Eucharist Archives - Deacon Chris Anderson

Two Theological Speculations During Mass

Often when I preach it feels like I’ve lowered myself into the river of my own anger and insecurity.

One Sunday, at the ambo, looking out at the congregation, I wondered, is this part of what the Lord shares in when He shares in my particular humanity?

This ego and this awareness of ego? This desire for approval? This insecurity? This constant interior struggle with idolatry and pride?

Then, as I was kneeling at the altar, at the moment of consecration: maybe the Host really is Christ, really is His Body, but in a perfectly obvious and ordinary way, as in the sky is blue or it’s cold outside, this is life, and so the response doesn’t have to be ecstasy or awe, though in another sense it should be, but ordinary acceptance.

To say This is His Body is to say this just is, this is happening and this is ordinary and this exists, and to say it without judgment or (even) adherence.

The Host embodies indifference.

It takes up and contains all the ordinariness of my life and of every life.

September 20, 2016

Prose

Any Increase We Can Bring

   Every day water and matter and light come together and become food.
   Every day we take food into our bodies and it becomes energy. It becomes thought and language and action.
   Every day we turn fabric into clothes and trees into buildings and sounds into songs.
   Every day morning becomes afternoon and afternoon becomes evening.
   And this is all miracle. This is all the work of God.

What could be more ordinary than wedding feast? What could be more ordinary than sitting together and drinking wine? Most of the people at the wedding in Cana, in the second chapter in John, don’t know a miracle has occurred at all.

   I know we all feel small and insignificant. I know we all feel invisible.
   But what could be more ordinary than wedding feast? What could be more ordinary than sitting together and drinking wine? Most of the people at the wedding in Cana, in the second chapter in John, don’t know a miracle has occurred at all.
   But it has. The wine has run out, and Mary has spoken, and Jesus has turned the great jars of water into great jars of wine, and only the servants know he has, and they don’t understand, and this is always going on, this is always happening, in some profound and invisible way, and it can happen through us.

August 29, 2016