Merton on the Mass

It isn’t very difficult to see that Merton has something quite pointed to say in this story (see my last post on The Art of Missing the Forest for the Trees).  On the surface, it would seem that the primary issue is racial equality and integration (keep in mind Merton told this story in the full tumult of the 1960s).  Yet Merton chose to direct his commentary toward the true lightening rod of the narrative: the Eucharist.  The churchgoers were so incensed by the priest’s sermon that they left prior to receiving the Eucharist, the body of Christ, the “source and summit of the Christian life.”[1]  Thus we have the consternated words of warning hurled at the priest as the offended parishioner stormed out, “If I miss Mass today it’s your fault!”

There is an implication of guilt and punishment here.  The parting parishioner assumes that there will be a penalty to pay because he was not able to partake in the Eucharistic meal.  For those Catholic readers, the guilt of moral obligation will already be ringing in your ears.  Yet in a beautiful turn of parody, Merton uses this very idea of judgment in his response:

 Not only do we see in these men a flat refusal to listen to the plain meaning of the word of God. . . there is also a complete moral and spiritual insensitivity to the meaning of the Mass as the Christian Agape, the union of brothers in Christ, a union from which no believer is to be excluded.  To exclude a brother in Christ from this union is to fail to “judge the Body of Christ” and hence to “eat and drink judgment to oneself.” (1 Corinthians)[2]

The proverbial forest missed in Merton’s provocative story is nothing short of Christ and the kingdom of shalom which Christ so insistently preached, a kingdom which, projected into the 1960s, envisioned “little black boys and girls holding hands with little white boys and girls,” to quote Martin Luther King, Jr.  Eucharist is not a private ritual for personal sanctification.  It is the real presence of God with the power to mobilize the people of God to build a civilization of love.  That civilization is marked by reconciliation, right relationship, wholeness and justice. “The ritual action of Eucharist is powerful when it is allowed to penetrate the life and action of the people, and transform them into an effective embodiment of the love that is God, a sacrament of his presence.”[3]   There is an essential relationship between ritual, especially sacramental ritual as momentous as the Eucharist, and the lived realities of human beings which serve as primary witnesses to Christ’s presence among us.

I’ll let Merton get the last word, but I pray that we, the whole body of Christ, will take this universal meaning into our own lives and religious practice.

Is not their attendance at Mass a legal formality?  Formalities, abstractions, are not enough.  Gestures of conformity do not make a man a Christian, and when one’s actual conduct obviously belies the whole meaning of the gesture, it is an objective statement that one’s Christianity has lost it’s meaning.[4]

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[1]             Lumen Gentium (The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), 11.

[2]             Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, NY: DoubleDay, 1966, 105.

[3]             Mary Peter McGinty, The Sacrament of Christian Life, Chicago, IL: The Thomas More Press, 1992, 50.

[4]             Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, NY: DoubleDay, 1966, 105-106.