"This little book is an attempt to speak to myself and to my friends about the Eucharist and to weave a network of connections between the daily celebration of the Eucharist and our daily human experience. We enter every celebration with a contrite heart and pray the Kyrie Eleison. We listen to the Word — the scriptural readings and the homily — we profess our faith, we give to God the fruits of the earth and the work of human hands and receive from God the body and blood of Jesus, and finally we are sent into the world with the task of renewing the face of the earth. The Eucharistic event reveals the deepest human experiences, those of sadness, attentiveness, invitation, intimacy, and engagement. It summarizes the life we are called to live in the Name of God. Only when we recognize the rich network of connections between the Eucharist and our life in the world can the Eucharist be “worldly” and our life “Eucharistic.”"
Last Spring I read a book of Henri Nouwen’s letters, a selection of the some 16,000 that he wrote over the course of his lifetime. There were so many beautiful letters written by Nouwen to friends, colleagues and strangers. One letter in particular caught my attention, when he wrote to a friend who was leaving the Catholic church for an Evangelical fellowship and Nouwen expresses his sadness that his friend would no longer have the Eucharist at the centre of his worship. It got me thinking about my own Reformed tradition, the Reformation, church architecture, the centrality of the Word and even now our infrequent celebration of the Eucharist. Why the overreaction and ought we not to correct this? The quote below is from Nouwen’s little book, With Burning Hearts, where he writes about this. I need to read that and have some conversations about this on the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.
"This little book is an attempt to speak to myself and to my friends about the Eucharist and to weave a network of connections between the daily celebration of the Eucharist and our daily human experience. We enter every celebration with a contrite heart and pray the Kyrie Eleison. We listen to the Word — the scriptural readings and the homily — we profess our faith, we give to God the fruits of the earth and the work of human hands and receive from God the body and blood of Jesus, and finally we are sent into the world with the task of renewing the face of the earth. The Eucharistic event reveals the deepest human experiences, those of sadness, attentiveness, invitation, intimacy, and engagement. It summarizes the life we are called to live in the Name of God. Only when we recognize the rich network of connections between the Eucharist and our life in the world can the Eucharist be “worldly” and our life “Eucharistic.”"
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
August 2022
Dennis deGrootCategories |