Helen Jelfs talk on the Eucharist from Sunday morning's service at St Bride's
Eucharist
Introduction
Last Sunday I was looking through the Observer’s Food Monthly magazine when a particular article caught my eye. It was an interview with the philosopher of everyday life, Alain de Botton (Cadwalladr, 2012). Botton has recently written a book entitled ‘Religion for Atheists’ in which he suggests that ‘civil society should steal the things religion does well but leave out all the God stuff’ (ibid). The heading caught my eye because it said something about Botton’s plans to open a restaurant based on the Christian Mass. In the course of the interview, the conversation turned to a focus on the obsession with food, rather than on that of gathering and meeting; that sometimes so much effort goes into creating the food but that that is only part of the experience. The interviewer proposed that the preparation of food can be an act of love, to which Botton responds like this: ‘what makes a meal an experience is when it’s a meaningful encounter in which each side reveals something of themselves’. He then went on to make the point that Christian Mass was a meal before it was a service – a shared meal or love feast. His proposal was for the kind of restaurant where people who entered as strangers left having become friends. That quote, I think, gives us a clue as to what might be going on in the Eucharist experience.
Jesus Suppers
Last week Rose reminded us that Jesus frequently had supper with various people, and that these were boundary breaking encounters in terms of being inclusive rather than exclusive. She posed a couple of questions. Was what we call the Last Supper the same or something different? Was it meant to be an exclusive or inclusive event? She then went on to explain that what we read of how the Christian community in the early years went about ensuring that people’s needs were met, we can assume that these involved the egalitarian sharing of spiritual and material resources. But there’s certainly something more going on.
Jesus Suppers were a way of introducing people to some key ideas about kingdom life. Beatrice Bruteau in her book The Holy Thursday Revolution (2006) invites us to think about eating as a means of initiating and maintaining human relationships and connectedness characterised by equality, reciprocity, mutual indwelling and abundance. Indeed the act of eating becomes a point of spiritual intimacy – the invitation to consider a different vision of reality and way of life. She proposes that if we think of human beings and the human community being composed of a series of ‘layers’ one inside each, then these suppers might be experienced at five levels:
FOOD - sharing food, and other things too
ENERGY - working for one another, helping with tasks, sharing emotional energies, supporting one another in joy and sorrow
MIND and MEMORY - sharing our stories, our news, our daily lives, and experience ourselves as community
SECRET INSIGHTS - sharing our dreams, our visions, our sacred revelations
INTIMACY and TRUST - shared joy and bliss
Mutuality in relation
Both the foot washing encounter and the bread and wine experience seem to be about Jesus demonstrating a totally different way of talking about how life and social relationships are organised, about trying to showing us how to live in the mutual kind of relationships that characterise the kingdom. This is something of a revolution, a profound shift in how we understand ourselves. So instead of me being me because I am not of you, I am me by virtue of giving myself to you. So I am not outside and separate, but within and symbiotic with you; and this not just something that happens at an individual, personal level but also at the level of community. So our identity is one of mutual affirmation not mutual negation in which we give ourselves away. The agape meal is thus ‘love under the guise of giving oneself as food for the others life…to put oneself inside the other and to receive the other inside oneself’.
Exchange
In the book Redeeming the Dream, Mary Grey (1989) suggests that what was happening at the Last Supper was that Jesus was attempting to breakthrough to a new level of intensity in relationship; new dynamic of community relating that goes beyond personal relationships to touch a ‘deep source of relational energy’, an ‘exchange of energy and life’, ‘a point at which it was possible for the group to reach a new level of intensity of presence to each other’ (p106). So Eucharist is ‘not merely memory of an event in which we engage, but a remembering and reclaiming of a living force which has empowered the lives and relational possibilities of so many…’ (p108). It is not a question of slavishly imitating Jesus’ life but being empowered by this power. Jesus’ call to ‘do this in remembrance of me’ involves ‘[living] the life that he did by responding in all the fullness of mutuality of which we are capable’; and it also transforms all other relationships of the material world (as was apparent in the early church).
Wisdom tradition
Looking at the Eucharist from a Christian wisdom tradition perspective it’s possible to develop further this idea. Within the wisdom tradition or mystic approach what is really important is finding and living the path – the way of Jesus – today, to connect to an encounter, a mysterious energy exchange. Cynthia Bourgeault in her book The Wisdom Jesus (2008) suggests that far from Jesus instituting ‘a cultic ritual’ that was to be central ritual of the new Christian religion, Eucharist is more of ‘a spiritual practice’. She suggests that it’s not so much a matter of Jesus coming into the bread and wine, but that we step through what is in effect a sacred threshold. The energy doesn’t so much reside in the objects themselves but in the energy of intention they bear. So this not primarily ‘a memorial meal’ or ‘a proclaiming his death until he comes in glory’ event, but rather an ‘ingesting’ of his energetic presence. But there is a sense in which, I think, the Holy Communion act encapsulates a further insight.
Eucharist and Ecology
This mutuality in relation of which I have been speaking is not limited to human beings, so we can talk about interconnectedness at another level, in terms of a Eucharistic Ecology or a Eucharist Planet, a good gift planet. This is a view of the world as the Real Presence of the Divine – a single living body in which various members give themselves as food to one another. This is a new story and vision of the wholeness of the planet – a communitarian life – a vision of being – how reality is constructed. Denis Edwards in his book Ecology at the Heart of Faith (2006) writes about the sense in which the bread and wine are perhaps representative of all the fruits of creation – indeed one of the Eucharistic prayers includes the words ‘fruit of the earth and work of human hands’. When these are brought to the Eucharistic table creation is lifted up in offering and thanksgiving – an act not restricted to the priestly role but an expression of love and celebration for the creation on the part of all us, with the intention of ‘[living] our lives in the great flow of giving and receiving – [which is] thanksgiving’.
These thoughts only touch the surface of the richness of what the Eucharistic act embodies, but I hope they give us some ideas on which to base our conversations. The question is: What might the implications be for how we understand and share bread and wine amongst us?
The scene of Eucharistica from the mosaic floor of a Baptistery at the World Heritage site of Butrint in South West Albania (http://butrint.com/explore_9_1.php).
BOURGEAULT, C. 2008. The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind - a New Perspaective on Christ and His Message, Boston, M.A., Shambhala.
BRUTEAU, B. 2006. The Holy Thursday Revolution, New York, Orbis Books.
CADWALLADR, C. 2012. Lunch with Alain de Botton. Observer Food Monthly.
EDWARDS, D. 2006. ECOLOGY AT THE HEART OF FAITH: THE CHANGE OF HEART THAT LEADS TO A NEW WAY OF LIVING ON EARTH, New York, Orbis Books.
GREY, M. 1989. Redeeming The Dream: Feminism, Redemption and Christian Tradition, London, SPCK.
©Helen Jelfs