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To Discern the Body

“The night has passed, and the day lies open before us; let us pray with one heart and mind.”

In the seminary at which I teach, we say these words each day as we begin the office of Morning Prayer. Profound and fitting though they are, I confess they occasionally give me pause. One heart and mind? I have sometimes thought. Not likely.

In our time — and perhaps this is true of all times — if you are even a little pastorally observant, you will quickly become aware of the fault lines that mark your community. You will come to know something of the effects on those with whom you gather of the many unravelings in the ecclesiastical canopy and fissures in the broader body politic.

If you are asked to lead in such a context, you will become aware, perhaps hyper-aware, of the propensity for what you do and say to be perceived as partisan: too much for some and not enough for others, setting some on edge and rubbing others the wrong way, everything altogether all too easily misspoken, misheard, misappropriated. This is not a phenomenon peculiar to the seminary; it is one we experience in any given Christian community, any congregation, in which we spend any decent length of time. Once we get to know it a bit, “one heart and mind” begins to seem like wishful thinking, sheer projection.

We are not without our aspirations, of course, that from disparate backgrounds we might be as one “school for the Lord’s service.” But as we look around, it is so easy for our attention to snag on what might separate, to perceive only the surfaces of divergence and disagreement. Yet what I have from time to time begun to glimpse — and I have heard from others something similar — is that before and beyond all of that, Christ issues to us, gently insistent, an invitation to discern the Body.

I do not think Christ’s invitation is withdrawn when our ecclesial imaginaries become clouded by cynicism; I think his invitation is always already just there. And just so our unity of heart and mind is not something we simply muster ourselves. On a fundamental level it is already achieved. By grace we are gathered with those whom Almighty God has “knit together … in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of … Christ our Lord.”

Something like this invitation is described by the poet Scott Cairns, in his extraordinary memoir A Short Trip to the Edge. The book largely concerns his pilgrimages to the Orthodox monasteries of Mount Athos, but the passage I have in mind, in fact, recalls an experience that occurred while he worshiped at an Episcopal Church, All Saints (whose name is, he now realizes, “very significant”):

It happened more or less like this: I had made my way to the altar for Communion, as I had many times before. This morning, as the Eucharist was placed in my hand — as I stared at that thin wafer with sudden apprehension of what I held — I heard Father Stan say, as he had always said, “The Body of Christ.”

As the cup came around, I took that wafer between thumb and finger, and dipped it into the chalice of wine, accompanied by the deacon’s words: “The blood of Christ.”

I placed those appalling elements on my tongue and returned to my place in the nave, where I knelt to pray, with uncharacteristic concentration. Then, though my eyes were closed, I began to notice the flickering effect caused by the passing of others who were then returning to their seats. As they walked down the aisle immediately to my right, they passed between me and the glorious stained-glass windows on the other side of the aisle, through which, all this time, brilliant sunlight was pouring. As others partook at the altar, the priest’s words continued, echoing throughout the sanctuary, “The Body of Christ.”

As those words resonated, I beheld the flickering shadows of those moving by my side. I startled, first, to the realization that these men, women, and children were the Body of Christ, and then, as suddenly, with the help of flickering shadow, I startled to the realization that these represented as well the body entire — the living and the dead, the cloud whose presence I had, until this moment, failed to acknowledge (39-40, italics original).

Now, Cairns’ point is ultimately one about the communion of saints: he describes this as “the occasion for my first apprehending the appalling presence of the cloud of witnesses, before whom we necessarily stand, regardless of our habitual obliviousness to the fact” (39). But the first realization he startles to — that “these men, women, and children were the Body of Christ” — is surely a fact to which we also are habitually oblivious.

Lest that all seem unduly romantic, let me make clear that it is not a problem that any Christian community is susceptible of different readings, and not all of them so apparently elevated. Decidedly non-mystical forms of analysis are available to us, and we will need them too, because what we contemplate in the Body, however transparent to the Divine, is never not creaturely; because the invisible is expressed in the visible; and, most soberingly, because in this order what we are confronted with and mixed up in is always a corpus permixtum.

So while it is true that our theological and spiritual perception can easily become silted if we employ only the more agonistic and agonized ways of reading our communities — regarding things only from “a human point of view” (2 Cor. 5:16) — we cannot do without them. We will need the sobriety of the sociological analysis, the evaluations of power and privilege, an attunement to the particular entanglements of ourselves and our people. Recognizing the realities of creaturely limitation and sin demands a certain disenchantment.

Yet more intriguing, still, is the inkling that Christ’s invitation to discern the Body is not so much one issued before and beyond other modes of interpretation, as I suggested earlier, as it is one concerned with discovering his presence in, with, and under them. To take up the imagery of Cairns’ narration, it will have to be a perception afforded not simply with our eyes closed, in abstraction from empirical reality, but also with our eyes wide open, yet spiritual senses undulled.

If that is so, then to discern the Body in our communities will not so often be to discern the church triumphant, but rather to discern the Body in pain, the broken Body. It may even be to perceive something of the participation of the Body in the sufferings of its Lord. Further, because we seek to perceive the Body as and in the actually existing community and not, as it were, above our heads, there is a kind of grounding discipline involved in the task: a tethering to the given. And not least whenever we are tempted to think that the grass elsewhere might be greener — in a community more ideologically streamlined, perhaps, or one less exposed to the storms of cultural conflict, or simply somewhere where our presence brings with it less baggage. No: unless and until we are called or compelled, this is where the Body is to be encountered. As Esther de Waal distills a characteristically Benedictine insight, “God is not elsewhere.”

It is a commonplace in the Christian tradition to suggest that this discernment is intensified in a singular way in the Eucharist. This is, of course, the context in which the Pauline phrase “to discern the body” is articulated (1 Cor. 11:29). Interpretation of the verse is ecumenically contested. But most will agree that “To discern the body of Christ is to discern the unity of the church in the participation of the one bread” (Kimlyn Bender, 1 Corinthians, 197). St. Augustine puts it more strongly still: “If you then are the Body and members of Christ, the mystery of yourselves is laid upon the table of the Lord, the mystery of yourselves you receive” (Sermons 272).

Yet, as in the Corinthian correspondence, to become effectual, this perception must ramify ethically within the community. As Austin Farrer writes, about the work of Christ in his Body: “The eucharist is the focus of it but the field of it is their common life together.” To be open to discerning the Body in and among these people, in this place, at this time, is to be open to Christ’s moral (and political) claims upon how it should be among us. There is a gracious givenness to be contemplated; there is also a goal toward which to press ahead. The Spirit is ever seeking to draw us into the full stature of Christ, to grow us to maturity. And, as St. Paul testified, to do so through our struggles, “until Christ is formed among your congregations” (as J. Louis Martyn translates Gal. 4:19).

As I conclude, three caveats. First, while I know there is a kind of second naïveté about my account, I do not mean to espouse a simple liturgical idealism. Worship may often be the forum for the graced perception of the God-given unity of the Body. But it does not produce the Body in any mechanistically sanctifying manner. Worship’s gifts can also be waylaid, as Lauren Winner has argued sharply. Even the sensibility of togetherness can foster complacent groupthink, and much worse.

Second, any grace-given glimpse does not begin to exhaust understanding of the reality of Christ’s work in the assembly, let alone in the world. Archbishop Michael Ramsey:

We do not know the whole fact of Christ Incarnate unless we know His Church and its life as a part of His own life. Yet the other language, in which Christ is called head over the body (Eph. 1:23, 4:15), warns us against a mere immanentism and reminds us that to know the Church is not to know the inexhaustible truth of the Christ who has ever more to give (The Gospel and the Catholic Church, 35).

This realization also carries a critical edge. As John Webster never tired of reminding us, it means that Christ stands not simply with and among his people, but over and against our sin — in judgment, ready to bring us to nothing and to recreate us in righteousness. (That is why one of the surefire moments to perceive aright the truth of the Body is in the prayers of confession.)

Third, this is not to suggest that a kind of heightened spiritual alertness is going to be our only and everyday form of engagement. Nobody could sustain that. To paraphrase Evelyn Underhill, attention needs to be accompanied by habit. But precisely by showing up in season and out of season — by being present to one another despite it all — we are putting ourselves in the place where Christ — whose presence is already promised — can begin to show us something, even the very givenness of his Body.

Samuel Tranter, PhD is Academic Dean at Cranmer Hall, St John’s College, in Durham, England, and an Honorary Research Fellow of Durham’s Department of Theology and Religion. A lay Anglican, he teaches and writes about theology and ethics and has served in theological education across the UK and in South-East Asia.

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