SNC

And Streams From Levanon

“The peace of the Lord be always with you,” says the priest as she breaks the host. I do not say “the bread,” because what we typically call its accidents is not at all what matters anymore. The crack rings out through the air, and I think of how communion wraps up all the senses: not just taste, but sight, and touch, and smell, and now hearing. I hear Christ, breaking the bread with the apostles, and I hear the staff of Moses on the rock from which the waters flowed. Most of all, I hear my broken heart: my heart of stone, cracked open. And from the altar streams a stunning excess of light.

Due to the mental wiring that God saw fit to give me, things often seem like more to me than what they simply are. I do not hallucinate and can readily tell what is real, but the visions and voices I subconsciously imagine at times impose themselves upon my senses. This was an eccentricity when I was a child, an affliction when I was a distressed teenager, and is now a source of considerable delight. Once this year, when I was genuflecting in front of the tabernacle, I was surprised to see the rood screen wreathed with rays of fire and glory. Astonished, I kept still for a while and prayed. At other times, I have seen haloes around the heads of strangers on the street, sometimes so many haloes they have seemed to blot out all other light. I have had moments where the sky seemed to open into radiance, where the hosts of Heaven scurried in delight. Possibly the most precious moment was watching three clergy as they censed the altar. When I saw one priest was very quietly singing along with the motet, my vision reinterpreted them as three bright suns, and I felt with every fiber of my being that all souls were precious beyond compare: better than gold, than fine gold.

But this reflexive faculty of the imagination is never sweeter than at the Eucharist. Seeing the host bleed rivers of hues which I simply was not worthy to look on, I averted my eyes from what I could not really hope to understand. The thought behind the image was: “There is a world here. There is a life here. There is a new creation here in this body which I am not worthy even to consider, which I cannot comprehend.” So the Mass continued, and it was with that thought that I said the prayer of humble access, including my favourite line: “We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table.” Then I had to raise my eyes again to watch as, during the Agnus Dei, the priest communed, and I rang the server’s bell with awe. Look how this body and blood was received, and the world in that flesh came into the flesh of this world. By the sound of the bell, let all know, let everyone stand stricken! I am stricken, I am still in awe.

In the evening two days before, as a gracious gift of my church’s cantrix, I had sat in the pews of a beautiful chapel listening to Latin plainchant. I spent that hour and change in tears, cut with beauty like the edge of a knife and held in contemplation. I kept thinking of the Song of Songs: “You ravish my heart, my sister, bride, you ravish my heart with just one of your eyes, with just one coil of your necklace” Song of Songs 4:9. My vision was doing its odd trick then, and I kept on seeing what I knew was Christ, only I could not make out his features because he overflowed with—everything. Light, but not just light: with everything in the world. I saw the wound on his side, and the water and blood pouring from it, and in that flow the force of every waterfall and river and beating heart on Earth and in all worlds. I saw his silhouette, in which creation unfurled like a flower in spring, a creation so far perfected over this creation that I could not comprehend its least detail. He contained, for me, every mote of dust, every cell, every atom, every subatomic particle with such an intensity of adoration as I had never felt for anything in my life. And behind this overflowing nature there seemed to be another nature entirely: not an infinitely involved and perfected thing, but a vast and more radical non-thing, shrouded in darkness of which I cannot speak, yet soaking with love.

In Das Stundenbuch, Rilke writes of Lucifer, as my dear friend Johanna pointed out to me:

Er ist der Fürst im Land des Lichts,
und seine Stirne steht
so steil am großen Glanz des Nichts,
dass er, versengten Angesichts,
nach Finsternissen fleht.

Rilke does not translate well and I am not at all qualified to try, but how I think of it in English is:

He is the prince of light’s country,
and his forehead stands
so steep at nothing’s glorious gleam
that with his face incinerated he
for eclipses begs.

Sitting there, listening to the chanting and following along in Latin and in French and in English, I inwardly saw that eye of which a single glance turns me to ash: I saw myself incinerated over and over and carried away in the wind. In the face of those glorious natures even the prince of light would be burned in just that way—but all I could think of was to plead, “Do not throw me away! Though you incinerate me, keep me!” My desire was to say, “I am my Lover’s and my Lover is mine. He grazes among the lilies” Song of Songs 6:3. And if in those pews being used for a concert I felt that I was scorched to ash, how I felt at the altar was unfathomably deeper. In that host and that chalice was a consuming fire. It consumed me, and it consumed everything else—and whatever was good, it kept and held. There was and is nothing worth finding that I could not and cannot find there.

I believe in the real presence of the Song of Songs in the Sacrament. Every word of that poem begs for the opposite of what Lucifer begs for: it begs for the “shalhebetyah” of 8:6, that passionate loving “flame of God,” to be present in the flesh and embodied with a kiss. The Incarnation wraps the words of this prayer like a cloak around the Son of God, and with it, whatever is sincere in every prayer. Not only words are in him: music, for example, is incarnate in Christ, everything that my cantrix seared me with that day—whoever sings prays double, as both Luther and Augustine say, and every note and melody and harmony of those prayers are in Christ fulfilled. The plea of this whole creation, which has fallen and seeks for its resurrection, has taken on flesh and continues to take on flesh before my eyes. It absolutely baffles me that it is of this flesh that I am told, “Take, eat”; that I am told, “Drink ye all of this.” It would be infinitely lesser for an ant to swallow up the sun.

I cross myself and receive the host on the tongue, hands clasped; the priest gives the host to the people at the altar rail as I wait for the chalice. A change happens in that time, a tide of roses, something subtle—I find I don’t know where I am anymore. I know who I am there with, with these my friends who eat and drink with me, but everything is apparelled with a shroud which keeps it beyond my comprehension. I receive the chalice, and my communion is done; I get up from my knees and stand. The world is doused in blood, and is restored. I am in the garden, I am suddenly in:

an orchard of pomegranates
with exquisite fruits,
of henna and spikenard
spikenard and saffron,
calamus and cinnamon
with all trees of frankincense,
myrrhs and aloes
with all choice perfumes—
a spring of the gardens,
a garden of live waters
and streams from Levanon. Song of Songs 4:13–15

Now I remember my baptism, and remember I have been here before. This is that foretaste of Paradise which was given to me, standing low against God’s glorious shining and surviving like burnished gold. This is the promise of a softened heart, of a land of milk and honey where I know that I have entered until I harden my heart again and forget. I desperately want not to forget. I want to learn so much about this place which Jacob knew like this: “How fearsome is this place! This can be but the house of God, and this is the gate of the heavens” Genesis 28:17. And because I am a part of it and it is part of me, broken in my stomach and mingling with my newborn cells, I know I can be satisfied nowhere else. “And here—we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy and living sacrifice unto thee.” So we pray in the liturgy, so I pray with all my heart. I cannot live on any other terms after what I have seen. I have to abide here, I have to cleave to my God, I have to remember: “God is love, and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him” 1 John 4:16.

All things of truth and beauty abide in love, and can be found there: all the ones we know, and the vastly greater sum we have not even begun to imagine. Eden abides in love, and the world is much richer there than outside its gates. Eden overflows with paths and patterns, each at unity with every other. Each path is walked on, every pattern weaved, by charity, in peace, with joy, and so there is no conflict. Eden continues to abide, and what it means to grasp for it in this vale of tears is a sacramental life, seeking inward graces in outward signs. The world, ruled by the Devil, runs off an economy of the Fall: distributing good and evil, wielding power of violence and privation. The sacramental economy is the economy of Eden found amid that world but held by very different powers: powers of self-giving, powers of resurrection. What the world cannot give that life can give, because it is there that we meet him—he “who turns the rock to a pond of water, flint to a spring of water” Psalm 114:8. We should desire to know what such power affords.

In the 1979 Episcopal catechism, with which I was catechized leading up to confirmation, the “sacraments” are described in two sets. First come baptism and holy communion, “the two great sacraments of the Gospel.” Then come the “other sacramental rites which evolved in the church, [which] include confirmation, ordination, holy matrimony, reconciliation of a penitent, and unction.” Then we reach one of the sections dearest to my heart:

Q. Is God’s activity limited to these rites?
A. God does not limit himself to these rites; they are patterns of countless ways by which God uses material things to reach out to us.

These lines gesture beautifully to the power of this fearsome place, this house of God, this gate of the heavens. Held in its economy by baptism and communion, things truly are more than they seem to be. Marriage, for example, that universal institution which has often been so terribly abused, here becomes something new, in human love enthroning the pattern of our mutual love with Christ. Sickness also becomes something new just by applying a little oil, creating a moment in which God’s infinite desire to heal and to restore is shown. Even the state of sin is made anew, forgiveness breaking through despair like the sun coming out from an eclipse. And as the catechism says, these ways are without number: in the holy water and the blessing of palms, in the beads of a rosary or the burning of a candle, in the putting on of vestments or the sign of the cross, in unlimited ways, we find out forms of grace. We find out grace under every stone.

Whatever the church does together, when our souls and our bodies strive together, caught up in a spirit of faith at work through love, is an occasion of grace. Because I believe that all the faithful belong to a royal priesthood, and that the church is mystically present whenever two or three are gathered together in the hallowed Name of God, I am comfortable drawing loose borders from this holy activity. All these priests and all these gathers form the hall of mirrors of the church, reflecting God’s patterns from place to place, between the bishops and the laity, the high altar and the world. In baptism and communion, a mysterious infinitude of patterns spring up and seep into our bodies, and those patterns which catch on the mirrors of our souls become the basis of our sacramental life. Some patterns shine through the holy orders, who establish the rites of the visible church. Others are taken up by the laity and put to daily use—in serving one another, in giving gifts and showing care, whether with apparently mundane gestures or with the flair of St. Francis preaching to the birds. Either way, there is no shortage of all. Your creativity, my Lord, spills over Heaven.

As I write these words, my clock reads 5:00 AM—and now 7:07 AM as I revise. I should have gone to sleep, but I am terribly stupid, and terribly in awe of a Christ who is still transfiguring. But whether I sleep or whether I write, I trust in a sacramental abundance which affords for me at all times. If I write, I write for my God; if I sleep, I sleep for my God. And in acts like these, my siblings at the rail have room for implications. Bless me as I start to write, and my writing will be a sign; bless me as I start to sleep, and my sleep will be a sign. Make the sign of the cross over my eyelids, touch a dab of oil on my head, or say “goodnight” with the etymology of “goodbye,” taking the “good” for “God.”

My friend, of you it is said, “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” Acts 1:8. You have received the very power of God. Therefore, in your charity, help my plea come true: “In peace, all whole, let me lie down and sleep: for You, LORD, alone, do set me down safely” Psalm 4:9.