Study Time at the Abbey

This past week we had classes from Dr Michon Matthiesen, a sacramental theologian who teaches at the University of Mary in North Dakota, and a long-time friend of Mother Sofia.

Dr Matthiesen began by inviting us to consider the full scope of the Catholic sacramental imagination, in which God reveals himself and communicates grace in ways accommodated to the human creature.  God communicates through creation, through the words of Scripture, in the incarnation of his Son and in the ecclesial sacraments, which St Thomas Aquinas calls “prolongations of the Incarnation.”  We read a chapter from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and pondered what prevents or helps us to see all things sacramentally.  With Thomas Aquinas, we considered the way in which God uses the ecclesial sacraments as instrumental causes of grace to communicate to his creatures the fruits of Christ’s incarnation and passion.

Next, we shifted our focus to the Eucharist, and spent time coming to understand exactly how the Mass is a sacrificial banquet.  According to the writings of French theologian Maurice de la Taille, eucharistic sacrifice is a gift offered by human beings to God of the already completed passion and death of his Son, in union with the self-offering of Christ to the Father at the Last Supper and on the cross.  This sacrifice is completed by the reception of the gift by God, as manifested in the resurrection and ascension of Christ to the right hand of the Father, where he stands as a continual offering, “the Lamb once slain who dies no more.”  At Mass, our offering to God is received and returned to us in the gift of the body and blood of Christ by which we are united to his Son.

When we considered the connection between Baptism and the Eucharist, we learned that it is the priestly character given to us at Baptism which allows us to participate actively in the eucharistic sacrifice.  We do this by our self-offering, the laying down of our lives and bodies in union with Christ on the altar, as well as on the altar of our own hearts.  The altar stands for the threshold between the profane and the sacred, as well as the nuptial bed on which spousal union is renewed beneath the wedding canopy.

Finally, we turned to the Eucharist and eschatology, or how the Mass is an interruption, a reminder that even as we stand before the real presence of Christ our risen Lord, our wounded Bridegroom, and our eschatological Judge, we also taste a real absence, that is the “not yet” of our pilgrim state on our way to the fullness of God’s kingdom.  The liturgy draws together the memory of the past, and the memory of the future, and brings about solidarity with the dead and those yet to be born.  It expresses the union of the earthly and heavenly sacrifice, sows hope and desire for that full union with Christ in a new heaven and a new earth, in which all material reality will be transparent to God.

We recognize that this concurrence of sacrifice and marriage, of oblative self-gift and intimate union, as at the heart of our monastic vocation.  Monastic life is a radical living-out of baptismal priesthood, a eucharistic act, a laying down of one’s life, with Christ, for his friends and ours.  Our desire is to live this more deeply and consciously at all times, but especially during the Mass, so that our desire and our capacity for sacrifice and marriage continues to grow.