Eucharist: The Real Presence, and the real presence

Years ago Ken Roxburgh and I went to a clergy retreat at Scottish Churches House in Dunblane. It seemed like a good opportunity to maintain a rich friendship while also sustaining two people working through the rigours of being Scottish Baptist ministers. The programme looked good, and the speaker was Bishop John V Taylor, writer of several award winning books including The Go-Between God, still a book so stimulating and original that it draws the reader into the same adoring wonder, about God and the world around, that seemed to captivate its writer.

Well anyway, at the first meeting with the good Bishop, the two dozen or so clergy were told that the Bishop had decided (no communal discernment allowed - he was a Bishop!) that it would be a silent retreat. This wasn't on the publicity, and alarmed most of us - but the Bishop, as is their wont, wasn't into negotiation. No talking or conversation outside of set devotional times - and meals also to be taken in silence. That kind of put the dampers on Ken and I, who had come to talk, to pray, to listen and learn - but not to be silent for 48 hours! Apart from the careful handwritten notes, written in a John Menzies A5 spiral notebook, used by Bishop Taylor to guide us, with slow spiritual deliberation, through the several retreat talks, two further less pious memories dominate.

The first was the near hysterical inner reaction I had to sitting at breakfast table, surrounded by another 7 hungry clergy, in a room devoid of human chatter, listening in the imposed semi-silence to the sound of muesli being chomped, coffee being slurped and toast being munched - and being reminded of feeding time in the byre when I was a boy on the farms! The second was the wonderful game of football Ken and I watched at the Dunblane Hydro in order to have at least one evening's conversation between friends who had gone to some trouble and expense to spend some time together. Anyway we is Baptists - and it's a point of principle to uphold the freedom of the individual conscience in matters spiritual

I was thinking about John V Taylor again recently. His book The Primal Vision written 40 years ago was an early foretaste of what has become a major theological discipline in its own right - missiology. Here is J V Taylor's take on what gives the Eucharist both its missiological and its witnessing function within the church, written by a man whose missionary vocation made him one of Africa's most sympathetic interpreters:

"So many of our Eucharists fall short of the glory of God because while purporting to concentrate on the Real Presence of Christ, they seem to be oblivious to the real presence of people, either in the worshipping family or the world around. To present oneself to God means to expose oneself, in an intense and vulnerable awareness, not only to him but to all that is."

The real presence of other people at the eucharist, and a Christlike intense and vulnerable awareness of God, and all that is - including these my sisters and brothers, around this table, and beyond, to those sharing with me the space and resources of this God-loved world. A properly eucharistic theology inevitably means we present ourselves to God, in response to divine love, and for the sake of the world.

Comments

[Margaret]

you???? Silent???? 48 hours????? Never!

[Jim Gordon]

Exactly Margaret. Hence the Hydro, the AC MIlan game, and a long blether with a good pal!