Dear Pastor Robin and Community of Grace Church,
Having just made a donation to support the church’s rebuilding, I wanted to reach out to share a story of the Divine Grace communicated to my family through this scorched yet sacred place.
By way of introduction, my family and I have sporadically been attending your services online for about a year now. I am Catholic, my wife is Hindu, and our daughter is a spirit of her own at sixteen months old. I am also a Benedictine oblate associated with a Hindu-Catholic monastery in India, Saccidananda Ashram at Shantivanam. In spite of my Catholicism, I’ve been streaming other Christian denominations’ services while our daughter is still a bit young to be attending Mass in person. We’ve particularly enjoyed your sermons.
Now to the unexpected irruption of God’s Grace. One Sunday late last year, when our daughter was perhaps nine months old, we were streaming your service while trying our best to get some solid food into the baby. We had just strapped her into her high chair, and I was breaking up a fresh pancake into tiny bits while my wife mashed up some blueberries. Coincidentally, you were celebrating the Lord’s Supper at the same time. You lifted up the elements in church, and invited anyone at home participating online to lift up their own elements for blessing—which is something I had never encountered as it would never happen in a live-streamed Catholic Mass.
So imagine my slack-jawed astonishment, holding a bit of breakfast bread, watching my wife mash up blueberry “wine”—fruit of the vine and work of human hands. I suddenly had the urge to hold up the pancake and shout, “Amen!”
I did not, being Catholic. I lack the ordained priestly authority to preside over the Transubstantiation, as set out in Catholic theology, so that was a line I dared not cross. Even so, I was also aware that your celebration followed Presbyterian theology of the Pneumatic Presence. And the thought occurred that Christ through the Spirit surely was present, powerfully, in our little family celebration of the Lord’s Pancakes.
Indeed, this is a theme taken up by the leaders of Shantivanam Ashram. Swami Abhishiktananda and Dom Bede Griffiths, each equally a Catholic and an Advaitin, speak of the Eucharist as the most perfect symbol of Christ’s Real Presence in all Creation, which in its totality is His Body. So the Lord’s Supper is a prefiguration of the time when, per Paul in First Corinthians, God through Christ will be “all in all.” And this is a time that is already present: “The Kingdom of God is within you,” per Jesus Christ in Luke; “All of this is the Supreme,” per the Chandogya Upanishad. We see then that the form of the Eucharist itself is an invitation to dive beyond names and forms into the infinite abyss of the Triune Mystery, the One Reality who in Hindu terms is Sat (Being), Chit (Consciousness), and Ananda (Bliss)—Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
We may not be in formal, ecclesial communion, and we may not share the same communion table, but we are in the communion of faith in the Absolute who saves us from death and leads us to glorious rebirth. Your unwitting celebration of my family’s pancake breakfast helped me to understand this.
I pray for this same rebirth for your beautiful church building, which I dearly hope to set foot in one day!
Peace,
Nicholas G. Santangelo, Obl.S.B.