CHAPTER 5: DYNAMICS OF COMMON LIFE AND COMMON EUCHARIST 157 Whenever this logic is interrupted, something is very wrong, according to BF. He mentions this with regard to two other contexts. He recalls that he was invited by Rowan Williams to attend the Anglican Lambeth Conference as his personal guest. Again, he explains how he shared their life for the duration of the conference: “So, I stayed three weeks as an Anglican bishop {laughs}, I mean, taking part in all the discussion, all the groups, all the prayers. Uh, except, again, the celebration of the Eucharist.”374Reflecting on this occasion later on, he continues: So, we were six hundred uh, Anglican bishops plus their spouses, so, one thousand three hundred people, and two people do not communicate. It was totally absurd. But I was there officially as a Catholic, I did not go to the small Catholic Mass that was celebrated in a, in a corner in another church, because I was there for the Lambeth Conference, for this [kind of] for the Anglican Communion. But, uh, it was shocking.375 Both contexts represent the situation in the early days of Bose itself in which the brothers and sisters found themselves unable to communicate together: The problem of sharing the Eucharist, here for me, uh… I had to learn, I was, I had no… um… uh, no criteria for my life before, to um, decide or to understand~ so, I assumed what the community already decided, in its history, in which at the beginning there was only a reformed pastor and no priest. So, with this absurdity that, again, like us in Switzerland, even as Daniel was here, there was a split on Sunday. So, the Catholic uh, celebrated Mass, if a priest from some friends came, and stay with us on Sunday. Or otherwise go to the parish church in the village. Where the parish priest didn’t agree at all with the community. So, just going as normal… Christians {laughs}. Uh, and Daniel was celebrating in Turin for a Waldensian community. Uh, so, for me uh… … this asked to… understand from inside, something that was totally new for me.376 The stories of Brother BF articulate one common concern: he experienced the divisions during the Eucharist as unnatural, “absurd,” and a “contradictory” discontinuation of the Christian life in common. Brother BE agrees. To my question of whether he could imagine living in an ecumenical monastic community without sharing the Eucharist, he replies: 374 BF-1,2g. 375 BF-1,22d. 376 BF-1,2h.
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