The Greening of Hymnody, Part 4: Greening the Eucharist

In this, the last of my Hymn Interpretations, I want to focus on how hymns and other sung resources can help the members of a congregation enter into the mystery of God's presence in the Eucharist, the Holy Communion, the Mass, the Lord's Supper as part of the process of discerning the presence throughout the whole of the Cosmos. It may seem rather odd to lump all these interpretations of this sacrament together. Yet when all the verbal leaves of the liturgical trees are removed the trunk and branches of each reveal a common structure. This structure owes its origin to the fourfold action of a communal meal so clearly identified by Dom Gregory Dix in his The Shape of the Liturgy. That series of actions is: The Offering (the bringing of the bread and wine and other gifts to the altar- table), The Great Thanksgiving (with its roots in many cultures in the prayer offered prior to the meal itself), The Breaking of The Bread, and lastly The Sharing of the food. My first attempt to embody this in a hymn was "The Patterned Mystery," in volume 2 of The Mystery Telling (Selah Publishing, forthcoming). Stanza 2 of this hymn is as follows: We take and bless the loaf and wine, We break the holy bread, We share them both with all who seek, To have their spirits fed. The last stanza goes on to mention the real presence as follows: Your risen presence we discern O Christ within each meal Which reaches out to feel the hurts Compassion's touch can heal. I once heard a fellow Methodist state that the Holy Communion was simply a memorial to the death of Jesus. However, I also had the following experience: a dear old lady responding to my claim in a sermon that the Communion should be a joyful time, stood up and said "I've never heard that before." Then she clapped her hands and said "happy, happy, happy"! Those words have rung out in my heart again and again. It has been said that the Protestant Communion is a liturgical crucifix. Now there are crucifixes and crucifixes. Some speak of a dead Christ, others of a living presence that is greater than suffering and death. Whether one is describing a sculpture or a service, it should always embody a radical aliveness and not solely the remembrance of a death. So Eucharistie hymns at their best should be about the real presence of God the Creator, of Christ the transformer, and of the empowering Spirit. In rejecting the idea that the presence of Christ could be confined to the bread, some Protestants have tiirown out the baby with the bathwater and denied any presence at all. What we need, I believe, is a radical expansion of the idea of presence to embrace the traditional concept that God is omnipresent (everywhere present). The whole purpose of God being "contracted to a span" as Wesley claimed occurred in die Incarnation, is to lead to an expansion in which as Jesus said, God could be worshipped everywhere (John 4:19-24). How then do we become aware of the presence of God and how can hymns help? In what is probably my magnum opus, Sacred Energy/Mass of the Universe, the liturgy commences with the human being exclaiming In the midst of my dreaming, I perceived a Way, A Way to the sacred heart of the mystery, A Way within and beyond the flesh and bone, Stream and stone, of the expanding Cosmos. Then follows a hymn the first two stanzas of which are as follows O golden doors now open wide Revealing myst'ry's grace, The grace beyond the imaged word, Beyond all time and space. The doors swing open every time We leave the realm of things To enter silent emptiness And touch what leaving brings. In this hymn I have sought to identify an entry point to The Mystery that we cannot access by rational definition but rather by the rich fabric of symbolic imagination. You may ask what has that to do with The Greening of Hymnody? …