254 PART THREE: CONCLUSIONS with the Roman Catholic Church seems to be an important impetus as well. This double loyalty plays an important role in understanding their practice of sharing the Eucharist. They experience the common life that they live – sharing their ordinary and liturgical lives – to provide a solid basis for Eucharistic sharing. If all of life is shared, why stop at the altar? At the same time, they understand the Eucharist as the very core and foundation on which their common life is built. They cannot imagine a common life as a monastic community without a common Eucharist. After all, without the Eucharist and the Easter mystery that it represents, there would not be a monastic communal life to begin with. The non-Catholic interviewees indicate that they have experienced growth in their understanding of the Eucharist by witnessing it and participating in it. The combination of joining the community and participating fully in the Eucharistic liturgy has been very important to some in order to grow a profound appreciation of the sacrament and their fellow monastics. The two dimensions seem to go together genuinely hand in hand. The monastics highly appreciate the fact that they have been given the opportunity to learn not only through theoretical transmission, but especially through participation. The wish to be in concrete, tangible unity has been expressed several times, and most explicitly by Brother BE. He has come to understand his own presence and participation in Bose as a substantiation of his desire to belong to the Roman Catholic Church, while remaining faithful to the Reformed Church in which he was baptized and initiated. This motive is present in other interviews as well, though more implicitly. The monastics do address the topic of the Eucharist and Eucharistic hospitality mainly because it has been the focus of my research and interview questions. Interestingly, though, the Eucharist has a rather modest position in their descriptions. Even though they attribute a prominent place to the Eucharist, there is a tangible field of tension between the different aspects of the Eucharist as mentioned above. They acknowledge the Eucharist to be a fundamental source for their common life as Christians yet, on some occasions, they explicitly question the prominence of the sacrament in the ecumenical dialogue. They seem especially critical of an isolated view on the Eucharist. They refer to the Eucharist as the culmination of the wider liturgical practice in which it is embedded and as a fundamental, but at the same time somewhat marginal, place in the common life. In Bose, for example, the Eucharist is ‘only’ celebrated on Thursdays and Sundays (and occasionally on other important feast days). In Taizé, the Eucharist is the main celebration on Sundays. On weekdays, it is celebrated prior to the morning prayer in which Communion is
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw