IN PRINT: BOOK REVIEW
Why to Go to Church

WHY GO TO CHURCH: The Drama of the Eucharist
by Timothy Radcliffe
(Continuum, London/New York, 2008, 214 pages, paper, $16.95)

Reviewed by Liz O’Connor, editor of CHURCH

Why Go to Church was chosen as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent book for 2009 and includes a foreword by Rowan Williams, but reading it is definitely not a penitential exercise.

Rather, author Timothy Radcliffe, former Master of the Dominican Order, takes the Mass—the central reason for most Catholics and many Anglicans to gather in church—and goes through it element by chronological element, unfolding and enriching the symbolism and meaning of all that goes on during Eucharist. With deceptive simplicity and admirable clarity he looks at the Mass as a drama in three acts: faith, hope, and love.

We know that on Holy Thursday Jesus bade his friends to do what he had done “in remembrance,” but Radcliffe says near the beginning of the book, We do not go to the Eucharist to remember an event that is simply past. We are touched by its present happening in our lives. Thomas Aquinas says that we encounter Christ not so much as risen but as rising (homo resurgens). We are contemporary with the drama, rather like the Jews remembering the crossing of the Red Sea as an event that they share in even now, every time they celebrate the Passover. Now we are touched by the inexhaustible novelty of Christ.

Radcliffe pulls together all sorts of materials to illustrate his points, from the writings of the early church fathers to poets of several different centuries to the work of contemporary novelists, all against the background of Scripture.

In his chapter on the general intercessions he writes of the very notion of petitioning God, which some people think an unworthy sort of prayer. To the contrary, Radcliffe points out that Jesus told his disciples to pray and in the Lord’s Prayer demonstrated asking God for what we need. He advises praying for the big things, such as peace in Iraq, but that we also must find time to pray for what we want now. “If we bring to God our real desires,” he writes, “then we will be in the presence of God as we are, rather than some false pious persona.”

In the eucharistic prayer we pray for the pope and the local bishop by name as a way to say that our community is not just the group gathered in a parish church on Sunday morning, but the whole church all over the globe, undivided by space, time, or even death: The first eucharistic prayer names the martyrs—Ignatius, Alexander, Marcellinus, Peter, Felicity, Agathy, Lucy, Agnes, Cecelia, Anastasia. We name them in defiance of the oblivion of death, in the hope of the resurrection. We name the saints, because they are companions in the literal sense of the word, having eaten of the same bread that is Christ’s Body. They too are part of the friendship which is the church, and which defies the divisions of sin and death.

He notes that in the past Christians “have often quarreled” over whether the Mass is primarily a meal or a sacrifice, but asserts that this is an unnecessary fight. “In the eucharistic prayer Jesus claims his death as a sacrifice, by which God embraces and consecrates all that is unholy, even death on the cross.” Jesus, he says, paid the price for our lack of love. “But the fruition of that sacrifice is Communion, a shared meal.” To see only the meal is to ignore Good Friday, he says, but to see only the sacrifice is to ignore Easter Sunday.

At the end of Mass we are sent forth, as the disciples were sent forth after Jesus returned to his father, “free to leave the church…and go to other people, to share their lives and name the God who is already there.”

Why go to church? Radcliffe suggests that we go “because we are offered a gift, Christ’s Body and Blood, and it would be odd not to wish to accept what he offers us…We gather because Christ gathers us…

“The slow working of grace,” he concludes, “will free me to be sent at the end. Why go to church? To be sent from it.”