In the eucharistic sacrifice, past, present, and future are reconciled and made whole. I wonder if the Mass he knew was similar to the Solemn High Mass I knew at St Paul’s Church, K Street, back in the mid-70s-a liturgy filled with chant, incense, and the beauty of holiness. What does Eliot mean when he writes that the past and present are present in the future, the future contained in the past?Įliot was an Anglo-Catholic churchman who attended Mass faithfully. How odd, ironic, to find myself in the Orthodox Church. After all these years as a Christian believer and priest, I remain an ascetical failure. The secret to holiness and contentment, he writes, is abandonment to the divine will given in the present moment: “To find contentment in the present moment is to relish and adore the divine will in the succession of all the things to be done and suffered which make up the duty to the present moment.” I can see the logic, but only rarely have I been able to practice such deep surrender, and even then it was never surrender. Years ago I read Jean Pierre de Caussade’s The Sacrament of the Present Moment. I am torn apart in time by time, fragmented. I am never satisfied with the present, never content. I live in time, bracketed by a past I can neither change nor retrieve and a future that beckons, disappoints, and terrifies. Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past.
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