Corpus Christi - St John's Forton

 Solemn Mass – 22^nd May

Southampton General Hospital is like any other hospital, with uniformed nurses, signs to direct patients and visitors, eateries of various kinds, and, of course, wards for patients.  During my various times there, especially when I was in total seclusion, the daily visit of one of the chaplains with communion became a routine which I shall never forget.  I was not always sure when they would come, because of their own commitments, as well as the many other people who’d care for me on a daily basis. This could be nurses taking my temperature and blood pressure, or ensuring that I had the correct prescribed fluids; the doctors and consultants coming in to examine me and tell me how I was getting on, and, of course, Sarah’s arrival each day late morning. 

This Eucharistic visit was part of my daily sustenance in a completely different way from my normal life in the diocese.  Sometimes the chaplain’s visit would coincide with the end of my recitation of Morning Prayer, sometimes it would be early afternoon, when I was usually feeling a bit sleepy, but always the chaplain concerned adapted to the surroundings, the priorities, and how ill (or not) I was.  The only vestment worn was a plastic disposable apron, and the only vessel used was a metal pyx containing the Sacrament, kept in a purse, which also had some carefully folded up service sheets, with the very bare bones of the Form for administering Communion.  It was all over in a few minutes, and there were times when the chaplain stayed to talk with me, and other occasions when I was either too tired, or someone else was waiting outside to get on with another procedure.  The sheer kindness of everyone concerned, chaplains included, stays in my mind.

We all bring different sorts of spiritual baggage with us to Church, and the Feast of Corpus Christi, because it is about the Eucharist, is perhaps a special focus.  It began in the 1250’s in Belgium, then was properly recognised and directed to be observed throughout the Catholic Church in 1264.  In those parts of northern Europe where the first Sunday after Pentecost was observed as Trinity Sunday, this new festival came on the following Thursday, and where Trinity Sunday was not yet observed, it came on the Thursday after Pentecost.  A sure indication that Corpus Christi was intended as a kind of eucharistic full stop after the big guns of the Easter season. 

To this historic, but not exactly ancient festival I bring this year my hospital baggage!  And clear as I am that God – unlike certain airports – never loses baggage (!), I am not exactly sure where exactly to place it.  It is not meant to be a kind of radical, austere protest against the exotic surroundings of tonight’s liturgy.  I have got to find a rather better purpose than that.  And a sure place can be found in the three special prayers used tonight, and written for this feast  soon after it was born by the great theologian Thomas Aquinas himself.  We have already heard the first of these three prayers, as the collect, which speaks of the eucharist as a memorial of the passion; we will hear the second one, which speaks of the eucharist as the food of the church, at the offering of the gifts; and we will hear the third one after communion, which speaks of the Eucharist as a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.  With the brilliant simplicity, tonight’s liturgy is located in time, looking back to the passion, focusing on the present as a time of feeding, and looking forward to heaven itself.

Taking these three one by one, it is not difficult to set them alongside what it felt like to lie in bed and be ministered to in that hospital.  The memorial of the passion means much more to me now, because I have had to face my own mortality, as well as gaze at the cross of Christ.  The present food of the Church takes on a new meaning altogether because that consecrated wafer with consecrated wine dabbed on it gained in significance at a time when eating (which I normally thoroughly enjoy) was a very considerable effort indeed.  And to think of heaven was no escape from the present world, but a way of seeing myself, those around me, my room, those caring for me, transformed from the functional and the earthly, to the symbolic and the eternal.

Christian teaching, sometimes called theology, is never intended to be dry and abstract, though it sometimes is. It is about relating the things of God to our experience, and putting them into words and symbols.  If I can go back to the feeding image, I suppose what I have discovered for myself for the very first time is how significant it is that the origins of the eucharist do not lie in the well stocked and lavishly cooked tables of a restaurant or a banquet, but in the simple vegetarian fare of the ancient world.  And I suspect that that is why the Eucharist soon developed a simplicity even greater than that Passover meal that Jesus shared with his disciples for the last time on that memorable Thursday evening.  It is no longer even that kind of meal, just a sharing of a morsel of bread and a sip of wine.  For that reason, all attempts – and there have been many of them – to make the eucharist like any other meal either fail or soon become very out of date. 

So we come to tonight’s eucharist with our own different forms of baggage – and they will, I suspect, all be very different indeed.  But however varied we all are in our Christian discipleship and witness, we are all united around that table, to celebrate the incomprehensible presence of Christ among us, in the memorial of his passion, in the feeding of his Church, and in sharing together a glimpse of what is to come at the end of all things.

+ Kenneth

Portsmouth