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REACHING OUT
St. AUGUSTINE'S CHURCH NEWSLETTER
Autumn 2004 No 55
WORLD IN A WAFER
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When l was a
child there were two kinds of ice cream, ice
cream in cornets and ice cream in wafers, and I
mustn't forget the choc ice! Ice cream wafers
and choc ices were considered slightly more
sophisticated and were strictly for the adults.
Wafers were banned, because, unable to contain
their melting mass, they were likely to drip all
over our hand knitted jumpers and fawn coloured
shorts! O happy days, we certainly knew how to
have fun in the 50's!
An article on
the history of ice cream? Well actually no, it's
about wafers, not ice cream wafers, but
communion wafers, what we in the 'know' call the
hosts. I want to say something about those
hosts, and more particularly the priest's host,
that's the big one, because that wafer sums up
the whole purpose of what the Church is here
for. Every time the Eucharist or Mass is
celebrated the cosmic Christ, Jesus himself
becomes present in our midst. Don't ask me how,
all I know is that at the last supper he took
bread and said, 'This is my body' and then he
took the cup and said, 'This is my blood' and
told his followers that by doing the same, he
would be always present with them. As a priest
that's exactly what I have been doing nearly
every day for the past 23 years.
Sometimes it
gets a bit lonely celebrating the Eucharist in
the week when there are only one or two people
in the congregation. Yes l know it says in the
bible that when two or three are gathered in my
name, there I am in the midst of them, but if I
were running a comer shop I would have to close
down. So why keep at it? I keep at it because I
also know that when I celebrate the Eucharist
all our everyday ideas about time and space are
suspended. I am in St. Augustine's Holly Road at
9.30am on a Monday morning, but I am carried
into another world, God's world, a world
in which there are no spatial barriers, a
world that collapses time and place. 'From East
to West a perfect offering is made to the honour
of my name', not only here and now but 'from age
to age', spooky or what! Is this Harry Potter or
Lord of the Rings? No its not, but in
celebrating the Eucharist I am enacting a story,
a story about the origin and destiny of the
whole world, a world that extends far beyond the
bounds of North Town.
The Eucharist
tells a story about a world united, not the
global village which shrinks the world to
proportions measurable by the click of a mouse,
but the story of a united human race in which
each of us is identified as a person and in
which each of us is entitled to equal measures
of human freedom and dignity and the means to
obtain them. That's the world I want to belong
to, the world I see before me as I take the host
in my hands, the whole world in a wafer. It’s
your world too, why not come and see for
yourself?
Your friend and priest,
Father Keith
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