Jesus Christ transfigured the ecology of the world, the abbot of Glenstal Abbey said recently. In the eucharist bread and wine were offered – neither of these were natural products, but human creations in co-operation with God-given raw materials.
The church had always struggled with this mystery, but over the 2000 years of its history, it had been in times of pressure and extreme anguish and difficulty that the “deep ecology” of this mystery had been forced upon us.
“Eucharist is the leavening of the batch of creation; the eventual blood transfusion of all humanity, so that the economy of our ecology is transferred to the alternative energy of Divine Love,” he said. “The bread and wine which we consecrate, the harvest of ecology and the work of human hands, is turned into the Body and Blood of divinity, so that we too can be nourished by this food and drink to make us into organisms breathing alternative energy into the ecosystems of this world. We are the priests who transubstantiate the world into immortal diamond.”
Abbot Patrick said a new vision was urgently required that placed responsibility before recklessness and that valued communion and co-operation over egoism and exploitation. “The privileged place, where the healing of this wound of our alienation might take place, is at the table of the Eucharist … When we gather around the Eucharistic table of intimacy, the circles of embrace include the natural order,” he said.
“When we prepare the gifts of the Eucharistic gesture, we do so in harmony with nature. We do not bring to the table raw elements: the grain and the grape. Rather, we bring ‘the work of our hands’: the bread and the wine …. These all already testify to a privileged co-operation with nature and with God … This tripartite relationship of nature, humanity, and God is ever renewed at the table of the Eucharist, and it is timely that we would attend more consciously to the silent and, at first sight, naïve presence of nature at this table.
“More than anything else the Eucharist underlines that our destiny is communion: unity, re-membering, bringing together that which is separated and fragmented, be that with God, with others, with fellow Christians, or with the natural order. To celebrate Eucharist is to come home – to each other, with our God, in the company of a forgiving nature.”
Abbot Patrick described the ecological crisis of our time as “such a responsibility”. “The human-induced destruction of the earth’s biosphere, our waters, our rainforests, our air quality, and so on, are a new responsibility,” he said. “No other generation has had to face the knowledge that our action, or indeed inaction, will determine the quality and the diversity of future life on our planet.
“At the table of celebration and thanksgiving we are challenged to a new sense of our kinship with, and covenantal responsibility for, the mountain and the valley, the river and the sea, the air and the soil; the fish, the flower, the bird, the plant and the animal. The table of the Eucharist is a place too of learning: teaching us through its action right relationship with ourselves, with others, with our God, and with the earth.
“We can no longer afford to dominate ‘mother nature’; we must learn to live in communion with her.”
Speaking during an Ecology, Education and Eucharist course held in Glenstal in August, Abbot Patrick Hederman said that the earth had to be subsumed into heaven and that we were the ones to achieve this miracle. The eucharist was the technology we were given to achieve this goal.