John 3:22-36
Each time that we participate in the Eucharist, we become part of the ongoing life of God. We celebrate the sacrament of Holy Eucharist, not just on Sunday mornings in gatherings of Christian faith communities, but on many other occasions as well. Many years ago Dom Gregory Dix, an English monk, published a wonderful description of such occasions. He wrote:
from The Shape of the Liturgy, by Dom Gregory Dix, p. 744
For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. People have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of a Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover. In thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia. . . for the settlement of a strike, for a son of a barren woman, for Captain So-and-so, wounded and prisoner of war. . .One could fill many pages with the reasons that people have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. Best of all, week by week, month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across the parishes of all Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the holy common people of God.
Peace,
Deacon Sue
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