Strengthen for service,
Lord,
the hands that have taken
holy things;
may the ears which have heard
your word
be deaf to clamour and dispute;
may the tongues which have
sung your praise be free
from deceit;
may the eyes which have seen
the tokens of your love
shine with the light of hope;
and may the bodies which have
been fed with your body
be refreshed with the fullness
of your life;
glory to you for ever.
Common Worship
Post-communion for the
8th Sunday after Trinity
THIS prayer has a long tradition in
Christian worship, right back to the fourth century. It originated
as a poem by Ephrem the Syrian (c.306-73), was used in the
fifth-century Malabar rite in South India, and came into many of
our hymn books in translations by J. M. Neale and Percy
Dearmer.
It is fascinating to experience how those early worshippers
responded to God in communion. The concerns addressed by the prayer
seem oh-so-contemporary to our lives, even if the language has a
timeless feel. Deceit, disputes, clamour, and gossip; unholy
actions and activities - these are the easy habits that we need God
to save us from. Instead, we are given a vision of love, hope, and
life, to feed and sustain us.
The intense physicality of the prayer is inescapable. No pious
generalisations here, but a direct equation between being nourished
by the Body of Christ and the impact this has on our bodies. Hands,
ears, tongues, eyes - and feet, too, in the hymn version of the
original - all absorb God's transfiguring, radiant power.
Eyes shine, and bodies are refreshed with a spiritual beauty
that the commercial efforts of the advertising, health-care, diet,
fashion, and cosmetic industries can never imitate. Here is a
regime and a ritual (a word now beloved of spas and salons) that
works.
If the prayer is wonderfully pragmatic, it is also programmatic.
This is the effect that the sacrament of Christ's body will have on
our bodies and our lives, listed sense by sense, clause by clause.
Or, at least, this should be the effect. . . It is good to be
reminded of what we are and will be in Christ.
The prayer could well be adapted as a form of self-examination -
a preparation for confession perhaps. Have my hands offered service
worthy of the most holy sacrament that is cradled and enthroned by
them when I receive communion? Have I listened as eagerly to God's
word as to gossip, grievances, and backbiting? Have I been honest
in my relationships with others, and in my praise and worship of
God? Would anyone recognise, for all my failings, the hope that is
in me, or the life of Christ at work in me?
Fullness of life is what Christ comes to give us, to refresh us
with, as we come to receive him. And the habits of worship are
habits that we will be clothed with eternally. I love the
physicality of the picture we get in Revelation of the worship of
heaven: falling down before the throne of God, hands holding bowls
of incense, eyes beholding what angels veil their faces to, and a
myriad of tongues singing "Holy, Holy, Holy".
This is what we are being strengthened and shaped for,
phys-ically and spiritually, by our worship here. This is what
Christ gives us a token and pledge of in communion, a promise that
we will share in the communion of the saints, and indeed give glory
to God for ever.
The Revd Dr Jo Spreadbury is the Vicar of Abbots Langley, in
the diocese of St Albans.