Holy Thursday Thoughts

DURING THE RECENT VISIT by Pope Francis to Iraq, I read the interesting bit of trivia (though hardly trivial to Christians in Iraq) that he could have said a mass in which the Eucharist was not consecrated using the formula of initiation, the words of Jesus at The Last Supper in which he said, "This is my body," while breaking the bread and,"This is my blood," over the cup of wine.  The reason founded in the enormously long history of Christianity in the region is too complex to go into, here's the article I read about it in.  The permission of Catholics of the Chaldean rite to attend masses which retain the local form of mass is used, in which the idea expressed in the formula is held to be enough to fulfill the act is a rare instance of broad-minded generosity during the John Paul II years, one which I'm surprised wasn't overturned by the more precisian neo-medievalism of Benedict XVI's court.

I'm kind of a heretic about the Eucharist, which I believe is valid in all its forms which have the right intention.   I think the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is due to the act of sharing food and drink, that it is as much the act of sharing that is the body and blood, the voluntary giving of the sustenance of the body and blood of the giver to others that is how the body and blood of Christ can come into our bodies.   It is a reenactment of the Creation of life, the free and generous act of God to give being to conscious creatures including us what is founded in the act of hospitality that Abram and Sarai gave to The Lord in the form of three strangers, an act that preceded the more dramatic one in which God tested the covenantal relationship by requesting the sacrifice of his promised son, his hope of his continuation into the human future on Earth, which, of course, turned out to be only a test which, however, sealed the covenant that Abram initiated with his act of hospitality. And I don't think that you have to say the words of initiation in an authorized mass to have that valid communion, the Eucharist.  I don't think you have to be a Catholic or a Christian or even to have heard of Jesus or Paul or even God, for that matter. 

The extension of that covenanted relationship happens throughout the Book of Exodus and become universal in the Gospels but the foundation of it in the extension of hospitality remains.  The act of giving the stuff of life, food and drink, is a faint human imitation of the very act of Creation which is ongoing and won't end, even if human beings under other influences and in our selfishness and vanity - the opposite of the covenant hospitality - destroy ourselves.  

I think the chronology of events in the Gospels, in which Jesus gives his body and blood in the form of food and drink to be eaten and drunk is intimately tied into him giving his body over to death in order to initiate the awareness of resurrection if not, according to traditional Christian theology - at least of some of it - beginning the universal resurrection to eternal life.  That's too varied, too complex, too controversial for me to get into - it would take a lot more reading and quoting and analyzing than the comparatively vapid thinking of Fred Hoyle's deification of "mathematics" and "the laws of physics" would.  

In my posts of the past several days I've pointed out that the scoffers and doubters and enemies of the Monotheistic tradition led lives and claimed the reality of rights and privileges even as they used their paid positions to undermine a belief in the legitimacy or even reality of what they would need to know to do any of it.  Certainly that is true of the lay public who buy their lines hook, line and sinker.   They have their like in "Christians" and others who profess to believe in the divinity of Jesus, of everything from the Virgin Birth to the Resurrection of Jesus to the "real presence" in the bread and wine (though that last one is bitterly rejected by some Protestants and is hardly identically believed among Catholics and Orthodox believers) but who reject the clearly stated commandments of hospitality, especially to those who cannot return it, to the least among us.   

One thing that I can say with total confidence is that if all of them, the academic atheist-materialist the Church of Prosperity type of heretic and hypocrite, is that if they went long without food they would know its lack very fast and it would become the most solid of realities that they have ever experienced in their lives.  Of course they would, their very lives depend on it.  An act of hospitality, of sharing with them at that point would be everything to them, surpassing all of their proudest professional and academic achievements, their maniacal and ecstatic emotional release in their "worship"  in their pagan-"Christian" cargo-cult.   It would mean everything that the neo-integralist "Latin Mass" Catholics (whose "worship" is only a different kind of show-biz than that of the as-seen-on-TV church of the variety show-night club).   It would be real, completely real, the act of giving, especially by someone who it would really cost everything too, would be pure worship.  

If Covid ever ends, I'm going to try to get an Intentional Eucharistic Community going here, the last church in town is dwindling down, it's the time for house churches again.  One where everyone says the formula together.