Communion

This February marks the 2nd year anniversary of our last “in-person” high service in the atrium at Brentwood. While I have enjoyed the virtual services and their focus on one section at a time from the High Service—be it the Call, the Death, the Path, the Gloria—I do miss the “music” of the in-person High Service. Perhaps what I miss most is the lyrical build-up to our Communion. 

photo @jhc on Unsplash

I love how the first three prayers articulate the nuances of each particular mystery service, how the Gloria launches with an all-out, glorious piece of music timed to the turning of the banner and then how it leads us into the Communion with the words, “Let us see and be seen by the Holy Spirit.”  

I find the phrase “To see and be seen” to be a very profound and intimate exchange of true vision and true visioning. “To be seen” is to be recognized, to be seen for who you are and not as how you hope to be seen or how you have been characterized. And “to see” is to experience “darshan”, the act of beholding a deity—in our case, by way of the bread and the wine. Our Communion provides the most intimate moment of the service when each of us is invited to: “Lie down in the Fire. See and taste the Flowing Godhead through thy being; feel the Holy Spirit moving and compelling Thee within the Flowing Fire and Light of God”—as Mechthild of Magdeburg, the 13th c Christian mystic so beautifully issued it. 

I wonder if being seen by the Holy Spirit is akin to what was revealed when a group of scientists got together to capture the detailed model of the cell. Using a combination of x-rays, nuclear magnetic resonance and cryoelectron microscopy, they captured a fantastical image of a single cell that reveals it to be a resplendent cache of jewels, bangles and beads as it flows with resplendent color into a sacred profusion of shapes and sparkles. Perhaps this splendored vision of the one cell is multiplied a million times over and is the very view, the darshan of us, when seen by the Holy Spirit. Perhaps, in the eyes of the Divine, the light from this aggregate of stardust which we call a body, resembles this profusion of bejeweled colors seen as if through a kaleidoscope.

In our high services, our Credo precedes the communion and we carry into the ritual of the Gloria the invocation of a darshan, a communion of seeing and being seen, hearing and being heard, knowing and being known and loving and being loved. The ritual serves as the swelling motif of the high service opus. It is in this culminating motif where we eat and drink of the Christ, to become the “here and now” of the Christ. It is here in this culminating motif that we invoke the Holy Spirit that we might in-spire the Holy Spirit; it is here in this culminating motif where we take the here of the votive light to become votive light. 

It is my hope that we find a way, perhaps a new way, to re-create the sacrality of the high service communion and its transformative power. Until then, I invite you to imaginatively enter into our weekly ritual of each high service in the spirit of our communion. 

Come, “Lie down in the Fire. See and taste the Flowing Godhead through thy being.” 

May it be so.