One of the good things about being a retired priest is that you don’t have to go to church unless you really want to – so sometimes on Sunday I stay in bed with my iPad for devotional reading and meditation — and there is an app for that — and other times I go to church and am surprised how much I enjoy sitting back and watching, being fed, even though I’ve always known Christianity can be a great spectator sport.
But on Wednesday mornings at 10 AM I sometimes show up at the Lady Chapel – off here to the side — for a weekday mass. It’s a small group, 6, 8, 12 or more people sometimes, sometimes music, sometimes not, often I am one of the younger people — except I kept seeing Jude there in the last few months. I had met her and C. here right after the Jazz Mass some eight years ago, remember her telling me how proud she was of C. singing in the choir, and now here we were on Wednesday mornings and I wondered why.
Let me tell you more by sharing another memory; in the late 1950s there was a US TV show called American Bandstand where the host would invite people to dance to a new song and then give it a score. Some would say, “the message was good but there’s no rhythm” or conversely, “I didn’t understand the words but I sure can dance to it!”
Now most people don’t think of the mass, the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion, if you like, as one of Christianity’s greatest hits; and fewer would think of it as a participatory sport, or as any kind of a dance, but at heart it really is. It’s not the only one.
I once wrote a paper called “Serving God” on the theology of tennis. I said that playing the game was a pleasurable way of hoping and holding, opening to the deep holiness contained in every moment of time. It was, I wrote, “to serve, receive, and return bright vehicles of meaning” and I went on to say the only difference between tennis and theology is that in tennis love means nothing and in theology it means everything. And that is what the Eucharist is like.
You see, Jesus, this human of mercy and compassion and principal, is gathering his community together for what looks like the Last Supper and he gets hold of the bread and the wine and links them up to the actions of his life in four simple steps: take, bless, break, share. And we’ve been trying to dance to that ever since.
What I think it means is; Jesus takes up his whole life, his wants and needs, hopes and fears, plans and possibilities and blesses them with this ever enlarging understanding of light, love, charity, compassion, call it God if that works. He lets that hopeful possibility break down, breakthrough, break into the particulars of his situation whatever the end may be, and open it up, and he shares that life and death action with the community he cares about the best he can, even invites them (invites us) to participate in this as much as we like.
So if tennis means serve, receive, return: then Jesus means take, bless, break, share. Either one is a way to dance with love that you can do ‘round the altar, on the court, at dinner, in bed: wherever and whenever life turns ‘round and the road looks new or the destination dubious, whether you’re angry, scared, alert, whatever — it’s the perfect dance for the middle of life and death.
And my hunch was J. was there, doing those steps well. I don’t know why or what lyrics or music, because nobody really knows anybody else’s story, but I had this strong sense that she was involved in some great and important steps in the dance. It wasn’t too much later that I heard she was sick and getting sicker and when Fr Ken told me she was in intensive care I went to see her and she wasn’t in good shape and I talked and prayed with her and her family, and then came back a few days later and on the following day she died peacefully.
OK. One of the most amazing things about being a human being is that you get to share some very vulnerable moments; and I don’t think J. would mind if I told you that I am convinced she was doing those steps all the way up to the end, moving with Jesus in that four step rhythm of “take, bless, break, share.”
You can go a long way with those moves; taking up all your life and looking with love on where to go next, letting yourself be blessed by the hope of a reality that’s bigger than you know, willing yourself to be broken open to some new understanding of how to share love in the middle of all this difficult and wonderful existence.
And J. was there, her breath getting softer and closer to the end in every inhalation and exhalation, the receiving and relinquishing, the taking up and letting go, she was living with love and love was with her all that time. And that’s what I want you to know — what I saw in J’s dying. Love living, love never ending, she was already where no one ever gets lost from love. We see that so dimly from here, but now I believe she knows it, breathes it, sees it now face-to-face. She finished the dance, she found that great peace, may we share that vision.
Amen
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