You Expect It At Any Minute.

 

 

 

"What?"
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The answer to this question is, of course, different for everyone and in all likelihood, different for everyone from moment to moment..  For me yesterday, the answer was the MANNA 1:00PM Eucharist celebrated in the basement of the Cathedral Church of St Paul in Boston. I'd not been with MANNA since well before the Plague. It was a disorienting pilgrimage to say the least. Every step I took navigating the subway and the bustling streets of downtown Boston was tentative as if I expected the earth to open up underneath me at any moment.  Settling into a seat in the back, that old feeling of home (believe it or not) came back. Pterry the pterodactyl was perched atop the wooden cross on the altar. The altar sported a hand-lettered altar cloth that said "ABIDE." My advancing deafness, the whirring of the A/C units and my location in the sanctuary prevented me from hearing much of what was being said. Didn't matter though. For about 45 minutes I was compassionately held by a roomful of unhoused men and women who were unaware of the great and generous gift they were giving me. Sitting there in the semi-dark with my semi-hearing I remembered a favorite Annie Dillard quote:

 

"The higher Christian churches …. come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches* you expect it any minute."   ~ Annie Dillard ~     *low churches - I am likely mis-applying Annie's term here - at least according to wikipedia - I think what I'm getting at is that the MANNA Eucharist is stripped down in terms of  both venue and ordo. It is humble and, to the untrained eye, ordinary. I assure you it is the furthest thing from ordinary.          ~