I shall call this a tea interval...

I doubt that too many visitors to Gloriana's Court shall fully comprehend how frustrated I am today. :) I have been digesting the richness of Papa Benedict's superb sermon for the feast of Corpus Christi, and greatly wishing to write a meditation here, drawing on some of the related images and expounding on the 6th chapter of John. Perhaps I shall be able to do so later in the week... for now, I'm sipping a cup of Earl Grey, stroking the cat (who is indignant that I've been spending too much time on the Offices recently), and asking God to grant me patience.

I am an odd blend, of course, being at once scholar, peasant, renaissance lady and working class survivor. (Well, I suppose that Jesus could identify with at least some of that, though I doubt the renaissance was much to his liking.) Perhaps it is that blend within myself which makes me see the King of Kings in the monstrance as reminding us of divine transcendence and mystery, while equally the hand of the Creator reminds us that the symbol of Himself, and of his body the Church, and of the Eucharist which has united us since the first century (and something had to do it...) is as simple as the fruit of the field.

Currently, some of my studies centre on the worship, sacraments, and ministry of the very early Church. (I was a bit disappointed - loving the patristic era as I do, I had not wanted the studies to focus entirely on the New Testament, the Didache, and Ignatius.) Yet I can see the hand of providence in this somehow. Again and again, I am seeing the sheer evidence that what held the Church together from the beginning was the memory of a resurrected Lord - and, despite all the bickering, disagreements, lapses into idolatry of whatever kind, and eternal weakness and sinfulness of its members, the action of celebrating baptism and the Eucharist. It is amazing how divine truth was revealed to the Church in its worship before there were established forms for worship or creeds.

I am much one for splendour - for all that I love that carpenter from Galilee, I tend to focus more on the risen and ascended King of Kings. :) I love processions, monstrances, Benediction, praying in the presence of a hanging pyx. Still, my years of mediaeval and renaissance studies remind me that, glorious though such devotions are, the splendour can sometimes blind us to the essential. Those during the Middle Ages cherished the Elevation, but seldom partook of communion, and began a tradition of so focussing on the Passion and our need for forgiveness that the Incarnation in its fulness sometimes was a forgotten concept. Then, in an effort to counterbalance the excesses of the Reformation (though my pragmatic side reminds me that Martin Luther's criticisms were all too apt, and that Cranmer's snide comments about viewing the Elevation were sadly accurate), the Eucharistic devotions tended to become divorced from the Holy Communion itself - as if the church were a reliquary. We can forget our own mission to be the Body of Christ (as Benedict exquisitely expressed in the sermon to which I placed the link) if we think only of the Host - rather than recalling our deification, our being Christ's Body.

Heavens, how I can ramble at times... well, off to fix another pot of tea. Tomorrow is the feast of the Visitation - perhaps that Elizabeth can remind this one that, however sluggish one may feel in middle age, divine grace can bring about the most remarkable developments. :)