Holy Communion: whisper of inward grace
St Augustine (354-430), Bishop Of Hippo Regius
AS dozens of Fathers and mystics confirm, to find God, we must go inward to the mind. Charles Wesley (1707-1788) wrote:
OPEN, Lord, my inward ear,
And bid my heart rejoice;
Bid my quiet spirit hear
Thy comfortable voice;Never in the whirlwind found,
Or where earthquakes rock the place,
Still and silent is the sound,
The whisper of thy grace.
In Book X of the Confessions, St Augustine searched for God in the things of the outward, visible world, but did not find him.
FOR behold, Thou wert within, and I without, and there did I seek Thee; I, unlovely, rushed heedlessly among the things of beauty Thou madest.
Augustine realised that he must go inward, deep into his own mind and memory. Not in the sense of images of the past – even animals can do that. “In calling Thee to mind, I soared beyond those parts of it which the beasts also possess”. Nor do we merely lose ourselves in our own minds. Memory has no parts: it is a mystical openness to something infinite.
BUT why do I now seek in what part of it Thou dwellest, as if truly there were places in it? Thou dost dwell in it assuredly, since I have remembered Thee from the time I learned Thee, and I find Thee in it when I call Thee to mind.
No, when we celebrate the Eucharist “in remembrance” of the Passion of Christ we do not merely remember past events, images or stories. Nor is it a spiritual introversion, isolation. That is not “remembrance” in this context.
The eye of the mind learns from the outward signs to look inward, but only to burst through the shadows and espy the Courts of the Morning which encompass us, to watch (as Bede might say) the night of this world passing into everlasting Day.
This is “to have in remembrance”. We “lift up our hearts” and enter inwardly by faith a real and heavenly sanctuary through, in and yet above the mind, guests together at the marriage supper of the Lamb.
Our Prayer Book is a liturgy of spartan, even monkish simplicity, yet also one of awed reverence in the presence of the angels which surround the throne of grace. We gather beneath the invisible firmament in which the Sun of Righteousness has risen,
LIGHT and life to all He brings,
Ris’n with healing in His wings.
Shaped as he was by Augustine’s Christian Platonism, Thomas Cranmer did not reject Transubstantiation because he wanted something less real. He already had something which – I must emphasise, given his philosophical assumptions – he thought was more real, more immediate. In the words of Wesley’s Victim Divine,
WE need not now go up to heaven,
To bring the long-sought Saviour down:
Thou art to all already given,
Thou dost even now thy banquet crown:
To every faithful soul appear,
And show thy real presence here!
Tags: St Augustine Of Hippo
"[Politicians] are employed in framing laws and statutes for preventing crimes, and keeping the disorderly multitude within bounds; and at the same time, by personally discountenancing public worship, they are weakening, they are even abolishing, among the multitude, that moral restraint which is of more general influence upon manners than all the laws they frame."
I FIND, by experience, that by often seeing her Portrait, & that of her Dearest Son, I many times recall Him & His Merits, her & her Perfections, to my mind, which before was void of such Heavenly Guests.
I BELIEVE in one God the Father Almighty,