Power Religion [1] | Power Religion [2] | Power Religion [3] | Power Religion [4]
So, how might we try to gather some of this together into a ritual, a performance, a remembering worthy of the rich tapestry of signs it suggests? I think, firstly, we have to humbly accept that we simply never will do this most mysterious meal full justice. But secondly, we must commit ourselves to trying. The bland, tasteless bread and wine that is served at many of the churches throughout the world is appropriate for the bland and tasteless act of weak theatre that communion has so often become. Here is a ritual, a commandment, an act of collective memory, an enactment that has so much power... and it demands that we don't allow it to be neutered.
The memories that we are working with are loaded with paradox. We remember a man dying, a bloody sacrifice, an injustice... and commemorate the beginning of our reconciliation, the breaking of elements that draw us together. In these posts we have been thinking about the bread and wine acting as prompts for grief at our domestication of the earth, our spread of cultural mediocrity and blandness where there was such vibrant diversity. We have also seen how they suggest to us the breaking of the hunter-gatherer God. (Something I haven't touched on is the symbolism of Jesus as the 'lamb of God' - Diamond makes the case for domestication of animals like sheep as a root cause of much human disease, and thus responsible for the wiping out of many times more indigenous peoples than European guns.)
I wonder then if the Hunter-Gatherer Eucharist ought to contain within it more 'savage' elements. Rather than eating fine bread, perhaps we might incorporate a battering of the wheat, a physical milling and breaking of the grain into flour. Rather than sipping fine wine, we might similarly trample grapes, and thus get back to the raw materials and processes involved in food production. Alternatively, we might celebrate with found or scavenged items. Freegans collect and eat discarded food from dumpsters behind restaurants. There is risk here, and dirt, and life.
The Hunter-Gatherer / Food Producer distinction does not simply exonerate the Hunter-Gatherer as some wild and truer way of life. Food production began in part because the hunters had exterminated most of the large, passive mammals that once roamed the earth. And food production has led us to have to get along, to be interdependent, rather than simply killing the stranger.
So we must also turn the Eucharist into a meditation on our own use of resources. Are we living lightly on the earth, or are we feasting from it? Are we drinking fine wine and ripping into fresh bread as exponents of a religion of power, or are we partaking in the body of Christ, the body of the hunted, the broken, the condemned, the poor, the misunderstood, the dying prophet who, like a grain of wheat, fell to the ground and had to be buried before bearing wild fruit?
I hope for one that my eating of this strange meal might lean more toward the latter, and somehow sow the seed within it, as Christ's eating did, the downfall of power religion.
Thanks for journeying on this little series.
Technorati: Anarchy | Body of Christ | Guns, Germs and Steel | Hunter-Gatherer | Jared Diamond | Power | Agriculture
The last couple of days have seen local government proposals to close hundreds of small village schools in the England, and central government proposals to build Titan 'super-prisons' in England and Wales.
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