THE EUCHARIST AND BODILY WELL-BEING
By Arthur W. Robinson, D.D.
The editor of this volume thinks that it should include a paper upon the relation of the Eucharist to bodily well-being, and he has asked me to deal with the question. I am fully aware of the difficulty of doing so, and shall be well content if what I am able to say should lead others to feel, as I do, that the subject is one which deserves much reverent and careful attention. Perhaps that is all that any of us who are taking part in the production of this book can hope to achieve. Our desire is to be allowed to prepare the way for the clearer and stronger action of the future. Little by little we are coming to see that the scope of Christianity is bigger and more comprehensive than has for some time been supposed. We can trace the steps by which religion and its benefits had got to be looked upon as chiefly, if not exclusively, concerned with individualsand their souls. And we can recognise that there have been, and are, counter-movements at work whose tendency is to raise us out of the limitations within which we had settled and to place our feet in a larger room.
To begin with, there has been the revival of the Corporate aspect of the faith, with an insistence upon the truth that the fullest life is only to be realised through fellowship. Very slowly we have been learning that we are not meant to be perfected as individuals, but as parts of a whole of which Christ is the head and we are all of us members. Already this sense of a corporate ideal has made a great difference to our thoughts about the Church and the Sacraments, and has begun to work a change in our beliefs as to the importance of unity and the possibilities of spiritual power. And now it looks as if we are being called to a yet farther enlargement of our conceptions and hopes. To-day we are bidden to add to our knowledge in another direction. This time it is the Corporal aspect of the Christian message which is coming into view. We are to learn that our religion is not only for us all as a whole, but that it has to do with the whole of each of us. In other words it is good for the body as well as for the soul. In some degree, no doubt, we have been accustomed to admitthat the fact of the Incarnation is a witness to the dignity of our bodies, and a pledge of their ultimate glorification; but the admission has too often lacked the full force of a living conviction. At the present moment, however, many influences are combining in a remarkable way to send us ‘back to Christ’ with quite a new willingness to believe that He meant His Church to stand in the forefront of all endeavours to bless men’s bodies as well as to save their souls. Some day the world may be filled with astonishment when it sees the fuller life of Christian fellowship brought to bear upon the social and physical problems that are waiting all around us for the power that can successfully deal with them.
Now, plainly such lines of thought must sooner or later converge upon the Eucharist. We may confidently assert that if the fuller life, corporate or corporal, is to be realised and manifested by us, it will be through a more faithful and more intelligent use of the great means which our Lord has provided for establishing a vital inter-communion between Himself and His members.
Let us, then, approach the consideration of the mystery patiently, and make a serious effort to grasp what we can of its meaning in right perspective and due proportion. Tothis end it will be best to set before our minds a clear statement of the aims and objects of the highest of all Christian services.
Briefly, we may say that the Eucharist is designed to fulfil a threefold purpose for us. In the first place, it is aSIGN OF PROFESSION. Sacraments are ‘not only badges or tokens of Christian men’s profession’ (Art. xxv.); but this they most certainly are. Again and again our Lord laid stress upon the duty and necessity of an open acknowledgment of discipleship. From the earliest times the Sacrament of His Body and Blood has been regarded as the oath and pledge of a Christian’s loyalty. We may be sure that Christ meant it to be this. Perhaps it is not altogether without significance that while the ancient allegory of the Old Testament had made the test of obedience, ‘Thou shalt not eat’; in the sacred symbolism of the New Covenant it became, ‘Do this,’ ‘Take eat.’ Through the Eucharist we declare our readiness to be known as members of the Christian fellowship, and our determination to be the true followers of Christ. That is its first and simplest and most obvious signification.
Then further the Eucharist isAN ACT OF WORSHIP. It has a Godward aspect, as wellas a bearing towards the Church and the world. The original institution had for its background the slaying of the lambs and the pouring out of the blood of the Passover sacrifices. This, said our Lord, is My way of celebrating the redemption, not merely of a nation, but of a world. ‘This is My Blood of the Covenant, which is shed for many.’ And accordingly whenever we solemnly repeat His words and His acts, we do it in a Consecration Prayer addressed not to man but to God. It has been thus that from the beginning the Church has made the ‘perpetual memory,’ setting forth the finished sacrifice of the Cross as the one and only ground and hope of man’s salvation. It is thus that we draw nigh by the ‘new and living way which He has prepared for us’ until we find ourselves amid all the company of heaven, nay more, suppliants before the very throne of God, humbly but confidently asking for the grace to help us in our earthly need. The prayer is freely granted. The very offerings we present are blessed and returned for our enrichment.
And so, finally, the Eucharist is aMEANS OF GRACE. The Altar becomes a Table, and the Sacrifice ends in a Feast. We are bidden, not only to ‘do this,’ but to ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ the Body and Blood. Here it is that we reachthe most mysterious aspect of all. Christ died and rose again for us that we might live by Him. In this holiest fellowship He fulfils His promise to be with us; in this highest worship we are made partakers of His very self. How the blessing is bestowed we are unable to explain. The explanations that have been attempted are not really explanations, for they are not themselves intelligible. But we can do better than explain. We can accept the fact, and look to prove it in experience. That is the way of our English Church teaching. ‘The benefit is great,’ we are assured, ‘if with a true penitent heart and lively faith we receive this Holy Sacrament, for then we spiritually eat the Flesh of Christ and drink His Blood.’ ‘The Body and Blood of Christ are verily and indeed’—not merely metaphorically and symbolically—‘taken and received by the faithful.’ So it has been believed since the foundation of the Church. ‘The doctrine of the reality of the gift bestowed in the Holy Communion is universal in the writings of the early Christians.’101And so it will be to the end, when the holy feast is to be royally ‘fulfilled in the kingdom of God.’102
It is in connexion with this third aspectof the Eucharist that we are to attempt some further inquiry. Granted that ‘the benefit is great,’ of what does it consist? When we meet together in the gladness of loyal fellowship to ‘lift up our hearts’ through the worship which unites us to the Great High Priest within the veil; when we receive, as from His hands, the more than tokens of our participation in His present life and coming triumph; when after meekly kneeling for the benediction of the heavenly peace, we rise and go our way—what thoughts may we dare to cherish with regard to the blessing that has been granted to us?
Shall we answer that the gain must be of a spiritual character, that what we have received is ‘the strengthening and refreshing of our souls,’ that this is what is intended when the Eucharist is spoken of as a ‘means of grace’? Assuredly we shall be right to answer thus. We cannot insist upon it too strongly, or claim it too confidently. We may not feel at the moment that we are stronger and more able for our life and duty; but then we do not always feel the benefit of physical food and medicine the moment they have been taken. The gain may not appear for hours or even days, when perhaps we have ceased to think of the source from which it came.Strangely enough, too, the immediate effect of a medicine may be to bring out the mischief, and to make us imagine that we are the worse for it rather than the better; and, as we know, there have been times when it has almost seemed as if we had become more distressingly conscious of our faults and failings as a result of our Communion. In spite of it all, faith takes and gives humble thanks for the blessing which has been received.
But, when we say that the blessing is of a spiritual nature, does that mean that its effects are therefore limited to the spiritual sphere? Can we think that they could be so limited? Is not the spiritual the dominant factor in all our life, and must not the quickening and gladdening of our spirits be felt, sooner or later, through every department of our being?
Is it not true that the mind is profoundly influenced by the state of the spirit; that, when the soul is at peace and in harmony with God’s will, light shines as it were from within upon the hardest and most perplexing problems around us? The good and wise Bishop Harold Browne once declared at a Church Congress that he had never known what it was to have intellectual doubts when present at the Holy Communion. So, too,one of the most brilliant of our living teachers, speaking of what he owed to the school chapel at Eton, has said, ‘There I mercifully gained the habit of constant Communion; and this habit was the one permanent stronghold of my faith when in after years at Oxford the violent storms of intellectual trouble broke over my mind.’103
If the mind may be helped through blessing received by the spirit, why not the body also? We are realising more and more forcibly every year how intimate is the connexion between mental action and the physical organism. The two are so linked that every change in the one would seem to be accompanied by a change in the other. Moreover, we are assured by recent psychology that there are regions within us which lie outside—above and below—the levels of our ordinary consciousness; and that influences exerted in these regions are determining causes, not merely of mental, but of bodily states. The close connexion between the spiritual and the physical is clearly insisted upon in the New Testament teaching. Our Lord showed plainly that the problem of bodily disease was not to be treated apart from the more baffling needs of the soul. In unhesitating terms He traced the miseries ofmorbid physical conditions to moral wrongdoing and the presence of spiritual forces of evil. The great word ‘Salvation’ strictly interpreted meant health; and it was applied to both body and soul. It is no small part of Christ’s redemption to ‘quicken your mortal bodies through His Spirit that dwelleth in you.’104
The fact that the body has its appointed part and share in the Holy Communion is in itself significant of the honour to be paid to it, and might be taken to imply that it too is to be partaker of the benefit. And when St. Paul declares that to receive ‘unworthily’ is to be in danger of bodily sickness and even of death,105we can scarcely avoid the inference that for the worthy recipient there might be expected some corresponding advantage of quickened health and physical vitality.
If we ask what the thoughts of early Christianity were in regard to this matter, we need remain in no uncertainty as to the reply. Recent discovery of documents and the critical study of the primitive liturgies have given us a great deal of knowledge as to the religious conceptions of those who met for Christian worship in the centuries after the Apostles.At first it was with reluctance that they committed their most sacred formularies to writing. Even as late as the time of Athanasius the precise nature of the liturgy was kept as a secret, to be revealed only to those who would be certain to regard it with reverence and understanding. ‘It is not permitted,’ he wrote, ‘to describe the mysteries to those who are not initiated.’106Not until this discipline of secrecy was gradually abandoned, as Christianity came to be accepted throughout the empire, were the actual forms of service allowed to become public property. From these we are able to gather much as to the place which the Eucharist held in the life of the Church, and as to the hopes that were centred in it. These hopes, without question, were primarily of a spiritual sort. Intercession was offered with a fulness and intensity which witness to a wonderful power of sustained devotion and a boundless range of sympathy. There were many and various prayers for the peace and perfecting of the Church and the enlightenment of the world, for the spread of true knowledge, for the sanctification of all estates of believers, and above all, and most of all, for the exaltation and glory of God in earth as in heaven. But no one can so muchas glance over these liturgies without being strongly impressed by the fact that those who framed them and used them had no notion of drawing any sharp line of distinction between the spiritual and the material, between the blessing of the soul and the good to be desired for the body. If they made intercession for the Church that it might be ‘kept sheltered from storms’ and be ‘preserved founded upon the rock until the consummation of the world,’ and were careful to remember the higher needs of all classes of Christian people, they were quick to add, ‘Let us pray for our brethren exercised by sickness, that the Lord may deliver them from every disease and from every infirmity, and may restore them whole to His Holy Church.’107In the prayer of Consecration they would ask that the Bread and the Wine might be made to all who received them a means of ‘faith, and watchfulness, and healing, and sober-mindedness, and sanctification, and renovation of soul and body and spirit.’108When they had partaken of the elements they implored that these might ‘not be unto condemnation but to salvation, for the benefit of soul and body.’109
Just ten years ago a very importantaddition was made to our store of early liturgical documents by the publication of the Sacramentary of Bishop Serapion, which dates from 350A.D.The work consists of thirty prayers such as a bishop would be likely to use.110Of these the first six and the last twelve have to do with the celebration of the Eucharist; the remainder relate to Baptism, Confirmation, Ordination, and Burial.
‘Life is a remarkable note of the collection,’ and it is life in the fullest sense of the word. A few quotations will indicate this, and will serve to strengthen the impression we have already sought to convey as to the content of the blessing to be expected in the Eucharist. In the opening Offertory prayer we find the words, ‘We beseech Thee, make us living men.’ At the invocation of the Word upon the elements, ‘Make all who communicate to receive a medicine of life for the healing of any sickness.’ In ‘the prayer for those who have suffered,’ ‘Grant health and soundness, and cheerfulness and all advancement of soul and body.’ And in the final Benediction, ‘Let the communion of the Body andBlood go with this people. Let their bodies be living bodies, and their souls be clean souls.’ Provision is also made for special prayer for the sick, and for the blessings of oils and waters for their benefit, and in these connexions we find such expressions as the following: ‘Be propitious, Master; assist and heal all that are sick. Rebuke the sicknesses.’ ‘Grant them to be counted worthy of health.’ ‘Make them to have perfect health of body and soul.’ ‘Grant healing power upon these creatures that every power and every evil spirit and every sickness may depart.’
It need scarcely be said that all such references to bodily wants are set in a context which is marked by the simplest and most ardent spiritual devotion. The physical is never allowed to usurp the first place. But it is never forgotten. The early Christians believed that the Life which was offered to them in fellowship with their Lord was to extend to every part of their constitution, to ‘spirit and soul and body.’111
In the light of our increasing knowledge of psychological processes, we to-day are turning with new interest and sympathy to the old stories of marvellous healing that have come down to us from early and medieval times; and we are doing our best, by careful investigation and analysis, to separate the well-authenticated cases from those for which the evidence is not satisfactory. Already it is clear beyond reasonable doubt that the instances in which directly religious influences wrought extraordinary cures were far more numerous than have been generally admitted by critical students of the history. In Mr. Percy Dearmer’s volume entitled ‘Body and Soul’ a large number of testimonies have been collected relating to such experiences at various times throughout the Christian centuries. Thus the passage from St. Augustine is quoted, in which he said that in his days miracles were still being wrought, ‘partly by the sacraments,’ and partly through other instrumentalities. And instances of such miracles are described as they were recorded of Bernard, and Francis, and Catherine of Siena; of Philip Neri, Fox, Wesley, Cardinal Hohenlohe, Pastor Blumhardt, Father John of Cronstadt, and many more. At least two cases are given in which the benefit was definitelyconnected with the reception of Holy Communion.112
It remains now to ask how far we English Church people have any guidance to which we can appeal in our liturgical forms. We have to admit that the well-being of the body does not receive the amount of consideration in our Prayer-book that it did receive in more primitive days. And yet the allusions are more frequent than many imagine. At the outset of Morning and Evening Prayer we are reminded that we have met ‘to ask those things which are requisite and necessary as well for the body as the soul.’ Over and over we repeat the clause in the Lord’s Prayer—‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ In the Creed we joyfully attest our belief in the ‘resurrection of the body.’ In the Litany we pray to be delivered from ‘plague and pestilence.’ A special intercession is appointed for use ‘in the time of common plague or sickness,’ as well as the more general one for all who are ‘any ways afflicted, or distressed, inmind, body, or estate,’ with a particular remembrance of ‘those for whom our prayers are desired.’ In the Collects, which were intended primarily for use at the Eucharist, we find petitions for help in ‘our infirmities,’ for defence from ‘all adversities which may happen to the body,’ for preservation ‘both in body and soul,’ and for readiness of ‘body’ to do the Divine will. In the Office for Holy Communion we may be glad to note even clearer traces of the Scriptural and primitive conception as to the place which the physical part of our nature is entitled to hold in the religion of the Incarnation.
When we say the prayer for the whole Church, we humbly beseech God ‘to comfort and succour all those who in this transitory life are in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity.’ In the Prayer of Humble Access there are petitions, first to be met with in the earliest form of the English service (1548), which sound like an echo from the already quoted Prayer-book of Serapion, ‘that our sinful bodies may be made clean by His Body, and our souls washed through His most precious Blood.’ Even more intentionally significant are the words of administration appointed to be addressed to every communicant, ‘The Body of our LordJesus Christ preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life’; ‘The Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life.’ These references to the ‘body’ appear to have been deliberately introduced into our service. In the Latin form the celebrant had said, ‘custodiat animam meam in vitam aeternam.’113And as the body has its place of privilege, so also it has a share of the corresponding responsibility. In the Prayer of Oblation ‘we offer and present our souls and bodies to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice.’ Finally, among the Collects suggested to be said after the Offertory, and at other times ‘as occasion shall serve,’ the foremost place is given to two which are closely connected with the thought of bodily welfare. The first, ‘Assist us mercifully, O Lord,’ was a prayer used in medieval times for persons who had gone on a pilgrimage to seek physical as well as spiritual blessings; the second is for the sanctification andgovernance of ‘both our hearts and bodies,’ that we may be ‘preserved in body and soul, through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.’
So then, in our Prayer-book, as in the older service books, the benefit of the body is closely associated with the gain which is sought for the soul. The physical effect is regarded as dependent upon the spiritual gift. As the Bishop of Birmingham has put it, ‘though in the Holy Communion the body is sanctified through the sanctification of our spirit, and transformed and endowed, in subtle and secret ways which pass our comprehension, with capacity for the life immortal; yet it is through the spirit and not directly.’114The blessing begins with the spirit, but it certainly does not end there.
This sketch of a great subject, imperfect as it has been, may serve to turn the thoughts of some of us to an aspect of our religious privileges which has not been very much before our minds. A friend who had been spending a good deal of time on ‘cures’ on the continent as well as in this country, wrote to me lately to say that he was beginning to think that he ought to get more assistancetowards recovery from his religion than he had been getting. That is an idea which accords with the temper of the first Christians, and is certainly encouraged by a careful study of our own Prayer-book. We dare not assert that all ‘the ills that flesh is heir to’ would disappear before a quickened vitality of soul, and the mental soundness which might follow from this; but we can well believe that the tendency of true religion is all in the direction of physical health. Indeed, we may go so far as to say that there is no restorative force that we know of to compare with the influence of spiritual peace and gladness. We have amongst us those who are fully conscious that they have owed much bodily strength to prayers and to sacraments. And there are medical men who would not hesitate to give their confirmatory testimony from what they have seen in their experiences of the sick.
Sometimes we hear of small attendance at the weekly or daily Eucharist. If this is to be remedied it will be because truer views have come to prevail again of the meaning of the greatest service of the Church. We shall recover the spiritual fervour and force of primitive Christianity when we learn once more to give the Eucharist its proper place in our worship and our life. We might behelped to do this if, like the first Christians, we accustomed ourselves to look to our Communions not only for the blessing that they can bring to our souls, but for the lesser, and yet not less real, blessing which we may find in them for the sanctification and preservation of our bodies.
PRAYER AND MENTAL HEALINGBYARTHUR CHANDLER, D.D.BISHOP OF BLOEMFONTEIN
PRAYER AND MENTAL HEALING
BYARTHUR CHANDLER, D.D.BISHOP OF BLOEMFONTEIN