238 PART TWO: AN EMPIRICAL ACCOUNT For BE, it is important to live out universal communion with other Christians (in this case, the Roman Catholic Church), even if things are not sorted out completely on a theological level. Still, as we have encountered throughout the material, the question of the place of the Eucharist in the ecumenical process is not unambiguously clear. Sister BG, in particular, articulates that, on the one hand, the community is able to receive Communion together while, on the other hand, she concludes: “if you will pray together, step by step, we also can do the ecu~ real ecumenism, and the Eucharist is the last step, not the first, we have to grow up in the others.”526 This is the tension in which the communities and the monastics find themselves. They have an exceptional position in this matter while the churches at large still feel unable to share the Eucharist. Brother BF, as we have seen already in section 6.3, interprets the Eucharist as an oil, a salve that comforts the wound and soothes the pain of division. I want to highlight this again because it adds extra nuance to the concept of the Eucharist as a source for unity. BF stresses that the community has suffered because of the ecumenical questions within the community, especially with regard to the Eucharist. The local solution of sharing the Eucharist is not a way to bypass these difficulties: “We suffered a lot in finding a way out, uh, this is not a full way out, it's just a way to go through without too much suffering. Never, nothing more.”527 The wounds of division, felt in particular in intimate settings like the ecumenical monastery of Bose, cause suffering and pain. Explaining why they started sharing the Eucharist, BF says: “we cannot bear longer this, uh, scandal.”528 This took place only shortly after BF himself joined the community and he had only recently been introduced to ecumenism. He describes the pain and the role of the Eucharist in that process: You cannot just say, okay, but [now] in Bose, we go outside all these problems. Uh, this creates, uh, a permanent um… suffer, and a permanent dynamic, I think. So, both things: it’s like a wound that obliges you to find uh, to find uh… something to um… to appease the suffering, something to avoid the re-opening of the wound, something to uh, take care of the wound of the other. So, it’s a painful situation, but in the same time, it’s a very um… very… … pushing situation, a very challenging situation, which you say, okay, we can’t go, until the um, solution, final solution, without our churches, but in 526 BG-1,34. 527 BF-1,10e. 528 BF-1,10a.
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