Rivendell Community
Formation Study Guide
Unit C: Reflections on Eucharistic Living
Part 2 - Offering; “He took bread...”
We intend to celebrate the Eucharist continually in our lives as well as in the liturgy, to offer ourselves in all that we do or suffer to God, with the intention that our offering be taken, consecrated and united to Christ’s sacrifice, broken and given. As members of a royal priesthood, we will also present to God the joys and sorrows of the world. Our intention is to give thanks to God in all things.
Our Rule reflects here the “four-fold shape of the liturgy,” which we find so inexhaustibly fruitful as a lens and pattern for all life. It’s as though the Eucharist itself is both the center and focal point for our Christian life and a kind of training and patterning, so that we may do always and everywhere what we do most intensely in the liturgy itself. As is, I imagine, familiar territory for most of us, one of the very influential and fruitful insights, or recoveries, of the liturgical movement in the 20th century was the realization that the four acts - offering/taking, giving thanks/consecrating, breaking and giving - form the fundamental shape of the liturgy; and that this is readily apparent even in the wording of Eucharistic references or allusions in the New Testament itself, from our earliest description of the Eucharistic tradition (by St. Paul in I Corinthians) and the Gospel narratives of the Last Supper to such allusive and profoundly eucharistic scenes as the feedings of the multitude and the resurrection appearance at Emmaus.
We intend “to offer ourselves in all that we do or suffer to God...” As you all are aware, the “oblations”, the bread and the wine (and perhaps money, food for the needy, church school artwork, etc.) which are presented to God at the Offertory and placed on the altar, represent our selves, our “lives and labors.” Many of you have heard me recount the story about my mentor when I was first ordained, the renowned Bill Crews, then rector of St. Thomas of Canterbury, Albuquerque. On one occasion I was complaining to him about something or other, ecclesiastical politics, as I recall, and he advised me, “When you feel like that, what you do is jump in the alms basin.” I thought this was marvelous advice; it helped me greatly, both then and through the years. What I didn’t then realize was that this was what Bill Crews invariably said to anyone about anything; it perhaps nearly exhausted the range of his pastoral care. The wonderful thing, of course, is that it’s quite pertinent and adequate in most any circumstance. (As an indication of the fruits of Bill Crews’ teaching: Some time later, two lawyers in his parish had been on opposite sides of a bitterly contested lawsuit. The Sunday after the matter was settled in court, the two of them sprayed a wheelbarrow with gold paint and put some red velvet in the bottom of it, and the winner wheeled the loser up the aisle with the bread and the wine at the Offertory!) Although at the time this seemed to me to be startlingly insightful counsel, and one of those many things they didn’t teach me at seminary, I must nevertheless have succeeded in conveying it to the congregation I was then serving, the newly forming mission of St. Chad’s, as I remember well the moving and lovely act of a parishioner, who, on the Sunday following the settlement of a very painful divorce, placed the divorce decree in the offering. It was the perfect thing to do; but it did rather bewilder the treasurer.
We intend to offer ourselves in all that we do or suffer to God – all, everything, nothing left out. This, of course, expresses something of what it means to seek to “give ourselves wholly...” to God, and this aspect of eucharistic living is a way of doing it. I imagine that for most of us there are some explicit or implicit exceptions, aspects or areas of life that somehow don’t get into the alms basin, or that we think don’t “fit.” Sometimes these are matters that we’d just as soon God didn’t mess with. For me, these are typically faults or distractions or parts of me that don’t seem worthy or fit to be presented to God, or, at least, that I (usually “preconsciously”) think need to be cleaned up or rearranged a bit before they’re laid on the altar. But “wholly” means both completely and undividedly. It’s both reassuring and challenging that nothing is supposed to be left out; that everything that we are is to be given, and done with whatever it pleases God to do. (I often reflect that one of the implications of making confession and receiving absolution is that even our sins don’t “belong” to us any more; they, too, have been given to God, to be disposed of however God sees fit: to be destroyed, “recycled,” caught up into redemption and used for good, whatever.)
But trying, even unconsciously, to withhold anything from God pulls us in two directions, divides us. The willed act of entire self-giving (which, however intensely and ardently done on particular occasions, needs to be done again and again and again - “continually,” in fact) is scary, maybe, but also profoundly liberating: it frees us from the stressful balancing act of apportioning ourselves, our resources and energies, to be wholly God’s, in will and hope if not yet in actualization. Our lives, then, with all their complexities and convolutions, fall into place around their true center, who is Christ. We’re moved toward both holiness and wholeness. And this, of course, is a central intention of our Rule (and of the Christian life).
As we come to the turn of the year, then, let’s “jump into the alms basin” and offer to God all that has been and that will be – all of the past year’s struggles and griefs and failures and joys and progress and work and accomplishment, and all our selves in the year to come: ordinary lives, like ordinary bread and wine, to be taken and filled with Christ’s presence, and broken and given for the life of the world, in union with him.
Here are a few questions for possible reflection:
How do you go about offering your self, your life and labor, to God in ordinary daily life? Are there particular practices that help with this?
What aspects of yourself and your life seem to be hardest to fit into the alms basin? Are there areas which you find yourself reluctant to place on the altar?
Do you remember particular occasions of willed self-giving to God? Looking back, do you see any sort of pattern?
Can you identify occasions in which you glimpsed a bit of gracious transformation of something you had “placed on the altar”?
In this letter, we’ve been mainly considering the offering of our own selves. Looking ahead a bit, what about “presenting to God the joys and sorrows of the world”? How do we do this, for instance, regarding the victims and the assistance efforts of the tsunami?