The Eucharist in Four Dimensions: Meaningful Worship in Contemporary Culture
by Jessica Martin
This is a short but packed volume, and an exceptional one too. I hope that will become clear shortly here. Jessica Martin is a priest of the Church of England, presently Residentiary Canon of Ely Cathedral. Previously she was a Fellow in English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge and priest in a multi-parish benefice. This book is the published version of her Bampton Lectures at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford. This volume is also part of three that the author says take on the body of Christ and the human bodies in which Christ dwells now in the world, in the church. Holiness and Desire (2020) was the first. I first knew Martin’s discerning writing from her contributions to two collections of essays from members of the Littlemore Group of clergy that met for conferences and which bears the name of John Henry Newman’s parish of Littlemore. The Group was organized by Sam Wells and Sarah Coakley, themselves gifted priest-theologians. These were Praying for England: Priestly Presence in Contemporary Culture (2008) and For God’s Sake: Re-Imaging Priesthood and Prayer in a Changing Church (2016). A further volume on the religious life has also appeared.
This publication, just over a hundred pages, does a great many things extraordinarily well. For one thing, Martin draws on her expertise in literature, using a poem or book or a piece of music as a point of departure and unifying force in each of the dimensions. Powerful pieces of writing are interlaced with her narrative throughout the book. As both a scholar and an experienced pastor, she probes how the Eucharist is confronted by modern consciousness. In the first chapter, she employs Patricia Lockwood’s provocative 2017 memoir, Priestdaddy, to bring a vivid sense of both knowing what traditional belief is, that the bread is the body of Christ, and the utter inability of Lockwood’s husband to grasp this faith that a material object can contain God. Hamlet’s ghost is also harnessed to her narrative, further deepening the conflict between faith and doubt.
She draws on Osip Mandelstam’s 1922 poem (also used by liturgical scholar and priest Alexander Schmemann) in examining what happened when the Covid lockdown prevented actual presence at eucharistic celebrations, in favor of liturgies celebrated live or archived on zoom, YouTube and other venues. She deftly speaks of this situation as “Flat Eucharist: Schemes and Screens.” Martin has difficulties with the passive watching of a liturgical celebration, viewed in one’s home. What to make of bread and wine that those at home took and received in such zoom services? I did, Sunday after Sunday, as did others in my parish. For more than a year it was the only eucharistic communion we had. Sure, we could read Alphonsus Liguori’s prayer of spiritual communion, from another time, sensibility and situation, something many found less than helpful. Then was the urge to take advantage of a prolonged “eucharistic fast” to better “feast on the Word.” It matters little that I followed Martin’s insightful thinking here yet disagreed. Nevertheless, it was a virtue of the book to take on this recent slice, a significant one, of our liturgical and sacramental experience.
Martin changes registers in chapter three, looking at “The Eucharist as Theatre: Place, Space and Bodies,” aided and guided by John Donne’s magnificent poem, “Hymn to God my God in my sickness,” an affliction from which the priest-poet recovered. Here Martin calls again on Hamlet, as well as Leonard Cohen, Barbara Ehrenreich, Sir Walter Raleigh, Tolkien and a slew of other favorite writers to address the reality that the Eucharist involves bodies, with all that entails — the cognitive, emotional and physical dimensions.
Finally, she ponders “The Eucharist in Time.” Martin draws us into the dream-like scene of a couple dropping into an Advent Evensong during WWII, in December, 1944, from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. She evokes the pages-long reverie of a cold night, soldiers heading into church, snow in the air. Martin notes a medieval Latin-German hymn, In Dulci Jubilo, sung in that Evensong and how it gets through to the nonbeliever Roger. But she doesn’t stop there. Martin pulls in a 1983 pop Tune, “It’s a Fine Day,” and its 1992 dance track remix, then, a tape loop of lines from an evangelical hymn “Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet.” To these she adds as the memory of a particular church most important to her when she was young that comes to mind when reciting the Prayer of Humble Access from The Book of Common Prayer. She also shares a moving moment with a shut-in, for whom watching a livestream of the eucharist in her parish is a true act of communion, perhaps more so than when communion is brought to her at home. There is also a eucharistic scene described at the Greenbelt Festival in 2019, involving the archbishop of Canterbury, pita bread, juice boxes and a bunch of children consecrating and distributing the elements. Most definitely this was a “messy church” liturgy, and Martin offers it up with graciousness, even if it might raise more questions than the zoom eucharists of the pandemic shutdown.
See what I mean about this book being “exceptional”? I should also say, “extraordinary.” It is no merely conceptual examination of eucharistic theology, nor even rigorous theological analysis. In the end, Martin makes us look long and hard about the bread and wine, all the words and gestures, the participants, the choreography ancient, later modified by reformers, and the contemporary efforts at making it relevant. If we had forgotten or ignored it, Jessica Martin enables us in these four dimensions to see the wonderful and complex experience that is the eucharist. This is the most moving and valuable book on the eucharist you will encounter in a long time.
Jessica Martin. The Eucharist in Four Dimensions: Meaningful Worship in Contemporary Culture. Canterbury Press Norwich, 2023. 160 pages. ISBN: 9781786224729.
REVIEWER: Michael Plekon
Michael Plekon is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Religion,
The City University of New York, Baruch College,
and has been a priest in the Western and Eastern Churches.
Community as Church, Church as Community (Cascade, 2021) is his most recent book.