This morning this quote came through the email via Richard Rohr’s daily meditation. it’s Thich Nhat Than writing on the Christian practice of communion.
The bread that Jesus handed to you, to us, is real bread, and if you can eat real bread you have real life. But we are not able to eat real bread. We only try to eat the word bread or the notion of bread. Even when we are celebrating the Eucharist, we are still eating notions and ideas. “Take, my friends, this is my flesh, this is my blood.” Can there be any more drastic language in order to wake you up? What could Jesus have said that is better than that? You have been eating ideas and notions, and I want you to eat real bread so that you become alive. If you come back to the present moment, fully alive, you will realize this is real bread, this piece of bread is the body of the whole cosmos.
If Christ is the body of God, which he is, then the bread he offers is also the body of the cosmos. Look deeply and you notice the sunshine in the bread, the blue sky in the bread, the cloud and the great earth in the bread. Can you tell me what is not in a piece of bread? The whole cosmos has come together in order to bring to you this piece of bread. You eat it in such a way that you become alive, truly alive. . . . Eat in such a way that the Holy Spirit becomes an energy within you and then the piece of bread that Jesus gives to you will stop being an idea, a notion.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), 106–107.
I love that. It reminds me of the power of acknowledging the simple and everyday sacred with a simple and everyday ritual. It uses a mindful practice to raise the ordinary to the sacred.
About seven years ago I was working at a conference called Awakening Soul as a facilitator and as a poet who captured the keynote presentations and the harvests from the world cafes I was leading. One of the speakers was John Phillip Newell, a prolific writer on Celtic Christianity informed by his time as warden of the monastery on Iona in the Hebrides.
His keynote contained a similar idea to Thay’s about the Eucharist. He spoke about the cosmology of matter and meaningfulness. He said that the bread in the Eucharist stood in for “the matter that matters.” Somehow in the dance of speaker and poet we also added that the wine is about the spirit that flows. The matter that matters and the spirit that flows. A simple ritual used to acknowledge the profound meaning of Jesus being together with his dearest friends on the last night of his life. If you have been with a dying person or in a situation like that you know the feeling of that moment. Only at birth and death does one experience it.
Later that night Newell and me and five other people all found ourselves talking around a dining table in our shared accommodation. We got on to telling the birth stories of our children and as the night deepened, the stories became more and more profound. Not all the stories were good news One was about a still birth. Others were funny like the way Caitlin gripped my knees so hard that the two of us were screaming in different kinds of pain when our son was born, much to the midwife’s amusement.
It was late in the night when our circle of stories drew to a close but before we all went to bed I suggested that we mark the end of this very sacred experience with a small communion. All we had was a bottle of Laphroaig whisky and a bar of Bowen Island chocolate. And so we passed these two elements to each other offering the simple blessing: this is the matter that matters and this is the spirit that flows. And it truly transformed our little gathering into something quite sacred.
Today I stood on the beach you see in the photo above, in a very isolated and sacred place on the south flank of Haleakala on Mau’i. It is a place where the first Hawaiians arrived on this island, a black cobble beach with incredible waves and the stunning 8000 foot high flank of the volcano behind. And as I stood there I felt my father very strongly. He sailed in these waters as a naval officer in the 1950s and he knew the power of the simple and transcendent. He knew deep in his bones about the communion that I am talking about. he knew to take time to stop and acknowledge it. That knowledge served him well in his death back in December and it has served me well in my grief journey since then.
And it served me well today, remembering in a simple act that “this is the matter that matters, and this is the spirit that flows.” That little prayer is your gateway to remembering that you belong to the cosmos.
Maybe returning everything to the blog.
Just perusing through some of the stories of the Desert Fathers and found this little anecdote.
“Abba Joseph asked Abba Pastor, ‘Tell me how I can become a monk.’ The elder replied, ‘If you want to have rest here in this life and also in the next, in every conflict with another say: “Who am I?” and so judge no one.’”
That’s probably good advice before I go on Twitter.
Slack tide in the Salish Sea.
These are the Olympic Mountains across the waters of the Juan de Fuca Strait, the body of water that links in inland parts of the Salish Sea to the open Pacific Ocean. So much water flows through this passage twice a day with the ebb and flow of the tides, that the Strait takes on the quality of a slow river, flowing in two directions, in and out, two great long breaths a day, taking in cold North Pacific water, and exhaling the fresh water from the mountains and snowpacks of the Coast and Cascade Mountains, and the silty flow of the Fraser River – Sto:lo, as it is known on the coast.
AS a result of this flow there is tremendous life in this region. Many times a day freighters come and go through the Strait, heading to the ports of Vancouver and Seattle, or the mills at Squamish and Duke Point or Port Angeles. They carry the atoms of capitalism: coal and cars and plastic toys and oil and clothing and computer parts and everything we take for granted to live the lives we live here. They also carry the military power of the US nuclear submarine fleet and the Pacific Command of the Canadian navy based in Victoria. From time to time one sees sinister ships like the Zumwalt-class guided missile destroyers, which frankly just creep me out. These are nuclear weapons of mass destruction, cruising lithely through the serene waters. All around this landscape are the scars of clear cutting, new and old, and not an hour from where I am is the Fairy Creek watershed and the the old growth, Indigenous stands of the Carmanah and Walbran forests. Like everything around here, it is a context of mixed and conflicted feelings, activities and histories.
The ocean here is rich and complex and full of life below. Yesterday we watched a pod of five orcas, including a couple of babies and a huge male, frolicking in the slack water. They were breaching and spy hopping and tail lobbing and fin slapping. The young ones were learning hunting techniques while the adults milled around. There are salmon and anchovies and seals and octopuses and all manner of living creatures in the rich near shore kelp beds and in the deep marine canyons and reefs. Walking along the cliff tops here I’m reminded of the Jogasaki Coast on the Izu penisula in Japan, where local fishers steward the forests and have placed signs along the trails to let you know you are walking through a “fish attracting forest.” This is true on the coast here, as at least 30% of the nitrogen in the forest ecosystem come from marine sources, from fish carcasses that litter the salmon streams after spawning and are carried by bears and birds throughout the woods, where they feed the trees that maintain the streams that bring the salmon home to spawn. This is the most ancient cycle of life here on the coast.
I am in T’Sou-ke Te’mekw, and evidence of the ancient and historic use of the land and ocean is all around for those that have eyes to see. Yesterday, walking above the beaches of East Sooke Regional Park, I could hear people down below us on the beaches harvesting mussels. On the trail was a sign indicating that miners had once used the land here for iron, even though there was little evidence of that. But literally below my feet, very near that sign, on a flat spot above the beach near a creek of fresh water was a midden of shells, clearly indicating that the two on the beach were far from the first people to harvest shellfish here. It had all the hallmarks of a historic village site; different signs, different stories.
BC lifted the in-province travel restrictions on Tuesday and it feels good to stretch out and leave home for a few days. While I have loved the global travel of the before-times, I’m lucky enough to live in an incredible natural and cultural landscape here, amongst the ancient Nations of the Salish Sea archipelago, that I really don’t have far to go to actually be in another country. One could simply stay in one place and visit ever deeper into the natural and social history of these places, and perhaps we should. It is important to know our place in all of its complicated and complex realities, to let the emotions and thoughts flow in and out like the tides, bringing new nutrients and new life upwelling from the deeps with the currents and the change of the times.
I think this quote really captures my own social justice practice and my own spiritual practice. Ilia Delio is perhaps what we would call an evolutionary theologian and what she says here about “becoming something that is not yet known” says volumes to me:
By evolution, I mean simply that change is integral to life. We are becoming something that is not yet known. To live in evolution is to let go of structures that prevent convergence and deepening of consciousness and assume new structures that are consonant with creativity, inspiration, and development.
Evolution requires trust in the process of life itself. There is a power at the heart of life that is divine and lovable. In a sense we are challenged to lean into life’s changing patterns and attend to the new patterns that are emerging in our midst. To live in openness to the future is to live with a sense of creativity and participation, to use our gifts for the sake of the whole by sharing them with others.
— Ilia Delio, The Hours of the Universe: Reflections on God, Science, and the Human Journey (Orbis Books: 2021), 220–221, 223–225.
It is hard to stay open to possibility when we are confronting a choice between the familiar and the new. I have always imagined that a world that addresses climate change, one that properly restores dignity and equality and essential relationships to land and sea and between peoples is one that will deliver a better world than the one we have now. But power and familiarity breed intransigence and unless we can truly let go of what we know and fall forward into the theoretically innumerable realities that are better than this one, we remain trapped in these patterns of behaviour in these ways of relating, in these ways of making a living.
We need moments of disturbance to move into new realities, and the more we refuse to accept the painful truths of the status quo, the less chance we have of actually making something better.
We are emerging from 2020, a year that was terrible in so many ways and one in which we saw many stories of governments mobilized to retool systems to create universal programs of health and economic care; stories of mitigated climate impacts and the support for local economies; stories of massive logistical challenges solved; stories of racial equity and justice being foregrounded and new conversations and actions around changing the coercive structures of power that perpetuate injustice.
We have evidence that we can quickly make massive changes that take us into that “becoming” but we remain trapped in the fear that doing so will cause loss and harm to people (let’s be honest, people who look like me) that benefit from the status quo. It might do, but the status quo is such that we are at a moment in history when we have enough wealth to mitigate those losses and usher people into a better world. There will be contraction. We can manage. Some of us have no idea how much resilience we actually have, because we’ve never been tested.
We can’t know what we are becoming, but we have enough evidence to know that the path we have been on and the vector on which we are travelling is heading towards a world where our gifts are increasingly discarded and our regard for life diminished. Perhaps at some point the fear of the immediate reality will outweigh the fear of choosing something different. I wish it weren’t so, that we have to be motivated by fear over love. And we need not hope for this future – it is the hope that kills – but rather we simply need to act now and trust in one another differently, listen to the voices that are at the margins of our world, at the ecotones between the thriving systems of life and the social clearcuts in which we are immersed. Those voices are bringing us the new patterns, the challenges, and the invitations. Hear them, amplify them, exchange gifts, follow them and let’s journey away from this hellscape.