Evelyn Underhill's MISSA CANTATA

 

Since my teens I have been blessed by the writings of Evelyn Underhill (1875-1942), a widely acclaimed Church of England spiritual director who more than deserves to be rediscovered. An Anthology of the Love of God, published after her death, is a good initiation into her work.  Each chapter begins with a poem, many of which come from Immanence, published by Underhill in 1912. Immanence is available FREE for downloading from the internet. I love this particular poem, a deeply moving burst of praise to the Lord for his sacred presence in the Holy Eucharist:

MISSA CANTATA   

Once in an Abbey-church, the whiles we prayed 

All silent at the lifting of the Host, 

A little bird through some high window strayed ; 

And to and fro 

Like a wee angel lost 

That on a sudden finds its heaven below, 

It went the morning long. 

And made our Eucharist more glad with song. 

It sang, it sang ! and as the quiet priest 

Far off about the lighted altar moved, 

The awful substance of the mystic feast 

All hushed before, 

It, like a thing that loved 

Yet loved in liberty, would plunge and soar 

Beneath the vault in play 

And thence toss down the oblation of its lay. 

The walls that went our sanctuary around 

Did, as of old, to that sweet summons yield. 

New scents and sounds within our gates were found ; 

The cry of kine. 

The fragrance of the field, 

All woodland whispers, hastened to the shrine : 

The country side was come 

Eager and joyful, to its spirit’s home. 

Far-stretched I saw the cornfield and the plough, 

The scudding cloud, the cleanly-running brook, 

The humble, kindly turf, the tossing bough 

That all their light 

From Love’s own furnace took — 

This altar, where one angel brownly bright 

Proclaimed the sylvan creed. 

And sang the Benedictus of the mead. 

All earth was lifted to communion then. 

All lovely life was there to meet its King ; 

Ah, not the little arid souls of men 

But sun and wind 

And all desirous thing 

The ground of their beseeching here did find ; 

All with one self-same bread. 

And all by one eternal priest, were fed.

The Eucharistic flow of love

"Behold, the Lamb of God . . ."

May 2008 at St Stephen's Coomera, Quseensland, Australia

Be pleased, O Lord, to accept this our bounden duty and service, 

and command that the prayers and supplications, 

together with the remembrance of Christ’s passion, 

which we now offer unto thee, 

may be received into thy heavenly Tabernacle; 

and that thou, not weighing our own merits, 

but looking upon the blessed sacrifice of our Saviour, 

which was once fully and perfectly made for us all, 

mayest pardon our offences, 

and replenish us with thy grace and heavenly benediction, 

through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

- John Cosin (1594-1672)

Evelyn Underhill defines Christian worship as ‘the total adoring response of man to the one eternal God self-revealed in time.’ This response is seen perfectly in Christ: ‘Lo, I have come to do thy will, O God’ (Hebrews 10:5-9). The whole life of our Lord Jesus Christ is an act of worship: his obedience, his ministry, his self-offering on Calvary. We can also say that it is a liturgical act of worship which is expressly articulated in the words of Jesus’ High-Priestly prayer in John 17:1-5.‘In Christ’ (2Corinthians 5:17) we enter the stream of obedience, devotion and love flowing from the Son to his Father. Therefore true worship is union with our Lord in the Holy Spirit, identifying ourselves with the Perfect Sacrifice of Jesus Christ, which is why the Eucharist will always be the most perfect form of worship.”

- Frank Lomax (1921-2007), in Worship and Liturgy 

(Lecture, Trinity Theological College, Singapore)

The Eucharist is the completion of all the sacraments, and not simply one of them . . . All human striving reaches here its ultimate goal. For in this sacrament we attain God himself, and God himself is made one with us in the most perfect of all unions . . . This is the final mystery; beyond this it is not possible to go, nor can anything be added to it.

- St Nicholas Cabasilas (1320-1371), 

quoted in The Orthodox Way by Kallistos Ware, p. 116

The eternal liturgy . . . is the work of Jesus our Great High Priest, offering himself in and through his Church to the Father in the union of the Holy Spirit. ‘Through him, with him, in him . . .’ At the end of the eucharistic prayer, the priest raises the Host and Chalice together, and the self-giving or oblation of the whole Church is represented, taken up into the sacrificial self-giving love of the Blessed Trinity. The whole assembly responds with the great ‘Amen!’, the resounding ‘Yes!’ of the faith of a priestly people.”

- Peter Elliott, in Priest, Sacrifice and Eucharist, 2001

The Eucharist is “surrounded by temporal ripples through which past and future things are refracted.”

- Robert Sokolowski (1936-), 

in Eucharistic Presence: A Study in the Theology of Disclosure, p. 105

“. . . the whole of Christian worship is focussed upon an altar 

where there is perpetually set forth the redemptive offering of pure love; 

and in that eternal offering, 

all other movements of love and sacrifice 

are sanctified before God.”

- Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), in Worship, p. 149

Christ was the Word that spake it;

He took the bread and break it;

And what that Word did make it;

That I believe and take it.

- Attributed to Queen Elizabeth 1 (1533-1603)

Above, the hosts of angels sing praise; 

below, men form choirs in the churches and imitate them 

by singing the same doxology. 

Above, the seraphim cry out in the thrice-holy hymn; 

below, the human throng sends up the same cry. 

The inhabitants of heaven and earth are brought together 

in a common assembly; 

there is one thanksgiving, one shout of delight, 

one joyful chorus.”

- St John Chrysostom (c. 347–407), in his Homily on Isaiah 6:1

In the bread of the Eucharist 

and the cup of blessing 

Christ’s presence is revealed at its most intense. 

Let your life be permeated 

with a tremendous reverence 

towards this mystery of faith. 

Your adoration needs no justification 

more than your love and wonder 

for the infinite, delicate grandeur of God, 

the unfathomable depths of Christ’s gifts. 

Let his praise not depart from your lips . . .

The Eucharist sets you on the way of Christ.

It takes you into his redeeming death

and gives you a share

in the most radical deliverance possible.

And already the light of the resurrection,

the new creation,

is streaming through it from beyond.

Whenever you sit at table with the risen Lord,

it is the first day of the week,

very early in the morning.

- H. Van Der Looy in Rule for a New Brother

Evelyn Underhill on self-abandonment, the Cross, St Thomas and Sacramentality

From The School of Charity: Meditations on the Christian Creed (pp. 64-66), by Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941)

The Crucifix, which is the perfect symbol of generous sacrifice, is the perfect symbol of victory too: of the love which shirks nothing and so achieves everything, the losing and the finding of life. “He was crucified, dead and buried—rose again and ascended.” With this double statement the Creed, the rule of prayer, reaches its climax, and shows us in a sentence the deepest meaning of our life: declaring in plain language that unlimited self-offering is the only path from man to God.

This means that the Thought of God, penetrating our tangled world and entering into union with our imperfect nature, saves and transforms that nature, raises it to a new level, not by power, but by the complete exercise of courageous love ; the deliberate facing of the world’s worst. And we, following the footsteps of that holy Life which reveals reality, must take the same way. “As dying and behold we live” is a literal fact for the genuine Christian. 

The release of power, the transformation of life which comes from unconditional self-abandonment, is guaranteed to us by the story of Easter and the Forty Days: its continuance in the sacraments and the saints. We too achieve all by risking all. Christianity is a triumphant heroism. The valiant obedience of the Blessed Virgin makes the Incarnation possible: the more complete and awful self-giving of the Cross makes the life-giving life of the Church and the Saints possible. The ancient Easter Sequence sums it up:

“Death and Life strove together in awful combat;

The Lord of Life, who died, living reigns.”

And yet this reign, with its strange triumphant beauty, is not manifested in any of the sensational incidents of which Apocalyptic writers had dreamed; by a sudden coming in the Clouds of Heaven, or by the shattering of our ordinary human world. Still true to the Divine method of hiddenness and humility, it comes back into that world very quietly; brought by love, and only recognized by love. It appears by preference in connection with the simple realities of everyday existence, and exercises its enlightening, pacifying, strengthening influence in and through these homely realities. Personal needs, friendly affections, become the consecrated channels of the immortal Love, which declares its victories by a quiet and tender benediction poured out on ordinary life. 

The glory of the Divine Humanity is not shown in the Temple and the Synagogue. He seeks out His nervous followers within the arena of ordinary life; meets them behind the locked doors of the Upper Room, waits for them in early morning by the lake side, walks with them on the country road, and suddenly discloses Himself in the breaking of bread. The characters of the old life which are carried through into this new and glorified life are just those which express a homely and cherishing love. It is the One who had fed the multitude, pacified the distracted, washed the dusty feet of His followers and given Himself to be their food, who now re-enters their troubled lives ; for their sake, not for His own.

For us, these scenes have an other-worldly beauty. We see them bathed in the supernatural light. But for Peter and Thomas, James and John, they happened under normal conditions of time and place. Frightened, weary and discouraged, worried about the future and remorseful about the past, for them the wonder abode in the quiet return of the Holy and Immortal who was yet the familiar and the human, to the commonplace surroundings in which they had known Him best. 

Silently disregarding their disappointing qualities, their stupidity, cowardice and lack of trust, He came back to them in a pure impetus of charity; came down to their level as one that serveth, making visible the Invisible Love, and gave the guarantees which their petty standards demanded and their narrow souls could apprehend. Thus, by this unblemished courtesy, “binding His majesty to our lowliness,” as the Byzantine liturgy says, He restored their faith, hope and charity; and gave them an example only less searching in its self-oblivious gentleness than the lesson of the washing of the feet.

Even their own fragmentary notes of what happened, or seemed to them to happen, shame and delight us by their witness to the splendour and humility of generous love. “My Lord!” says St. Thomas, seeing, touching, and measuring the Holiness so meekly shown to him in his own crude terms; and then, passing beyond that sacramental revelation to the unseen, untouched, unmeasured, uttering the word every awakened soul longs to utter—” My God! “The very heart of the Christian revelation is disclosed in that scene.

So it is that the real mark of spiritual triumph - the possession of that more lovely, more abundant life which we discern in moments of deep prayer - is not an abstraction from this world, but a return to it; a willing use of its conditions as material for the expression of love. There is nothing high-minded about Christian holiness. It is most at home in the slum, the street, the hospital ward: and the mysteries through which its gifts are distributed are themselves chosen from amongst the most homely realities of life. 

A little water, some fragments of bread, and a chalice of wine are enough to close the gap between two worlds; and give soul and senses a trembling contact with the Eternal Charity. By means of these its creatures, that touch still cleanses, and that hand still feeds. The serene, unhurried, self-imparting which began before Gethsemane continues still. Either secretly or sacramentally, every Christian is a link in the chain of perpetual penitents and perpetual communicants through which the rescuing Love reaches out to the world. Perhaps there is no more certain mark of a mature spirituality than the way in which those who possess it are able to enter a troubled situation and say, “Peace,” or turn from the exercise of heroic love to meet the humblest needs of men.

Evelyn Underhill on Advent waiting & our expectation of God

From Advent with Evelyn Underhill, edited by Christopher L. Webber

We should think of the whole power and splendour of God as always pressing in upon our small souls. “In him we live and move and have our being.” But that power and splendour mostly reaches us in homely and inconspicuous ways; in the sacraments, and in our prayers, joys and sorrows and in all opportunities of loving service. This means that one of the most important things in our prayer is the eagerness and confidence with which we throw ourselves open to his perpetual coming. There should always be more waiting than striving in a Christian’s prayer - an absolute dependence on the self-giving charity of God. “As dew shall our God descend on us.”

As we draw near Christmas, this sense of our own need and of the whole world’s need of God`s coming - never greater perhaps than it is now - becomes more intense. In the great Advent Antiphons which are said in the week before Christmas we seem to hear the voice of the whole suffering creation saying, “Come! give us wisdom, give us light, deliver us, liberate us, lead us, teach us how to live. Save us.” And we, joining in that prayer, unite our need with the one need of the whole world. We have to remember that the answer to the prayer was not a new and wonderful world order but Bethlehem and the Cross; a life of complete surrender to God’s Will; and we must expect this answer to be worked out in our own lives in terms of humility and sacrifice. If our lives are ruled by this spirit of Advent, this loving expectation of God, they will have a quality quite different from that of conventional piety. For they will be centred on an entire and conscious dependence upon the supernatural love which supports us; hence all self-confidence will be destroyed in them and replaced by perfect confidence in God. They will be docile to his pressure, and obedient to every indication of his Will.

The fully Christian life is a Eucharistic life . . . (Evelyn Underhill)

Mass at St Peter's London Docks, Wapping, London

. . . the fully Christian life is a Eucharistic life: that is, a natural life conformed to the pattern of Jesus, given in its wholeness to God, laid on His altar as a sacrifice of love, and consecrated, transformed by His inpouring life, to be used to give life and food to other souls. It will be, according to its measure and special call, adoring, declaratory, intercessory and redemptive: but always a vehicle of the Supernatural. The creative spirit of God is a redemptive and cherishing love; and it is as friends and fellow workers with the Spirit, tools of the Divine redemptive action that Christians are required to live. ‘You are the Body of Christ’, said Saint Augustine to his communicants. That is to say, in you and through you the method and work of the Incarnation must go forward. You are meant to incarnate in your lives the theme of your adoration. You are to be taken, consecrated, broken and made means of grace; vehicles of the Eternal Charity.

Thus every Christian communicant volunteers for translation into the supernatural order, and is self-offered for the supernatural purposes of God. The Liturgy leads us out towards Eternity, by way of the acts in which men express their need of God and relation to God. It commits every worshipper to the adventure of holiness, and has no meaning apart from this. In it the Church shows forth again and again her great objective; the hallowing of the whole created order and the restoration of all things in Christ. The Liturgy recapitulates all the essentials in this life of sanctification — to repent, to pray, to listen, to learn; and then to offer upon the altar of God, to intercede, to be transformed to the purposes of God, to be fed and maintained by the very life of God.

And though it is the voice of the Church, none the less in it is to be recognized the voice of each separate soul, and the care of the Praying Church for each separate soul. ‘Holy Things for the Holy!’, cries the celebrant in the earliest liturgies, as he lifts up the consecrated gifts. Not ‘Good Things for the Good’; but supernatural things for those imperfect creatures who have been baptized into the Supernatural, translated to another order — those looking towards God the Perfect and beginning to conceive of life as a response to God the Perfect; but unable without the ‘rich bread of Christ’ to actualize the state to which they are called.

- Evelyn Underhill, from The Mystery of Sacrifice

Worship must not be just down to earth . . .

The Liturgy in a Serbian Monastery

Worship must not be just down to earth, otherwise it will be exclusive, worship for those bits of the earth which like that sort of thing. 

Worship which raises our prayers and praises and unites them with the prayer of Christ and all his saints in heaven will necessarily be representative . . . 

If we are before God in Christ we are in his Body together with all his holy people - visible and invisible, known and unknown. Then we are truly where we belong as a Church and we are truly both serving the world and serving God. The risen Christ is with his saints - and his saints are with him, for they are also the Body of Christ and in Christ we are one with them. All our worship must bring us into the kingdom and raise us into the fellowship of the saints, together with "angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven." Only such heavenly worship is any earthly use at all. 

So, whether it is at the bedside of an old lady who is dying; or at the glorious worship of a huge congregation in a vast basilica; whether it is with two or three huddled together in prison on the eve of their execution - singing hymns at midnight like Paul and Silas - or locked up in the basilica like Ambrose with his congregation at Milan; whether in a hospital ward, or in a trench before battle; there is no corner of the earth and no gathering too insignificant which cannot be raised beyond itself in Christ into the presence of the Father with all the saints, "enkingdomed", transfigured and glorified. So we all can become even now (for those with eyes to see) what we were intended to be from all eternity and will be in Christ throughout all ages and world without end. 

As Evelyn Underhill says in "The Mystery of Sacrifice": "In our religion, and in the worship which is the expression of our religion, we look out towards eternity; and bit by bit, in various ways and degrees, we discover in ourselves a certain capacity for eternity." 

 - Bishop Michael Marshall, in "Renewal and Worship" (1982)

Our dependence on him is absolute

Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) was a scholar, a mystic and a well-known spiritual guide. A little out of fashion at the present time, she deserves to be rediscovered by this generation! The following is from her book, The Spiritual Life, pages 34-46.

"There is no real occasion for tumult, strain, conflict, anxiety, once we have reached the living conviction that God is All. All takes place within him. He alone matters. He alone is. Our spiritual life is his affair; because, whatever we may think to the contrary, it is really produced by his steady attraction, and our humble and self forgetful response to it. It consists in being drawn, at his pace and in his way, to the place where he wants us to be; not the place we fancied for ourselves.

"Some people may seem to us to go to God by a moving staircase; where they can assist matters a bit by their own efforts, but much gets done for them and progress does not cease. Some appear to be whisked past us in a lift (elevator); whilst we find ourselves on a steep flight of stairs with a bend at the top, so that we cannot see how much farther we have to go. But none of this really matters; what matters is the conviction that all are moving towards God, and, in that journey, accompanied, supported, checked and fed by God. Since our dependence on him is absolute, and our desire is that his will shall be done, this great desire can gradually swallow up, neutralise all our small self-centred desires. When that happens life, inner and outer, becomes one single, various act of adoration and self-giving; one undivided response of the creature to the demand and pressure of Creative Love."

Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) on the Lord's Prayer

This is Chapter 6 of ABBA - Meditations Based upon the Lord's Prayer, first published in 1940 by Longmans, Green & Co Ltd.

IN the first part of the Lord's Prayer, we are wholly concerned with God's glory. We pray with angelic spirits; creatures whose purposes are completely harmonized with the Creative Will. In the second part, we turn from the Eternal Splendour to our earthly limitations, and bring before God the burden, neediness and sinfulness of our state.

Give us this day our daily bread.

With this proclamation of our utter dependence, the presentation before God of the simplest and most fundamental of our needs, we pass from adoration to petition, and enter into the full paradox of Christian prayer: the unspeakable majesty and abiding perfection of the Infinite, and because of that majesty and that perfection, the importance of the claim of the fugitive, the imperfect, the finite.

There is a natural tendency in man to reverse this order of approach; to come before God in a spirit of heaviness, greatly concerned with his own imperfections, needs and desires-"my soul and its shortcomings," "the world and its wants"-and defer the putting on of the garment of praise: that wedding-garment which introduces us into the company of the sons of God and is the only possible beginning of real prayer. Here, Christ's teaching and practice are decisive.

First the heavenly, then the earthly. First ascend in heart and mind to the Eternal, adore the Father, seek the Kingdom, accept the Will: and all the rest shall be added unto you. Again and again the New Testament insists on that . . . keep reading