Living The Eucharistic Prayer

The author of this article explores the eucharistic prayer and asks how we as Christians can live this prayer and how we can be formed by this prayer.The author hopes to illustrate how the weekly ritual of assembling around Christ in prayer for the world will form in Christian people the mind of praise and the habit of service.

It is difficult to describe how liturgy forms the faithful in the spiritual life. Yet throughout the world's liturgical movement, liturgists desire for participation in the liturgy to form the faithful into the community of God. But we who are eager for the formation of persons as Christians must beware that we do not merely gun our engines on the theory that more and better liturgy, like more gasoline, will get this church moving. For we know that there are countless people who regularly participate in Christian liturgical celebrations whose lives appear to be untouched by the experience. We speak autobiographically. Or we probe Christian history. Or we interpret studies. But we do not know how and when the liturgy is experienced as the vehicle for God's Spirit. We speak to one another only our hopes that the liturgy, which has brought grace into our lives, will do the same for others, children and adults alike. Many of the techniques for formation that are popular among newly converted adults are inappropriate for my daughters, still young children who were baptized as tiny infants. Yet I can hope that their weekly participation in the Eucharist will form in them an attitude of praise, prayer, and service that will join them to other Christians even in an increasingly secular culture. Simply said, here is the liturgical logic: The weekly ritual of assembling around Christ in prayer for the world will form in Christian people the mind of praise and the habit of service. Prayer is to shape us by giving us hope for compassion. Unfortunately, much of the prayer written by white, middle-class, North American Christians has been so dwarfed by psychological rhetoric that intercession has more in common with personal therapy than with baptismal formation. The nineteenth-century faith in Jesus as personal Savior has met the twentieth-century human-potential movement. This results too often in prayers about how I can be more fulfilled this week. To find a prayer for Christian formation, let us look to the classic Western eucharistic prayer with its elements of praise, remembrance, and petition. Let us ask together how to live the prayer.

A Good and Joyful Thing

It is right, and a good and joyful thing always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Sovereign of the Ages You created all things and called them good. (In this article, I am using the form of the eucharistic prayer found in Holy Communion, Supplemental Resource no. 16, Service 20 [Nashville: Abingdon, 1987], 46–47. Copyright by The United Methodist Publishing House. Used by permission.) Aristotle said that a story needs a beginning, a middle, and an ending. But the literature of this century indicates a world in which such naive order has been destroyed. Stories begin in the middle, proceed with a logic all their own, and stop without concluding. In many novels, the calendar day is the only shape given the protagonist's tale. The death of the omniscient narrator suggests a world in which we can speak only a private vision of personal values. The incoherent violence of recent movies seems to cement in American consciousness, rather than purge away, the terrible pattern of Vietnam, where our highest ideals began questionably, proceeded dishonestly, and ended, in the words of T. S. Eliot, "?not with a bang, but a whimper.?" Adopted children in a mythic search for origins locate their birth parents, discovering only one or two slight, middle-aged aliens. Like digital clocks, we live minute by minute, the sweep of life obscured by the orange flashing figures, numbers as isolated as we ourselves are. What would it be like if we were formed by the beginning of the eucharistic prayer? In the first place, we would have assembled on the Sabbath. Endless orderless time would be benevolently laid before us in units we could grasp. We would give priority to the first day of the week, by assembling with others who shared this calendar of grace. Like the disciples in John's Gospel, we would gather on the first day of the week with sure knowledge that at such a weekly meeting God would be present to bless us. This communal affirmation of a human order to the universe, this peaceful acknowledgment that our time begins together in God, and this shared value that from such an assembly flows life in abundance is no small thing. Assembling on Sunday is like acting out Genesis 1. In the beginning, the universe, rather than mindlessly expanding into more vacuum, is benevolently ordered for the good of humankind by God. Thus merely to assemble with the baptized on Sunday is to re-create the modern universe, giving it a beginning in God and a middle in grace, with hope for an end in fulfillment and peace. The eucharistic prayer, like the Sabbath, situates the community in a graceful world. We begin by praising God. We acknowledge God as an Abba God, the loving parent who arranges the nursery to the child's best advantage, who protects the infant from evil, who nurses, instructs, and chides better than all the human parents and all the mythic gods and goddesses who fill our lives and storybooks. We state that God created the world. We form our community around this assertion that the world has its meaning in and from God. Since we are in God, we participate in its meaning. We state that God saves the world. We form our assembly around this belief that contrary to appearances, evil has been overcome by and in God. Since we are in God, we together are saved. Were the assembled community to enter fully into this opening paragraph of praise, our formation as Christians would have made a substantive beginning. In Remembrance of These Your Mighty Acts

Holy are you,

and blessed is your eternal Word, who became flesh and came to dwell among us in Jesus Christ. "?Humankind cannot bear much reality,?" wrote T. S. Eliot. One way that we protect ourselves is to forget. The old saying is true, women do not quite remember the pains of childbirth. That I was in pain, I remember. What the pain was like in order to made me scream so wildly, I cannot recall. We forget the sufferings of the race, assassinations in our country, and quarrels in the family. We try to relax in an easy chair with earphones gently playing only New Age music. Another way that we protect ourselves is to overlook. There is a man lying on the train platform crying out in pain, but I am in a hurry. I must not miss my appointment; it might even be a setup. It is as if each person has a certain capacity for pain, and this capacity is usually filled to the brim. Whether our pains be personal, familial, social, or political, there is no room for the suffering of others. To pray the eucharistic prayer is to be the community that focuses on the Suffering Servant. In the center of the prayer, we remember Christ, the one who heeded the cry of the man on the platform even to his own death. We call to our remembrance, making the memory alive and well, that God is among us as one who serves the suffering ones. God sees human suffering and remembers it. And God's response to the cries in the emergency ward and around the world is to bind up our wounds, pouring on oil and wine. To pray this prayer together is to take on the mind of Christ, to don with the name Christian the lifestyle of the Servant. Let the church be the donkey on which Jesus lays the wounded man; we are to carry those who are newly anointed and communed. To pray this prayer is to recall, even against our self-protective amnesia, the death of Christ and to hear, in spite of our headset, the cries of all in need. John's Gospel teaches us that the meaning of the Last Supper is seen in Jesus' washing his disciples' feet. So we come to the Table ready to serve. One in Ministry to All the World

By your Spirit, make us one with Christ,

one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world, until Christ comes in final victory and we feast at Christ's heavenly banquet. Our culture is exhausted by its frantic search for community. No wonder, our children are enchanted by reruns of Little House on the Prairie with its evocation of a mythic time when small neighborhoods lived with shared values in communities marked by friendliness and concern. The reformed drug addicts visiting our schools eagerly petition everyone to join their enthusiastic campaign for a drug-free society. I see in their fervor the old delight in group identity: "?We are reformed addicts; we call you to our mission.?" Such a sense of group identity, such shared goals, such communal responsibility and support are increasingly rare in a society that seems overwhelmed by trying to embrace too much too fast. Now we do not look any longer to the pages of the National Geographic for pictures of foreign patterns of life. We see them across the hall of our apartment building. To pray the eucharistic prayer is to invoke God, the Paraclete. In this prayer, we pray for the Paraclete to come among us, to make us one, to bring all the needy into the heavenly city. We pray that the Paraclete will continuously voice our concerns before God's throne, that there might finally be some action toward mercy and renewal. Together we pray for communion and even in the prayer begin to enjoy the communion we seek. But the communion of God's mind is so far beyond our own that always in the eucharistic prayer we are drawn to a deeper sense of what human communion is. It is not wearing similar clothes or seeking the same entertainment, but discovering a bond of love that God alone can create. We are formed by our culture to live in chaos without praise, in the moment without sympathy, and in a lonely search for communion. To pray the eucharistic prayer is to praise God for a world mercifully saved, to remember the suffering ones as a faithful servant would, and to petition together so heartily for communion in this world that our lives naturally follow our prayers. Thus, we learn not to molder away our lives watching television, with its sound blocking out the needy world and its emptiness a symbol of our own barren lives. We join with a community that on Sunday morning sings hymns, that remembers Christ, and that hears the needy. We join a community that in praying for communion becomes a community of servants. All Glory and Honor

Through your eternal Word Jesus Christ,

with the Holy Spirit in your holy Church, all honor and glory is yours, Almighty God, now and for ever. The eucharistic prayer forms us by bringing us to God. God is the Abba, ordering the world in mercy; God is the Servant, identifying with all the needy; God is the Paraclete, forming us into a community. The doctrine of the Trinity need not be an archaic and sexist way to draw silly pictures of God. For Christians, the doctrine of the Trinity hints at the mystery of God and calls us into a human existence made in the image of this mysterious and merciful God. The institutional church is always buying some new method for catechesis and some new theory of education. Prophets on the edge of the church are always calling out their prescriptions for conversion and reform. Yet no sooner have we sold our decade's soul to a method or a cause than we see our convictions and methods as limitations. The doctrine of the Trinity, which classically provided the church with its outline for eucharistic praying, also offers to the church a program for catechesis and its inspiration for amendment of life. What would our catechesis and conversion be if it was formed by the doctrine of the Trinity? Here are some suggestions for congregational education and service committees. The families of the newly baptized infants would recommit themselves to regular eucharistic praise and service. Our children would learn the Bible stories of God's benevolent love and would hear the lives of the saints, who are coservants with us, part of the community for which we strive. Mystagogical catechesis would be revived among us, with adults growing more deeply each paschal season into the mystery of life with God. Rather than mirror the aimless race of contemporary culture, congregational life would be marked by the beauty of hospitality and peace. The "?least of these?" would be the most honored in our midst, as we remember with St. Lawrence that the treasures of the church ought not be the new copes in our sacristy, but the homeless in our cities. We would see every need, every sorrow, every stranger with the eyes of a servant. We would stand together to support one another in the pain of seeing. We would break through the solipsism that sets in after the evening news by choosing one or two people who need our care, by choosing one or two cooperative efforts, and by working for the communion for which we pray. These are only several suggestions, merely starters, for the church's formation by the liturgy. We are to be formed by the church's prayer to become, such prayers in the world, such instances of praise, service, and community, such personifications of joy, sympathy, and hope. We are so formed not by successful church programs or popular media techniques but by the Spirit of God, who draws us by God into God. May God, Abba, Servant, and Paraclete, teach us so to pray.