I’ve really been enjoying my internship year. Because I’m in a pretty small parish with an exceptionally generous supervisor, I get to do a ton of things that a pastor does. I get to preach every other week or so (some of my peers in seminary only get to preach once or twice the entire year of internship!). I’ve gotten to lead book studies, do home visits, confessions, baptisms, and be a chaplain at the detention center.
But the ONE THING I CANNOT DO until I’m ordained is the Eucharistic prayer. I cannot say what my tradition calls the ‘institutional narrative’. This is the blessing that the pastor says when she holds up the bread and wine that ends with, “...do this for the remembrance of me.”
This blessing of remembrance - this institutional narrative - MUST be a big damn deal if I can’t say it until I’m ordained.
I think this is really cool. Like, there’s something definitely here if it’s the ONE THING they keep non-ordained folks away from.
This blessing of remembrance that Jesus gave his disciples as he held up the bread and wine on the night which he was betrayed during the last supper makes me think of a creation story I once heard in my spiritual-but-not-religious days (yes, I’m a total geek for creation stories). It was written by Neale Donald Walsch originally, but I’ve taken the liberty of adding a Christian twist to it. Let’s see how this goes...
In the beginning, God was all there was. God just... Was. There was nothing else.
God didn’t want to just know Godself... God wanted to experience Godself. God yearned to know what it was like to experience God’s magnificience (or beauty or whatever of God’s qualities you want to insert here). God wanted to go from being a concept to becoming participatory.
However, God could not experience Godself unless that which was NOT God showed up.
For without that which is not,
that which IS
is NOT.
God needed a reference point outside of Godself and this did not exist when God was all there was.
So, God divided Godself. God separated Godself. For the first time in forever, THIS and THAT existed separately from each other along with that which was NEITHER THIS NOR THAT.
In other words, God became triune. God became three elements/persons:
This
That
Neither-This-Nor-That (the space between and all around this and that which must exist for this and that to exist).
Another way to put it is this...
The creator
The created
That which is
Or, of course...
God, the Father
God, the Son
God, the Holy Spirit
God went from one
to three.
By becoming triune, God created relativity, the greatest gift that God ever gave to Godself. You and I are given this in relationship. This is the perichoresis or divine circle dance between creator, created, and the relationship that holds them together.
This might explain the Big Bang (or whatever we decide to call it down the road). This is when time was created. It is when the space between this and that became measurable. All things became relative to each other.
Since God is love and God needed to experience God as love, God had to create Love’s opposite. That’s when God created fear. And just like that, love became an experienceable thing. Not just a knowable concept. (Perhaps this is mythologized by the story in the garden.)
So maybe God’s reason for creating you and me is this... For God to be able to experience Godself as God in and through us.
This wasn’t likely an easy task for God. For us to experience that we are God’s beloved, we must first experience ourselves as NOT God’s beloved. We must forget our belovedness. For in a relative world, in order to experience what being tall is like, we must experience that which is short.
We can’t experience what we are unless we encounter that which we are not.
It’s impossible for us to truly not be a beloved creation of God (if you REALLY want to go there, it’s impossible for us to not be an inseparable part of God). We simply are that, have always been, and forever will be.
So, in us, God did something totally bonkers... God caused Godself, in us, to forget who we really are.
In entering our physicality, we gave up our REMEMBRANCE (there’s that word again!) of ourselves (and thereby God Godself). This allows us to experience what it’s like to come back to our ultimate reality. To go from there back to here. In other words, to REMEMBER who we are. And to remember who everyone and everything else is.
In the Eucharist, we eat and drink the body and blood IN THE REMEMBRANCE of He who is life. He who is Reality. Or, Christ.
And here’s the cool part...
By REMEMBERING, we are RE-MEMBERED. We are put back together again individually and collectively. Corporally and corporately. In the re-membrance of him, we are brought back to the place we never truly left.
When this hits us, we do what we are created for... To experience AND BE the astonishment of God’s love. And God is overjoyed at the astonishment that God experiences in Godself through our lives. This remembrance never gets old to God.
Do this
in the remembrance
of me.
Share this post