The Absence in the Presence during Liturgical Distancing 2020



Title: The Incredulity of Saint Thomas [Click for larger image view]
Caravaggio's "The Incredulity of Saint Thomas"
In John 20, the story of Thomas, we do not have an explicit statement that he put his finger in the nail holes or in the lacerated side of Christ. Was the invitation enough? 

The invitation is to enter the mystery: “Put your finger here…only believe.” (20:27) The “hole” in Christ’s side is the mystery. The risen Christ calls Thomas and all of us to enter the mystery. In that we and Thomas are not different in time and space.

In Compassionate Christ, Compassionate People*, Bob Hurd muses on the silence of the congregation after reception and before the post-communion prayer. “It signifies the beyond words character of union, corresponding to comtemplatio in the fourth stage of lection divina.” (p.230) Hurd goes on to call this “companionable silence” entry into the Mystery. The silence after reception of the Eucharist is (if it is observed in practice**) the moment of stillness in the experience of the Mystery of the risen Christ. It is going beyond any notions of possession or physicality. Thomas encountered the Mystery. It is the anticipation, as Hurd notes, of the ascension. “Believing without seeing corresponds to recognizing the absence in the presence.” (p. 232) Christ is present as the soul animates the body, though it is not the body.

Could the extended hiatus from Eucharist during the Covid-19 pandemic be our extended post-communion silence when we encounter the absence in the presence of the risen Christ? Might we observe it as a time to be silent before the mystery of what we otherwise take for granted? Can this be a silence to encounter Christ truly risen, present in the absence, present behind locked doors? Christ is accessible in the mystery. Paul wrote, “Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed…” (1 Cor. 15:51) The silence is an encounter with our own mystery—that in Christ we are all being transformed, the mortal body putting on Christ’s immortality.

For catholic and apostolic Christians, the post-communion silence is a strange gift—a season to behold the mystery of Christ risen, present in the absence. And here, like Thomas Aquinas***, we fall silent because like Thomas the apostle, lost in the mystery , it dawns upon us as total awe and transforming awareness, “My Lord and my God.!”

Daniel

*Bob Hurd, Compassionate Christ, Compassionate People: Liturgical Foundations of Christian Spirituality. (Collegeville: Liturgical Press Academic, 2019).

**In searching various liturgical traditions including Roman Catholic, Episcopal, Evangelical Lutheran, and United Methodist, I could find no rubric for observing such a silence. In subsequent a subesequent email exchange with Bob Hurd, he directed me to the General Instructions on the Roman Missal nos. 56 and 88 which deal with silence in the liturgy of the Word and the liturgy of the Eucharist. 

***The great theologian fell silent from writing reputed to have said, “I can write no more. All that I have written seems like straw.” Accessed on 4/19/2020 at https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/incontext/article/aquinas

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