 THAT WE MAY PERFECTLY LOVE THEE Preparing Our Hearts for the Eucharist
It occurred to me once that I had been in church most of the Sundays of my life without really knowing why we do the things that we do there — where those things came from and what they meant. It also occurred to me that I might not be the only one.
On the Sundays that I can, the Sundays when I do not have to travel, the Sundays on which I am in the city where I live and have slept under my own roof and can go to worship with the people that I love and alongside the people who call me by my name when I am among them, I like to rise early, before the sun if I can. It is a way of keeping the sabbath for me.
Of all of the Sundays that I have lived, it is these Sundays that are the ones that I have come to treasure the most. They are the ones that are the most ordinary to me and yet the most sacred at the same time.
There is the blue-black of the sky just before the sun begins its daily journey to the other side of the horizon. There are the long red streaks in the sky that remind you that the dark night will indeed end before too long. And then the birds begin, chirping and chattering and whistling. These days, as I write this, it is late summer — almost autumn — and the birds are beginning to congregate regularly around the feeders in our yard, especially the one that I hung from the roof of the front porch. I put it there so that I can see the chickadees through the window across the room from where I sit cross legged in the corner of a little couch, nursing a cup of coffee and scribbling prayer of a sort in a sketch book, and waiting to see what manner of day this will be that the Lord has made.
It is Sunday, and the one word that I will do my best not to say today is hurry.
‘What the church does first and foremost,’ writes Jeffrey Lee in Opening the Prayer Book, ‘is worship the living God.’ His statement is not poetic, but it is not to be taken lightly. What we do with this day, in our homes and in our hearts, in our churches and in our cathedrals, in our auditoriums and our sanctuaries is the one thing that matters the most. This day that we call Sunday, the Sabbath, is the day when we are called to worship the Living God with the utmost faithfulness and reverence and devotion. And this service, the service of Word and Table — the Eucharist, the Holy Communion, the Blessed Sacrament, the Lord’s Supper, whatever named is used for it in the community with which we gather — this is the act of worship that we are called to offer up.
This is a critical part of our life together, I think to myself sometimes. It seems critically important that we approach this act of praise and thanksgiving with some measure of reverence and attention to its art and its history and its tradition.
And it is hard for me to do so sometimes, because I live in a busy, complex society, where I spend much of my time trying to do so many things at once. It is often difficult for me to respond to a call to observe the Sabbath with anything resembling the sort of single mindedness that is required.…
There is another thing that happens sometimes as well. Sometimes our age of consumerism gets the better of us even in our pews, and we approach our worship with an eye toward getting something out of it for ourselves rather than with an eye toward what we are to give to it. Our particpation in the mystery of the Eucharist is colored by our desire to be sure that there is something in it for us rather than for the One Whom we worship. The truth is that what we do this day in the name of worship is not even for us, it is for the Living God.…
The coffee is finished now and the birds have gone off to other yards in the neighborhood on their daily rounds, and my knees have begun to ache from sitting here so long. It is time to wake the ones to whom I have been given and who have been given to me. It is time for us to go unto the house of the Lord, to join with all those who would enter his courts with praise. It is time to make our entrance, together, with a hymn of worship and honor and adoration, time to hear the Word Proclaimed, time to offer our prayers and offerings and thanksgivings. And it is time to come to the Table of the Lord, where the Word Made Flesh will be broken and shared.
Let us rejoice and be glad together.
Excerpted from That We May Perfectly Love Thee by Robert Benson
(Paraclete Press, copyright 2002, ISBN 1557253005)
|
