Non Theological Reconciliation

Reconciliation is a big word.  Reconciliation is (among other things) a gift.  To be reconciled with someone means to give the gift of trust exactly where you have very good reason not to give it.  Reconciliation is also not a first step.  You can't short circuit the process of grieving through the pain caused by evil.  You can't short circuit the real loss and the real anger.  If you do, than what you arrive at isn't actually reconciliation -- it is a fairy tale land in which we pretend to be at peace.

Our faith claims to offer reconciliation.  More than that though, our faith claims to actually be reconciliation.  The whole drama recounted in the Scriptures, continued in the life of the church today, and (we hope) completed in the bodily resurrection of all is itself a story of reconciliation.  The drams is a story of humanity being reconciled with God, of humanity being reconciled again with creation, of humanity being reconciled with each other, and of personal reconciliation -- a healing of the internal divide that sin causes in each of us.

This reconciliation, we profess, happens in and through the work of Christ.  Somehow his incarnation, life, crucifixion, descent into hell, resurrection, and ascension make possible all of this reconciliation.

Unfortunately for us, while everything I have just said is true, it doesn't make things any clearer.  What we usually end up doing (in Seminary anyway) is arguing about just how this reconciliation happens.  We have a tendency to say that if you are arguing wrongly, you don't believe rightly.  And, if you don't believe rightly, you may not be reconciled.  It is easy enough to clarify the different ways of arguing -- and for the most part they fall under denominational differences -- although here yet again some would argue that they don't.

What interests me here (and this really is the point of my post today) is trying to find ways of getting at reconciliation without doing so using any of the theology we argue about.  I'm certainly not trying to collapse the very real differences of opinion we have on how reconciliation is achieved through God in Christ.  But I think there is much more to our very real lack of reconciliation with each other.

I also think that not all reconciliation has, first of all, to do with our relationship with God.  I know that that is a fairly controversial thing to say, and is probably even wrong.  But bear with me.  It needs to be said.  We Christians need to hear that there is so much more to what makes us people than our relationship or status of reconciliation with God.  We are more than our beliefs about God, we are more than our spoken message (to non Christians!), we are more than our effort to follow Christ.  

I'll close this with this slightly tangential story.  Luther (those of you who know me know that Luther isn't my favorite theologian... hopefully me using him can be seen as an act of good faith.)  When he finally got it -- when his reading of Romans made the story of man's reconciliation with God make sense for him at a very visceral gut level, do you know what he did?  He went outside and planted a tree.  He created new life.  Can we do that?  I like to think that if we do do that, it will aid us in our journey towards reconciliation.

Talking about Eucharist

C.S. Lewis, in his book, Mere Christianity, begs us to imagine that we are living (for the sake of argument) in a post apocalyptic world in the future.  Pick your favorite conspiracy, and imagine that WWIII has happened.  Now, 2 hundred years later, humanity is trying to survive on a largely ruined planet.  This imaginary culture doesn’t have access to the technological expertise that we possess.  They are what we would refer to as “hunter-gatherers” – the destruction of the world as we know it was so total that all their time is taken up in mere survival. Yet, for whatever reason, they recognize that in our culture, technology was highly valued.  So they use words like internet, computer, database, texting, cell phone, Facebook, and Tablet, but don’t actually understand how these words fit together.  These words have no context in their culture at all.

Lewis brings us on this exercise to make the argument that one can draw an analogy between this future culture and our culture – instead of technology though it is the moral virtues that don’t have traction for us.  We use words like justice, temperance, courage, humility, etc but we don’t have the cultural context anymore for how these words fit together. 

I would like to take this analogy and apply it in a different direction.  We use words every Sunday to refer to the Eucharist – sacrifice, oblation, sacrament, ritual, Priest, rites, etc – yet we are almost entirely lacking the cultural context for how these words fit together.  Despite this reality, we recognize (like the imaginary society from the future) that these words once contained great importance and meaning for the society that gave us these words.  In fact, we also remember (through our Scriptural texts) that Christ himself asked us to do this in memory of Him – so we do this – and try as often as we do to remember Him at least in our hearts.

Yet, the situation is slightly more complicated than I have just let on.  For, not only do we remember that these words mean something quite possibly very important, we remember that whatever the trauma was that caused our culture(s) to be so utterly different from the culture(s) in which these words made sense was linked in some important way to precisely a fight over these words!  So the words are not only somewhat nonsensical to most of us, but also very loaded.  They carry with them all the embattled tension of a theological battle with massive social and cultural upheaval that was fought now over 400 years ago. 

We may not be able to tell what these words mean anymore, but we can tell what side of the old battle we are on.  So if someone uses some combination of the words in a way that doesn’t sound similar to how we are used to hearing them, we can know that they are not “one of us.”  All I need to do to illustrate my point is to articulate a few different combinations of these terms.  Someone who says, “The Eucharist is the Sacrifice of the Mass” is clearly referring to something different then someone who says, “The Eucharist is a remembering of the oblation of Christ” or again, “the Eucharist is primarily a communal experience in which our eating a meal together reminds us of Christ.”

As soon as you heard any of those statements I’m guessing you either felt more at ease, or more alarm – yet were unable to say exactly what the phrases meant!  Proof of Lewis’s point, I guess.  That we live in a world that is so dynamically different from the world in which either these words had currency or these phrases were coined is relatively beyond the need for proof.  What we do about that is quite a different story. 

That brings me to the crux of the article – what do we do with the Eucharist now that we are living in a different world?  I am trained as a church historian.  That’s what I do.  I study the way it was.  I find my work fascinating for many reasons – none the least of which is the sometimes utter incongruity between how (as best we can tell, anyway) things were viewed during a particular age, and how we use those concepts today.  Religion and the development of religious rites is perhaps the most shocking of all in precisely this regard. 

Most things change quite dramatically given enough years.  It is very rare to have, say, the same political organization in the same geographical space for more than about 600 years.  It is also very rare to have the same language spoken in the same geographical location for more than about 600 years.  There are exceptions, of course.  But generally, the norm is change. 

Religious rites, by contrast (here I’m using the phrase, “religious rites” to refer to a particular practice done in one particular way by a particular religion) change even slower than political forms of government or language even language.  Since I’m not a historian of Islamic or Eastern religious practices I won’t attempt to draw examples there.  However, one can show that (as an  example) the particular way in which someone was baptized in, say, 3^rd century Ravenna is surprisingly similar to how someone was baptized in 14^th century Ravenna… even though (to use our examples) the language they spoke changed, and the political structures changed.  This general rule applies all across the board – the more sacred a particular practice is believed to be, the less it will change even though everything else around it changes with some regular frequency.

So where are we?  Well, we are in a culture that doesn’t understand the phrases and terminology used to describe what was perhaps the single most important religious rite of the culture that preceded it.  We are 400-500 years away from whatever it was that caused this tremendous cultural upheaval.

I think there are two things we must keep in mind.  

1.)  We will absolutely never be able to rewind the clock and either understand these terms as they were understood by these people or describe them in a necessarily similar format.  I think we have to come to terms with the finality of that loss.  Any attempt to go back (say, to the Medieval or even the Patristic or late Classical period) and resurrect these particular thought worlds regarding the Eucharist is finally a failed attempt.  

2.) The value though that they placed in the Eucharist we can appreciate.  We should not ignore this.  In fact, we must not ignore this.  Simply because 1 is true, doesn’t mean that we can therefore ignore the central importance of the Eucharist in our own religious practices. 

So what?  Why is it important to say everything we’ve just said?  Well, for starters, it helps to remember that the Eucharist is perhaps centrally important to the faith.  It also helps to remember that the battles that were fought over what the Eucharist means lie at the heart of much of what it means today to either be Baptist, or Assembly of God, or Presbyterian, or Anglican, or Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox.  In other words, our current divisions resulted in a large part out of the massive social and cultural upheaval that caused the loss in translation that Lewis’ analogy helps us understand.

But there is more than that, isn’t there?  Much of what we take away from this article depends on how we reconcile points 1 and 2 above.  Can we (without collapsing 1) actually justify 2?  That is the crux of the matter.  How do we appropriate the centrality – both in how we think about God and in how we structure our time together in worship on Sunday – of the Eucharist in the 21^st century?  How can we learn from the past in a way that doesn’t re-enter into those old battles which are fought with terms that no longer fit into a cohesive whole?

First Post!

This blog is a space for me to think through the tremendously complex intersections of personal existence, church life, and responsible living in America in the 21st century.  I am (and have been for sometime) a student studying in Boston for the Anglican Priesthood.  In fact, I've been studying for so long now, I think it will be a bit strange to experience life -- not as a student, but as a professional minister.  I ask myself, what will that look like?  I think one of the things it looks like is for me to engage with the world I live in through the written word.

I like to write, and there are a lot of things that deeply bother me.  The more I read, and the more I intentionally listen to you (my readers, those who are in the various communities that I live in, those who are from communities I used to live in but now don't, and those who are strangers to me) the more I realize that a lot of what bothers me also bothers you.  

I named this blog "Reconciled Bodies" because I think the phrase holds a lot of room for exploration.  We use the word "body" to refer to many aspects of our experience of living the life we have.  We also wrap much of our identity around how we perceive our bodies, and how others perceive them.  Our sexuality, our race, our own personal history of growing up and discovering that we live in a very large world with very real sorrows and very real joys, our expectations for the future and our memories of the past are all deeply wrapped up in our bodies.  

Yet, the word body also can refer to more than one person as well.  A "body of people" refers to a "group" of people who all share in some common interest or desire or goal or belief or assumption.  The great religious bodies of our world and the great political bodies both claim our allegiance and involvement in different ways.  Part of being a responsible human being is choosing how we are involved in these bodies.  Using our resources, our time, and our energy in a way that nourishes our own body while also providing for the well being of the body of others in a way that increases the common good is central to our very humanity.  

Our bodies are also in conflict.  Statistically, many of us have experienced very terrible atrocities and violations to our own bodies -- and we bear the emotional and psychological wounds and memories.  Many of the larger, corporate bodies that we belong to are also in conflict.  Each of these larger bodies also has a history -- a shared memory of past wounds, triumphs, and expectations for the future.  

The Christian Church(s) centrally make the claim that the wounds we each bear in all of our several bodies can be healed in the Body of Christ.  Yet each of them (individually) bears its own permanent markers of separation from everyone else.  There are really just two questions that I think all the reasonable topics within this blog fit into.  Everything else that can be said can be phrased inside of these two questions.

1. How does healing (reconciliation) in the Body of Christ work?
2. What does that healing look like for me and the bodies that I am a part of?

There are some relatively obvious things that can be excluded right off the bat.  For starters, we can say that reconciliation doesn't mean pretending that we aren't, in fact, different.  When we gloss over our differences in the name of unity we practically end up in a fairy tale.  We end up in a world that we all know doesn't actually exist.  Additionally, we may say that reconciliation also doesn't mean insisting that my viewpoint is, in fact, the one that God shares.  We can and should bring God into the journey of reconciling our bodies, but if the result of having brought God in further increases our distance than perhaps we need to rework many of our fundamental assumptions.  Lastly, (and this one is perhaps not so obvious) reconciliation isn't the same thing as suppression, but it may involve denial.  Suppression involves the coercive use of power to achieve peace.  Denial involves the voluntary suspension of self in order to hear the other.  

We may say that in order to reconcile our bodies, and to do so within the Body of Christ, we must listen.  That is, of course, a very ironic thing to have in the first post on a blog of all things, but bear with me.  My hope is that if you are still reading, if you decide to engage with my blog, perhaps we share a few things in common.  Like you, I am deeply curious about how this reconciliation of our bodies takes place.  Like you, I am stumbling towards a deeper appreciation for and understanding of my role in this reconciliation.  Like you, I am grieved by the horror of a world torn by violence.  Like you, I bear within me (against all odds) the hope that reconciliation is possible.