Trusting the Silence

Last Sunday, I tried something new. At Communion, instead of leading the congregation through the long Great Thanksgiving, I omitted that and also did the Institution (the blessing of the Bread and Cup) in silence.

This was my own response to conversations I had with recently retied colleagues. Two of them, who do not know each other and with whom I had coffee on separate occasions in the past two weeks, said that they felt overwhelmed by words went they recently went to church as worshippers. One of them sent me this Wendell Berry poem:

What a consolation it is, after

the explanations and the predictions

of further explanations still

to come, to return unpersuaded

to the woods, entering again

the presence of the blessed trees.

A tree forms itself in answer

to its place and to the light.

Explain it how you will, the only

thing explainable will be

your explanation.  There is

in the woods on a summer’s

morning, birdsong all around

from guess where, nowhere

that rigid measure which predicts

only humankind’s demise.

Wendell Berry

from The Given, Sabbath Poems 

Going forward, I am greatly reducing the words at Communion, trusting the silence, the gestures, the senses as we experience (instead of “explaining”) Christ’s gift of his body and blood.

In Christ,

Lee