Healing a Broken Body

The experience of sharing and consuming Love’s Body, the Blessed Sacrament of the Universe, the Cosmic Bread of Incarnate Divinity, the Sacred Wine of a growing humanity, the Holy Communion of all forms of life, brings, as well as deep joy, forebodings, where the future appears as a yawning chasm into which a mutilated and drained earth must fall. Let us look briefly at some reasons for such deep concern.

Thomas Berry wrote about the failing of our present energy sources as pollution darkens the skies and poisons the seas, as tensions between nations and within nations intensify, as military methods grow more destructive, at the multitudes of humankind doubled in numbers and people swarmed toward the urban centres of crime and violence. The labour-saving and leisure-filling dimensions of the technological and industrial breakthroughs were creative, appropriate and very welcome. But in a turbulent age of change where political power and social sin are liable to run wild, the earth was exploited in irrevocable ways. Savage assaults were made upon the environment and people became destructive beyond imagination. The discoveries that initially brought enrichment and satisfaction to human hearts later went to the heads of power-oriented men and emerged as manipulation and exploitation of all life-levels. The experience of sacred communion with the earth went underground, so to speak, waiting, in the darkness, to be rediscovered and nurtured into vibrant life. Human power over life and death has become frighteningly efficient. . .

Berry numbers this change in the relation of human activity to the earth process among the major shifts of evolution such as the transition from non-life to life or from life to consciousness. I have no doubt that when the hoped-for awakening consciousness and the redeeming vision of humanity assume the fullness of spiritual power, the resultant transformation of the universe will rank with the morning of creation itself.  . . .

As we take, eat and drink the cosmic bread and wine and turn to embrace the stranger at the ‘kiss of peace’ how aware are we of the kind of dying we may be called upon to make!

In one sense we are at the beginning now. There is a mission of cosmic proportions to be accomplished – a world to win and a universe to save and a Body to be healed. To live the Ritual. To be the Myth. To see the world as God sees it; o love it into health as God does. ‘ The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. How do we acquire a new vision? How do we inspire the unconscious heart of humanity? Who will recreate the human species as an intrinsic development of cosmic evolution, as a child of the universe? Who will set the context for re inhabiting the earth?

A massive re-education of the heart is called for. Luckily we have the teachers. There is also, it seems to me, a readiness for change, a potential for transformation. There is a growing sensitivity to new strategies of concern, a kind of genetic awareness of the need for imminent action. There are pockets of conspirators all over the world; and when these small streams of consciousness seem to make but little headway into the dry mainland, we must believe that at another invisible level, the waves of transformation are already sweeping through:

 ‘For while the tired ways vainly breaking

 seem here no painful inch to gain

 far back, through creeks and inlets making

 come silent flooding in the main.’ (Arthur Hugh Clough)

(Year of the heart pp142 – 145)

(In Year of the Heart for the month of June, Daniel writes

‘My intentions in this month’s reflections are to offer an approach ‘from below’, so to speak, from the point of view of the cosmos itself- thus making a new effort to intrinsically link all the elements and all the dimensions that constitute Eucharist celebration. My intention is to offer the reader a vision of the Eucharist that does not threaten orthodox doctrine but rather deepens and enriches the believers participation at the Lords table each week.’ Our weekly reflections for June will all be taken from this chapter.)