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Saint Alban's Sunday and Corpus Christi Sunday
June 22, 2003
We have a double feast day today-Corpus Christi, the institution
of the Holy Eucharist by Our Lord Christ, and the feast day of Saint
Alban the Martyr, who is the Patron Saint of the worldwide Liberal
Catholic Church. Saint Alban is pictured on the left side of the
Altar here at Saint Francis. (The paintings on the Altar were done
by a former Deacon of this church, Walter Krusch. If you ever go
to our Liberal Catholic Church in Huizen, Holland, you will see
the original pieces of art, in stained glass.)
In researching the life of Saint Alban, I mostly found that very
little was known about him. (Perhaps this is true of many of the
saints?) First I will paint for you what seems to be the brief but
factual picture. In Butler's Lives of the Saints, he states
that "In art, Saint Alban is represented sometimes in civil,
and sometimes in military dress, bearing the palm and sword, or
a cross and a sword." Well, in our picture, he seems dressed
in somewhat of a Roman military garb, and he does indeed hold a
sword. The Oxford Dictionary of the Saints says, "Alban's
cult extended all over England and in parts of France influenced
by Germanus. Nine ancient English churches were dedicated to him."
Alban was martyred in England in 304. All the books agree that he
was a Roman soldier, called a pagan by those who recognize only
their own religion as valid. Thomas Morgan in the book Saints
says that he was the first person martyred in Britain. At the time
of these persecutions Alban, a Roman, had sheltered in his house
a Christian priest. All the sources seem to agree that Alban was
impressed by this cleric, and that he became baptized into the Christian
faith. When his former Christian-hounding colleagues came to search
his house for the priest, Alban donned the priest's cloak and presented
himself to the soldiers, refusing to let them take the priest, who
escaped. Alban himself was taken away.
When brought before the magistrate and asked to make a sacrifice
to the Roman gods, Alban, now Christianized, refused. He was ordered
to be put to death by his fellow soldiers. Perhaps it is by now
legend that has it that one of them refused to participate and confessed
to being a Christian on the spot. The other apparently beheaded
both of them, but it is said that his eyes fell out as a consequence.
One book said that later artists loved to depict this! The former
city of Verulam became Saint Albans, and many healings have been
attributed to the spring that came forth, supposedly at this time,
and at the shrine built there.
Well, if this were another church, my talk about Our Patron Saint
Alban would perhaps end here, my having given about all the information
I could find about him. But this is the Liberal Catholic Church,
and we have other realms to explore. Reincarnation, as most of you
may know, is not a foreign concept here. And Bishop C. W. Leadbeater,
one of our most prolific early writers, was a clairvoyant who sometimes
traced the various lives lived by a particular soul. Certainly,
I cannot speak from experience, but I understand that, to one trained
in how and where to look, the path that a particular soul follows
in its evolution toward divinity is something that can be followed.
Bishop Leadbeater in The Hidden Side of Christian Festivals
takes us further along that path, following some more lives of the
soul who was once known as Alban. He tells us he was next born in
Constantinople in 411 as Proclus, one of the last great exponents
of Neoplatonism. He was born in 1211 as Roger Bacon, the Franciscan
friar who invented gunpowder in the West. In 1375 he was born as
Christian Rosenkreutz, founder of the Rosicrucians. In 1561 he was
born as Francis Bacon, the scholar who reconstituted the English
language. In the 1600s he took birth as Ivan Rakoczy, the prince
of Transylvania, and he was the Comte de Saint Germain at the time
of the French revolution.
Leadbeater, in speaking of this great soul, says: "He is the
Prince Adept at the head of the Seventh Ray. Naturally he is deeply
interested both in the work of the Church and in Freemasonry, in
reality two expressions of the same eternal truth. We have much
for which to thank him now in this present day, as well as for those
earlier achievements of his, the magnificent gift of the English
language, the introduction of Freemasonry into England, and the
moulding of Christian medieval metaphysical and philosophical thought."
Now, on to Corpus Christi.
One of the two possible Gospels for Corpus Christi is full of what
to the casual observer might be thought of as strange words, and
since today we read the Gospel for Saint Alban's Sunday, I'll quote
briefly from Saint John's Gospel here:
The bread that I give is my flesh, which I will give for the life
of the world. The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying:
How can this man give us his flesh to eat? Then Jesus said unto
them: Amen, amen, I say unto you: Except ye eat the flesh of the
Son of Man and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso
eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life.
The bread and wine (or the grape juice that is used in the Liberal
Catholic Church) at the moment of the consecration, when the priest
says "This is my body" and "This is my blood,"
are transformed by Christ's power into His very essence on the
inner planes. Yes, to our physical eyes they look the same as
before the Words of Power were spoken, but on the higher realms
of existence, had we but the ability to perceive them clairvoyantly,
they are of the same nature as Our Lord Christ, veritable Suns raying
forth His light and power from the Altar. And when we partake of
Holy Communion, we take this holy food into our selves, where it
works its benign magic and helps transform our cruder natures into
a nature more like His own divine one.
The change is subtle. It takes a very long time, for most of us,
but eventually it does work its white magic upon us, and little
by little we become better people here in the material, outer world,
here where it matters. We can be highly developed spiritually, but
unless we bring this goodness out here, to our daily workaday lives,
it really does "profit us nothing." Because here in the
physical world is where we currently are, and it is here that our
assignment is-to leave it a better place and ourselves a better
person than they were when we arrived.
For example, I hope that I have picked up enough trash to compensate
for that which I tossed heedlessly in my childhood years. My mother
taught me to always leave an apartment cleaner than it was when
I moved in, and I have tried to do that in all my years when I was
a renter. And that lesson stays with me yet. There are many ways
in which we can leave the world in a better place than it was before.
So, when you partake of Holy Communion (and we hope that you will-no
one is denied this sacrament in the Liberal Catholic Church), when
you partake, try to consciously envision Our Lord becoming a very
personal part of yourself, entering your heart, uplifting and ennobling
you. In so doing, you may carry His blessing for a longer period
of time through to the outer world when you walk out of our doors.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost,
three Persons in one God, be ascribed all honour, might, majesty,
power and dominion, now and for evermore.
Amen.
Judie A. C. Cilcain
June 22, 2003
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