I have been asked to provide a forum for tthe adult education hour at our Episcopal cathedral in Paris. It should be amusing, since (a) the congregation contains a lot of rich expatriates, and (b) it is locate dat a very swanky address in the "golden triangle": right off the Champs Elysee next to one of the world's most expensive hotels (The Four Seasons). So, I have decided to talk about the necessity of Christian socialism!
In preparation, I have been running across lots of interesting stuff. Here is a sample, a quotation from Fr. Kenneth Leech, one of the luminaries of my generation:
Transformation occurs only in the liturgy and not in the world, there bread and wine remain hoarded, but not offered, concentrated and not broken, maldistributed and not shared. The Eucharist becomes a freak, a contradiction of social reality, instead of a pointer to how reality should be reshaped. If we then go back to read the early Christian Fathers we find how far we have come from their understanding. St. John Chrysostom draws the closest connection between the real presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament and his real presence in the poor and oppressed. We need to recover this connection between the Sacraments and the structures of the world, and to take seriously the social and political consequences of being one body in Christ.
And here is one of St. John Chrysostom's sermons. It is rather hilarious, in that it asks the congregation of the principal church in the Roman capital of Constantinople to imagine what it would be like if everyone did as the first Christians, and gave everything they had to the Church for redistribution! "And if you please, let us now for awhile depict it in words, and derive at least this pleasure from it, since you have no mind for it in your actions."
No comments:
Post a Comment