I enjoy reading letters.

We don’t write letters anymore; you must read them in a book. We’ve lost something there; we’re not better for all our email and texts and Twitter. We used to write letters, beautiful things filled with emotion and thought. You should read old letters; they’re relics of a humanity no longer ours. It’s sad and beautiful and healing all at the same time.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about one letter in particular that’s got stuck in my head in recent weeks. I’ve been reading some of the letters of the poet Rilke, his wartime letters. Rilke is a poet that fascinates me, although I’m almost certain I would not have liked him. His poems, of course, are beautiful, even though sometimes very hard to read. His letters (and he wrote many) are also beautiful; reading them is like seeing the world a century ago through a poet’s eyes. But again, that’s another matter. I was reading his wartime letters because that seemed a fitting thing to do given the present madness of the world; I thought Rilke might help me think through things like war and conflict, better than, say, scrolling through Twitter. I don’t know if it worked, but that was the idea.

But the letter stuck in my head: A letter from 1919 written to Anni Mewes; she was an actress. Rilke was writing about a friend of his, the painter Heinrich Vogeler. He had become a communist, fascinated by the vision of Soviet revolution; Vogeler had become an apologist of communism, a pamphleteer. That’s what Rilke was writing about, disturbed and concerned for his friend. Vogeler was impatient for what he called “Brotherhood,” but Rilke suspected violence in the way he used the word. “What clothes itself with the pretext of this new brotherhood is really still the war,” Rilke wrote. Yes, we all want brotherhood, all of us want progress and community and brotherhood and sisterhood; but Rilke, the poet, worried that Vogeler, the painter, had made a mistake, a tragic and possibly violent error—believing in something that only appeared to deliver progress but left only destruction instead.

For Rilke, something else was progress. “To me the least thing seems building-up,” he wrote. The carpenter at work, the merchant at his shop, the man and woman daily and humbly at work: “these are the progressives, these are the pure revolutionaries,” Rilke suggested. Those are they more likely to change the world, he thought—ordinary folk doing ordinary things daily and humbly, even among collapse, among ruins; rebuilding if necessary, refusing violence and force, even though things may be terrible and terribly urgent. “It is so understandable that people have become impatient—and yet…wounds require time and do not heal by having flags planted in them,” he wrote.[1] That’s what made him worry about his passionate friend, not his desire but his spirit. Because he discounted the ordinary; because he had not spiritually let violence go.

Now, what on earth this has to do with Holy Thursday, I’m sure some of you are wondering. I’m not talking about politics or economics or even the ethics of what Rilke was saying (for I’m not sure we should always be as patient about some things as his words might suggest); rather, what I can’t get out of my head is the idea that real progressives are ordinary people and real revolution is ordinary people doing ordinary things. And it makes me think of what we’re doing here. It makes me think of what Jesus did—an ordinary thing, a meal.

As the Russian military drops bombs on civilians, as we all fear a wider war; as the Romans rule the world, what does Jesus do? What do his followers do? An ordinary thing: they gather around a table, an altar. And God is present, and we eat his flesh in sacrament; and we become Christs, ready to love sacrificially just as Jesus loved, even as the world readies its crosses. These are the progressives; these are the pure revolutionaries—ordinary Christians. That is, if we’ve not forgotten our calling in this noisy politicized circus of a world, if we’ve not forgotten the good of being ordinary.

One my favorite things Saint John Paul II ever said, he said about the Eucharist; it’s so simple, what he said. To share in the Eucharist, to engage in eucharistic worship: it’s “the transformation of the world in the human heart.”[2] In the human heart. Not by way of armies, not by the destinies of nations, not by philosophical or cultural movements, not by elections: the world is transformed in the hearts of those transformed by the Eucharist. This ordinary thing changes the world. These tables, these altars scattered all over the globe, the people who are changed at these altars: this is what God does, how he redeems the world. It’s the ordinary thing Jesus did this same night millennia ago, this night we remember, to which we’re mysteriously somehow connected by some “oneness of time.”[3]

This is why it’s very good we’re here. This is why it matters, why it’s not a waste of your time. Because we’re doing what Christians do, this ordinary thing. Because we are the pure revolutionaries, and this the pure revolution. Amen.

[1] Rainer Maria Rilke, Wartime Letters, 136-139

[2] St. John Paul II, Dominicae Cenae 7

[3] St. John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia 5

© 2022 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield