Richard Coyardy, comes from Toledo, and is a professor of Catholic Studies at Toledo University, which is a state university. And this is something fairly new, that Catholic Studies be established at a state university. It's happening in several places right now. So he's there now, and he'd like to go to Boston College in a year or so from now. And you're a young man from Texas, wife too, and family of four teenage boys and one daughter? No, just four boys. Four boys. Unless you know something I don't know. No, no, no. And they're all about being in college, yeah? Two of them are. So you know what that means? So, are you anything else interested? And we're very happy to have Richard with us today. And he specializes in ecclesiology, a wonderful sub-topic, and he studies spirituality too. And you said you're writing something?

[01:06]

I'm always writing. Always writing, yeah. OK, that's your specialty, ecclesiology. That's a wonderful subject. And so without further ado, I'll let Richard take over. Thank you. Good morning. I suspect I don't need the microphone. Would that be fair for everybody in the back? Can you hear me all right? The other reason is it tethers me to the podium, and I prefer to walk around a little. I must tell you, I came with a written text of about 20 pages, and I would be happy to read it to you. But I'm feeling that maybe a little more informal mode of conversation might be appropriate. I'm also thinking, if you don't mind, I'm going to remove my coat. This is my first time to visit the monastery, and it has been a wonderful experience. I'm delighted to be a part of this beautiful community and wonderful surroundings. And I'm particularly honored to be invited to give a lecture in honor of the memory of Father Damascus. I've had an opportunity to do a little bit of background reading, and the more I did, the more impressed I was with him, and the more I was sort of disappointed in myself that I had not already heard of him.

[02:14]

because it seems to me clear that he's a very important figure, particularly in the history of American monasticism. I was particularly struck by the number of connections that he had throughout his life with some of the leading figures in the liturgical renewal movement, that movement which of course paved the way for many of the changes at the Second Vatican Council. He knew, for example, the great German liturgical scholar Romano Gordini, German in spite of the Italian name, and the great Benedictine scholar Godfrey Dieblon, and of course he was originally part of that very important Benedictine Center for Liturgical Studies, Maria Lach, before coming here. So I thought it appropriate, once I read a little bit about Fr. Demas, to perhaps give a presentation reflecting on liturgy, and in particular, on the Eucharist. You know, for 2,000 years we have been obeying the mandate of Jesus Christ.

[03:18]

Do this in remembrance of me. For 2,000 years Christians have gathered to celebrate the Lord's Supper, under multiple names, referring to it as the Mass, the Eucharist, Communion, the Lord's Supper, the Divine Liturgy. But in all of those instances, we have kept alive one of the most ancient of Christian ritual traditions. It is, in many ways, the foundation of our Christian faith. Christians gathered regularly for worship long before they developed the elaborate creed that you and I know as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. Indeed, Prospero of Aquitaine, that great lay theologian of the 5th century, had established a maxim, Lex Orandi Lex Credendi, the law of worship establishes the law of belief. And what he was saying was, and historians will back this up, that frequently it has been the case that we have prayed our way toward Christian faith.

[04:23]

So, for example, St. Basil of Caesarea, when there was a great debate over the divinity of the Holy Spirit, says, we affirm that the Holy Spirit is divine. Why? Because in our liturgy, we direct worship to the Holy Spirit. You see? So our belief about the Spirit proceeded from our liturgical practice. Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi. Lately, though, there are a number of liturgical scholars who suggested there's another axiom that we probably ought to be mindful of. Lex Orandi, Lex Agendi. The law of worship, the law of prayer, establishes the law of Christian action. The justice, the liturgy, is intimately connected with the belief of the church. In the same way, the liturgy is equally connected to the life of the church, the action of the church. In particular, the ethical action of the church. And so it's with that in mind that what I'd like to reflect with you on today is that connection, that connection between liturgy and Christian ethics.

[05:28]

Because it is my sense that today it is one of the more neglected dimensions of our Eucharistic theology. You know, it was in the 9th century that a protracted debate developed in the Church. Actually, it had its origins in a French monastery in Corbier, a debate about what it meant to believe in the Real Presence. Two monks, Retremnus and Pascasius Robertus, were both engaged in a very lively discussion about Real Presence. A discussion that would animate the Church for three or four centuries. And then, around the time of the Reformation, and in the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church's response to the Reformation, Eucharistic controversy shifted a little bit from Real Presence to questions about Eucharistic sacrifice. And indeed, today in the 21st century, these two aspects of Eucharistic doctrine remain absolutely essential for us. So I want to say right at the start that to be a Catholic is to believe deeply and profoundly in the Eucharistic real presence and in the efficacy of the Eucharistic sacrifice.

[06:36]

My concern, however, is that contemporary Eucharistic belief has too often succumbed to a kind of reduction of the great heritage of our church's belief and practice on the Eucharist. We've reduced Eucharist to those two elements, Real Presence and Sacrifice. And we've neglected two other elements that in the early church were equally vital. Indeed, I would suggest to you, more pages were written about these two elements than about real presence. Indeed, I often remind my students that if you were to go into a time machine and go back in time to St. Paul and say, St. Paul, I really need your help. I'm trying to understand our church's most precious of teachings in transubstantiation, you would have gotten a blank stare. The term had not been invented yet. The same if you had gone to somebody like Augustine. The term had not yet been invented. But, if you'd have asked them, what is the relationship between the Eucharist and the Church, the Ecclesial Body of Christ, they would have had much to say.

[07:44]

If you'd have asked them, what's the relationship between what we do in the Eucharist and how we live our daily lives, they would have had much to say. So it seems to me worthwhile that at the beginning we stipulate to all that we Catholics understand about real presence and Eucharistic sacrifice. But if you don't mind, today I'm going to focus on this other element, this element that I think is too much neglected, the relationship between the Eucharist and ethics. So in order to do that, I want to proceed in sort of two moves. The first thing I want to do is I want to talk about how it is that the Eucharist in particular, but liturgy, ritual in general, transforms us. in such a way that we think about our action in the world differently. So, that's going to require that I do a very brief excursus on some new developments in what we call ritual studies.

[08:45]

More theoretical understandings about how ritual works. So, that'll be the first part. And then the second part, I want to apply that. I want to say, okay, if this is true, if ritual is capable of transforming us, What is its relationship? What is the relationship between the Eucharist and two vital Christian concerns? Care for the poor and care for the earth. Okay. And that's all I really want to do. That's a lot, actually. That's a whole semester's worth, but we can get that in. I'm confident we can do it. So the first thing I want to do is I want to talk about the dynamics of liturgical transformation. What happens? How does the liturgy work in such a way that it can bring about our transformation? And I want to suggest that it's not as easy. as it might be, that in fact there are important forces that push back against the capacity of the liturgy to transform.

[09:49]

One of the most profound is the danger of liturgical domestication. I like that word, domesticity. When we speak of a domestic animal, what do we mean? Of course you know the word domestic comes from domus, the household, the home. So when you have a domestic animal, a pet, what have you done? To domesticate that pet, you have taught the pet to live according to the rules of your doms, your domsa, right? It's got to learn to do things the way we do it in the house, not the way you do it out in the wild, right? So you house break an animal, for example. Presumably. I have a dog that's still iffy in this story. But the point is, we get the dog, in theory, to understand here's how it works in this house. Does that follow? Now that power of domestication, takes place in religion all the time. In fact, I remember one of the beautiful meditations of Thomas Merton on the Friday, in which he said the problem with scripture is that it's too familiar to us.

[10:54]

We've tamed it, we've domesticated it, it doesn't bother us anymore. And I want to suggest to you we have the same danger with the liturgy. It can become so familiar that ceases to startle us, that ceases to challenge us. We've tamed it so that we can conclude the celebration of the liturgy largely unaffected, going about our life just the same way as we did before. Now the question is, how do we recover that transformative power? There's a well-known passage, liturgists love this passage, so some of you may have heard of this, from the American nationalist author Annie Dillard. She writes in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, in which she lived as something in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and a hermitage by a place called Tinker Creek, and kept very minute observations of what was going on in the natural order, but also had a profound mystical consciousness that the closer she came to what was going on in the natural order, the more the holy mystery of God was manifesting itself to her.

[12:09]

Well, in one of her, a collection of her essays, teaching a stone to talk. She writes about how on Sundays she would leave the hermitage and she would go to a small rural Catholic parish to celebrate Sunday Mass. She, by the way, would eventually convert to Catholicism. But at this point, she was not a Catholic. But she was still very taken by the importance of regular worship. So she would go to this very small rural Catholic parish and celebrate Mass. However, in one of her essays, she offers a rather shocking indictment. about the celebration of the liturgy, and I would share it with you. It's sort of intentionally evocative. She says, why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the absolute? On the whole, she says, I do not find Christians, well, perhaps outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions.

[13:12]

Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power it is we so blithely evoke, invoke, or, as I suspect, does no one really believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. Well, it is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats and men's three-piece suits to church. We should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares. They should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake some day and take offense, or the waking God draw us out to where we can never return. Well, she's using rather provocative language to say, be careful what you pray.

[14:14]

We gather here. Wait, what? Wait a minute. There? Am I right? More or less there. And we dare to pray, every time we pray, that God change us. Not just that God changed the gifts of bread and wine. We'll get to that. But that in the changing the gifts of bread and wine, we're transformed. But of course, as Amy Gillard says, does any of us really believe that? This is the question. OK. So I want to consider, then, how that kind of transformation might work, how the liturgy might work in a way that disposes us to act differently in the world. With two issues, I'm just going to focus on, and we can focus on many others, concern to the poor, concern to the earth. The problem, and those of us who are of a certain age probably remember this, is that when Catholics have, for the last four decades since the Second Vatican Council, tried to make the connection between the liturgy or the Eucharist and social ethics, we have tended to succumb to what you might call a liturgical didacticism.

[15:29]

But liturgical didacticism, what I mean by that is we think you've got this liturgy, and really directly it has nothing to do with ethics. But we can gussy it up, we can dress it up and make it about ethics. So we can have, and this used to be, some of us might remember in the 70s, this was really big, a peace mass, right? But you could have a mass for the poor. You could have a green mass. You could have a mass of greater environmental consciousness, a pro-life mass. But know what the assumption is. You've got to superimpose on the liturgy, right? a special set of social concerns. So you'll have a liturgy planning committee, and they'll pick hymns that have some sort of relevance to that issue, the prayer of St. Francis or something like that. You'll have banners, perhaps, that will shout out that particular social issue. The assumption, though, and this is the nature of liturgical didactics, didacticism, there we go, is that you've got to add on to the liturgy something to make it socially relevant.

[16:33]

Is that following? Now, what contemporary ritual theorists are telling us is, that's a mistake. That's a mistake. That's not how the liturgy relates to ethics. Now, they're not saying it's a bad thing to have a mass where you're picking certain readings and following a theme. What they're saying is you're missing the intrinsically ethical character of the liturgy. The way the liturgy is about ethics before you add banners to it. Is that wrong? And that part we haven't necessarily caught. So, to get that, we need to talk about liturgical transformation. How does the liturgy change us? Now, here, the short answer to that, of course, for believers is, through God's grace. Fair enough. But, of course, we believe that God's grace works through the mediation of human realities. God's grace works through human actions, through human symbols and gestures.

[17:36]

And so, while always recognizing the theological answers through God's grace, I'm interested in how does God's grace work through the ritual? And here I wanna take advantage of a number of very fruitful ritual studies that have come to the fore in the last three decades, last two decades anyway. In particular, the work of a French theologian, Louis-Marie Chauvet. who says that, look, here's how a ritual works. The way it transforms us is that it creates a ritual behavior that establishes a certain distance from our ordinary behavior, right? That when we do the ritual, there are things that we do when we celebrate the ritual that distance us from ordinary activity. So for example, baptism. is ultimately a bath. But for it to be powerful, it can't look like what I did with my six-month-old, right, when I would take my six-month-old into the bathtub.

[18:38]

It has to look a little bit different from an ordinary bath. The Eucharist is a meal. But for it to work transformatively, there must be a distinction. He calls it symbolic distance or symbolic rupture between the ordinary activity and what we do in the ritual. And the idea is it's precisely in that difference between the ordinary world and what we do in the ritual that allows us to look at the ordinary differently. So he says, let's look at the objects that we use in the celebration of the Eucharist. We have a cup. But it's not an ordinary dinner tumbler. It's a chalice. And there's some way in which we ought to be able to recognize, through its artistic value, the craftsmanship that brought it into existence. And that doesn't mean it has to be bejeweled or anything. It could be a simple work of pottery, but something that gives it a certain dignity, that tells me this isn't a Dixie cup.

[19:41]

This isn't an ordinary water glass. There's something different here. We have bread, which should be, and sadly is not always, recognizable as bread, but nevertheless ought not to be confused with a slice of Wonder Bread, an ordinary sandwich bread. Is that fault? So it should be bread, but it should look different from ordinary bread. It should be a cup, but look different from an ordinary tumbler. It should be a table, but not look like something that you pop up at a Sunday picnic outdoors, right? And it's that distance between the ordinary that allows us to consider things differently. So, for example, the great Russian Orthodox liturgical theologian, Alexander Shmaiman, said, the liturgy is not an escape from the world. Though I must confess, there are some of us who want to think of it that way. It's not an escape from the world. The liturgy is intended to draw us to that place from which we can look at the world

[20:45]

with new eyes. The world should look different because of the liturgy. You see what's happening? Now, we could do a whole day on this, but I can't spend some time on it, because one of the things that Chauvet then says is, you've got to be careful about this distance thing. If you don't make it distant enough, if you become so focused on relevance, on what we see in some of the megachurches where you're bringing styrofoam cups into the assembly and all that, if you make it too casual and too familiar, and there's no distance, Well, there's no call to change the way you look at the ordinary. Does that follow? But if you go in the other direction, and you make it so remote, so distant, so arcane, that people no longer make the connection with the ordinary line, well, then it's just become sort of some exotic antiquarian activity that has nothing to do with our lives. Does that follow? And may I suggest to you, in the liturgy wars that we suffer under today, you see us pulling in both those directions, right?

[21:51]

For self-people, everything in liturgy has to be determined by contemporary relevance, familiarity, and informality. But then you lose this transformative power. But for others, you can't have a mass high enough. You can't have enough insets. You can't have enough chant. You can't have enough formality. But then one wonders whether this simply becomes a museum piece. incapable of calling us to look at our ordinary world differently. Now, if we go back to the writing in the early church, we discover they naturally navigated between those two extremes. They understood that the Eucharist should not be an ordinary meal, but they also understood it should shine light on our ordinary life. Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, And several centuries later, St. Augustine of Hippo. Both were fond of speaking of the Eucharist, the liturgy, as a divine pedagogy, a school that shapes us, a school that forms a particular moral vision.

[23:04]

The idea was to celebrate this liturgy was to learn to see differently. I often think we miss this. You know, among a lot of our young people, it's become trendy for the last, oh gosh, I don't know, it's probably been 10 or 15 years now, wearing these little bracelets, WWJD, everybody familiar with that? What would Jesus do? The suggestion here, there ought to be WWJS. The measure of the Christian life is to ask ourselves, what would Jesus see? Are we trained to see differently? I'll give you an example of how that works. There was a debate among two theologians, both very faithful theologians. They were talking about the evil of abortion. And one of them thought it was very clever. He got up and said, well, I'll tell you what. There'd be a lot fewer abortions in the world if wombs were transparent. Interesting observation, right?

[24:06]

If people saw what they were destroying, they'd have a harder time having an abortion. Is that right? Now, hold on, though. His colleague got up and refuted him. He said, no. Because if wombs were transparent, some would see children and some would see fetuses. What do you see? What do you see? Jesus taught us the importance of transformed vision, learning to see. differently. Learning to see according to the values of the Kingdom of God. Learning to see. After all, one could argue the whole definition of the Baselay of Truth, the Kingdom of God, the whole definition of it is the world as God would have it be. The world as God sees it. So that living according to the values of the Kingdom means living as if we see everything through God's eyes. Irenaeus and Augustine understood this is what Eucharist is supposed to do.

[25:12]

It changes you. It changes how you see the world. And only when you learn to see differently can you recognize your obligations to care for the poor, your obligations to care for the earth. Does that follow? It's not about peace hymns and banners, as good as those can be. It's about allowing the Eucharist to do its work through the power of the Holy Spirit. All right, what is the danger of my just rambling without occasionally looking at notes here? I'm almost certain to miss something. So all right, I think we've gone far enough. So now what I want to suggest to you is that this insight that liturgy is intrinsically related to ethical living is not a modern one. It's not trendy. It's not politically correct. I would argue that it is fundamental to our Judeo-Christian tradition. Biblical scholars in the Old Testament who studied the Old Testament at the Tanakh tell us that at the very earliest strata of the history of Israel was an understanding that worship and ethics were intimately connected.

[26:24]

That worship was part of the act of gratitude of the people of Israel, an act of gratitude for God's having established covenant with them. Indeed, one of the sad things about some strands of contemporary Christianity is that we buy into Luther's kind of dichotomy between gospel and law, and we imagine that law, as it dominated Torah, as was understood in the Old Testament, was all about legalism. But that was a distortion of law. That was not the true meaning of Torah. Torah was the grateful response of the people of Israel. responding to the covenant love of God, and therefore feeling compelled to act as their God. Act. Act it. And so in the book of Exodus, for example, God tells them to show care to the stranger, the foreigner. Why? Because you were once foreigners.

[27:26]

And I showed hospitality to you." In other words, the whole point of living the law was to mirror God's gracious, loving actions in history. Only over time does Israel lose the connection between authentic worship and authentic living. And when it happens, they hear the harsh denunciations of the prophets. the prophets who warned them again and again, what happens when you separate worship from ethical living, right? And so we find Amos saying that those he was preaching to should forsake empty sacrifices and let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. or we find from the prophet Micah, with what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil?

[28:30]

Shall I give my firstborn for my transgressions, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has told you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? But to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God. What did the prophets understand? Sacrifices are empty unless they are intimately connected with the concern for the least in our society. This connection between worship and ethical living is picked up again in a new Testament. Let's take, for example, Mark's Gospel. Now, it's important as we look at Mark's Gospel that you remember something really basic about all the Gospels. They're not transcripts. Nobody was sitting at the Sermon on the Mount with a stenographer, getting everything down.

[29:32]

They're the memories of the early Christian community of Jesus' teaching. But they're memories filtered through their practice. So, for example, Mark's Gospel, which most biblical scholars think was the first, is probably dated around 69. That's three decades after the death and resurrection of Christ. They have presumably been celebrating the Eucharist for the last three decades, following Jesus' mandate. Do this in remembrance of me. Does that follow? So, it shouldn't surprise us. The great biblical scholar, Eugene LaVerdier, points this out. that when it comes time to write down some of the stories of Jesus, the way those stories are told are in some ways shaped by the worship of the church, the way they've been already practicing. And nowhere is this more evident than in Mark's stories of the feeding of the thousands. In Mark 6, you have the feeding of the 5,000.

[30:33]

And in Mark 8, you have the feeding of the 4,000. We're all familiar with these stories, aren't we? But we should pay attention to the way Mark tells the story. Is it based on a historical fact in Jesus' life? Almost certainly. But Mark wants to take advantage of the story to make a point that he considers is fundamental to discipleship. And so in both stories, Jesus engages in a four-fold action, and four verbs are used, the same verbs that will be used in the institution narrative later in the Last Supper account. Jesus takes, He blesses, He breaks, He gives in both feeding stories. He takes, blesses, breaks, and gives. And when you go to the institution narrative at the Last Supper, Jesus takes, blesses, breaks, and gives.

[31:35]

Now to those in Mark's community who hear the telling of the feeding of the thousands, they immediately recognize what we sadly often overlook, that what Jesus is doing in the feeding of the thousands is Eucharistic. It's Eucharistic. Jean Lavergne says the feeding stories are hospitality meals. They are Jesus. You see, we today tend to focus on the miracle part of it. Oh my gosh, how did he miraculously feed those people? Well, it is a miracle, but what was significant to the early Christian community wasn't the miracle dimension. It was Jesus exercising hospitality, responding to the concerns of the people. And Mark tells the story in Eucharistic language. in order to communicate to his people that when we celebrate the Eucharist, that's what we're supposed to do.

[32:38]

Always keep in mind the least in our midst. It was fundamental to Jesus' ministry. It's to be fundamental to our own. We see something like this recounted in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, the great Eucharistic controversy that's recounted in chapter 11, in which Paul is quite harsh with the Corinthian community. Now, biblical scholars have spent a lot of time trying to piece together what goes on here. And in order to appreciate this, you have to understand that the Corinthian Christian community would have been somewhat socially stratified. There would have been some wealthy people. There would have been some you know, somewhat prosperous business people, there would have been some other people not so wealthy. As we know, there were no churches, no houses of worship yet. So people met in what we sometimes call house churches, but we shouldn't get carried away. We shouldn't imagine that's somebody's little living room. Most people, prosperous businessmen, conducted business in a large hall. And then they would have a somewhat smaller but still substantial dining room for entertaining closer guests.

[33:43]

What many biblical scholars suspect was happening in the Corinthian community was that when the Eucharist was celebrated, and you should remember that there was an ordinary meal that preceded the Eucharistic meal in the Corinthian community. But what's happening here, apparently, was that some of the wealthier were coming earlier. They were perhaps allowed to dine in the smaller dining cave. The rest of the community would have had to dine in the larger hall, much less comfortable and intimate surroundings. Those, of course, who are wealthy were not necessarily day laborers, so they could arrive early, whereas the day laborers might have to come later in the day. And so what you're having was a scandal in which some in the Corinthian community were eating a sumptuous meal, followed by the Eucharist, while others were effectively going away hungry. Is that following? And so Paul hears about this, and he's not happy. Let's see if I have this. Well, I don't have it here.

[34:45]

You all know the story, but it's worth looking at what Paul says here. All right, maybe I won't, but I'll find it quickly. Yeah, here we go. This is 1 Corinthians 11. What? Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for your church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What should I say to you? Should I commend you? No, in this manner I do not commend you. Whoever therefore eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner, will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. So then, my brothers and sisters, when you come together to eat, wait for one another. Now, we're not sure about this, but the suggestion is that Paul's quite upset that some are eating sumptuous meals as part of the Eucharist, and some are eating much more modestly.

[35:56]

And he's saying, you are eating the Eucharist to your condemnation. Now, I can't help mentioning something. You know, we have a saying in Texas, speak the truth and ride a fast horse. I'm riding a fast horse tomorrow morning out of here. When Catholics today speak of reverence for the Eucharist, we intuitively think about reverencing the Eucharistic elements, as we should. But I should point out that Paul is not angry that they are not reverencing the Eucharistic elements. Paul is angry that they are not reverencing one another. And that the Eucharistic scandal is not that somebody is casual and insufficiently respectful in receiving the elements. The scandal for Paul is their callous disregard for one another. You see? Paul understood that to celebrate the Eucharist brings with it fundamental ethical obligations.

[37:01]

We move out of the New Testament to the early 2nd century. The first post-biblical account of a Sunday celebration of the Eucharist that we have is in Justin Martyr's first apologia, dated around 150. And what's interesting in his account of this is the way in which in every service During the service, they stopped and there was a question about providing for the needs of the least in their community. They understood that this connection between Eucharist and concern for the needy was fundamental. It continues well on in the church. In the 4th century, St. John Chrysostom offers this homily. He's reflecting on the Gospel of Matthew. He offers this homily. He says, Do you wish to honor the body of Christ then do not ignore him when he's naked. Do not pay homage in the temple clad in silk, only then to neglect him outside where he's cold and ill-clad. For he who said, this is my body, is the same who said, you saw me hungry and you gave me no food.

[38:13]

And whatever you did to the least of my brothers, you did also to me. What good is it if the Eucharistic table is overloaded with golden chalices when your brother is dying of hunger? Start by satisfying his hunger, and then with what is left, you may adore the altar as well. One of the great doctors of the Church, John Chrysostom, St. John Chrysostom, coming to us from the Eastern tradition, recognizes, already centuries removed from Christ, that celebrating the Eucharist, in care of the least, go hand in hand. You cannot be doing one faithfully and authentically unless you're also concerned for the other. The early Christian church understood the fundamental connection between Eucharist and concern for the poor. Okay, so let's shift a little bit.

[39:15]

I tried to say just in a sketchy way something about what Eucharist and concern for the poor looks like, but now what about Eucharist and care for the earth? Now, in order to establish this connection, we're going to have to do a little bit more work. In order to do this, we're going to have to engage in a little excursus, a little explanation about what we might call the theology of gift. Well, actually, there's a wonderful Benedictine liturgical scholar who's written a very good book on this. Father Kevin Cecil or something, in a college book. So, I'm not going to footnote him all the way through here, but his book's a very helpful summary of a lot of this. In order to understand the connection between Eucharist and a concern for the earth, a concern for creation, it seems to me we have to start with this notion of gift. The idea that the Christian tradition begins with the priority of gift, begins, in fact, with a very unique and radical claim about creation itself, namely, that creation, the cosmos, the universe, is itself gift.

[40:33]

You know, one of our most radical, but insufficiently reflected upon Christian teachings, is the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. We Christians believe that God created the world out of nothing. Now, yeah, we could go off on this for a while, explaining how unique that is. Because in the ancient world, many of the creation myths were not about creation coming into existence out of nothing. Some of them were creation coming into existence as a result of cosmic balance between two different primordial entities. Or in the Platonic tradition, a way in which creation proceeds out of necessity through a kind of series of divine emanations. But the Christian tradition has emphasized that creation did not have to be. It wasn't always there.

[41:34]

It doesn't emerge out of divine necessity. God freely, if you will, loved the world into existence. So that the world exists, but did not have to exist. It exists only because as an act of divine love, God freely brings it into existence. This means that for us, creation itself stands under the logic, what the Holy Father in his recent encyclical called, the economy of the gift. It's one of the great contributions of Pope Benedict's recent social encyclical, Caritas in Meritata, is he talks about the economy of gift. And that's a weird thing, you know, but economy, we think of it, of course, in public policy and so on. It actually is a biblical origin. The oikonomia, Paul talks about the divine oikonomia. Oikonomia, etymologically, is broken down into two Greek words, roots. Oikos, or oikia, which means household.

[42:37]

Nomos, which means rule, or law. The economy, literally, is about how you run your household. Does that follow? I mean, if you think about it, that makes sense. That's how you run your household. And of course, Paul had an idea about how God runs God's household, which is, of course, the whole cosmos, right? And Pope Benedict reminds us that for we Christians, the bigger economy is always the economy of gift. Because God gifted the whole world into existence. The fact that we are here at all is about gift. Now, I just want you to think about this notion of gift a little bit. Because in order for us to understand this, we have to contrast gift with a commodity. A commodity is something that is subject to my manipulation and control.

[43:40]

I do most of the cooking in our household. And it's real convenient for me doing the cooking. If I go to the grocery store and buy boneless, skinless chicken breasts, wonderfully shrink-wrapped, coral-colored, without a blemish, almost no fat on it. Now, It's a classic example of a commodity. It's nutritive material. It's nutritive Play-Doh. When I open up a shrink-wrapped package of chicken breast, not for one moment do I think about the chicken that gave its life. for me to have this. Not once do I think about that excruciatingly painful process that some laborer had of skinning and boning that. By the way, one of the most difficult things that people can do in chicken factories, okay, is skinning and boning. Not once do I ask myself, by the way, what the work conditions were for the people who worked in that chicken factory, or anything like that. I don't even think about the chicken. This is just something to be diced.

[44:44]

Right? Does that make sense? And stir fried or something like that. It's a blob that I manipulate and control. I keep when there's a good sale. I buy a bunch of them. I have it shrink wrapped in the freezer. I grab them when I need it. I do what I want with it. It's consumed and done with. I don't think about the larger world. I don't think about chickens. I don't think about people who took care of the chickens. That's it. I just eat the material. Does that follow? That's a commodity. Now, some of you If you were raised on a farm and are of a certain age, you may remember a time where having chicken Florentine that night meant that you were one chicken short from yesterday, right? And you still ate the chicken. I'm not, by the way, making an argument for vegetarianism. But may I suggest that when you have chicken Florentine and you knew where the chicken came from the day before, you eat that meal differently. then my children eat the meals that I prepare.

[45:46]

You understood that something gave its life for this meal. You understood that you're connected with a larger world of people who care to put that food on your table. And so there's a little bit more gratitude about what went into preparing that meal. Much in the same way in which, you know, when I fix a home-cooked meal that takes an hour or two, we're not eating on paper plates. We're going to eat on our good china, why? It took me two hours to prepare this meal, by now you're going to sit down and enjoy it. Nobody breaks out the china for a microwave dinner. Microwave dinners are commodities intended to be consumed on one's lap, in the van, on the way to soccer practice. At least in my household, that's what it is. You see the difference? The Michaelite dinner is a commodity. You don't think about how it connects you to the larger world. Nobody stops and says at that Stouffer's dinner, this is an extraordinary, tender piece of meat. And we just consume it, and we're done with it, right?

[46:49]

Whereas in my household, there will be proper expressions of gratitude at the end of a meal that I spent two hours preparing. And by God, we will sit down. In fact, there's a basic rule. The amount of time it takes to prepare the meal determines the leisurely consumption of the meal. I spend two hours preparing it. You're not getting up in five minutes to go watch TV or something like that. You're going to sit down for a while. Is that all? Do you see a little bit the difference between commodity, something just manipulate, control, consume, and forget, and gift, something that connects you to the larger world and that you enjoy in gratitude. You with me so far in this? Alright, now, we're going to get there. We're going to get back to the Eucharist. I know it may seem circuitous, but it's going to happen. I'm not altogether sure how quite yet, but I am going to get us there. The priority of gift, yeah. The value of a commodity is determined by what I want to do with it.

[47:53]

That's the bottom line. I buy things because I want to use them, or I want to consume them. I have some purpose in mind. And my desires for these commodities determines everything. Okay? And if I buy something, and it's not what I want, wrong size clothes. The golf club is, you know, causing me to slice. It's not my swing, it's the golf. I've got to return it. I've got to get a different club. The value of a gift is different. The value of the gift depends on the intentions of the giver, not myself. So we come to Christmas. My wife's told me that the boys that pooled their finances together to get me a special gift for Christmas. I'm thinking they heard that I need a new driver. I wait eagerly for Christmas Day to come, and I get a sweater.

[48:55]

It's not what I was looking for. I don't need another sweater. I have lots of sweaters. It's not even the kind of sweater that helps cover up my increasing girth. But every time I wear this sweater, I'm conscious. And it's value. And I have one of these sweaters. And it is precious. And I recall it every time I open my drawer. It's value is determined by the giver. not by whether I wanted it, whether it's useful in some special way to me. Does that follow? And so there's a gratitude that emerges in my receiving the gift that actually has very little to do whether it's what I was looking for. It's a gratitude based on the fact that it was given according to someone else's intention. And so the economy of gift is when we learn to receive things, not necessarily because they're what we're looking for, but because they're what has been offered to us.

[50:05]

They connect us to the giver. And so when we say that creation, in the doctrine of kriyatso ex nihilo, creation is absolute gift. The world did not have to be here. It is only here because God gifts it into existence. Then our attitude towards the entire created world is to be governed by gift. Gratitude. Respect. The kind of respect that I give to that sweater, where I would not think of giving it away to goodwill. Right? Why? I don't need it. But it has value that goes beyond its utility. Right? Its value comes from the giver. Now, where on the heck does this relate to Eucharist? The starting point of Eucharist is the gift of creation. The starting point of Eucharist is the gift of creation. Remember, now here in the monastic community it's a little bit different.

[51:10]

But in your average Sunday parish, the Sunday gifts of bread and wine are in the back of the church. Here they were brought forward by a brother, but they're normally brought forward by members of the laity. Is that right? The clergy never go back to get the gifts, do they? We bring them forward. This is actually an important ritual act. This isn't just, you know, housekeeping. There is genuine significance in the idea that that gift, those gifts of bread and wine, they come from us. They come from our world. And that prayer that the priests praise over, sometimes silently, sometimes out loud, but we're all familiar with it, is in fact one of the oldest prayers in the entire lineage. Scholars think it has its roots in the ancient Jewish Barakoth prayer. Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have this bread to offer, which earth has given, and human hands have made. It is a gift, and we will cooperate with that gift.

[52:14]

Because no, we do not bring wheat forward. We bring bread. Bread is the fruit of the cooperation between what the earth gives us and what we make. Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have not grapes, it's wine to offer. Fruit of the vine, gift of creation, work of human hands. These gifts that we place on the altar, or are all about our cooperative relationship with creation. They represent us, they represent our relationship to the world, they represent our capacity. to be grateful. And so, for example, in the prayer preparation of the preface today, the prayer speaks of this holy gift exchange. Because that's what we do at every Eucharist. There's a gift exchange. Our humble, limited gifts, the fruit of our cooperation with the world, are placed on the altar and transformed into God's gifts for us.

[53:19]

And what's supposed to happen in this gift exchange is that we're drawn into this whole economy of gift. in Pope Benedict's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Us. He said, in every Eucharist, we are drawn into Christ's self-giving love. God who comes to us in Christ's gifting Himself, offering Himself, we become part of that, because our gifts are part of that gift exchange. Our gifts are part of that transformation. And so, again, to go back to Irenaeus of Lyon, to go back to Augustine of Hippo, what are we doing? We're engaging in this transformed way of living, in which we learn to receive all things as gifts. I want to make sure we have time for some discussion. But I want to go back to one last thing about the early church. There have been a number of very interesting historical studies on the origins of the Eucharist in the first couple of centuries that I have benefited from.

[54:22]

One is by a scholar named Dennis Smith, who wrote a book called, From Symposium to the Eucharist. And he talks about the cultural world of the Mediterranean when Christianity was first growing in those first two to three centuries. And he says, you know, it was a very socially stratified society. But it wasn't stratified the way we think of society today. We tend to think of social stratification in economic terms. Upper class, middle class, lower class. But in the Mediterranean, the social stratification was based on a patronage system. It wasn't based on income. Your social stratification was based really, in a way, on who you knew. So at the top, you had wealthy patrons. All right. Then you had, at the intermediate level, influential business clients. And then at the lower level, you had sort of social, we would say today, hangers on, right?

[55:23]

People trying to make connections. But the system was built not on how much you made, not even on how much you owned, but on who you knew, who you were in good with. Does that follow? And one of the ways in which that stratification was reinforced was through certain social rituals and practices. And most important of them was the meal. Meals, of course, were important in all ancient cultures, much more than today. But in the Greco-Roman way, there was a particular meal called the symposium. It was a formal meal, and what it was, was a kind of school of manners. When you're invited to this meal, it sort of taught you where you fit in society. And so there would be one of the wealthy patrons, the host, who would send the invitation to you. And when you came, servants would meet you at the door, and they would wash your feet, and they would take you to the table where you would recline.

[56:24]

There wouldn't be chairs. You would lay down. There would be a small bowl at the table where you would wash your own hands. Wine would be served. A meal would be served. The plates and everything would be taken away. And there would usually be some more formal, learned conversation before everyone left. Now, some version of that happened frequently throughout the Mediterranean. And what it did was it sort of established the social order. It created what Patrick McCormick calls a kind of peaceable, ordered community. Everybody knows where they fit in. And I would suggest to you, by the way, that the influence of the Symposium had migrated all the way to Palestine. That even in the time of Jesus there is some awareness of this. Indeed, may I suggest to you that Jesus has this Greco-Roman Symposium in mind in some of his teachings. When he says things about, I'll take the head of the table, right? But go to the end of the table and be invited up.

[57:25]

All right? Where Jesus says, when you hold a banquet, don't just invite close friends and influential people. Go out to the highways and invite the stranger. The assumption, some scholars say, is that the early Christian community knew all about the symposium. I mean, this was just, you know, this was a prominent cultural feature. But they understood the Eucharist to kind of turn the symposium on its head. Right? Because this is a meal in which now think about John's Gospel. In John's Gospel where you might expect the institution narrative, everybody knows what the institution narrative is, the tale that tells us about Jesus when he took the bread and he took the cup and he said, do this in memory of me. But it's not there in John's Gospel at the Last Supper. I don't know if you realize that. It's there in all the synoptics and Paul has an example of it. It's not there in John's Gospel. Where you might expect the institution narrative, you have a different story. Jesus is washing the feet of his disciples. Now some biblical scholars wonder about that.

[58:28]

Is John saying something when he puts where you would expect the story of the institution of the Eucharist, a ritual about washing the feet? Is he perhaps saying that this is what Eucharist is all about? Humble service. Yes, in the Greco-Roman symposium, the host sits back and lets the servants wash people's feet. But not in the community of followers of Jesus, where we're all culted in the tick Christ, and engage in lives of humbled service. Where we don't just invite the politically and economically influential, but according to Jesus' teaching, we go out and invite the stranger. the one who owes us nothing and who has no established patronal relationship with us. The assumption is that the Eucharist was also a school of manners, but it's a school of an entirely different kind of etiquette. a Christian etiquette in which we're called to realize our relationship with one another in radically different ways, in which we come to the table of the Lord and we do not divide by economic class and political influence.

[59:44]

We come to the table of the Lord as baptized sinners, every one of us. in which the only thing we have in common when we come to that table is that we are all in need of Christ's grace and we are all called to that transformation that allows us to imitate Christ in service of the least among us and in our attitudes of humble gratitude for the gift of all creation and its intrinsic sacredness. Thank you all very much. And right on time, 11.30. I had to do some self-editing as I was going there. So I hope you found this helpful. It was a little more random. It's what happens when you don't read a page of a book. Anyway. So I would invite, if it's appropriate, to have some give and take, some questions, comments, polite disagreements.

[60:47]

Oh, he's short, by the way, the plaintiff's period. Noah, yes, sir. If the liturgy is to change the way we see, as you say, it requires being informed about what to say. If you experience liturgy just about yourself, your personal perspective, It seems to me to serve the poor, serve the earth, you have to inform congregations. And I think in many cases that doesn't happen. I agree. I just think being informed is key to what you're saying. I think it's true. I think you're absolutely right. I think, in some ways, the way we celebrate the liturgy, however, can go a long way towards this.

[61:49]

We have, a lot of us, still residual liturgical houses that are very privatized. The image I have is, you know, in a church in the nave, 400 phone booths. each with an individual line going to the altar, and then one trunk line going up to heaven, you know? And I think there's still, in some Catholic circles, by the way, it's an image I can't use with my students, because they increasingly don't know much about holy beliefs. It's an image that just doesn't work anymore. But I think most people here remember that. But you know, and I think that's so, I think some of it can be changed by how we celebrate. the doing of the ritual can go a long way. The other thing is we can make much more explicit the connections. So, for example, we have a lot of young students, college students, who are recovering an interest in Eucharistic adoration, which is, you know, a very important tradition in our Catholic Church. But I worry about it.

[62:50]

Now, you've got to hear me out here. This is the type of thing that people only hear certain things and they get mad. Eucharistic adoration in a consumer society is a lot different than Eucharistic adoration before consumer society. That is to say, in a consumer society, where we're inclined to take goods and turn them into commodities that we manipulate and consume at our pleasure, shapes, I think, the way people look at Eucharistic adoration. That is, there's a danger of Eucharistic adoration to commodify the Eucharist, to forget that it is an adoring encounter with the Christ whom we encounter most profoundly in the Mass, offering Himself in that dynamism of self-giving love. So that adoring Christ in the Eucharist, in the Blessed Sacrament, should always really be bringing us back to Christ who comes to us most profoundly in the Eucharist. Does that follow? And a Christ who we do not encounter as an object to adore or to be consumed, but the second person of the Trinity who comes to us in self-giving love and calls us into that.

[63:59]

So now, let me finish. So now the question is, if that's the case, and I really believe that's the case, I think that a lot of our young adults are inclined to think of adoration in a commodified way, how do we correct that? I don't think it's by doing away with Eucharistic adoration. But one of the things that we do at our university parish is that we conjoin Eucharistic adoration with some act of social service, providing lunches for the poor. And so from 7 to 8 there's going to be Eucharistic adoration. At 8 o'clock we gather in the meeting space and we're making brown bag lunches for Cherry Street Mission. So what are we doing? We're immediately connecting Eucharist with our larger obligations. You're absolutely right that we have to educate people. But I don't want to undersell how much we educate simply by our action. By the way we juxtapose things. The way we start to teach our communities that the most natural and appropriate thing in the world for all of us to do immediately after Mass

[65:04]

is some effort of Christian service. which we don't think about at all. Largely because a lot of our churches have got Indian parking lots 15-20 minutes. But, you know, we started thinking that, shouldn't every celebration of the Mass immediately send us out? I didn't have enough time here, but I was going to talk about, you know, in the Tridentine Mass, in that the priest said at the end, many of you remember, Ite Misa Est, right? He would say, Deo Gratis. Now, there's actually an interesting question about the translation of that Ite Misa Est. Joseph Jungmann, the great liturgical scholar, says, well, at least at some point it came to be understood that missio was related to dimissio, which had to do with dismissal. And so it was go, it is ended. Or go, you're dismissed. But of course, missio also has that sense of mission. Mission. And it's worth asking whether the earliest meaning of that was not go, it is ended. But go, you were sent.

[66:05]

You were sent. Great Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner spoke of the liturgy, but then he said we are sent to the liturgy after the liturgy, the liturgy of the transformation of the world, in which the Eucharistic liturgy nourishes us and sends us forth in mission. The challenge, it seems to me, for all of our Eucharistic communities is how do we recover that E.T. and Nisa asked, go, you are sent. How do we connect what we do in church with what happens when we're sent out into the world? That's the great challenge for our time. What else? Yes. You spoke of the tension today and the whole idea of the tension being the distances and how to create it. Put your comments a little bit on this new translation that's coming in and how that's going to affect the distance. That's a good question.

[67:08]

And you know, I'm going to only make a few general observations. Because I have read selected passages, I have not looked through the entire translation. So it would be unfair for me to pronounce judgment on it. Second, my Latin's passable, but I'm not a Latinist. I mean, in other words, there's knowing Latin, and there's knowing Latin. And I think it's important to understand that the kind of people that do translations Really, no Latin. And I'm not going to pretend that I'm a Latinist, a Latin scholar, okay? There are people out there that are more equipped than I am to do that. I'm nervous, as many people are, about some of the things that I've heard. And I think there's some legitimate criticisms about some of the translations. And there's an even more legitimate principled criticism about the rules for translation, which, from what I understand, call for a pretty slavish imitation of the grammatical structure of the Latin. which anybody who knows, even as much Latin as I know, knows that's a mistake because Latin functions in a very different system that allows for different kinds of rules, longer sentences, multiple clauses, and so on.

[68:22]

And my understanding is sometimes slavish What's the word I want to use? Adherence. Adherence, thank you. I was losing it. To the original may end up, leave us with text that will be more difficult to throw. Alright, those are the currencies. Now, I'm a notorious vote the end person. I also think, however, that there is a legitimate effort to recover a bit of the poetic in the liturgy. That some of the earlier ISIL translations, in their legitimate desire for clarity, All right? Ease of understanding, something so important immediately coming out of the Second Vatican Council, may have lost some of the evocative power of the language. And we may undersell the ability of people to grapple with language that uses terms and terms of phrase that maybe are a little bit unfamiliar. All right? I think there's something about the liturgical text capturing our imaginations.

[69:24]

This is that distance thing that we're talking about. So there may be, I want to be open to the idea that there may be some good things here. That maybe we'll recover a kind of vocabulary that isn't so ordinary and everyday, but teases the religious imagination. Or, in some cases, brings us back to biblical texts. In at least two instances I know of, the change is an attempt to make more obvious to us the biblical text, for example, the Lord I'm not worthy to receive, which has its biblical origins, but the new translation is going to make that biblical origin, I think, much more apparent. So, I guess what I want to see is we should have an open mind. Let's wait until we see the old text. I know the problematic passages, I'm ready to get all upset, but I also want to be open to the idea that there may be some good things in this translation that will encourage a more prayerful, contemplative celebration of the liturgy, which should also be important to all of us.

[70:27]

Yes, in the back. You just appreciate your insight about the liturgy and how you present this to the Eucharistic community, to this group of people here. How do these insights, or how can these insights be sent to or influenced the people who celebrate in our ecosystem community, because it's, you know, we want to see, but we have a leader in this community, and how are they being trained, and what is happening on that level? Well, that's a very good question. Ashley is an ecclesiologist. I'm more interested in that question than this other stuff. I mean, that's the stuff I spend a lot of time working on. I mean, there's no one answer to this. I mean, I taught in a seminary for 10 years, and one obvious thing is, you know, let's look at the quality of our seminary formation.

[71:36]

But I've also learned after 10 years in seminary that Sometimes we oversell what can happen in the seminary. We would teach people, the seminarians, they'd go out to the parishes and then somebody would come back to me and say, what are you teaching these guys? And I'd say, now wait a minute, don't assume that what you're hearing is what we talk. Because they have a funny way of only hearing what they want to hear. So I don't think seminary education is a lot of it. We're in the middle here in the United States of some important shifts. Some important shifts in our priestly ministry. And we're going to have to see how it shakes out. But it's already evident, and I'm speaking in massive generalizations, and I'm going to speak much more of diocesan clergy than religious, all right? Which is a little bit different case. But I taught in a diocesan seminary, and I drew a lot of clergy There's a younger generation of priests that are coming out of the seminary, that are being ordained, that have

[72:41]

A theology of the priesthood that's maybe a little different from the priest who came before. A little more emphasis on the sacral character of the priesthood. A little more eagerness to emphasize the difference between the priest and the laity. strong emphasis on the reverence for the Eucharist, the Eucharistic elements in their particular ministry, not always as strong on the ecclesial dimensions of the Eucharist. I think there are a lot of reasons for this. We could go on and take me beyond the ten minutes I have. I think it has to do with just changes in our younger generation. Those my generation and older Our Catholic identity is very much shaped, I think, by the Second Vatican Council in a lot of ways. Some here in this room actually probably have memories of the Church prior to the Council, but we almost all have memories of the momentous changes that came from the Council, and most of us received that and saw that as a very good thing, right?

[73:55]

And our Catholic identity was so deeply established that the reforms the Council called us to were kind of a breath of fresh air, if that makes sense. They didn't threaten my Catholic identity. I was Catholic in my bones, right? But it allowed some of us to move out of kind of a suffocating ghetto Catholicism to a little bit more open one. I think, frankly, what I've read about Father Damascus, he's a good example of that. He never doubted his being rooted in the Catholic liturgical tradition, the Benedictine tradition. But he also, he recognized that these are different times, that this isn't the 19th century, that there are new possibilities. But you could do that if you were a Father Damascus. Because there was no question about your being immersed in the tradition, and you're having a coherent religious identity. The young people that I teach in the class, and a lot of the young people who go to seminary, don't have that identity. Many of them come from homes where the faith wasn't practiced.

[74:57]

They come from broken households. And this is just a statistical fact. Katarina Schuth has done a demographic study about the makeup of seminarians coming into seminary. A much higher percentage of seminarians today are coming into the seminary who had no coherent, intact that were being raised in the faith. Now, what that means is, their Catholic identity is not just something they perceived and taken for granted. It's kind of constructed, right? And it tends to be constructed around things that sort of shout out, this is what it means to be Catholic. So for some of our seminarians, it's Catholics, and the Roman caller, and call me father all the time, and strong separation between laity and the clergy. And I think that's simply because they don't take their identity for granted. They weren't raised with that, and so they're looking for things that are gonna say to everybody, this is me, I'm Catholic, can you tell? And that's okay, and my hope is that we work with them, we help them to develop

[76:00]

you know, a different kind of identity. I mean, I think of my own life. I mean, I grew up praying the rosary, but I don't feel the need to flash a rosary in front of everybody so they kind of get who I am. You see the difference? I mean, there's a difference between praying the rosary because it's what you did, And the rosary defining what it means for you to be Catholic. You see the difference? Adoration's much the same thing. These are things that they take on a different valence when you have people who aren't secure in their identity. And so we get a different kind of leadership. And that leadership maybe isn't as interested in focusing on the kinds of things that I've emphasized here. That's a long-winded answer to your question. I'm not sure that's even what you were looking for, but that's kind of what I wanted to say, and I have a quote. If you're pining for the refreshments in the back, I'll understand. But if anybody has a question or comment or disagreement, I'm happy to engage it.

[77:06]

Thank you. Thank you all very much for coming. I think there are a lot of good refreshments back here. So, uh, coffee and some pastry.

[77:15]

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