Mar 11 | Bless, Break, Share: Lent Journal #5

Celebrated Anglican theologian (and beloved friend) Richard Hooker picks up where we left off on the question of the authority of ultimately subjective Scripture. While Hooker affirmed its centrality, he also affirmed that it was best when it supported the life of the community. Perhaps we are called to bless, break, and share Scripture, just as we do with our bread.

The part of Hooker that most seduces me is his practical Aristotelianism. Normally I tend to hover between particularity and the mystical shadows of Platonism, but I appreciate Hooker’s reluctance to impose order on ideas before examining them in detail. We exist as Anglicans in an invitatory sort of universe where we draw closer to know all things. Many of us recognize that theology can change. This for me is essential to faith – all things will change, and those that do not in the particular world are often seen as malfunctioning in some way. I might cheekily go so far as to say that all things should change lest they appear dead.

This would definitely be applicable to our own precarious position in the skeptical postmodern world. Questions of relevancy dominate our parish council meetings, our vestries, and our sermons. While our relevancy as an institution is a question I cannot answer, I find a peculiarly Anglican thought arising: that for me the relevancy of our ritual is so much more important. I see in my mind’s eye a child, many years from now, ask me why we do the strange things we are doing with this bread and this wine, like a Jewish boy asks his father what they are to remember on the Passover. I fear that when I can no longer proclaim that meaning, I will know that religion has outlived its relevancy. But this fear seems to sit alongside my fear of the boogeyman. Human beings will always be engaged in myth and meaning-making. The population of people who can answer the child’s question is shrinking rapidly, but is this something that should frighten me? What will fill the void? Ultimately, for however long we remain, it will be those of us who lovingly learned the meaning in order to share it with the world.

Bless, break, share. We should engage, then, in building up the body not necessarily in numbers, but in love and learning. What this will do, I’m not really sure. I don’t subscribe to liberal progressive optimism; I don’t think anyone can afford to anymore. But I do think it might continue the mission of Christ, and that’s enough for me.

Hooker believed in two kinds of law: natural law and revelation. We have our revelation, and we constantly turn it over and over to peer into each facet, sometimes magnifying, sometimes distorting. But we also have natural law, which Augustine and Francis argued was simply another kind of revelation, one that was much older than God’s hallowing of human flesh by the incarnation. This was a hallowing that occurred when we were still but carbon, held within stars that had not yet been born. This was creation itself. These stars too were blessed, broken, and shared, like the incarnate God – and we were brought into life. The world was our gift, and we were the world’s gift. The ritual is our remembrance of this cosmic give-and-take.

Remember. Bless. Break. Share. It is the acknowledgement of the remembrance’s power that makes us live in communion, rather than simple community.

-Clarity