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THE Christian COMMUNION:
BARRIER OR CONNECTION?
↓
“The Body and Blood of Christ:
Bless, take, eat, drink....”
What a strange
ritual. Eating the body and drinking the
blood of a murdered Jew? Or is it cannibalism?
HINT ONE: All the working rituals
associated with the durable religious traditions are connection software. Atheists tend to see the connection as a
closed loop while their spiritually engaged brothers and sisters tend to see it
as an open one.
HINT TWO: The most successful
religions use spiritual connection software. That is the function of ritual and
meditation practice.
HINT THREE: Not all spiritual software
runs on your platform & operating system.
INTRODUCTION
The world is filled with men and women who are genuinely searching for the spiritual/ethical connections that are the natural province of religions, but the world seems to be equally crowded with the off-putting features and doctrines of those same religions....
About one billion people find solace and inspiration
in the Christian rite of communion every week, but for others this ceremony is ritual
cannibalism.
This is my personal take on the communion tradition as I encountered it, and it describes how my private theological struggle with the ritual was resolved. Both are minority positions.
Part One, below, started with a letter I wrote to a mother who was looking for a spiritual home for her family but was held back by the communion in an otherwise attractive church.
Part Two is my personal theological resolution.
I believe that we can only come to know the truly important universal truths of existence in one way – as they are revealed in the particulars of life. We are only able to discover those deep parts of reality that go beyond the raw data and dispassionate chronicles of events into explanation, importance and transcendence, by living and contemplating the particulars of the world. Only when we go deep enough into the smile of a baby, the surprise of unbidden beauty, the power of an act of caring, the wonder of a numinous encounter, do we encounter the living universal, the carrier of holy meaning. All ritual and religious history are about the intensely particular and how it calls the universal into our lives.
PART ONE
My Personal Encounter
I was a reluctant Methodist as a kid (the kind who asks
too many questions), then I became a law school Unitarian in
I first really got to know and experience Episcopal
worship when dating my wife, “R” - she was living in a
Soon I found myself drawn in by the easy going sincerity of the rector, a Tom Selleck of the suburban Episcopate, a guy’s guy with a hale and friendly personality that dispelled any trace of that “religion is just for sissies” mindset. I felt welcomed in the general spirit of theological tolerance that permeates that denomination and the robust sense of community in that parish.
The EC tends to have an educated demographic, not
dissimilar to that in, say, a liberal Reform Jewish congregation. Fortunately, I didn’t feel at all pressured
to go to the communion rail. And for the
longest time, I did not. I was a
spiritual observer, basking in the whole spectacle from my pew, like a
sympathetic anthropologist.
R and I dated for a year courtesy of Alaska Airlines
(we’d known each other in high school in our home state) and we married at
midnight in her church on new Years’ Eve.
She moved to CA a year later. By that time, I’d begun to take communion regularly,
soaking up the ritual, making sense of it in my own terms.
After a search, we settled on an
Flash forward to September, 2001. My wife and I have frequently traveled in and
out of
We ended up spending an unforgettable ten days there. From the moment that we woke up on September
11th till the day that we got off the plane in
On the afternoon of 9-11, my wife and I were wandering in
mid-town, filled with shock, grief and wonder at the outbreak of goodness and
kindness among all those brusque, sassy new Yorkers, when we happened on a very
old Episcopal Church near 14th. Drawn in
by a hand-lettered sign on the door, we entered a space filled with music,
grief and solace. The organist had been
continuously playing for several hours.
People filed in and out quietly, staying to pray and sing and to make
sense of the event that had shattered the city.
That Sunday we attended mass at
That was the moment when I finally got it – in a visceral
sense of “aha!” when I took the bread in my hand and glanced up. A missing element
of my self was falling gently into
place. No one is ever alone in this
ritual, not me, not the 800 or so others, not a single person on a desert
island. The communion’s essential magic
is in the depth and scale of the connection it makes across time and space to
millions of other men, women and children...and beyond. For me, that simple,
historically freighted ritual meal had become a shared glimpse of the numinous,
and a mirror of the brokenness I share with a certain crucified rabbi and
everyone else born of a mother.
As CS Lewis put it,
“One of our great allies at present is the Church itself.
Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out
through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with
banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters
uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans.”
CS Lewis became one of my mentors. He and his literary pub-mates, the “Inklings”
– JR Tolkien and Charles Williams, among them – enjoyed a “communion” over beer
in a certain Oxford pub for many years.
Lewis had followed a course from a smarter-that-you atheism to genial
and generous Christian belief. His
defense of Christianity is as sophisticated and eloquent as any I know of. If he has written about the communion as
such, I haven’t run onto it. But the
theology of CS Lewis and that of a physicist, turned Anglican priest, John
Polkinghorne, cleared the path for me.
[Polkinghorne is still alive and well in the
If there is a bottom line for me, it is this: that all
religion, writ large, consists of ethical/therapeutic communities (the former
for the kids, the latter for the parents!) organized around symbols and stories
that carry the embedded essential human wisdom.
We work out our own individual, internal arrangements and our key
relationships (with doctrine, our fellow travelers and the ultimate Truth) in
order to participate in this special kind of community.
I’m sure that parents suddenly make a point of going to church when that they/we realize that the great ethical and moral traditions don’t just self perpetuate. It really is up to us to see that the great intergenerational cultural transmission belt carries ethical and moral knowledge to the little ones.
So, if you find a spiritual home in any ethical/therapeutic
community that otherwise is a good fit and is filled with the little ones,
please don’t be put off by the communion or any other working ritual.
PART TWO
My Personal Theology
I’m not one of those for whom Christianity is the only valid approach to the Creator, the Ultimate, by any of the any Holy One’s names.
But I do maintain that nearly all of the world’s surviving religious traditions are seeking a communion with ultimate being (or “Beingness” as our Buddhist friends might term it).
I am deeply persuaded that religions “all seek communion”. I believe that this remains true at some deep level however a particular religious method or doctrine or denomination might attempt to describe (or circumscribe) that process.
And I believe that this insight remains on the mark whether one’s ultimate communion is approached as the Buddhist’s universal compassion for sentient beings, the Abrahamic traditions’ sense of reverence for / obedience to / dialogue with the one true God, or the intuitions of the mystics whose mainline numinous experiences defy all attempts at ordinary verbal description.
Christianity is unique in the same sense that Judaism is unique, founded as both traditions are, not on a single prophet’s flash of divine insight, but on an entire, world-changing train of events sparked by a divine intervention. [Leave aside, if you will, just what such an “intervention’ might entail.]
Judaism hinges on a history-changing Moses, in concert with the divine, prying the Jewish people free of their Egyptian captivity into a perilous freedom where they were charged with custody of the Moral Law, embedded in their Torah.
Christianity hinges on a history-changing Jesus (Jesuah), that charismatic Jewish rabbi, in concert with the divine, confronting the occupying Roman authorities with “the liberation virus”. The Jesus Event had the ultimate purpose of ferrying the Moral Law out of its tribal boundaries and broadcasting it to the world at large. There were associated miracles, of course, but that is another discussion.
The communion in Christian practice cannot be understood without identifying its origins in the history of Judaism, its sister religion. The Jewish Passover dinner, the Seder, ritually recapitulates and memorializes one emblematic night during the great power struggle between Moses and the Pharaoh. Before the Exodus when plagues were visited on the Egyptian captors, Jewish families were instructed to remain indoors in preparation for their escape. The privations and hardships of the Exodus are recalled in the Seder ritual, and elements of the meal are blessed.
Jesus was a practicing first-Century Jew who regularly conducted
the Passover Seder with his Talmudim (the corps of
loyal, itinerant students who became the apostles). Like many of his fellow
Jews, Jesus criticized the corrupt practices of
As part of this agenda or charge, he had already
initiated the practice of substituting private symbolic sacrifice in the form
of sacramental meals as an alternative to
The night before this remarkable rabbi was seized for his
“show trial” and Roman crucifixion (it was the most spectacularly failed
execution in human history), he held one last dinner
with his students. When he gave the
traditional Jewish blessing for the wine and the matzo bread, he added a
seemingly heretical (and prophetic) comment. Knowing the likely outcome of his forthcoming
arrest, he commanded his followers to “do this [ritual] in my memory” and told
them that the wine was his “blood” and the bread was his “body”. He explicitly
identified his own person as a ritual sacrifice in lieu of those conducted in
the
As a scientifically aware 21st century lawyer, when I participate in this sacred Christian ritual, I realize that I am experiencing allegory and symbolism. But as a monotheist, I part company with my secular friends in that the allegory carries embedded divine-engendered meaning and the symbolism is an instantiation of the living spirit of the creator of all that is.
I believe that Christ’s injunction was an invitation to participate in a multi-level symbolic act. To eat the Elements ceremonially, after the fact of the Christ’s execution, is to take them in, to incorporate them into one’s being, not literally as blood and flesh, but symbolically.
In this sense, I personally understand the blood reference to be the life-giving spirit of the divine and the body reference to be the corpus or body of the Moral Law, the essence of the Torah. When Jesus was saying “remember me” through this ritual I believe that he meant something like, “Remember me as I incarnated the spirit and the law, and as you take in the bread and wine know that I will live in you and you in me”.
In this form of discourse, the boundaries between poetry, symbolism and the presence of the numinous are erased.
Surely, this was the deeper meaning of the “sacrifice” or
offering in that first “last supper”. And
it is an offering to us that is endlessly recapitulated in every communion
thereafter. Some of us take communion in
order to take in the spirit of profound, divine-engendered life affirmation and
to digest the living body of the Moral Law. For us, this is a ritual commemoration
of the One whose sacrifice demonstrated the divine power to remake the world
though the faith of good people. Mystery, faith, morality and reason in are
concert.
Communion is by no means the indispensable ritual or the only path to enlightenment. But it is a communion. I don’t think it is coincidental that before the religion now known by the Greek term for the anointed One had become differentiated from Judaism, it was commonly called “the way”. It was a new path that had opened up within Judaism, one that ultimately spread knowledge of the Torah to the entire world.
JBG
A FOOTNOTE:
In the first century,
before the Romans brutally suppressed the great Jewish rebellion and destroyed
the great temple in
Rabbi Hillel, possibly the
most revered and famous of rabbis within the Jewish tradition, lived about one
generation before Jesus. Whether Hillel’s life
overlapped that of Jesus, his core teachings as a sage of great ethical wisdom,
most certainly reached Jesus’ ears. Among Hillel’s
aphorisms (which are generally recorded in Pirkei Avot - Ethics of the Fathers, captured in written form in
the Mishnah) was: “If I am not for myself, then who
will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now,
when?”
One day, a gentile seeking
to know the Torah (apparently he wanted the first century Cliff Notes version)
approached Hillel, after his request had been harshly rejected by another
Rabbi. The gentile impertinently asked
Hillel whether he could recite the entire Torah while standing on one leg. Hillel gracefully complied. “Do not do to
your neighbor that which is hateful if done to you. This is the whole of the
Torah. All the rest is commentary. Go and study. ” According to the legend, the
gentile did enter a course of Torah study and was converted.
Not long after that,
another rabbi – Jesus from
A similar encounter with
Jesus is captured in the Gospel accounts.
The Shema (the injunction
to love G-d) and the obligation to love one’s neighbor (The love one’s neighbor
rule first occurs in Leviticus 19/18.) are common to both traditions. The Shema
is set out in Deuteronomy 6:4-5 “And you shall love the lord your G-d
with all your heart and with all your soul and all your might.” [V-ahavta et Adonai Elohecha b-chol l’vavcha u-v-chol m’odecha.]
In Mark 12:28-30 28 we find
Jesus quoting the Shema:
“One of the teachers of the
law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good
answer, he asked him, ‘Of all the commandments, which is the most important?’
29 ‘The most important one,’ answered Jesus, ‘is this: Hear, O Israel, the Lord
our G-d, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your G-d with all your heart and
with all your soul and with all your mind and with all
your strength.” And in Luke