Flesh and Blood: A Sermon on John 6: 41-51 (et seq)

(Delivered at St. Bartholomew's Church, NYC, August 12, 2018)

It doesn’t look like bread, does it, the little wafer we hand out? It is, of course, but it looks almost like a simple disc of some unknown substance. Not quite cardboard, certainly not bread you’d get a sandwich on. More like a Necco wafer, if your remember those, than what you think of when you think of bread.

But it is bread.

It’s made from unleavened wheat flour and water. The bread most Episcopal churches use is made by Cavanagh Altar Breads, a secular baker out of Rhode Island that provides altar bread to C.M. Almy, which sells it to Catholics, Protestants, and those of us in between.

Apparently, Cavanagh’s bread has something like 80% market share, and its popularity was enough to put the Poor Clare Nuns of Bernham, Texas, out of the business. A few orders of nuns have stopped competing and started distributing as retailers, so there’s a whole distribution chain in which these wafers travel.

When we give it to you, we remind you what it is: “The Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven.”

But how can something that barely qualifies as bread be the Body of Christ? And does the recurring liturgical formula, “The Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven,” become so rote that we don’t hear it, don’t take it in?

Because if you think about it, “the Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven” is not an easy teaching. The Eucharist, which we share, which is central to this service, is one we don’t reflect on often.

[That’s strange because, in breaking with Roman Catholicism, the Church of England in the Thirty-nine Articles rejected the traditional 7 sacraments taught in that faith, holding instead in Article 25 that “[t]here are two Sacraments ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel, that is to say, Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord. The other five were denied the status of sacraments on the ground that they were more properly viewed as “states of life allowed in the Scriptures”, such as marriage, or holy orders, or else they are the result of “corrupt following of the Apostles”—extreme unction, Penance, or Confirmation.

Now, we’ve moved away from the 39 Articles and, since the success of the Anglo-Catholic movements of the 19th Century, we have welcomed back confirmation, anointing of the sick, and Confession.] (Bracketed paragraphs omitted in delivery).

But, for all the quarrels about the sacraments that have marred Anglican Church, the two sacraments on which the most Low Church and High Church partisans have always agreed on are baptism and “the Supper of the Lord.”

So the Eucharist—the eating of bread and drinking of wine in commemoration of the death of Jesus—is at the core of our liturgy, at the core of our worship.

Normally, we just do it, and don’t grapple with the language Jesus uses. But today, I don’t think we have a choice in the matter—we have to listen to what Jesus says, and try to understand the emotionally-laden language he uses.

Which means that this week and next, we’ll be facing some of the harder to bear language in the Fourth Gospel, in which Jesus talks at length about what it means to say that Jesus himself is the Bread of Life.

So it’s our duty to wrestle with this Gospel and next week’s, each part of the same conversation, but broken up in our weekly reading so that this week we get to think of Jesus as the bread that comes down from heaven, so that whoever eats of it shall not die, and not just let it sail over our heads.

A nice metaphor. Jesus is like manna from heaven—a phrase that nowadays can mean simply a great gift, unexpected and welcome, life-enhancing.

Not too threatening yet, right?

We feed on Jesus, and, since we are still in the more abstract part of the Gospel today, we can think of it as Jesus nourishing us with the Spirit, or by his teachings.

But then this Gospel reading has a sting in its tail. Jesus then tells is that “Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

And we, like the crowd, do a double take. He can’t mean it literally, can he?

Next week it gets a little frighteningly concrete. The crowd is murmuring “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

And here’s where Jesus really does an un-Episcopalian thing: crosses the line of good taste and discretion. Jesus says to them

“Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”

Archbishop William Temple in his Readings in St. John's Gospel (First and Second Series) reminds us that these words were especially shocking to Jesus’s Jewish audience because to consume the blood of sacrifices was a grave offense under the Law.

Not to mention what Raymond Brown, the great scholar of the Fourth Gospel, calls “the Jewish repugnance at the cannibalistic thought of eating his flesh.” Brown asserts that these words led to claims that the early Christians were in fact cannibals and blood-drinkers, and the Roman historian Tacitus says that Nero “fastened the guilt” for the great fire of Rome “on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace.” (Annals, 15:4)

Even today these words can draw strong reactions when they aren’t cushioned by routine, safe in a church. These last few verses disturbed the writer Alan Ryan enough that he wrote a story, called “Following the Way,” about a young man who, over a period of years, keeps meeting a Jesuit priest who repeatedly invites him into the order, only for him to discover at the end that the chalice which promises eternal life is not filled with wine.

Mind you, I graduated from a Jesuit college, and I’m not taking any bets about their induction ceremonies.

But just as Ryan found in these lines fuel for a Gothic fantasia, the Gospel itself tells us that “because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” In fact, only the Twelve remained—and one of them, as Jesus rather pointedly observes, is a devil.

So why did Jesus choose such provocative, such offensive, language?

Quite possibly because it was the only language that came close to doing the job. Temple reminds us that to eat something is to take it into ourselves and to use it as the basic building blocks assembling our bodies; we make Jesus’s full humanity—his flesh—his mortality—a constituent element of who we are. We make our own the dying of Jesus.

Likewise, the book of Deuteronomy tells us, “The blood is the Life”; (No, I didn’t recognize Count Dracula was quoting Scripture until I read Temple either. Apparently Shakespeare was right to warn us that the “Devil can quote Scripture for his purpose”).

By drinking from the cup, Archbishop Temple tells us, we accept the life of Jesus into ourselves, the resurrected life.

Temple urges us to see a synergy in the eating of the Bread and the drinking from the cup, that each requires the other.

Or, as Temple puts it, by eating the bread, we receive the power of self giving and self-sacrifice; by drinking the cup, we receive, through that self-giving and that self-sacrifice, the life that is triumphant over death and united to God.

Which is beautiful and eloquent Eucharistic theology—but what does it mean here, today, this minute?

Let me try a translation:

We Christians believe that we are called to lives of service, not of selfishness. By eating the bread, we make part of our very physical being a perpetual reminder of that calling. We literally take it into ourselves and let it become a part of our anatomy.

By drinking of the cup, we claim that the love of God, the deathless and unkillable love of God is so much a part of the redemption of Creation that that love flows through our very arteries and veins. We acknowledge that we are called to love, and that love literally pervades our being—again, our physical being.

We ourselves claim the blessing and assert that the love of God surges through us, is that of which we are made.

So how can we refuse to love, to forgive, to care for others? How can we allow ourselves to let that love become just a dry routine, instead of a call to arms?

But not to literal arms, not to violence, or triumphalism. We are called to the much harder task of building bridges to those with whom we disagree. To those who have hurt us, or, even harder, to those whom we have hurt.

We are called to a life in which we pray and try to live the beautiful words of St Francis:

Where there is hatred, let me sow love,
Where there is injury, pardon,
Where there is doubt, faith,
Where there is despair, joy;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.

And how can we, knowing our own faults and weaknesses, our own moments of anger and unkindness, even hope to achieve this?

We eat the bread of life, we drink from the cup of love.

It’s in our muscle memories, our own sinews, our very DNA.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Down for the Count

When I was eleven, my grammar school had a book fair, and I bought a copy of Dracula, the original Bram Stoker novel. It was in December, I remember, and later that day, my sister and I found out that our beloved grandmother had died. I fled into the book, the stunning opening sequence of which--Jonathan Harker's trip to Transylvania, his meeting Count Dracula, his encounter with Dracula's wives--gave me a nightmare that kept me from reading any further for some time. (I strongly suspect, but don't know, that this nightmare was some part of my processing my sense of loss.) Two years later, I saw the Frank Langella version, and returned to Stoker's original.

I have visited Dracula recurrently ever since.

The book itself is brilliant, and no film adaptation has done it justice--Francis Ford Coppola's misleadingly namedBram Stoker's Dracula (1992) flirts with elements of the book, but overlays a romanticized version of Vlad the Impaler and a cheapening of the core group hunting him--Coppola deprives Jonathan Harker of his stature in the novel, and Anthony Hopkins's Van Helsing is, well...



Yeah. "She is the Devil's concubine" is probably the nadir of a great acting career.

Another not-so-much version at least had the benefit of introducing me to Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata, and to classical music, so, that's another one I owe the Count.



In any event, every year around Halloween I read a supernaturally themed work--ranging from classics to modern genre fiction. I'm not a snob about it; Peter Straub's underrated, chilling Julia, Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot, even the deservedly despised Varney the Vampyre (James Malcolm Ryder or Thomas Preskett Prest, depending on whom you believe). My late, lamented professor and thesis adviser, Walter Kendrick boasted of being the only man to actually finish reading Varney, and, alas, he still holds the title.

Two years ago, I read Kim Newman's Anno Dracula, in which he felt free to hijack not only Stoker's plot and characters but those of other Victorian writers, and of other novels set in the era. (Yes, I was writing Phineas at Bay at the time, and Newman's borrowings, like Trollope's own, encouraged me to let rip and follow my own allusive turn of mind.) Newman knew enough to keep the Count offstage as much as possible, and his presence, almost never seen, but always looming over the scene, makes the book work--a trick he repeats in his Johnny Alucard, a seemingly disconnected series of stories that suddenly clicks into a coherent whole, with a brilliant twist.

This year I am re-reading one of the very few Dracula pastiches to restore the Count's mystery and ability to frighten, despite his cultural ubiquity. I refer to Elizabeth Kostova's 2005 debut novel The Historian, a subtle, slowly unravelling skein that I am enjoying on this go as much as I did when I first read it, ten years ago.

All because, in a time of terrible loss, a book gave a child a lesser fear to distract him from a very much greater one.

Thank you, Bram Stoker.

Musings from a County Dock

So la Caterina and I are down in North Carolina, from whence she hails, and we're staying at her sister's beautiful home on a lake. We came down for a family funeral, and I was once again reminded of how remarkably warm and embracing her side of our family is--the extended family, too, I mean; her two sisters and my brother-in-law and their children took me in from day 1. But the network of cousins, aunts, uncles, &c., found time, despite their grief, to make sure I was made very welcome.

So I'm writing this looking out on a beautiful lake, far from home, and yet feeling quite at home.

Meanwhile, I'm waiting for CreateSpace to finish re-formatting revisions to Phineas at Bay, and to finalize the book, and re-reading Antony Powell's Hearing Secret Harmonies, the last volume of his twelve-novel series, Dance to the Music of Time. After finishing Simon Raven's "Alms for Oblivion" series and the linked "First Born in Egypt" books, as well as the two linking novels The Roses of Picardie and September Castle (which occur between the two series; a good conspectus may be found here), I felt the need of a change--something similar in scope but different in tone. So I returned to Powell.

As I near the end of this epic re-read, I've noticed much that I missed the first go, probably because Powell's narrative verve just carried me along. Some have criticized the ending, with Widmerpool falling prey to the young mystic Scorpio Murtlock, but it actually makes sense, in my opinion. Widmerpool has always had a self-destructive streak (his Cold War activities, his tangling with higher-ranking officers during the war), as well as a streak that Stringham describes as "slavish" that first surfaces in the minor incident of a banana thrown by the prestigious Budd which accidentally hits Widmerpool. His reaction to Barbara Goring's pouring a full canister of sugar on him at a dance, his engagement to Mildred Haycock, and finally his marriage to Pamela Flitton, demonstrate an escalation of the tension between Widmerpool's will to power and his will to self-destruction. He survives each, but in HSH, we see that he is seriously undermined by Pamela's final act: her suicide during a tryst with American academic Russell Gwinnett. (This is also entirely in character for Pamela, who, we are told, is like a corpse during intercourse. In Books Do Furnish a Room, at the Fission Party, Pamela asks Nick Jenkinsif he's attended any funerals recently, remarks that she's just awaiting her own; Nick answers, conventionally enough, "Not imminent, I hope?" only for Pamela to reply "I rather hope it is." When Nick asks her "How are you enjoying political life?" she replies, "Like any other form of life - sheer hell." Her thanatos-drive is already in high gear, in short) Widmerpool's loss of his actually rather precarious balance after this, and the reckless rush toward power through the youth movement combine to his undoing--and yet he breaks free of Murtlock at the very end. It's a superb ending, really; Widmerpool's survival instinct may have been overpowered, but he wrests his freedom back by a quick, tough, act of will, and dies in an echo of his introduction.

Even the cameos are masterful. The borderline-sinister Canon Paul Fenneau, who warns Widmerpool off Murtlock, but yields to his insistence at being introduced and puts the two in contact, has a surprisingly charismatic presence--Jenkins himself feels it. Fenneau carefully balances his obligations to his "cloth"--that is, his Christian orthodoxy--with his esoteric interests, and firmly disapproves Murtlock's heretical view of harmony. (He seems to me, for what it is worth, to have a touch of occultist and vampire folklore scholar Montague Summers about him, the description Powell gives of him even matches photos of Summers.)

In re-reading HSH, I was reminded of just how good Colin Baker's performance is in the fourth installment of the 1997 adaptation of Dance. A smallish part, but admirably enacted.

I'm not quite done with Powell, yet; I have his memoirs and journals yet to go, and his pre- and post- Dance novels.

Edited to Correct reference to Pamela and Nick's conversation; my memory played me false on the specifics.
Edited also to correct the state I was in. North Carolina is where I have family; South Carolina is Conroy Country. My bad, and I do know the difference.

Some Further Thoughts About Simon Raven

I have now read 20 volumes of Simon Raven's novels--his ten volume "Alms for Oblivion" series (10 volumes; my copies are a three volume paperback omnibus, alas), the related First Born in Egypt series (7 volumes, obtained in one fell swoop from a kindly book dealer in Ireland who had them all in first edition--and now has them no longer), two books that occur between the two larger series, and include characters from them, The Roses of Picardie and September Castle (patience and abebooks got me both in first edition, quite inexpensively--the same price as a paperback, really). Oh, and Doctors Wear Scarlet, which I have as an ebook on my Kindle.

Now, Raven is an oddity in so many ways that it is hard to say anything about him without being misleading. He is profoundly politically and socially conservative, profoundly cynical, profoundly irresponsible, and profoundly despairing. He is a traditionalist in every way, except for his utter flouting of tradition, rationalist except for his recurrent interest and absorption in the supernatural, funny as hell, except when being tragic--

See what I mean?

My curiosity about his writing stemmed from re-viewing The Pallisers with la Caterina. In this viewing, I noticed all of the changes, some subtle, some obvious, that Raven's script made in Trollope's storyline--the use of Dolly Longestaffe, a minor character in only one of the books, as a viewpoint character who prompts much exposition and comments on the storyline, the darker motives of Phineas Finn in marrying Mary Flood-Jones (in Raven's telling, he's gotten her pregnant, and so much do the decent thing; in Trollope, he feels bound in honor to Mary), etc. I wondered about his novels, and, after downloading and reading Doctors Wear Scarlet, wanted to grapple with his other works.

It's been quite a ride. His oddity as a writer reflects the man:

A pair of novel cycles, Alms For Oblivion and The First-Born of Egypt, eventually ran (somewhat loosely) to 17 volumes. They take on a mystical edge, and supernatural occurrences always held a fascination for Raven. He said of his writing, "I arrange words into pleasing patterns to make money", and although he never found a huge readership, he did grow more industrious.

The public became familiar with his TV adaptations of The Pallisers and Edward and Mrs Simpson, and he also wrote dialogue for the Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service. His memoir, Shadows in the Grass was described as "the filthiest cricket book ever written", and Prion Humour Classics recently published a selection of his non-fiction writings, which include a treatise on recognising rent boys.

A gambler, flâneur, cricketer, controversialist, imbiber and fine host, he revelled in pushing his restaurant bills to astonishing levels. Of gambling, he cheerfully described "the almost sexual satisfaction which comes from an evening of steady and disastrous losses". Passionate yet aloof, dissipated yet energetic, Raven represents the perfect paradox of a certain type of Englishness. After obeying his publisher's restraining order for 34 years, he returned to London and died in an almshouse for the impoverished, regretting nothing. He wrote his own epitaph: "He shared his bottle, and when still young and appetising, his bed."

Raven had an appealing honesty as a writer. His stand-in, Fielding Grey, is no hero--in fact he misses several opportunities to be one, and can be appallingly selfish. Yet he, like his creator, has a certain charm.

Raven was an inspired choice to adapt The Pallisers, departures notwithstanding, because he shared Trollope's interest in depicting characters changing over time--his Captain Detterling, for example, develops, decays, and dies most credibly--his flaws and virtues evolve and devolve over the years depicted. He waxes and then wanes, in just such a way as the real man would likely do. Most of his old standbys do; if and when they die, they die of beign themselves, rather like Trollope's Mrs. Proudie. Raven brings that sensibility to the series, and, as a result, the series feels Trollopian even where it strays.

A Happy Halloween of Copyright Infringement

The 1922 German film Nosferatu (in full above) is now in the public domain, and may be used without permission. Ironically, the classic film itself did just that, so blatantly ripping off Bram Stoker's novel Dracula that Florence Stoker sued, and won an order that every print of the film be destroyed:

The court’s order was followed with amazing thoroughness. All prints of the movie were destroyed, that is, save one.

One print found its way to the United States. Since Dracula was already in the public domain there, there was no way to have a U.S. court order its destruction.

It is from that print that every copy of the film existing today was made.

As someone who is continuing the work of a long-dead author--one that is in the public domain, as are the handful of supporting cast members I have imported from elsewhere--I can feel the pain of F.W. Murnau being told that his work is so derivative as to be a violation of the rights of authorship, insufficiently original to have a justified separate existence. Every creative person's nightmare, really...

Of course, as Murnau did to Stoker, others have done to Murnau:



The game, in short, continues...

Happy Halloween!