So I did sit and eat
In the preface to her 2008 book Sacramental Poetics Regina Mara Schwarz (scholar at Northwestern University) says, “The Eucharist has always been mysterious to me. As a Jewish child, nothing in my tradition could prepare me for such a ritual.” In Judaism, according to Regina, “The separation between the Creator and his Creation is the fundamental tenet. ” In other words, God by nature had to be absolutely distant, even unimaginable – or one might end up worshipping idols.
And yet the Mass with its presence of the divine in bread and wine fascinated her. Why? Maybe because we now seem to live in a disenchanted world – where thanks to modern trends our world seems rinsed clean of the divine presence that used to be found in the wind, the rain, the sunrise, in roses, in prophets and kings. We live in an age when people speak glibly of the “death of God” and glory in the freedom that comes of his absence (until the emptiness that follows upon such godless freedom leads many to despair even in the midst of prosperity). In other words, what need have I for some divine Other (with a capital O) when I have my Self for companionship?
Finding a disenchanted, godless world unsettling, Regina felt drawn to the Mass now and then – with its faith in God’s presence in bread and wine. She would try to be inconspicuous during the service – until communion. Then she was drawn into the procession toward the altar – except, “while I gave my limbs the command to stand and walk, they did not move. Frozen and embarrassed, I began to reassure myself that I was neither sinner nor convert, but someone who simply wanted to join [in]. I tried again . . . but again I was unable to move.”
The restraints of her Jewish upbringing, fear that her experiment was insensitive to the beliefs of the congregation . . . all kept her back. But ultimately it seems she felt – after the horror of the Holocaust – that the world was not yet fit for the proximity of God. Nevertheless she found solace in the Eucharistic poetry of the English writers of the 17th century – people like George Herbert. In reading such poetry a kind of non-physical communion might be had – in one’s imagination. Take his poem Love (III): Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back / Guiltie of dust and sinne. / But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack, From my first entrance in, / Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, / If I lacked any thing. // A guest, I answered, worthy to be here: Love said, You shall be he. There is further hesitancy but Love insists upon being the gracious host: You must sit down, says Love, / and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat.
Regina says something else at the close of her book that hits home. She admits that Christians down through time have made the Eucharist an occasion for warfare, for painful discrimination between those who are welcome and those who are not. But its real intent is “to create a community that coheres, not from blood or territorial boundaries, not from history or from political allegiance, but through SHARING DIVINITY . . .” [The capitals are mine!] It seeks “to overturn the pain of difference, to achieve reconciliation.”
Does that ever enter your mind as your take the bread and wine into your being – that you are consuming divinity, becoming divine, becoming the Love who plays the host in George Herbert’s poem? After communion do you behave in godly ways?