i Scripture
The ancient church undoubtedly believed the bread and wine shared in memory of Christ’s life and death were indeed the body and blood of Jesus Christ. The earliest record, that of the apostle Paul to the church in Corinth, speaks of participating in the blood of Christ, of the need to receive the Lord’s body discerningly (1 Corinthians 10, 11). In chapter six of The Gospel according to St. John there is a dialogue on the Eucharist and its meaning. The crowd asks Jesus for a sign. They set the scene by making reference to the sign Moses gave the Israelites in the desert. Moses gave them mana. Jesus corrects them. It was God, not Moses, who gave the mana. Jesus then begins to teach them about who he is. He underscores his unity with God. The mana of the desert was a perishable food, and they that ate it perished. He will give an imperishable food, and it will bestow eternal life. He himself is this food come down from heaven. To have this food that satisfies all hunger and quenches all thirst one must “come” to him, and “believe” in him. Jesus emphatically continues that if one would have eternal life, one must eat “the flesh of the Son of Man” and drink his blood. Some declare these words too “difficult to hear.” They walk away from Jesus. Jesus is insistent, but he gives directionality to his claim: “it is the Spirit who gives life.”
We need to make note of certain aspects of John’s gospel.[i] First, the asking for a sign represents an essential part of this work. Indeed, the central section of the text is usually termed “the book of signs.” In it Jesus is found at one major feast day after another, identifies himself with the intent of the feast, and then gives a sign to demonstrate that in him the ancient feast is superceded. Second, while this is the gospel that most strongly underscores the divinity of Jesus, it is also the gospel that equally emphasizes the incarnate nature of that divinity. Jesus goes about demonstrably self-assured that he and the Father are one. He keeps referring to himself by uttering “I am” together with some descriptor—the gate, the good shepherd, the way, the vine. He is aware that his co-religionists will see in that an allusion, sometimes a blasphemous allusion, to the not-to-be-pronounced divine name, “I AM.” At the same time we find a Jesus who can be filled with sympathy, empathy, tears, anger, hubris. Third, the construction of this gospel is a most layered and complex weave. One may see it as an intricate lace-work full of minute but essential cross-stiches and loops that form an organic whole. It is also the most Hebraic text, and the most poetic. Unlike the narrative form of the other gospels, here we find the parallel lines and inverted series of parallels characteristic of Hebrew poetry (Cf: Psalms). Thus we hear that one must “come” to Jesus and then “believe” in Jesus. But how especially in this work where everything is about God-in-Jesus coming to man does one “come” to Jesus? The two words must be understood as receiving him who is come, accepting him, and as such believing in him. The two words are parallels, a nuance-rich decoupling of a single action. Fourth, unlike other texts in Christian scripture, the gospel uses the word flesh not body. Neither ancient Hebrew nor Aramaic have a specific word for body. Thus we are closer to the terminology Aramaic speaking Jesus himself would have used. There are possibly here several things going on at once—itself a characteristic of this gospel. As noted above, throughout the gospel there is an intent to underscore the tangible physicality of the incarnation of God. This in part may have been to counter Docetism, an early heresy that over-emphasized the divinity of Jesus and claimed he was not really a human being, but merely seemed to be so. Fifth, that some took the command to eat flesh and drink blood literally, the response of labelling such “difficult” to hear and so giving up on Jesus seems reasonable, morally responsible even. Scripture teaches that to eat someone’s flesh is a disgraceful act brimming with the demonic (Psalms 27:2, Ezechiel 39:17, Zachariah 11:9). To drink blood is forbidden by God (Genesis 9:4, Leviticus 3:17, Acts 15:20). Yet, Jesus is not encouraging cannibalism. He is speaking about something spiritual, “the Spirit gives life.” It is here that the dialogue reaches its climax. God and Jesus form a unity. They are one. That unity is and always has been in and through the Spirit. The incarnation of God is by the power of the Spirit. As the theology of the Spirit develops through the centuries we can see how richly it grows out of the Johannine vision of the unity of the Godhead bounded in the Spirit, and how the church is by that same Spirit bounded to the Godhead. The Spirit is the bond of union. Those who partake of the life, the flesh and blood, of Jesus participate in the incarnate life of Jesus in his unbreakable and eternal oneness with God—in the power of the Spirit. Sixth, if we may augment the above with that which Paul has to say to the Corinthians, we have—in the power of the Spirit who is invoked over the gifts of the body and blood—a participation in the life of Jesus who is at once both God and man. Thus, as Paul has it, every celebration of the Eucharist is a proclamation of Christ incarnate until he comes again in glory. Eucharist is the precursor of Parousia. If we may wander off to Aristotelean thought for the moment, it becomes the final cause of history. It is teleological. In Christian terms it is eschatological. It stands on the edge of history, and its grace floods back into history and changes history. It is hence redemptive.
It must be noted that neither Paul nor John, nor any other writer of scripture was a Greek philosopher. They were not interested in philosophy or meta-physics. They were men of faith. They were Jews imbued with a deep sense of religion, religious revelation, religious ritual and symbol. God was present to them in their history, in their temple, in their sacred texts. For them God perfected those forms of presence in his sent servant, his son, his very image, his “self,” his Christ. The “how” of all this, the “how can this be?” was not a question that required explanation beyond “the power of the Most High shall over-shadow.” God’s power can over come the limitations of both history and nature. This is simply a given of faith supported in every notable event in the history of the people, both the glorious and ignominious. And it ought to be further noted, that both history and nature, while steered by God, were ever being dis-oriented in the hands of man. Thus man needed ever to be on watch until the “orient[-ation] from on High” should come to correct the direction of creation. For the disciples religious experiences are valid experiences. They are facts. Jesus and God are one. How? How does one plummet the depths of God? Jesus was raised up by God. How? How does one plummet the mystery of life hidden in God? The Eucharist is a memorial, a re-membering, of Christ’s life and death until he comes again. How? How does one plummet the depth of grace?
Paul and John and their fellow disciples were men of faith. They were men moved by their experiences, moved from the depths within, moved with a surety that caused them to offer up their very lives. That which seized them was not intellectual curiosity but something more profound, something of insight, something they knew as a revelation, as of totally beyond them. It was defining of life. It was meaning-full. It was so filled with meaning that they found life was lived in it. It was not something within that could be deciphered because it in it-self defined the individual. The individual was held within its cipher. When Paul says “It is not I, but Christ Jesus within me” he is alluding to this loss of ego to something within the psyche and soul that acts autonomously and definitively. Here is the Spirit of God moving in the world, remaking the world. It is a grace. For all the turmoil it might well and did cause, it is peace. If the depth psychologist reading this sees in this the sacrificial ascent of the psyche’s core, the “self,” over the ego, it is an interpretation to which one is welcome.
ii Reason
That Christ was in some manner “really” present, “truly present” in the eucharistic sacrament was not questioned. However, interpretations of this “mystery,” this indecipherable event, this spiritual event, this world-consecratory event would eventually arise. As the first millennium was coming to its close, as the chaos of an imploded empire began to clear, the Western human psyche began to agitate for logic and reason in the world. Intriguingly, it is at this time that the works of Aristotle are rediscovered by the West. Aristotle had established sound rules for precision in reasoning. He had also devised an hypothesis as to the fundamental formulae of reality. Primal matter, which may be taken as simply pure potentiality, was given reality in being acted upon by the application of a form (or forms). These were akin to Plato’s forms for the varied things of our world. We may understand these forms as somewhat akin to mathematical formulae or to genetic codes. They make a pure possibility of being something into a specific item of function and experience. The formula for man was the “code” that made matter into a human. There were sundry forms. Some were defining, and some were refining. The substance of being a human was given by the substantial formula of man. Men, however, come in all manner of shapes, colours, sizes. The formulae for making a human white, blond, blue-eyed were accidental to the substance of being human, and were accordingly dubbed “accidental forms.” Thomas Aquinas perfected the entry of Aristotle’s thought into the Western mind. When he looked to the eucharistic mystery he applied Aristotle’s theory of substantial and accidental forms. When the words of Christ were recited over the bread and wine they became “in substance” the body and blood of Christ. Being lesser, the substances of bread and wine were gone. Only the “accidental” appearances, the shape, taste, feel, smell of bread and wine remained. The “How?” had been answered. Intellect blossomed before the face of faith, and it was the first great triumph of rational man over grace-led man. Here was the triumph that would lead to the Renaissance, the ascent of science and experimentation, the backlash of faith looking for the assurances of the primitive church and the unwaveringly clear—the literal—truth of scripture, the enantiodromia of psyche that fostered the age of Romanticism, and the continued swings back and forth between tight fisted science and pragmatism, and fluttering inspiration and hopeful vision. As difficult as it may be for modern Western man to acknowledge, faith made his world, and science, for all its benefits, in its single minded obstinance may well destroy it. Evolution!
Evolution belies a certain tragedy to life. We mistakenly believe psyche is something inside us, our hidden pulse. Psyche, however, is something that contains us. We are in psyche, in life, in the life-force that has been pulsing from the beginning of time. It enfolds not only us but the reality we call the world. When we concentrate all our attention on one aspect of the complexity of powers that define us the others do not simply fade away in humble obeisance. They surreptitiously vie for re-cognition and their due respect. As we falsely define reason as our crowning glory, aspects of our life such as the personalizing forces within intuition, feeling, sensibility seek fissures through which to make themselves heard and known. The more we ignore them or deny their validity, the more aggressively they seek to be acknowledged. In our scientific age, in our age of rationality and algorithms, the sensitivities and mysteries of life coded in religion and faith are devalued. Yet the forces behind religion and faith do not cease to be. They emerge from the depths of us. Because they have been forced to emerge through cracks in the surface we have made they appear in distorted form. Thus, society is plagued with spurious ideologies, demi-gods, and unripened and unrepentant sensuality at every turn. The man of reason without faith is as much the brute as the man of faith without reason.
Caught up in the evolution of psyche, Thomas Aquinas never would have conjectured that his revival of Aristotelean logic and metaphysics would eventually set the stage for the fracturing of Christendom and the church, but it did. In the centuries that follow Aquinas, logic and reason were given over to scaling impossible heights of speculation. Parts of the mediaeval world began a slow revolt against that which logic and philosophy were doing to faith. It was a revolt against the materialistic superstitions that Greek “realism” was nourishing. The world of the Spirit was not bound to reason and logic. There was a need to return to the basics, to the beginning, to the scriptures, to the ways of the first communities of believers. The reactive thrust to get back to the basics sprang up here and there, but never gained the momentum to substantially change things, basically because anyone with any power, with any sensitivity for power, knew instinctively that that which was at stake was political and cultural sustainability. The reformers knew the world needed to change, not into that which the apotheosis of reason was making of it, but back into the spirituality it was fast discarding.
iii Protests
Martin Luther was not a misologist. Yet he claimed reason was the devil’s plaything. It was leading man back to that ancient tree that promised to bestow a knowledge that would transform the human into the divine. But that was precisely where man and his world fell apart. Man needed to rely on something other than the glory of his rational mind. Man needed faith in himself as valued, as loved, as the beloved of God despite all his faults and failings. Luther had the benefit of saying such things in a part of the world plump with princes who were aching to fledge from out of the nest of imperialism. The momentum of life, of psyche, was with him. I could say the momentum of the Spirit was with him. Christendom was not a healthy creature, and a change of direction was necessary. Luther rejected Aquinas’ “transubstantiation,” the idea that the substances changed but the accidentals of bread and wine did not. It was a verbal prestidigitation, “Hoc est corpus” become hocus pocus. For Luther, to those who came to Christ in faith, Christ was really present to them and for them, as were the bread and wine. Some—without warrant—have dubbed this idea “consubstantiation.” Unfortunately, as it is so often in theological disputes, words are the enemies. It needs be stressed for many the idea of Christ really present could not be distilled from Christ physically present. Tantalizing tales abounded of bleeding hosts. To chew the consecrated bread was considered a horrifying crime. When in the 1960s the Mass got turned around [my pejorative turn of phrase], my father saw the priest chewing the bread, and he was beside himself with wrath at the site of the sacrilege.
John Calvin, despite his blatant iconoclasm, declares the Eucharist a “symbol” of Christ’s body and blood. Christ is and remains in the glory of heaven, but whenever the believer sees the symbol, the bread and wine mandated by Christ as a memorial of himself, he ought to reflect upon it, and to be convinced that the truth signified in and by the symbol is truly present to him. The worthy receiver of the sacrament is by faith made a partaker of Christ’s life, of his body and blood, to his spiritual nourishment and growth in grace. There is no conjured descent of Christ onto an altar of sacrifice. Calvin’s theory has been referred to as instrumental symbolism. God uses the eucharistic elements to convey that which they symbolize—union with Christ. Ulrich Zwingli also emphasized the symbolic nature of the Eucharist. He counters the Roman position and declares the Eucharist is neither a sacrifice, nor the re-presenting of a sacrifice, nor is it about a bodily presence. It is a remembering, a memorial, of the sacrifice of Christ. Salvation is by faith in Christ, not in the consuming of bread and wine.
We find the ideas of faith and symbol reappearing in the reformers’ thoughts. First, the term symbol does not appear to be used consistently. At times symbol appears to mean sign. It is a fundamental of psychological semiology that symbols are not mere signs that point us in a certain direction, but portals that transport us to where we know not how to go and yet need to go. They convey a psychic truth, a spiritual truth, which needs to be expressed but cannot be directly expressed because of its fundamental psychic power. The symbol does not convey knowledge; it transmits power and direction. In the reformers’ works the uncertainty of the intended meaning of the terms may well have been contributory to the inability of the reformers to reach an agreement among themselves. Second, the reformers present a distinct distaste for the Roman idea that the sacrament automatically infuses grace into the soul. It is a simple principle. By the sacramental action grace is given. However, that idea of ex opere operato had always required the worthiness and faith of the communicant to make the grace operative. While the Roman position upheld the certainty of grace given, the reformers accented the faith needed to make grace operative. That accent removed the absoluteness of God’s grace present in the sacrament, and faith became the central concern. But how is one certain of one’s faith? How is one certain grace is given? And with such comes the question about the absoluteness of God’s grace itself. Are all chosen and loved? Are all destined for grace and salvation? Could it be that God has predestined only some? With this faith is made to climb a mountain of sand. Eventually there would come preachers preaching one could feel their chosen status by the experience of being saved. They would feel themselves from within “born again.” It is a precarious situation to doubt the universality of God’s love in Christ. If God’s redemptive love is not absolute, man hangs on his doubts and insecurities rather than on the saving cross of Christ. Third, there was the emotional chaos arising from the confusion of bodily or physical presence with real presence. It was the reactionary move to this that hurled the reformers into elevating the significance, the sign-power, of the Eucharist. Eventually this would activate a slow shift of emphasis from how Christ was present to why Christ was present. But had it not always been to affect a change in the heart and soul of man by assuring man of union with Christ in God? Fourth, undoubtedly in reaction to the mediaeval bedizening of ceremonial and image, for many the cross and scripture came to be seen as the assurance of God’s love, care, concern, and grace to grow in fellowship. Thus, as diverse communities of faith and discipline continued to cleave off the bedrock of the original reformation churches, many grew away from the ancient practice of the eucharistic celebration on the Lord’s day. The significant action, the symbol laden action, had lost its tether to the mysterious. The assurance of grace and fellowship could be conveyed in scripture and preaching. Ironically, this is a triumph of intellection over imagination, the realm of symbol. While the Roman church immediately reacted to the bluntness of the reform positions with a riot of emotion in art and architecture that went perhaps a tad too far, the protestant churches would need to await centuries for the flowering of pietism and the revival movements to put something of feeling and sentience back into the sterility of intellection.
iv Perspectives
Let us consider where in terms of civilization and its evolution stand Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli. Aquinas was caught up in the rediscovery of Aristotelean thought. Plato’s thought transmitted through Augustine had to his point in time informed Western thought and spirituality. Scripture was held supreme in academia, and it was taught in neat thematic parcels with snippets of commentaries from the founding fathers most of whom were in a Platonic or Augustinian orbit. Aquinas was the forefront of a new theology. In the following centuries, the logic and meta-physics that defined the presentation of that theology got too caught up in their own sophistry. Reason running amok is always countered by some form of not-reason forcing itself upon the conscious mind as a counter-balance and corrective. Symbol is about such power of not-reason. It is sublime. It holds up the concrete to speak about the reality hidden from the concrete, hidden in the concrete. Symbol is the quantum particle that tosses aside the surety of Newtonian reasoning. It points to things unseen and unseeable, yet there, demandingly there. Thus, we find the reformers trying not only to rescue faith from rationalization, but a civilization from falling prey to the false god that is man thinking himself lord of the universe, measure of all things, dominator of all that is before him. This man is and ever will be the sinner, the man who while trumpeting his rationality will behave in every manner the ego-centric child. Reason without insight and humility, without sentience and feeling, is a lie. It is half-human, and less. It is deceptive of self, and it is ultimately destructive of self. It is the devil wrapped around that primal tree saying, “Let us rationally figure this out” and all the while throwing a pall over the “better parts of our nature.”
One is inclined to question how far apart Aquinas and the reformers really are. Did Aquinas’ notion of substantial change mean a material change? Was the change in the consecrated elements on the level of nature (physics), super-nature (Spirit), or sub-nature (meta-physics)? From the human side was not, for all these men, the faith and worthiness of the communicant at the heart of the sacrament’s grace? In what manner would they disagree as to the Pneumatic power behind the act of re-membering Christ? Do they not all hold to Christ present for the believer? Do they not all hold the redemptive nature of that presence? Is not memory a pre-sent, a concatenation of things past brought into the present, and attesting to the value of the past to the present in order to maintain a psychic wholeness, a health of soul and therein of body? How much of the arguments that tore through the unity of the church are founded in sub-cultural distinctions among men, distinctions of evolving temperaments, distinctions of evolving times? How much turmoil could have been avoided had the controversies been met on the personal level rather than upon that of doctrine? I pose such questions for reflection because too often adherents of one side or the other tend to be more doctrinaire than charitable, more rationally tied to a set of words than open to the heart of another. No one was denying Christ, or Christ present for us, only how he is present. Aquinas after his elegant meta-physics of transubstantiation wrote an eloquent hymn in which he sang “faith for all defects supplying.” The evangelist John did not write about ingestion of flesh and blood, but about union with God incarnate. The “real bread” that comes down from heaven to lift man up to heaven is not something in the order of nature, but “of Spirit.” As has been marked above, large parts of John’s gospel show Jesus supplanting every great festival in the Jewish liturgical year. In chapter six it is Passover that is being supplanted, and Jesus is the pascal offering. Just as Jesus saying he will in three days rebuild the Temple were it to be destroyed, here he is speaking not literally. There is a distinction between materiality and reality. Psychology and sub-atomic physics stand the proof of that. There is a distinction between physicality and being present. Memory[ii] demonstrates that. There is a distinction between of this world and for this world. Hence have we sacrament.
v Sacrament
In the sacrament we stand before the cross and remember. We break the bread, and we reconnect the broken into a whole. Christ is known not simply in the breaking of the bread but in the sharing of the bread and the cup, creating a union, not only with God in Christ, but amongst us all. In the ancient church before the action of communion a piece of the bread was broken off and placed into a cup of the wine. That cup was then taken to a neighbouring church, where the same action was repeated. This was done to highlight the entire church partook of the same union with Christ in the sharing of the one bread and cup. We profess Christ is man and Christ is God. The act of remembering, of re-assembling, is thus as social as it is spiritual. The Christ who is in union with the Father is the very unity, the very life of us all. The church becomes the body. It is real. It is present. It is physical. It is of the Spirit. It is, in brief, incarnation expanded to the bounds of creation and raised up into God.
Good and evil are met in the cross, and they are transcended. Those who stand under the cross live not bounded by the Law of the ancient covenant, but by the freedom of the Spirit of God, the creativity of God. In the cross their sin is confronted, forgiven. In the cross they are glorified, given their rightful substantiality, their “righteous” nature. The cross of Christ stands between two thieves. Good and evil are both thieves. One cannot be without the other. They divide us. They divide how we see both God and the world. They divide the soul, and spill out into the world as divisiveness and all the fruits which that bears. In its crossed bars, the cross itself joins good and evil, holds them in a tensor, and so reveals the proper action, the propitious action. The propitious action is not judged upon the scales of good and evil. It stands above them. It is the action wisdom deems proper to dissolve the blockage of the present and healthily free life into its future. This dissolution is an absolution, and every absolution opens reality to face its complexities. The cross is thus at once the tree of shame, the tree of death, the tree of life eternal, the tree of God made flesh, and made flesh for-us. To stand under the cross is to stand under God and in the Spirit that he, Wisdom, sends forth from that tree. It is a remembering of that revelatory and propitious sacrifice of God in man for man. Only under the cross can “This is my body given” have meaning. Only in the sacrifice of the cross, the triumph of the cross, can the sacred symbols of bread and wine be handled, be remembered, be received. Only under the cross of the pascal lamb of our deliverance can not merely a new people be made, a new land of promise be nurtured, but a new heaven and earth created. The cross cancels the division of man from God and from one another. It is the judgement of God that cancels our judgement, the foundation of all our judgements—the divisibility of good and evil that grew from but one tree.
The eucharistic sacrament is also for-us the resurrection experience. The cross cannot be realistically separated from the resurrection. They are one event. Thus the Risen One retains the marks of Crucified One. The eucharistic sacrament is for us the encounter with the resurrection. Without the Eucharist being seen as the moment of our encounter with the resurrection, the sacrament might well be taken as simply the memorial of a godly man whose good example we ought to follow. But the resurrection is the point at which talk of Jesus moves from being Christology, talk about one chosen to be God’s agent upon earth, and becomes Theology, talk of God.
In a sense, all our talk of God is from our side. God in se cannot be known.[iii] “Only he who has come down from heaven” knows God. Only through him do we know God. Thus, that which we confess is not God in se, but God incarnate. When do we, we here today, see this God if not in the Eucharist, in the eucharistic community? Where do we see this God if not in the world we—as partakers of God’s nature, God’s body and blood—are summoned to create out of the chaos of a fallen world?
As with the first disciples, the seeing is illusive. It is not an ordinary seeing. It relies not merely upon the eyes but on the Spirit, on the graciousness of God in us: “They were kept from recognizing him,” and again “Their eye were opened.” Christ bids us not grasp him, not to hold him down. He is spirit: “He goes before you.” He is a mystery: “No one dared to ask him who are you.” His sudden appearing is a cause for alarm: “They were frightened.” Is he a spectre? He says he is real, but he is the “first born from among the dead.” What type of man is this new man, this “new Adam?” He is willing to demonstrate his worldliness. He asks for something to eat. He is recognized in the breaking of the bread, but then he is vanished. Yet, his trace elements remain: “Did not our hearts burn within us when he spoke?” As from the cross he surrendered his Spirit, now risen into the Spirit he breathes it out upon his disciples. He gives them his peace. But what is this peace that turns simple men into martyrs, bread and wine into the presence of God? How? Is it by grace, by faith, by both ever incarnate in man summoned up into God? Why? Is it because in this our world God, that Mystery beyond all our concepts of life, wills to be with us, to be Emmanuel? Every Eucharist is a Viaticum because in every Eucharist dwells the moment of ultimate encounter, the moment of decision, of vital most decision, of the decisive decision.[iv] Where in this dawning moment of encounter stand I? “Body of Christ given for you.” “Blood of Christ shed for you.” Say I “Amen,” or do I, like Yeats’ horseman, “pass by”?[v] Do I—before the Mystery—dare to join with God in a new covenant? Do I dare to take my place under the cross? Do I dare to take my place with the one who says to me, “Come to me”?
In scripture we read “While still we were sinners Christ died for us,” and again “He goes before you.” Christ is always one step ahead of us. He is the “dawn” moment that has already happened before we can receive it, come to it. Grace is needed to re-cognize him: “Tell me where you have taken him.” He stands between our now and the Parousia. The Eucharist is given as the moment of promise. It is the moment wherein grace stands in victory over sin, revealing and nurturing a new way. It is the moment wherein Christ glorified raises up into his self, into God, the remnants of a broken soul, a broken world, and heals them. It is the moment wherein our woundedness is transvalued for we are given into our hands, into our body and blood, “so great a Saviour.” Without his lifting us up with him, in him, through him “we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs from under this, thy table.”
Who is this perplexing God made man? How does a man know himself to be God? In psychological terms does some ancient psychic archetype take possession of him? How do his disciples have the dis-position to embrace him as Christ, as divine? How do they come to “see” him risen? How is any of this possible without some deep rooted “revelation?” What is revelation from this side of the human consciousness? Is it some vital, evolving imagination stirred up out of the depths of us? Is it this “by grace?” Is it some vital and world-timed in-sight into the meaningfulness of life, of psyche, of soul, of Spirit? Is it some pertinent reflection forced upon the conscious mind? Reflection is a mirroring of something. It is not an act of intellection, or of will. It is not a manipulation of objective stuff “out there.” It is a breaking out from the bounds of the objective world. It is an encounter with the face of the objective world, the super-ficiality of the world. Reflection forces upon us a new perspective. It allows us to see that which is behind us, the whence we have come, the whence to which we are tethered. Revelation is a reflection, a mirroring-action at the end of time-space. It calls not for sense or intellect, but action. It is an actualization demanding actualization. It is Spiritual, and it summons forth the spirit, the Spirit at the root of man. It is not of this world, but for this world, for-us. It is Spirit reflected onto the objective world to reveal the true subject behind the objective world.
vi Psyche and Spirit
Some might well critique all this and say it is but a psychic activity particular to this or that type of person. I do not doubt it is a matter of psychic activity. But psyche has it depths, its layers, and they recede to the dawn of creation, to the dawn of being, and at that dawn is that power well dubbed Spirit. Furthermore, psyche, the primordiality of life, makes matter. It is itself the primal matter. The material world of our daily encounter is psyche in differentiation, psyche imagining itself. In Genesis as God initiates the world all is a formless, dark, watery void. It is something unconscious, a “primal matter,” a mass of potentiality. Then God said let there be light, and separated the light from the darkness. Light is an actualization. It reveals the potential of reality. It begins the making of reality. It brings things to light. Psyche is the light before all other things which allows all things to come to light. There may have been “day” and “night,” that first “day,” but it is not, notably, until the fourth day that those great lights that demark day and night appear. That first day is speaking of how Spirit, out of its everlasting creativity, churns up actuality out of the chaos of pure potentiality. Spirit, the root of psyche, of life, makes reality out of imagining itself until it makes man as the very image of itself, man the imaginer, the willful creator. Resurrection is about the coming of light. We come to it at the dawning moment of a new first day. Again light is separated from darkness. Spirit re-imagines the world. In the Eucharist we come again to that resurrection moment. It is always a refreshment of the psyche, the soul, the world.
Most of us do not pause to fathom the depths of us. We may be distantly aware that biological evolution is a field of replicating forms reaching back into the dawn of biologic life. We give less attention to the continuous evolution of life itself. Everything that ever was, that ever had “being” is within us, and is become a constitutive of us. Everything that ever will be is possibly within us, in psyche. Every great complex of power that gave rise to the self recognition of a hero or saint is within psyche. Every complex of powers that revealed to the world some form of the Sacred, the Holy, is within us, within the psyche, and there working to move us forward into the wholeness of self, into the making of the wholeness of the world. Life, that which we call psyche with its infinite regress of levels, abounds with powers ever making themselves known to us. The revelation, the continuous revelation, is the challenge to acknowledge psyche and its creative thrust. Such is the phenomenological truth of psyche, and that psychic reality is easily enough translated into theology. We are a complexity of a depth unimaginable, except that we are imaginable for we have been imagined, and the endless summons is to continuously imagine ourselves according to him who is the living image of the Father who first imagined us.
Man has long pondered at what point matter and spirit touch, how matter and spirit could join. Anciently it was said that a universal “Nous” (Mind) was the point or event wherein the immaterial put on materiality. “Logos” (Word) was another term akin to “Nous.” In scripture the Word of God (“Logos”) makes the world, and Christ is identified as the incarnate-Logos. That which is being expressed is the notion of creativity. Creativity is not simply about a vision, an envisioning, an imagining, it is about its production, the making of a reality. Creativity is always an ex-pression, a giving out, a giving outward. It has of itself a directionality. Thus, when we read Genesis we ought not to take the progression of the first verses as separate actions, as first a hovering, then a command to be, etc. We are looking at a singular act of creativity conceptually divided. Spirit makes the world. If we, the great dividers of everything we touch, want to divide that down into some type of conceptual notions about God, then we may say the Logos, the creative word of God in the power of the Spirit, creates the world. But we must note the primal hovering Spirit is the “behind” of everything. The trace of that Spirit is within us. It is the root of soul and psyche, of my life and the life of the world. It is the power that conjoins man and God in grace, the founding grace that is creation. It is the power that conjoins God to man in Jesus Christ. Concrete, flesh and blood, Jesus is the created form through which we come to see the formless and creative God. All this is ever related to us as “in the power of the Spirit,” “by the power of the Spirit.” We confess God is one, and Spirit and Logos are for-us the incarnating power and the incarnate form by, in, and through which we know God. It is because Spirit is the root of psyche that we can so know, that revelation can be re-cognized.
Talk of psyche and its unfathomable depths does not reduce God or grace to psyche. Rather it expresses the very materiality of the processes of incarnation. As God works through and in history, history, both my history and that of the world, must be understood as something which is not an object, a thing, or a conglomerate of “facts,” but an interpretation, an inter-penetration, of the meaning of human life. Since the infancy of human self-awareness, human life has been the history of sin. The action of the divine in history has always been the corrective, the healing momentum. The fracture of man in the knowing of good and evil, in the knowing of sin, is confronted on Golgotha wherein the history of sin is transcended, and the division of the world is ended: “We have the propitiation of sin,” the divisiveness of the world is ended: “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free.” Darkness, it is said, covered the earth that day on Golgotha because creation was ended. We were at anew beginning. The resurrection is its dawn. It is a new imagining of man. It is no longer a world of man hiding in shame, jealously projecting out onto the world blame, hate and murderous intent. It is no longer the world of man who in his fear is alienated from himself, from the other, and from God. It is man consoled, man in communion with God, man under God, man for God and the whole of the world he so loves. It is no longer a world objectified by man, dominated by man. It is a world brought back into man’s care. Man can now care because man is free, free to be his true “self.” He needs no longer to act out the fear that made him hide behind excuses or the masks of ego and persona. At last “like unto God” he can truly love himself and the world.
vii Symbol and Reality
Sadly, many no longer re-cognize the significance of resurrection or sacrament. They want to objectify them, delete them from the mind, look away from their psychic truth, their spiritual truth and power. Yet, man lives by symbols. Thus many today look to other symbols, to projections upon items that are too weak to hold the power of psyche and spirit. They look to the exotic and the foreign rather than to their own cultural heritage of symbol. They conjure images of gods long past, Mother Earth, Father Sun. They look to diluted notions of someone else’s spiritual disciplines. I dearly value the images of Hindu spirituality, but I sincerely question if the Western soul can be healed by looking to Vishnu any more than the Germanic psyche could have been by looking to Odin. We all know where the worship of Odin (“Furor” by any other name) led Germany under Hitler.[vi] Symbols are transmitters of power, and the right symbol needs to be embraced at the right place and time. In the chaos and global compression of our age, too many allow themselves to be caught up in neurotic, even psychotic, behaviours. They put their faith in unfounded fabrications, follow false saviours—dicasts and demigods who promise to lead them into a new time of grace, agility, accomplishment, power, prestige, empire, greatness. But all thus is but compensation for the attenuation of the psyche and soul they have inflicted upon themselves by languor, laxity, or the fear to acknowledge the power and meaningfulness resident in the ancient symbols psyche itself has put forward for them to heal and guide them. The world around us is living proof that the past cannot be jettisoned unless we are willing for the present to be disjointed, dissociated. Thus we live the rising seas of tensions, anxieties, and the health-less beasts they spawn. The risen Christ bears the wounds of the crossbars of good and evil because the past cannot be deleted from the full substantiation (“glorification’) of the present which is always the dawn of the future. We cannot run away from who we are and where we have been, not even in heaven. We must face the truth of self, of whence we came, and whither we are summoned, or we wither in the darkness of a soul gone out.
Every shadow within and every grace within awaits to be acknowledged and woven into the living out, the creative thrust, of life. The history, the sacred history, of the Christ is about the confrontation of the shadow and the glorification of the holy within. From the temptations in the desert to the temptation to come down from the cross he confronted the shadow within. From his adolescent disputations in the Temple to the handing over of his spirit upon the cross he glorified the Holy One within. On the cross he held shadow and saint together. In him in us we follow him. Of course, the church has always known this. Christ, it has taught, lives in the soul of the believer. His life is within the believer, is constitutive of the believer, defining of the believer. He is the light, the primal light, the light of the world. By him all things are brought to light, all things revealed. As such Christ dwells as the potential of every soul in every soul, awaiting the day when the soul will pause, and “come,” to him, “believe” in him who is its light revealing God and self, and opening life, opening psyche and soul to the creativity of life, to life unbounded from ego and free to the eternal, to the Spirit. This is creativity making itself known, making itself and the world, not fable and phantasy, but reality. This is life risen into itself. This is life re-membered. This is sacrament, the symbol that makes reality, makes whole, makes holy.
Is Christ really, realistically, present in the sacrament? Yes. The proof is in the saints it has made, and the saints it continues to make. For those that want for a more concrete proof dissectible by reason, there is none. We stand here in the light of faith not science. We stand here at the dawn of the new heaven and earth. Even here God and eternal life are incomprehensible items. They de-fine the cosmos and every aspiration, every imagination of this tangible life. We are bounded by them. We cannot contain them—conceptually, rationally. To attempt to do so is precisely the action that devalued the Eucharist, excavated and devastated the symbol of mystery, presence, power. The Eucharist is not a thing. It is not an object. It is an action, an actualization, brought forth by the Spirit dwelling at the root of being, ever hovering, ever rising, and from thence making its presence known—realistically.
At least one of my readers will complain that I could have simply said the resurrection is a spiritual event that in-forms itself in the sacrament of the Eucharist, and so in-forms itself upon the soul open to saying “Amen.” Or I could simply have said the Eucharist is a living symbol, a sacrament whose meaning-fullness exceeds us, goes before us to prepare the way, and so draws us forward to make us true to ourselves and the world. But had I not obeyed the season and “beat the bounds” in prayerful reflection the realistic parameters of those statements would have been lost to us.
[i] Cf: on John, Reflections on a Vision. February 2016.
[ii] Cf: comments on Henri Bergon’s analysis of memory in The Question of Immortality, sub-section “The why of our asking” paragraphs 5-11. July 2020.
[iii] Cf: God, Knowledge, and My Dog. February 2024.
[iv] Cf: on Kenosis and Eschaton. April 2013.
[v] W. B. Yeats: “Under Ben Bulben.”
[vi] National Socialism and Hitler did not appear out of the thin blue air. Something had long been brewing in the German soul. Perhaps it had to do with an ancient tribal guilt that Christianity never managed to expunge. The warrior in the soul could not be reconciled, and so it bided its time until it could rage. We can detect its repressed anger in Nietzsche, its yearning for absolution in Wagner. The German mind having been wounded in the great war was all the more aching for its integrity. In its smoldering it could not hear the Christ of brotherhood and peace speaking to its lostness. It turned to the fascination of its own darkness. It turned to Odin. One thinks of the not-good thief who harbours the fear that he cannot be re-membered, put back together. We have here a soul that fears it cannot be forgiven for the things it harbours in its heart, cannot be re-deemed, esteemed, ultimately—cannot be loved. Thusly self-condemned as unlovable, it must become powerful. The undeveloped Eros always manifests as a thirst for power. The National Socialist Party and Hitler become the incarnation of this deflectional dynamic, a hypostatic union of politics and religion. The uneasiness with the God of sacrifice for others and of peace was felt in other nations as well, but nowhere was the response to it so visceral and tribal as in German mind. The French, the Spanish et al., perhaps because they are less driven to be methodical, were more pragmatic than devoted. They were in varying degree content to be anti-clerical, and to look to a Machiavellian Duce or Generalissimo to get things done. Yet, behind all these movements one senses an unvanquished guilt, which is a topic for another day.
We need to reflect upon the fact that every society functions healthily as long as a certain percentage of its members are themselves “individuals”—integrated persons who are ever open to the continuous integration of self into self and world. When that percentage falls below a certain level, the society begins the descent into the herd-mentality. The herd has an accelerating momentum of its own, and it will seek to propel from amongst its members the most cunning to lead it. Sociality vanishes and is replaced by a mindless mass running headlong after its head who in himself epitomizes its self-deceit.
As to the other question placed that Vishnu, being an Indian divinity, cannot cure the soul of Europe, we need ask if cults are culture specific. Is Islam specific to the Arab mind, Hinduism to the Indian mind, Christianity to the European mind? It must be said cult and culture are more than etymologically related. The above question has worried the Western mind for centuries. John Locke felt compelled to uneasily defend the reasonableness of Christianity (Cf: Occidental Ideas, Part 16, paragraphs 12-14, June 2014). Ernst Troeltsch had to concede to a certain relativity. Choan Seng Song found in Christianity a more happy versatility (Cf: Occidental Ideas, Part 19, endnote ii, paragraphs 6-7, and paragraph 17, November 2014). Raimon Panikkar approached the issue more optimistically still (Occidental Ideas, Part 24, subsection “A note on theology…,” September 2015).
I do not see Christianity as something specifically European. From its inception it has proven itself adaptable. It began as an off-shoot of Judaism, an Eastern religion. It quickly rooted itself into the soil of the Roman empire, and communicated itself to its varied peoples. After the collapse of Rome it addressed the sundry groups that wandered through the detritus of empire, and acclimated itself to their cults and customs. In all this it was not lessened but enriched. It acted as an agent of unification for peoples and the embryonic nations. Admittedly, early in the second millennium it did experience a change of focus. This may well have been a reaction to the rapidity of its success. The Western mind needed a space to adjust. Rather than become reflective, it became inquisitive and constrained. There came to the foreground the attitude that one needed to be European in order to be Christian—no matter one’s biology or continent. That attitude has been in decline. Once again we find Christianity adapting itself to varied cultures, seeking not to replace them with something European in flavour, but rather to nourish them to become wholly themselves.
Fundamentally the Christian cult is adaptable because the core of the cult, its God, is not an entity abstracted or enisled in some type of celestial orb. The God of Christianity is human. Therefore, we find a God who has experienced in his very self the trials and tribulations of being human, the hopes and aspirations, the joys and sorrows, the sense of aloneness, and the desire to be by someone called “Beloved.” Beyond all these, this God knows what it is to be dead. While no mortal can escape death, we know no one who can speak to us of being dead, of the experience of one’s own death. It is the horizon that terminates experience and communication, at least as far as the workings of this world are concerned. Because the immortal God knows what being dead is, he encompasses the fullness of being human. In that he transcends every culture, nation, and soul. He is socio-propitious. No man, no culture is foreign to him. As man he exists as the full-realization of being human, and as God he is the medium of all communication, the “Alpha and Omega.”
APPENDIX
Does the direction of the eucharistic celebration matter? Yes. Mid-last century some sought to emphasize the communal aspect of the Eucharist, and by extension the other liturgies, and the concept of church itself. It was a move away from the perceived heaviness of ritual and the predominance of the clerical. That which was claimed was a return to the ways of the primitive church. It was in fact a confusion. The impulses of the contemporary world were mistaken for the necessary forms. As with the reformation of a half millennium before, hundreds of years of pious reflection were defenestrated. As regards the Eucharist, the ancient agape meal was confused with the sacrament. The liturgical reformers of the twentieth century neglected to see plainly in the scriptures before them that St. Paul had seen the issue and resolved it. The agape feast had become a social gathering that like all social events had a connatural tendency to devolve from the brotherly into the boisterous. It was a setting unfit for the discerning reception of the sacrament, the mystery of faith. He did not put an end to the agape gathering, but he separated it from the celebration of the mystery of the sharing of the body and blood of Christ which, while social in nature by the very humanity of Christ, is above all where the divinity of Christ is handed to us.
A society, whether it be political or religious, is composed of individuals and must foster the individual if it is to remain a healthily functioning society. When the eucharistic celebration becomes about “us” and “we” it looses the momentum of the individual in com-union and becomes instead a formless mass. Properly, the church is not formless. It is the community of forms, of individuals formed in, by, through the Spirit, the com-unity of incarnating forms. The incarnation cannot take place in a mass, only in the individual. Without those incarnating individuals there is no one to make a community. All that emerges is at best the group. It will either be effete and dissipate, or it will find someone to “program” it, and so allow it to run wheresoever. Fundamentally it will be driven. It will not be a living body, but a type of Golem. Here we have a surplus of feeling without thought. Thoughts are given to it. Because of its “touchy-feely-ness” it will believe it is authentically human, but it in fact and in deed will have lost its base in both reason and sensation. As a religious organization it will present itself as being relevant and vitalising, but it will be neither. Any healthy, any affective power to nurture the individual as individual will be lost simply because the “movement” will have lost the tether to the depths, to the mystery, to the sacramentality of life that relies upon the Spirit for direction and the making of the essential component of every viable union—the integrated individual, the incarnating individual.
I do not doubt the good intentions and sincerity of them that embrace the novelties of the 1960s. I do not doubt that every minister feels assured that he or she is acting in accord with that which is right and proper. I do not doubt that most people today, having grown up knowing no other form of liturgy, think that which they have is solid tradition. I do not doubt that coming together to hear the Word proclaimed and broken open, to pray to the Father, and to share in fellowship can bear good fruit. I do not doubt that God can, as he did at Meribah, bring forth water from a stone. Grace abounds. I fear for what is lost. We have lost the sense of the sacred mystery within which we are enfolded. When we are called upon to proclaim the “mystery of faith” it is almost as if we need to remind ourselves of something that is slipping away from the conscious mind, from the functionality of soul.
We need to reflect upon the fact that we do get caught up in the age, and want the casual, the comfortable, the factual. The awe and majesty of God and sacrament tend to get lost behind those forces that in themselves distract from and indeed demean the depths of us. They that are given to reflect and pray that they might lead Christ’s holy church need to well discern the difference between the de rigueur fashions of the world and the processes of the Spirit. In certain things it may well be a fine thing to embrace the swift moving progress of the world but one must not therein be caught up in its every whim or ignore or abandon the modalities of the psyche, the soul, the Spirit working in the soul. My question is about orientation. How do these new, alternative rites orient a soul if they ignore the processes of psychic development? Do they bring us to that well of inner silence wherein we are made to be attentive to the depths of psyche and soul, to the profundity of the God who has made us, preserves us, and leads us forward?
In this regard, we must doubly well consider that it is the individual who is saved, made whole. Only because the individual is saved can a com-unity of the sacred be formed. Without a viable, a wholistic “I” any “we” is but a façade. Church to be a church must make individuals open to their continuous integration into self, other and world. The individual, for all its psychic fluidity, is in fact a solidity. It is substantial. That which is built of such material is reliable. Are we to be a house of brick or of straw?
The media frenzied world claims to honour individuality. In fact that is a lie. That which it celebrates is conformity, the identity of the anonymous mass. It is all show and superficiality. It is an excitation empty of truth, vision, depth. That which the world needs, and that which the church is called to confront it with is mystery, the Mystery of the sacred, of the sacrament, of the creed, of God, and of God in Christ. Man without that anchor to his core is exactly that which the world trains him to be—all show and no substance, all as it were bread-and-wine and, no body-and-blood.
To them that say it is about being pastoral, I mark pastoral action concerns those individual needs, cares, concerns that can be met in the street, the parlour, the confessional. But every individual has needs which can only be met in the sacrament because only in the sacrament given to us by God can one be enfolded into the depths of soul wherein the Spirit moves, wherein true com-unity becomes possible, wherein the Trinity is met and begins the process of unfolding the individual into the true com-unity of man and God. Pastoral and liturgical actions are complimentary, but they are for the psyche radically different. To them that say using the liturgy as a pastoral moment of outreach is a modern necessity, I must argue such only devalues everything it touches, everything it intends. A confusion of means and a misuse of times and places helps no one to see clearly. Every spiritual director, every confessor, every counsellor of any heft knows this from experience, and sometimes painfully wrought wisdom.
The change of position for the celebration of the Eucharist has caused a change of disposition. It is natural to us when we face one another to assume a conversational attitude. And because we live in a time that has become casual about everything we become casual and chatty. Time for reflection and silence are constrained. Prayerfulness slips away. Expedience and sensitivity raise their beastly heads. For example, how often today are we allowed to kneel to receive into our hands our Lord and God? In most places we stand in line and are made to move along. Has the reception of the sacred sacrament become a cafeteria line? Is that why lay ministers need not ritually robe? At the sharing of the Peace of Christ, where is the profundity of that which we do? We bow and nod and wave, and shake hands as if we were meeting on the street. Is this “the Peace that the world cannot give?” The examples of such mindlessness, of such un-mindfulness of the overwhelming awe of that which we are about in the sacred liturgy are myriad. Ritual matters in attitude, in language, in dress, in action. Ritual matters because it in-forms subtly, in sublime fashion. How dare we be so casual about the Mystery that descends to recreate us in its image. We cannot exchange the serious and solemn charges of life for the folksy and casual without committing sacrilege. Yes, God loves the world, but when we gather as a sacramental community we are neither in the world nor of the world. We are the sacred assembly in sacred time-space. We are retreated from the world to be immersed in our identity as the children of God come each to be renewed in his Holy Spirit for the sake of the world.
Let us for a moment consider one of the central symbols of the eucharistic feast, the altar. The new liturgies approach it as a table. The minister stands behind it and faces the sacred assembly. Adjust a few items and we stand before something very familiar to us. We encounter everyday someone standing behind a table an trying to sell us something, be it their power-point presentation, the news, or a pie at the market. In most churches today we look upon the sanctuary, the holy place, and that which we do not see is a priest knelling before an altar and making supplications for the people, standing before an altar and voicing our thanks to God for his inestimable love. We do not see something “extraordinary” to confront us with the majesty and power of the sacred. We see something common. But common is that which the anonymity of the unthinking mass wants. Once we understood the altar as the symbol of Christ. It represented him as the cornerstone of the church. It confessed itself to be the place of sacrifice—his self-sacrifice. It presented itself as the tomb from which he was risen. It was the place where he stood as both victim and priest. It was honoured with incense and kiss. It was vested in priestly cloths. Before the power of this sacred icon we—priest and people alike— knelt humbly to confess our sins, and to plead our prayers. We stood before it in the power of faith to confess our faith, and to give thanks for “all the benefits and blessing of this life, but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and the hope of glory.” And we knelt before it to receive from God the body and blood of his Son, our Lord. It was a place of wonder uncontestable and prodigious. In itself it acted to silence the world that clung to the soul. It was a portal to the sacred, the symbol of holiness. Today, where is this holy table once known as God’s altar? Where is this sacred place before which we meet our God?
Many once understood the need to create a sacred time and a sacred space—a not-common time and space—in order to open the gathered church to the awe and terror of God’s love in Christ. Awe has been replaced by light-heartedness, and terror is considered something best left behind. It is not simply what is said and done, but how and where it is said and done that matters. Because liturgy has come to be considered the “work of the people” rather than that which ought to be working—energizing—the people, emphasis has been placed upon having the congregants do things. The people must recite meditative psalms that ought to be chanted by a choir or omitted in favour of a prolonged silence. The people must go about giving a sign of peace. The people must present bread and wine, and dressed in everyday attire distribute the same become the most sacred gifts. The weight of placing the entirety of the assembled in the presence of God is lost to keeping the occupants of the nave busy and “engaged.” After due examination one cannot but opine all this is a matter for the confessional.
Liturgy must manifest the dignity and decorum of the sacred actions we are about. The profundity of where we stand and what we are doing cannot be overstated. Here in symbol laden time, place and action we come before God. Symbol laden it must be because we have no other way to express either the intangible depth of soul or the world-shattering breadth of the Sacred. The scope and profundity of it all, however, does not mean that liturgy is doomed to be mind-numbingly dour. We sing “Gloria” and “Hosanna” for a reason. God has come to us in our sin and brought us back to wholeness, to health, to the promise of holiness. The proper response to that glorious grace is joy. Joy, however, is far from light-heartedness or anything else that saps of levity. Joy is a spontaneous response to a favour undeserved, encountered, enfolded, and cherished. Joy is always tinged with gratitude. Because it has the power of profundity, because it has such weight and depth, it is a radiance, and it radiates itself outward. It bursts the bounds of the soul and seeks to embrace all others. It flows outward toward community. On the other hand, light-heartedness in any of its forms is something superficial, a passing titillation. Within a social situation its superficiality allows for no more than a momentary connection. It is expressed with a shared smile, a nod, a pat on the back, a bump of the fist, and it dissipates as quickly as it arose. Joy endures. Thus we say there is joy in heaven. Where in heaven where Christ bears his wounds, martyrs present their blood, and saints fall on their faces in adoration is there levity?
Unfortunately, we live in an age that pines for superficialities, simple answers, simple ways. Because of that we live in an age that does not know what appropriate behaviour is. In language we want one usage, the everyday. Formality of word, sound, dress or manner is shunned. Everything and everybody is expected to be “laid back” and casual. That is the new notion of being authentic, being real. Anything else is seen as pretentious, pompous, at best, elitist. But there are times and places where casual and “laid back” are simply disrespectful, ignorant of or mindlessly ignoring of the dignity due. How very much do we live the age of ignorance, of ignoring the dignity of other, the dignity of world? How much do we ignore responsibility to the awe inspiring and terrifying dignity of life, of love, of God, of the God placed into our hands?