Returning to Our Knees: Reviving Eucharistic Revival

In the Most Holy Eucharist, we meet Christ physically. This astonishing mystery causes us to fall to our knees, or should, unless we have suffered a fatal breach of faith.

Published in Crisis Magazine on May 30, 2024

There was one part of the house I had not yet visited, and I went there now. The chapel showed no ill-effects of its long neglect; the art nouveau paint was as fresh and bright as ever; the art nouveau lamp burned once more before the altar. I said a prayer, an ancient, newly learned form of words, and left, turning towards the camp…

Something quite remote from anything the builder had intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame—a beaten copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burning again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit except for the builders and tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning new among the old stones.

I quickened my pace and reached the hut which served us for our ante-room.

“You’re looking unusually cheerful today,” said the second-in-command.

So ends Brideshead Revisited. An ending sweetly triumphant. Not only does the bon vivant Ryder come to the Faith, but the thing that transfixes him in that manorial house he knew so well was the “burning red flame of the sanctuary lamp.” Like a magnet, it drew him. It announced, like a hundred silver trumpets, that the King sat upon His throne again. With the understatement of a true genius writer, Waugh simply concludes: “You’re looking unusually cheerful today.” Little did the second-in-command know that that singular joy climbed deep from within Ryder’s soul. It was the joy of a man meeting his God. It is the joy which fills all of us when we spot the flickering flame in the red sanctuary lamp. No joy on earth matches this joy.

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