Today was Communion once a gain at church; I recently gained the privilege of participating in such.
In my readings of Catholic theologians in my look at Catholicism and RO, sacrament has a meaning for me perhaps beyond that mentioned in the Christian Reformed forms – sacrament is the place where the physical and transcendent are intermingled.
This mirrors the balance in the place of the church. The church gathers for things like prayer and sermons and Bible study, but needs also to be involved in meeting the physical needs of its surrounding community and elsewhere. With too much emphasis on either side, the church becomes warped.
And this, in turn, is like the peculiar makeup of human beings themselves, a mixture of transcendent and physical.
Thus, sacraments, especially Communion, emphasize the odd tensions in all of these. Communion is a remembrance of Christ’s death, a way of tangibly experiencing him physically, while he is in a transcendent place. It is an expression of union and solidarity with the church of all times in all places, as one Body of Christ that together celebrates the Sacrament. It also expresses the bond between people, as exists in both planes. It fulfills the participant’s inner need by being a very human activity, existing in both planes.
Quite interesting.
