Sunday Letter: Then The Letting Go
Sunday Letter: Then The Letting Go
"The vast operations of the spiritual as of the physical world are simply a turning again to the source."
MacDonald-specific posts can be found here.
You can manage your subscription here, including unsubscribing from or resubscribing to MacDonald-related emails.
A Prayer for the Past
Every highest human act is just a giving back to God of that which he first gave to us.— “Thou, God, hast given me; here again is thy gift ; I send my spirit home.” Every act of worship is a holding up to God of what God hath made us. “Here, Lord, look what I have got : feel with me in what thou hast made me, in this thy own bounty, my being. I am thy child, and know not how to thank thee save by uplifting the heaven-offering of the overflowing of thy life and calling aloud ' It is thine : it is mine, I am thine, and therefore I am mine.'” The vast operations of the spiritual as of the physical world are simply a turning again to the source.
—George MacDonald
“I [Paul] planted, Apollos watered, but it is God who made it grow! And so, neither the one planting nor the one watering is anything: only God makes it grow. Now the one planting and the one watering are the same, but each will receive a personal reward according to his own labor. Indeed, we are God’s co-workers! You are God’s field, God’s building.” 1 Corinthians 3:5–9 (EOB)
In all historic liturgies, the Offertory, that is, the bringing of the people's offerings to God, precedes the Holy Communion. In the Offertory is celebrated variously throughout the world. In some it is simply a passing of a plate or bag down a line of pews, in others, especially in Africa, it is a grand celebration of bringing of gifts for the use of the church, which is to say the community, to the Altar of God. If you look on YouTube you will see grand processions of the whole church in a song-filled queue singing praises as the people bring tithes, bread, wine, etc. This is very much how the offertory worked in the early church. The people would bring the fruits of their labor to God. Often it was in the offertory that not just tithes and alms were brought but the bread and wine to be consecrated itself. An adaptation of this was brought back into popularity in the Liturgical Movement of the late 20th century, where the ushers, or other lay people, would bring the hosts and cruets to be consecrated up with the tithes at the Offertory.
The importance of this is:
All that is brought to the altar was God’s to begin with. The first principle of all Reformation theology is that God is Gracious: we receive what we did not earn, because God is gracious. This includes the fruits of our labor, the fact that we were born, that we grow, that even the plants that we eat grow: all we receive is a Gift.
In order to show that we love and honor God, in our thankfulness we bring that which we have received and present it to him. It was not ours to begin with, and he can have it all, not just a tithe, but a tithe will do in most cases as Scripture has modelled. Additionally, to not recognize that what he have has come from above1, we risk the peril of thinking that we made things happen: we watered, therefore we made it grow. This is idolatrous self-sufficiency. Alternatively, we might think that we own what we made: that it belongs to us. It belongs to the one who produced, it, and the one who produced you, your parents, the whole universe, is God.
In the liturgy, after the Offertory, there is the Sursum Corda, or the portion of the liturgy that begins with “Lift up your hearts.” As we have placed our offerings down, we have let them go, we are brought up soon after. Through the operation of the priest, symbolically acting in persona Christi, that which is offered, the Bread and Wine, is through the invocation of the Holy Spirit now called Body and Blood.
We receive life from God, we eat the food that he makes grow, as we cooperate with that effort in our vocation as caretakers—gardeners, and we offer it back to him, because, like our very lives, and our parent’s lives, all came from God first. And when we let go, and offer it back to him, he, in giving us his Son, returns our efforts with life itself: the things which are best for us given our present state and condition. He made us in his image, and when we stop trying to be God by holding on to what is not ours (the only things we really own are our sins), we receive much, much more. We are lifted up to participate the source itself, not just the fruits.
"The vast operations of the spiritual as of the physical world are simply a turning again to the source."
Further Reading: For the Life of the World, Alexander Schmemann
{ιμκ☩}
"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there can be no variation or shifting shadow.” (James 1:17 EOB)