A Golden Anniversary

Fr. Fred Pope, March 19, 2000

(On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination to the Sacred Order of Priests.)

Your insufficiently humble servant here was ordained priest on March 21, 1950,in the Church of our Savior, Trenton, South Carolina, by the Right Reverend John J. Gravatt, Bishop of Upper South Carolina. It is a tiny church. A white frame building set at the edge of a tiny village. Across the street, there is a pecan grove. On two other sides there are cotton fields. On one side at a distance, across the churchyard, there is the Masonic hall. It is a family church—literally: Everyone, at least then, was kin to everyone else no greater removed than second cousin.

About a week before my ordination, I paid a courtesy call on old Miss Em, the matriarch of the congregation. I remember what she said to me when I told her that not only I, but also Sam Hardman, were going to be ordained that week. “How nice” she said “two more to bring us the Holy Communion”! She was a country woman. I doubt if she had ever seen the liturgical finery currently in vogue; but she knew what a priest was for.

That Ordination Eucharist was the culmination of the affect on me, my life, myself, my soul and body, of many Eucharists in the nine years preceding. I can still remember quite vividly just when the desirability of this struck me. It was in the spring of 1941 in the Chapel St. John The Divine, just across the street from the campus of the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. The Reverend J. Rodger McColl (Father Rodger) was celebrating the Eucharist. We called it “the mass” in those days. It was all somewhat new and wonderful to me, since my confirmation had taken place only a few months before.

Father Roger was standing at the altar. His arms were uplifted, the age-old posture of solemn prayer, a gesture older than the oldest book of the Old Testament, and he was reciting softly and reverently words older than the oldest book of the New Testament.

“For on the night in which He was betrayed He took bread, and when He’d given thanks He brake it and gave it to His disciples saying, take, eat, this is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

It seemed to me then that what Father McColl was doing at that moment was the greatest thing that anyone could do on earth. It is odd how God can use the most unlikely traits in the most unlikely people.

I was wildly ambitious, as only the young can be. Some success in writing had come my way. I felt myself destined for great things in newspaper journalism. There was born in me at that moment, however, the conviction that the greatest thing a person could do was to celebrate the Eucharist, to be a priest, to stand where Father McColl was standing, before the altar of God, and to say those words which Father McColl had just said. I still think so.

Between that day of my ordination there were many, many other Eucharists in which I participated. Some of them were of notable effect on my maturing vocation. I remember a Eucharist in a parish church in Tidworth, England -- three young lieutenants, making special requests of the parish priest that he would provide a communion for us. One of them died in the Netherlands and one other literally lost his mind in the Netherlands in a very high casualty operation.

We had a Roman Catholic Chaplain, “Father O’B” we called him, who was greatly beloved. I remember a field mass near Verdun. With the tailgate of a two and a half ton truck as an altar and and a sort of a khaki-colored thing for a chasuble and one piece of liturgical furniture you don’t have, off to one side. On the Gospel side, as we then spoke of it, was a hole in the ground. Well, Father O’B had begun, and very shortly we found out what the hole in the ground was for.

An air strafer came overhead from the airfield at Metz, spraying the place with 20mm projectiles. Father O’B snatched the vessels from the altar and with one motion stepped into that hole. When the strafing stopped, a couple of strong men reached down, one on each side, under his armpits, lifted him up, set him on his feet, brushed him off, and Father O’B went on without missing a syllable.

I remember what I thought at the elevation of the Host: that this is the only clean thing in all the world. Death and destruction had engulfed Western Europe. The casualties were mounting day by day. It was the only thing not besmirched by mankind’s obsession with death and destruction.

When the white Host goes aloft in this and every other parish church or in whatever setting the Eucharist is celebrated, it is still the only fully clean thing in all the world. Our world is obsessed with death and destruction, with war and partisan politics. With consumerism, and materialism. These things blur but do not extinguish the light of Christ in the world. And when the white Host goes aloft remember, this alone is clean in a besmirched world.

On December 16, 1944, in the Netherlands, it became my privilege and duty to arrange a mass with a Dutch priest in the village. It was the custom of the 23rd Armored Infantry Batallion to offer a mass before action. We did not know then that we were going into what civilians called “the Bulge,” the Ardennes campaign.

It was cold and dark. Darkness fell at 4:30pm at that latitude at that date. Think of a stone church, cold, with no lights except the red glow of the hooded black-out flashlights carried by some men in the congregation, two candles alone upon the altar. No one asked if you were Roman Catholic. No one asked anything at all. It is a custom, not known I understand in these days, but known then for the church to offer the Sacraments to any person penitent at the point of death. If you weren’t penitent, you were out of your mind.

On December 23rd, after Field Marshall Montgomery had withdrawn us, 3400 persons had been left behind. One third of a division. I remember the Eucharist and Morning Prayer at a fourteenth century church in Llanggwndr in Wales, while I was in the hospital near there, I remember sitting in the choir with the crusader’s tomb on my right and over the tomb set in the wall were the blue tiles he had brought back from the savage rape of the Church of Santa Sophia.

There’s a lesson in Christian history. We do not find ourselves always proud of our history, but we have to live with it. The people in that village were so kind to share with me after services their meager rations. Always serving mine cut into bite size squares and never mentioning that I was wearing my right arm down to my chest while the grafts healed.

I was ordained Deacon in St. Luke’s Chapel of the School of Theology at Sewanee, with my seminary classmates singing the service in the congregation being made up of their wives, the officiants provided by the faculty. It was the custom of Sewanee in those days for the newest deacon on the mountain to assist at the Chancellor’s Eucharist at 8:00am. And so my first service as an ordained person was to assist the Right Reverend Gerald Jones, Bishop of Louisiana. I remember we prayed for a seminarian, newly diagnosed with cancer. It’s what a priest does. He prays. He intercedes.

Of course, I remember the service there at Trenton. The only setting for the Eucharist the congregation knew was the Merbecke. Some of you may remember that. I lusted for the Healy Willan service, and the organist knew it. She was a red haired old gal named Sue Smith. Without telling me, she gathered the congregation, for there was no choir, for some time before that service, and they learned the Willan setting. I still cry when I think about it. What a gift from warm people!

I shall never forget my first celebration of the Eucharist, on the Feast of the Annunciation, in Trinity Church, Edgefield, S.C. It will be commemorated this coming Saturday, which is the Feast of the Annunciation. There probably won’t be many people there Saturday. There weren’t many people there at Edgefield, either. The church at Edgefield lost precisely 100% of its male members in the Confederate service. But there were still women who came, and I shall remember them Saturday night.

And after that, so many.

I went back there five years ago, and it broke my heart. On the walls were the names, on plaques, of my congregation. In the churchyard were their graves. Their grandchildren were my acolytes, and they welcomed me as if I had never been away.

One of the blessed aspects of the continuing miracle of Christ’s Church continually offering the great thanksgiving as he commended us to do, is that it does not grow stale with repetition. It seems all the more true to me now that this Supper of the Lord, this Eucharist, this Great Thanksgiving, this Holy Communion is the greatest thing in the world. It is the greatest thing which is or can be in this world because it is the most real. It is the most real because it partakes of a substance of all reality. Unsmelled, unseen, untasted, and untouched, except under the forms of offered bread wine. Unheard, except for the application of its divinely offered words; not present to the senses, yet more real than they. This alone is real and will endure.

Paschal was right. The blood of Christ streams down the universe, and blessed are they who perceive it and drink the chalaced wine of life. Happy are they who discern the Lord’s body and are nourished into eternal life by the bread of heaven. Blessed is he whom the Church calls to celebrate these Holy Mysteries in the midst of the holy people of God.

The essential acts of priesthood are not spectacular, although they may be spectacularly adorned on some occasions. The essential, priestly action in the Eucharist is four-fold. As representative of holy people of God he takes, blesses, breaks, and distributes breads and takes, blesses and shares a cup of watered wine, as this was done by a young Jew before and after sat with his friends on the night before his execution. He told his friends to do this henceforward with a new meaning, for his recalling, for the continuation of his presence among us; and we have done it ever since.

This so simple a thing, this Eucharistic action, yet nothing in the experience of Western civilization has meant so much to so many for so long as this Eucharistic action. Nothing in my priesthood has impressed me so as has the continued response of the people of God to the invitation to draw near with faith and take this holy sacrament to their comfort: the lines, long or short, of men, women and children moving from pew to altar rail; the service plain, almost severe in its unadorned simplicity, or adorned with lights and candles, bells, organs, choirs, vestments, incense on great occasions, its ancient texts set to music by composes from Palestrina to Poulenc.

Why do they come to share morseled bread and sip watered wine? Each one who comes has his or her own reason. Each one knows the meaning of the Eucharist none other knows. It is not possible to assign a single meaning to the Eucharist, because it is the sharing of all that’s ultimately meaningful in human life. It is quite simply the greatest thing in the world because it is the most real thing in all the world. It is a sharing of Ultimate Reality.

I have been blessed that the Church has called me to serve her people as their priest these fifty years, that she has permitted me to stand before her altars, offering this holy sacrifice. I am grateful for the opportunities afforded me here in this parish church to do just this, for very nearly four years now, in the midst of the holy people of God, that they and I may know ourselves to be now and forever beloved of our God.