Archive for August 2018
Real Presence
[At dinner] the novelist Mary McCarthy, who would later proclaim her emancipation from the church in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, opined that she still found the symbolism of the Eucharist to be useful for her fiction, though of course she didn’t believe a word of its hocus–pocus. The ordinarily quiet and unassertive [Flannery] O’Connor—who rarely spoke to strangers unless first addressed, and then only with a shy hesitance—made a notoriously acid reply: “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” (Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works, 977, quoted in Flannery O’Connor and the Christ–Haunted South, 23)
Memorialize
We are to remember, rather, to memorialize to and before God, the Sabbath day (Exodus 20:8ff).
We are to remember, rather, to memorialize to and before God, the body and blood of Jesus in the bread and wine of the Lord’s supper (1 Corinthians 11:23ff).
Thus, weekly communion: always on the Lord’s day we cease from labor and the gathering of bread, enjoying instead the bread God provides, as a comprehensive memorial to him of Jesus’s work and rest, his provision and enthronement.
HT: Peter Leithart
I gotta have my orange juice. 