Forgotten Altars: Tolkien on the Eucharist

Friday, July 13, 2012

Tolkien on the Eucharist

"Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament... There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death. By the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste -or foretaste- of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man's heart desires.

The only cure for sagging or fainting faith is Communion. Though always Itself, perfect and complete and inviolate, the Blessed Sacrament does not operate completely and once for all in any of us. Like the act of Faith it must be continuous and grow by exercise. Frequency is of the highest effect. Seven times a week is more nourishing than seven times at intervals.

Also I can recommend this as an exercise (alas! only too easy to find opportunity for): make your communion in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children - from those who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is opened sit back and yawn - open necked and dirty youths, women in trousers and often with hair both unkempt and uncovered. Go to communion with them (and pray for them). It will be just the same (or better than that) as a mass said beautifully by a visibly holy man, and shared by a few devout and decorous people. It could not be worse than the mess of the feeding of the Five Thousand - after which our Lord propounded the feeding that was to come."

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

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Forgotten Altars Project:

There are many authentically Catholic familial traditions that have been forgotten. The goal of this blog is to share our odyssey, first in performing an archeology of these traditions, second, in trying to integrate these traditions in our modern lives. We wish to celebrate our heritage as a young Catholic family, recognizing our responsibility to reflect the Kingdom of God and to chart what we have learned for anyone who is also seeking for a more beautiful (sacramental) way to live.

Two other areas are intimate to the Forgotten Altars project:

Southwest Catholic

Locality is the soil and topography of authentic (Catholic) culture. As residents of Phoenix, we wish to explore exactly what being a Catholic in the Southwest means. We are blessed to live in an area with some of the most ancient Catholic roots in America.

Scottish Catholic

As a family of Scottish descent, we wish to perform an archeology of traditional Catholic Scottish Culture. Given the violence of the Scottish Reformation, old Catholic traditions in Scotland require genuine excavation. Although Scotland is associated with some of the most vehemently anti-Catholic sentiments in Europe, to forget that root culture preceding the Reformation, which still stubbornly persists (nearly unnoticed) today, as well as those who bled and died for Scottish Catholicism, would be irreverent.