BREAKING OF BREAD AND THE PRAYERS DEVOTIONAL 3
You are yourselves what you receive.
— St. Augustine (1)
I open my eyes.
And survey across the chancel my fellow sojourners here on earth. Do we all not know what we have just professed, that we were baptized in Christ, and were buried with Him, and with Him, have been given new life?
Perhaps. But that was once, and for many of us a long time ago. But what about now? What sustains us every day until we breathe our last, and come into the lap of God?
The Celebrant breaks the consecrated Bread.
Do we know what awaits us? What we are about to do?
That hand in hand as members of the Body of Christ, each uniquely and wonderfully made, we are, as One Body, together, about to join hands and jump into God?
I open my palms.
And in them, I behold Christ’s body. It has been broken for me. Or should I say, it has been, is now, and will forever be opened for us? Is it not an invitation to enter, and behold, as did Julian of Norwich,” the joys of heaven”?
We open our lips.
He so graciously receives us, as we, His redeemed, so thankfully receive Him. And become Him, His Body, the Holy Church, in the world.
We pray, “Grant us gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.”
It is time. We eat. We leap.
I open my heart.
There is a hymn inscribed on it. I wish I knew the melody. It was written some 1,000 years ago by a fellow sojourner with God.
But I will sing it as best I can, as my gift to my fellow companions, and as always to give praise and glory to God.
We awaken in Christ’s body,
As Christ awakens our bodies.
There I look down and my poor hand is Christ,
He enters my foot, and is infinitely me.
I move my hand and wonderfully
My hand becomes Christ,
Becomes all of Him.
I move my foot and at once
He appears in a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous to you?
– Then open your heart to Him.
And let yourself receive the one
Who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
We wake up inside Christ’s body
Where all our body all over,
Every most hidden part of it,
Is realized in joy as Him,
And he makes us utterly real.
And everything that is hurt, everything
That seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
Maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged
Is in Him transformed.
And in Him, recognized as whole, as lovely,
And radiant in His light,
We awaken as the beloved
In every last part of our body.
— Saint Symeon the New Theologian (2)
Sermon 227, preached on the Holy Day of Easter to the Infantes (i.e. the newly baptized), on the Sacraments, from the collection of Sermons on the Liturgical Seasons (PL 38:1099-2001; trans. Edmund Hill, The works of St Augustine: A translation for the 21st Century III/6 (Rochelle, NY: New City Press. 1993), p. 254.
Paraphrase by Stephen Mitchell, The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), pp. 38-39, of Symeon’s Erotes, or Hymns of Divine Eros 15:141-159 based on an unpublished translation by Donald Sheehan, further revised and popularized by Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2008), pp. 219-220.
