Lent starts in just ten days time. Months with so few landmark moments seem to slip by quickly. Once more today, I prayed Morning Prayer and then the Creation Sunday Eucharist on my own, still resolved to embrace the solitude that results from the absence of public worship in the parish, rather than sit in front of a screen for a virtual service. It's what I did with occasional lapses during last year's lock-down in Ibiza in an effort to explore what a fast from receiving Communion really means.
It is, after all, what some faithful Christians have lived with in remote rural areas without priests over centuries. It's what a hermit may choose to live, in order to pray continuously without distraction. It's what has been forced on some faithful Christians by rigorist church discipline after a marriage failure, or due to a sexual identity crisis, or due to traumatic abuse in the church leading someone to feel revulsion towards it. The need to belong, the longing for communion with God together with others remains, but is inaccessible.
Recently I thought of Teilhard de Chardin being away on a paleontological expedition in the Gobi desert away on his own from his Jesuit community fellow workers didn't share his religion. Providentially this week the monthly Ty Mawr newsletter written by Mother Catherine SSC contains a quotation from de Chardin's poetic prayer 'Mass on the World', included in his book 'Hymn of the Universe'. He writes this
“O, Lord, since I have neither bread nor wine nor altar here on the Asian steppes, I lift up myself far above the symbols, to the pure majesty of the Real; and I, your priest, offer to you on the altar of the entire earth, the travail and suffering of the world. Yonder breaks the sun, to light the uttermost east, and then to send its sheets of fire over the living surface of the earth, which wakens, shudders and resumes its relentless struggle. My paten and my chalice are the depths of a soul laid widely open to all the forces which in a moment will rise up from every corner of the earth and converge upon the Spirit.”
Praise, thanksgiving, self-offering are or should be our everyday response to knowing that Jesus died and rose again for us, and is with us always, in loneliness as much as in togetherness. 'Love so amazing, so divine demands my soul my life my all', as my favourite hymn says. And we see that same amazing love in the entire created order of our existence too. The Spirit active in creation awakens us and points us to God in Christ. Whatever we miss or long for, sacraments, fellowship, ritual, celebration, we're in nature we're part of nature. Looking upwards, looking outwards, looking deep within can arouse joy wonder gratitude in us, the very essence of Eucharist. How then to learn afresh how to live it?
Walking after worship, and walking again after lunch was a very chilling experience, even though I was well dressed. The temperature was 2-3 degrees, but that persistent strong wind made it feel sub-zero, and such a relief to step back into the comforting warmth of home afterwards.
I completed watching the last three episodes of 'A Deadly Union'. It was quite complex to follow with a succession of sad sub plots and a couple of romances thrown in with all the darker stuff. The suspicious death of a bride on her wedding day turned out not to be a dark secrets. murder but the suicide of a blackmailed and sexually abused woman who concealed her suffering from her husband out of family loyalty and other. Cleverly stitched together, but I think there was a continuity error in the penultimate, but who cares now it's over?
I went to bed early as my wound decided to give me trouble. Some days it catches in the dressing and opens up unexpectedly, the physical shock more than the pain leaves me needing to lie down to recover. I watched the fourth episode of Finding Alice' in bed. It's a study in bereavement, bizarre and meant to be humorous. I'm starting to find it cringe-worthy. The portrayal of grief in 'A Deadly Union' felt authentic and much closer to reality.
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