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From a homily by Fr. Mark:
The Mayflower Puritans, you will remember, fled Europe to put far behind them, once and for all, altar and priest, chalice and paten, saints, feast-days, and every Popish trapping and Romish invention. The Puritans of Plymouth and of New Haven deemed the Mass an abomination. They judged even the Protestantized Communion Service of the Church of England by far too Catholic. The Puritans grasped the link between thanksgiving and fruitfulness but, having rejected the Mass, they had no way to express it sacramentally. The Thanksgiving festival emerged in a Eucharistic void, in a culture bereft of altar and of priest. The Puritans of Plymouth and of the New Haven Colony would be horrified to see their “Thanksgiving” observed today in a Papist nunnery with the Romish Sacrifice of the Mass!
For our part, being incurably Papist and given to everything Romish, Thanksgiving Day falls within the greater Catholic rhythm of a life measured by thy Holy Sacrifice. We live from Mass to Mass, from one Great Thanksgiving to another. To be Catholic is “always and everywhere to give thanks.” To be Catholic is to live eucharistically, drawn into the prayer of Christ to the Father and the fruitfulness that comes from the Holy Spirit.
The Eucharistic life is a ceaseless thanksgiving; it is thanksgiving, semper et ubique, always and everywhere. Saint Benedict teaches us the same thing: to bless always giving primacy to the praise of God, to forswear grumbling and murmuring, so as to enter, day after day, into the thanksgiving of Christ to the Father.
We go the altar today, as we did yesterday and as we will tomorrow: to enter into the Great Thanksgiving of Christ our Eternal High Priest. We go to the altar because there is no other way for us to be fruitful, no other way to bear “fruit that will abide” (Jn 15:16). May he take us to himself, and draw us after him, beyond the veil (cf. Heb 6:19), into the presence of the Father. There it is always Thanksgiving; there is made ready for us a feasting that “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived” (1 Cor 2:9), the wedding feast of the Lamb (cf. Rev 19:9). (Read entire homily.)
2 comments:
The Church of England then was a thoroughly Genevan institution. These Puritans had to have been the most obnoxious fanatics.
They were misguided, of course, and dangerously zealous, but one also has to admire their total dedication to what they saw as the true religion.
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