by Liz Goodyear Jones
My latest distraction in life is my new Apple Watch. I have it because I’m an old lady of 75. (I’m in a three-year heart study with Johnson + Johnson)
The other evening as I was studying J+J’s messages to me, I came across these facts. “In one’s lifetime, the heart will beat about 3 billion times.” Three billion! Think of it. As well, “every day your body uses 2,000 gallons of blood to send around your veins and arteries. That’s five hot tubs worth!!”
So today, as I began to write for the Episcopal Café, for March 22, 2021 I looked up who we were honoring as their feast day and it is The Reverend James DeKoven, priest, professor, and confessor of the Real Presence of Christ.
And I thought about that. I thought about my blood, all 2,000 gallons of it, and the body and blood of Christ, that continues to inform my faith and strengthen my love affair with God.
I know almost none of the arguments for literal presence and the typical ones for symbolic, but I know a whole lot about my own physical blood, that precious fluid that runs this body. And then I thought about my experiences of Centering Prayer, and those moments of true exhilaration of being in God, and God in me. Of being a body in which Christ lives, reconciling the world to himself and us to one another and I began to get it… Real Presence or as Dr. King would say, “a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love”.
The whole quote actually goes like this:
“Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don’t’ have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I think The Reverend DeKoven would agree.