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There certainly has been no more central symbol for Catholic Christianity than the celebration of the Eucharist. Eucharistein is the Greek word for giving thanks. Thus, the Eucharist is a thanksgiving meal. The early Christians combined the weekly Jewish scripture service and the Jewish Passover meal into one meal, intended as a symbol of universal table fellowship. In light of that, it is disappointing whenever it has become a symbol of ethnicity, worthiness, or group membership and loyalty.
Jesus’s most common image for what he was doing in his three years of public ministry is the image of a wedding banquet.
In Judaism, most of the major rituals, most of the major feast days, are not celebrated in the synagogue or the Temple, but around the family table.
I use the word priesthood intentionally, because priesthood simply means the one who names the connection between the transcendent world and this world. If you make that connection, you’re a priest.
We must rediscover the Eucharist—and, indeed, our own family meals—as feasts of God’s magnanimity, as celebrations of God’s gracious givenness to this work-a-day world.
We are now natural fixers, changers, adjustors—constant engineers of our own reality. It makes for a very different kind of soul. It develops what I call the calculative mind, as opposed to the goal of all mature spirituality: the contemplative mind.
“I will create an absolute for myself to justify and settle my choices: my football team, my marriage, my religion, my land, my theory, my self-image, my rights, my exercise machine—anything at all. Just give me something to wrap my thoughts and feelings around for a while, something outside of myself—an idea, an event, a person, a project—to free me from the boredom and tyranny of myself!”
The idea is not wrong, just misplaced. The only real issue is to find an absolute that really has some Absolute character to it. That is probably the difference between a wise person and a merely opinionated or driven person.
I believe that everybody has faith in something in order to survive, even if it is faith in cynicism. We all find something upon which to lean, and false gods do work for short periods. We all find some absolute around which to whirl, even if it is an absolute opinion that there is no God.
In this different mind, we do not so much try to change reality or others, as allow ourselves to be changed, so that we can be useable for God. It is not so important what we do now—as the who that is doing it.
The word change normally refers to new beginnings. But transformation, the mystery we’re examining, more often happens not when something new begins, but when something old falls apart.
Change happens, but transformation is always a process of letting go, living in the confusing, shadowy space for a while, and eventually being spit up on a new and unexpected shore. You can see why Jonah in the belly of the whale is such an important symbol for many Jews and Christians.
It’s that deeper something we are strongly for that allows us to wait it out. It’s someone in whom we absolutely believe and to whom we commit. In plain language, love wins out over guilt any day.
The previous personal, theistic worldview saw things in terms of what was often called the Great Chain of Being. The great monotheistic religions held God as a clear outer reference point that grounded and originated all things. All lower things were understood in terms of the higher, which gave them an essential importance in the universe.
Either we see God in everything or we have lost the basis for seeing God in anything. Once the dualistic mind takes over, the ego is in a “pick, choose, and decide” game, which is the beginning of exclusionary, punishing, and even violent religion.
Remember, anthropologically, religion begins with the making of a distinction between the pure and the impure. Jesus consistently ignores such a distinction. In fact, it is at the heart of almost half of his gospel actions!
The reductionist and suspicious mind is trapped in a world where it can always be “in charge,” which is only at the smallest level and with the most insecure self—our own tiny moment of history, our limited individual capacity to understand.
Richard Tarnas helped me to recognize how each century is trapped in its own web, its own limited categories, its own limited way of understanding. Presently, for example, we are trapped in a “market” worldview. This worldview is very pragmatic and individualistic and uses the language of romantic expressionism: “I have” and “I choose” are the power statements.
All of us, even Christians, usually find ourselves trapped inside of exchange values instead of inherent values.
Postmodernism has tried to overcome the emptiness, or nihilism, of modernism by refusing to commit itself to any worldview.
Skepticism is another way to avoid ever having to place our bet, and therefore ever getting hurt. Universal skepticism is a common thought process today; critical thinking often looks like intelligence, and sometimes is.
Postmodernism is a way out: no commitments, no surrenders, no absolute anything, no passion for anything—and, therefore, no disappointment, no hurt.
In that sense, I say Christianity was intended by Jesus to be a minority position and always will be. He wasn’t dividing the world into those God loved and those God didn’t love. Jesus was creating a remnant who were useable by God— to keep the whole world from its violent path toward self-destruction. Jesus was loving and drawing all of us into God, or, as John put it, “to gather together into one the scattered children of God” (John 11:52). That is very different than forming a new tribe of saved and superior people.
It seems that, in earthly terms, all Jesus ever intended was a yeast of truth that would be a change agent or leavener in history. Ironically, Jesus and his disciples looked much more like an immoral minority than any moral majority! His plan was truly subversive and is the only one that ever has a chance of true victory.
The Jesus story stands as a revelatory judgment on every other story line, trial, and legal system in the world.
Jesus has a lot of hope in sinners (which is good news for just about everybody). Jesus only has problems with those who don’t think they are sinners. This turns all religious history upside down. The search for so-called purity is over. Now the only issue is honesty and humility. We call it by the hard word repentance.
The gospel story line will have the final chapter of history. God is winning, and that is good news for all the people, especially for those who don’t yet know they are also “under the mercy.”
It’s risky because the movement of God in history is larger than any denomination, any culture, or any tradition’s ability to verbalize it. We feel out of control here, and yet why would anybody want it to be anything less than that?
The institutional or machine stage of a movement will necessarily be a less-alive manifestation, which is not bad, although always surprising for those who see church as an end in itself instead of merely a vehicle for the vision.
We make it a monument, a closed system operating inside of its own, often self-serving, logic.
As soon as we get employment norms and professional people whose job depends on status, security, and dependability, it’s very hard to take risks for God or for gospel values. Eventually this monument, and its maintenance and self-preservation, become ends in themselves.
Truth is never actualized until it becomes my truth—suffered, owned, and internalized.
A machine-be-come-monument is now in place. It is so easy to just step on board, without ever knowing why or feeling the longing ourselves.
In this state, religion is merely an excuse to remain unconscious, a memory of something that must once have been a great adventure.
The secret is to know how to keep in touch with the man and movement stages, without being naïve about the necessity of some machine and the inevitability of those who love monuments. We must also be honest: All of us love monuments when they are monuments to our man, our movement, or our machine.
It’s hard, and very rare, to call your own job into question. When Jesus called his disciples, he also called them away from their jobs and their families (see, for example, Matthew 4:22). Now, jobs and families don’t sound like bad things, do they? He called them to leave their nets because as long as anyone is tied to job security, there are a lot of things they cannot see and cannot say.
“Would you really bother to try to prove or defend papal infallibility or who can ‘transubstantiate’ if you did not have a vested interest in the answer? Those are the prefab answers of people in management, but they are not even the questions of those in labor!”
Jesus called the disciples away from their natural families too. If there’s another blindness that keeps us from bigger truth—an even more sacred cow than job—it is family. Families are either very good or very bad for human growth but, in either case, they are only runways for takeoff.
In India, for example, the four stages of a full life are student, householder, forest dweller/seeker, and, finally, wise elder. People cannot get on to the third and last stages of life until they have left the second. In the practical West, we stop at stage two, and increasingly do not have the skills for living even that stage well. I am sure this is part of the explanation for why our wisdom is so small, as are our insular politics and our tribal view of so much of the church.
When the safe assumptions of society and family reach the monument stage, you might think you need TNT or major surgery to break through. But you never win with any frontal attack on the mystery of evil.
Jesus calls that trying to drive out the devil by the prince of devils (see Luke 11:14–22). That’s how evil expands so successfully. The disguise is almost perfect and, without spiritual discernment, will fool the best of us.
He wasn’t, with his mouth, telling the others they were doing it wrong. He just gently, lovingly tried to do it better. I think that’s true reconstruction. Remember, the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.
Most of us either become paralyzed or think we are enlightened because we know about the problems, the sin, the scandal, the essentially tragic nature of human existence.
Also, for some reason, they don’t compare. They take what is right in front of them on its own, self-evident terms, giving each person the benefit of the doubt.
The patterns through which each generation must maneuver are the same as our ancestors, and someone who has once touched the face and name of sin in themselves is never shocked again. Evil, like God, is One, which is probably why we personified it in Satan.
By very traditional wisdom or moral realism, I refer to qualities or states of being such as silence, solitude, detachment, honesty, confession, forgiveness, and radical humility.
