body of Christ is the Cosmos brought to life by the Holy
Spirit, poured out on all flesh in these latter days. The Church born on Pentecost, is the
firstfruit; the End Result — what Father Teilhard called the "Omega
Point" — will be the whole cosmos transfigured, spiritualized in the sense
of being made alive by the Holy Spirit, so that — as Paul wrote — God shall be
All in all.
Anciently, the Paschal cycle ended on the day of
Pentecost. Later, Western custom
observed the first Sunday after Pentecost, as the Feast of the Holy Trinity,
and our time sees the increasing observance of the second Sunday after
Pentecost, as the Solemnity of the Body of Christ. I think this is appropriate, since the
pouring out of the Holy Spirit upon all flesh, which began at Pentecost,
started the process of revelation in which the Holy Spirit leads humanity into
all truth, which we celebrate on Trinity Sunday. And then, on Corpus Christi, we celebrate the
transubstantiation of flesh into Body, as the Holy Spirit, poured out on all
flesh, incorporates all material creation into the Divine Society of Father,
Son and Holy Spirit.
The Second
Person is God's Word, and the Third Person is God's Spirit, or Breath. As we must expel breath in order to speak, so
in our analogy God sends forth the Holy Spirit in uttering the creative Word,
All three Persons act together to create the cosmos when God says: "Let
there be light.
Now is the New Creation, when God speaks a second time,
saying of all creation, "This is my Body."
ALLELUIA!
YOU
GAVE THEM BREAD FROM HEAVEN
CONTAINING IN ITSELF ALL SWEETNESS.
CONTAINING IN ITSELF ALL SWEETNESS.
ALLELUIA! ALLELUIA!
