OF COURSE, as everyone knows, the words which form the title to this talk¹ are immediately followed by “as he talked to us on the road”, which is one of the reasons, though possibly not the most profound,² that this quotation is so appropriate within the context of Student Cross. The passage continues with the further explanation: “as he opened to us the Scriptures.” How much actual ‘opening up [or unfolding] of the Scriptures’ takes place as we walk on Student Cross? – well, a certain amount, I should say, varying from ‘leg’ to ‘leg’ and from time to time, but it is not exactly the most characteristic aspect of Student Cross. And yet as we walk, as we proceed day by day, as we cross the map at snail’s pace, still to a certain extent intriguing some of those who live along the way, but at the same time distressing the local police forces and the heavy lorry drivers, finally to converge on that relatively insignificant village in Norfolk, which I personally have come to love perhaps more than any other place within these isles – the power of our arrival there, the meeting up with one another and celebrating the Resurrection together giving it that quality. For me, I’m afraid, the shrine in itself means nothing, indeed, as I will shortly explain, I think that shrines in general are destructive of strong faith rather than supportive of it. Approached as it is, both literally and metaphorically, on Student Cross, on foot and as the culmination of that week of travelling in close company, Walsingham transcends all that is normally signified by ‘shrine’, it becomes Church – and particularly ‘Renewal Church’ and ‘Pilgrim Church’.

Going back to the road, however, to the road to Emmaus, on which those disciples of Jesus walked with a stranger without knowing him, we must wonder whether our experience is the same or not. We have all the advantage over them of hindsight. The rest of the Resurrection experiences (if this story really is a Resurrection experience), the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost, the faith of the Church. We are no longer surprised by the Resurrection, we know all about it. We can puzzle over it, we can doubt it, we can wonder whether we can really believe it. But to a large extent it has gone stale on us – except, perhaps, sometimes at Walsingham. There have been times in the Church’s life when it has gone so stale as to be almost forgotten beneath the overwhelming cult of the Passion. Those disciples could only say what they said at Emmaus with hindsight, after his manifestation in the breaking and sharing of bread (this is the story line.) Did what St Luke relates, however, actually take place? Did it happen? and does it matter, or not, whether it actually happened – in any simplistic way?

Do our hearts burn within us as we walk to Walsingham? The soles of our feet may well feel on fire (“Didn’t our soles burn within our boots?”), and our hearts open out, in the most surprising way, to others in distress or in pain, physical or mental; but is it only with hindsight, the hindsight, this would imply, of breaking bread at the Easter Vigil that we can identify with Cleopas and his companion? Why is it that there are some amongst us who come back again and again, year after year, on Student Cross. Is it just that they like long distance walking? is it just that they like the company – a lot of it distinctly odd and often distinctly awkward? is it that they like an uninhibited opportunity to drink a firkin (or is it a tun? I forget) of ale? Is it that they just like Walsingham and cannot imagine (especially with the current state of rail transport and road traffic) any other way of getting there apart from walking? And what about those who do not repeat the performance and only walk once or twice? The first time I walked (and I actually walked the entire distance on that occasion!) I regarded it as a ‘one off’ experience probably not to be repeated – but that was before I discovered Northern Leg! With few exceptions I suspect that those who have only walked once or twice can still look back on the experience and say (however bloody awful it was) “Did not our hearts burn within us?”
 

Scripture
   We return now to the “unfolding”³ of the Scriptures. How did Jesus carry out this task. We are told that “beginning with Moses and all the prophets” he explained how the Scriptures referred to himself. He would have been speaking Aramaic I presume (or would Luke have conceived him as speaking Greek?) Would he have explained the technical differences between the Hebrew and the Aramaic languages, so that what might have looked to the uninitiated as so and so was in fact really thus? Would he have explained to them all about Form Criticism, about the difference between Proto and Deutero-Isaiah and the Yahwist ( J ) and the Eloist theological traditions. There are indeed theologians (or at least I hope I can say have been theologians) who would maintain that Jesus (united hypostatically to the Word) knew the details of all this, even if his listeners would not have understood any of it had he tried to put it over. Or did Jesus just explain the Scriptures to those disciples in the way that a fundamentalist would today – and if so back to the question as to in which language – there are those who seem to think that English is the only truly inspired version of the text! All this only goes to show, of course, that the whole question is misdirected. The story of Emmaus is not about this; it is not precisely about expounding Scripture. It, together with the rest of the Scripture, is not aiming at imparting this sort of information. So let us go back to the earlier question “Did it actually happen?” If we ask this we have got not only the wrong idea of the purpose of Scripture, but surely also the wrong idea about the meaning of actuality. The ‘story’ has three points to it. Upon the first everything depends; this is the Resurrection, the New Life, the New Creation⁴ which is its total source and in a sense its totality. But secondly, within this, the emphasis is on Scripture and the Eucharist. In these together we look for the meaning of the “Road to Emmaus” – or perhaps that should be put completely the other way round. While we turn our minds for the moment to the place and significance of Scripture within our belief, let us not forget that, according to the Emmaus story it was not the comprehension of Scripture as such that opened their eyes to understanding, but the breaking of bread. Emmaus is of course talking about the life of the Church and the life of the Scripture within that life.

As I have suggested, on Student Cross not all that much (unless things have changed very radically within recent years) takes place in the way of Scriptural exegisis. I have tried it in an odd pub or two on the way, but I think it mostly gets lost in the haze of beer fumes and I’m afraid to say sometimes in the clouds of tobacco smoke. Does this mean that it is unimportant, or perhaps more profoundly (but also more questionably, I suggest) unnecessary, and that the penitance, the ascesis, the discipline, of Student Cross, the piety, the prayers and so on, are an adequate substitute for it? With regard to this the Roman tradition compared with other groups has been weak in the extreme (until the foundation of the Ecole biblique in Jerusalem⁵ began to bear fruit and all that has followed from that slowly dispersed itself amongst the faithful.) The encouragement and improvement, and by and large the lack of oppression and restriction of biblical scholars throughout this century has been one of the more encouraging signs in the life of the Roman Church.

It is not only that a knowledge and understanding of Scripture is necessary so as not to misunderstand and misrepresent our faith (as the Emmaus story tells us: “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel”), but more importantly it is that a knowledge and understanding of Scripture enfires our faith – “did not our hearts burn within us?” A knowledge of Hebrew grammar, an understanding of the literary genre of the ‘stories’ told, and of the theological presuppositions (and therefore often the slant) behind the details, can in many cases prevent us from thinking that Scripture implies some particular doctrine which is often enough the product of history’s, and our own, insecurities or limitations. In other words it can save us from misreading Scripture, and drawing wrong conclusions from it. But on the much, much more positive side it can enrich our understanding and appreciation, our empathy with, our sharing of, the faith of our forefathers (and mothers), our awareness of what exactly it was that Jesus, in his revelation and manifestation of God in a shared humanity, achieved, gave to us and now asks from us. For example, if we want to understand the nature of the faith of those first disciples we must realise that what they saw in Jesus was the possibility (indeed the actuality) of the fulfilment of all the hope and expectation and promise of the history of their People – God’s chosen People. “How odd of God to choose the Jews; but not so odd as those who choose a Jewish God and spurn the Jews.” One of the more encouraging signs of the times is the current tendency, the desire, to understand the Jews as our fellow believers, our sisters/brothers in faith – the faith ultimately of Abraham. Unless we understand how Jesus was seen by those who adhered to him we will understand little of what he is presented by them (the apostles and evangelists) as saying. In all this we need grammar, syntax, philology, epistemology, archaeology and so on, to help us. Of course we cannot all be experts, nor can all afford to devote their time to this, and little nuggets of concentrated learning cannot but fail dismally in crowded pubs if that is how they are offered; though nevertheless the pub does have its role and play its part. Scriptural understanding and vision cannot afford to be seen as something cut off from ‘ordinary’ enjoyable life, just as prayer should not be seen as something separated off from and even divorced from ‘ordinary life’. There have been many occasions on Student Cross when somebody, or a group of persons, has complained that we are not prayerful enough – instead of going to the Church to ‘pray’ for a period on arrival somewhere, say, there are those who make a bee line for the pub. Personally I find this dichotomy entirely false. It is not difficult at all, it seems to me, whilst in the pub, to be ‘offering’ almost continually to God the companionship and the cares and desires of those around one, while one is drinking or singing or just nodding off. And if this is not prayer I do not know what is, though I do know that it also depends upon the ability to be still, sometimes to be silent, and to be at least attempting to integrate one’s life, one’s faith and one’s cares. The awareness of the role of Scripture in the vitality of our faith is a part of this integration. It is perhaps the division into groups of opposing taste (or ideologies) that can be most destructive of shared prayer, shared life.

Jesus, I am sure, did not go into the intricacies of Hebrew grammar (as I’m afraid I am inclined to do in my sermons – sometimes to the delight, but often I fear to the despair, of my listeners) nor was he giving a lecture (peripatetically à la school of Aristotle) on Biblical Semantics. This is in no way relevant to how we nowadays have to approach Scripture, but it does give us a hint of some aspects of our study which cannot be omitted if we are truly to be enriched and our hearts set on fire. Perhaps unfortunately, but I would rather suspect fortunately, we cannot go back into the past and attempt to live there, the past must live – come alive – here and now in us; and it is in this spirit that we read and study Scripture. It should be read clearly, and so that it can be heard and taken in, not just thrown away from lectern and pulpit. It is in this spirit that it has its place within the Eucharist.

The Church as a whole not only reads and studies its Scripture (privately or in groups), but almost more importantly acts it out, acts it through – in the liturgy. At this moment (13th June 1998) we are half way between the feast of the Trinity and of Corpus Christi. These two particular feasts (together perhaps with the Sacred Heart to follow – all specified incidentally as “feasts of our Lord”), are an opportunity for the Church to stand back, as it were, and take an overall view of its nature, its reality, its faith and its devotion. Throughout a great part of the year the Church celebrates its “mysteries”, its foundation history, temporarily, chronologically, through Advent, Christmas, Lent, the Passion and Resurrection, Ascension and Pentecost. Liturgically the Church lives out its Scriptural heritage. At this point then, it would seem appropriate to take a pause from this process and look down(?), look up(?) at the whole and see its depths, its implications. On Student Cross, during the week itself, we are in Holy Week. Christ went up to Jerusalem. He rode triumphantly [? – with a big question mark] into the city. He leaves the city, he goes out to Bethany. He chooses a room for the Passover; we follow him through the Garden of Gethsamane; before Caiaphas and Pilate, and so on. This may not be Scripture Study in a classroom sense, but surely, Scripture being lived out, walked out, talked out, in the living Church is Scripture lived and Scripture studied. At the same time, however, the ‘reality’ achieved depends not only upon devotion, dedication, commitment, and a love to serve, but on having a more richly understood appreciation of the semantic dimensions as well. Scriptural life and Scriptural study are not two separate items, but one – in the life of the Church. This, I suggest, can be felt as reality on Student Cross because Student Cross is not just a week of pilgrimage, a week of prayer, but is Church.⁶ The Gospel (the Good News) is not a book to be read, to be studied, to be seen as a source of prophecies or pious texts; the Gospel is the Good News as proclaimed and lived out in the Church. This is the basic reason why I object to the trendy modern custom of holding the book of readings up after the Gospel and proclaiming “This is the Gospel of the Lord” – it is not! It is but a shadow of it (though a privileged shadow.)
 

Church
   We have, I suggest, almost lost sight of the fact that our Churches are meeting places – to which we are called out (ecclesia). We have turned them into shrines. For the most part, in the Catholic tradition they have become Eucharistic shrines and/or hagiolatrous shrines in which predominate the tabernacle and the statues of Mary and Joseph. Perhaps I exaggerate, and certainly in many churches there are signs of a movement away from this. The implications, however, both for our understanding of the Eucharist and of the Church in the widest, not only the narrowest, sense are considerable. By turning churches into shrines we replace praxis with piety. It is often claimed that this latter in particular keeps faith alive, but I suggest that it comes closer to killing it by attrition, by the atrophying of life in the Spirit, in the Word.

A few years ago the English Benedictines (specifically from Ampleforth) set up a priory in York: St Bede’s. In cooperation with the bishop it was set up as a pastoral centre; it was to combine Benedictine prayer and scholarship with the widest pastoral and ecumenical outreach. It was open to good talking, good cooking (much appreciated by yours truly!) good liturgy (both traditional and experimental) though hard floors to kip down on. Some members of Northern Leg will I think remember a reunion there with appreciation. But, like so many good things, its life was not very long. I do not know the full history of the discussions and negotiations over its closure, but let me quote some of the words which I later wrote to the prior, to the bishop, and to the abbot of Ampleforth. They help to bring out the point I am making.

After first of all referring to and commending “the pastoral/spiritual discussion series...” to which I myself had helped to contribute whilst I was in York, I continued:

After expressing my belief, in solidarity with many of our bishops and other wise authorities, that

I went on to support the remedies I was confident that the Benedictines, together with the new bishop, would now be taking:

I backed this by an appeal to the traditional Dominican motto (that motto which in its day helped give rise to the Inquisition):

The Benedictines were abandonning St Bede’s and its tendentious work and were moving, instead, to Osmotherly on the North Yorskhire Moors, where there is a shrine which the Franciscans who had administered it for so many years were now no longer able to staff. So, in the spirit of support, I commended the “Safer and more important work of running the shrine at Osmotherley...”

Well, perhaps all that was a bit heavy handed (though it actually puzzeled one or two of those who saw the letter – I do not know whether the bishop or the abbot actually read it) but I think, even in exaggeration, it illustrates the point I am trying to put over. I ended, in that letter, by expressing my belief that “this kind of work, especially when the Franciscans can no longer cope with it, together with the Privileged Education the Benedictines provide for the rich (therefore helping to form our future leaders and ruling classes) at Ampleforth, is a truer expression of the Benedictine vocation than that in which you had got unwittingly involved in York. Please do congratulate...” This was not just gratuitously rude; there is, I think, a real connection. The misuse and misrepresentation of authority in the Church goes together with the misunderstanding of Church itself. It leaves out the ideas of the Church as the People of God, the Church of Renewal, and even the Church as Pilgrimage. The ideas of church (the building at the centre of the parish) and Church as the totality of the faithful are (or should be) as closely connected today in the context of renewal, as they were in their original development.
 

Eucharist
   The Eucharist is at the heart of the Church – its central work of worship, even, I would suggest, constituting it as Church – you cannot have Church without Eucharist. This, of course, is a highly controversial claim. On Student Cross some Legs religiously insist on a ‘Mass’ (capitals and inverted commas!) every day; some (when there is no magical person available) can go a whole week without feeling a desparate need. (Could they celebrate the Resurrection without it however?)

There is more and more criticism these days of the way in which every Catholic meeting which is religiously inclined or has a dimension of prayer to it has to start with a Mass (again I use a word which I would rather see dropped.) Would it not often be better, it is being more and more suggested, if instead a ‘Bible Service’, or some other form of liturgical prayer were substituted? In as far as this implied criticism of the Eucharist derives from a concept of it which emerges from our churches being treated as shrines, and has helped to turn them into these, I fully go along with it. The Mass has become a magical act in which a magical person says the magic words and “Hey, presto!” We are back to the same categories that give us a conjurer God – which David Jenkins, a few years ago, so definitively rejected in the context of Christ’s resurrection.

Many years ago, at a moment of crisis and in a state of considerable distress, I was on the door step of a great friend of mine in the early hours of the morning. Despite the hour she warmly received me and began to give me the support and comfort for which I had come. After a while I suddenly remembered that it was her custom to go off each morning to early mass in the nearby church, and I realised that in thinking entirely about myself and my own distress I had prevented her from going. She pointed out to me that if I though that the eucharist only took place with the priest present in that church, rather than also in the comfort and support she was giving to me, then there was something very wrong with my theology. A salutary lesson, I hope well learned. We have turned the Eucharist into the act of saying those words of institution and the product of it – little more. Even the scriptural context within which it is now more clearly seen to have its location is to a large extent thrown away, by the way in which it is so often read, by the way in which it so often receives no homiletic comment, and by the distorted theological perspective (official) which encourages the separation of the “liturgy of the word” from the “liturgy of the ‘altar’”. It is probably no longer the case that seminary students doing their sacramental theology have to study the mindblowing problem of what ‘happens’ (and what does one do about it) if a drunken priest going down the High Street puts out his hand – the symbol of ‘power’ that it – and says “Hoc est corpus meum” whilst passing the bakers shop. The “product” (if one can use such a term) of the consecration, the recalling of the words of Jesus amongst his disciples on their last night together, should be LIFE; less and less effectively does it usually transcend the dessicated wafer under whose form it is for the most part maintained and presented. Such ‘doctrine’ as Transubstantiation has done little to help; in fact it has probably contributed considerably towards making the situation worse. Perhaps there is an analogy between those words “This is my body...” and “This is the Gospel of the Lord” mentioned a little earlier.⁷ In both cases the wider context, looking both backwards to Christ himself and beyond, and forwards into the on-going life of the Church and of humanity, is a necessary part of the whole, without which it does not come alive. No wonder is it felt by many that importation of the ordained priest to say those critical words does not constitute the Eucharist, and that so damaging can the traditional attitude be that it might well on many occasion be better to omit it from our worship. As I say, I can see the point, the strength of this argument; I would want, however, to up-play, rather than to down-play, the Eucharist.

I know the extent to which I am stepping on dangerous ground here, but I would like to point out within this context that the practice of receiving communion on Good Friday belongs firmly within this pietistic and as it were ‘static’ understanding of the Eucharist. It belongs to worship as pertaining to shrine rather than worship as pertaining to church. It remains like a ball and chain on our legs, and on the legs of Christ walking with us to Emmaus. Into the same category fall such devotions as Exposition and Benediction. They are to my theological understanding abuses of the Eucharist, adding to a concept of authority and majesty, which is anti-Church, anti the Life of the Spirit which, with hindsight, makes “our hearts burn within us”, but which is however ‘safe’, attractive to those who practice inadequate authority, rather than leadership.

The week’s walk on Student Cross can, with Mass every day, be a wonderful opportunity for discovering how the Mass can be turned into Eucharist, shared, offered, celebrated by all together, as one – not priest over against laity. I remember The Victory, Clenchwharton, as one of the most prominent of these experiences. Many pilgrims will have their own similar memories. That is why I have valued the daily Leg Mass of my experience over the years during which I was a chaplain. But I have another vision. I think that if the whole pilgrimage, coming together from its different starting places, and its individual members coming from their different homes, merging on Walsingham – to go, first through the emptiness of Good Friday, and then on to the celebration of the Resurrection – if this as a whole could be seen as what really is the Eucharist, we would be given a much better idea of what it is all about, and what it is that we are celebrating. And then at Walsingham we would not need to have a ‘Catholic Eucharist’ on the Saturday evening and an ‘Anglican Eucharist’ on the Sunday morning – that would all be a witness to the one Church, which we indeed are all part of, but in this way we could be seen to all be part of the one whole: God’s People. And then the day would be nearer, I think, to that in which we do not have to have two separated liturgies. The road to unity is not, to my mind, so much to do with discussing doctrinal points and trying to come to an agreed statement, but praxis – prayer together, sharing together, living together in Christ and in the Holy Spirit. Such work as that done by ARCIC for example has of course been great, it has been invaluable, but the way ahead to unity is about how we are to share Church together, share our heritage together, share our Scripture more fully together, take it more seriously together, allow our open and burning hearts to develop, perhaps one could say, more brazenly!

The Eucharist is a thanksgiving (eucharistia.) In its central prayer, made by the Church to the Father, it recalls how Jesus, giving thanks to the Father took bread and broke it... He offers himself, his life, and that of his disciples also; for his life is not simply his physical body, the blood running through the veins, the heart beating to its rhythm; his life is the life shared with his disciples, that which he called them to him to share together. It reaches its climax and its focal point in that Last Supper. It wasn’t easy to get them to share, and the immediate aftermath of the Passion shows it as falling apart. We see, in the Gospel accounts themselves, how difficult they found it to understand him. Whilst they were going up to Jerusalem and he was trying to explain to them the purpose of his journey they seem to have been arguing amongst themselves as to who was the most important.⁸

The bringing together of the disciples into his own life, however, was not simply a matter of calling Peter, Andrew, James, Matthew, Nathanael⁹ and so on, to come and walk with him, and talk with him (not forgetting Cleopas and his companion...) to share life, share death, share resurrection with him; it was the collecting together of the whole history of Israel, in its revelation of God. This is taken up into Jesus’ life, his passion and his resurrection. It was not just Jesus alone who overcame death through the triumph of the Cross – the “glorification” which the IV Gospel identifies with the death on that cross; the life that was renewed, the new life of the New Creation, manifest on that “first day of the week” was the life which he had shared with those disciples and the whole People of God behind them. We talk of the Resurrection Community and see the Apostles as primarily constituting it; we see the Spirit that came down upon them as witnessing to its truth, but in fact the “Resurrection Community” is more even than this, it is the whole Church, the whole call-out of God’s People being brought into the life of Christ, with the Holy Spirit, into the presence of the Father. In the widest sense of Church, from the Alpha to the Omega, we are new-created; and the Thanksgiving at the heart of this Life is both constitutive of it and its ‘product’. This is the nature of our Eucharistic worship.
 

Conclusion
   Walsingham is, in its primary aspect, a shrine, even if its prominence is due more to the Wars of the Roses than to any miraculous apparition or intervention, for the Wars of the Roses divided the country in such a way as to prevent many a pilgrim from making their way to Canterbury. But for Student Cross it is much more than a pilgrimage to a shrine, it is a pilgrimage of witness to Church, to Church as Pilgrim Church, to Church as Resurrection Community, to Church as Ecclesia, to the Church of Sabaoth.¹⁰ It is, I suggest, much more than a shrine; let us keep it that way, for Student Cross and Walsingham have to a large extent made us what we are, and “We are Church.”

Giles Hibbert O.P.
11th June 1998

Notes

1. Luke 24:32.

2. The considerable assonance between the English words talk and walk is also significant here.

3. Explained – JB; explained/opened (up) – RSV, etc.

4. There are many who muddle, to their own considerable disadvantage I think, the difference between the Sabbath and the first day of the week (Sunday). It is sad to say that a Dominican liturgical book for Holy Week and Pascal Time, as late as the 1950s, told us that all these happenings occurred, not early on the “first day of the week”, but “early on the Monday morning”! Sunday is the day of the Resurrection, the day of New Life. It is also the First Day of the week, on which God originally said “Let there be Light!” It is now the celebration of the creation of New Life. The Sabbath is, by contrast, the last day of the week; if we treat it as the first we are missing out on the awareness of the New Creation involved in our lives in Christ.

5. Founded by M-J. Lagrange O.P. in 1890. Nowadays some Roman Catholic scholars (e.g. Raymond Brown) are considered amongst the world’s greatest.

6. There are those who have criticised the We are Church movement on, amongst other reactions, the grounds that as a phrase it is, at least in English, grammatically inept. It is certainly a development of language, a development of usage which hasn’t before existed. But I suggest that it is a development which is an enrichment. One would not earlier have been able to say “Student Cross is Church” but it is a richer idea than anything we could have said before.

7. See Giles Hibbert O.P. The Lamb – From Passover to Adoration, Blackfriars Publications 1996.

8. Cf. Luke 18:31-34; Mat 20:17-28.

9. Jn 1:44.

10. – the levy of fighting men from the Tribes under Yahweh’s command – perhaps the prototypical Church Militant!