Like the Earth, Women Image the Creator
Spirit
by Elizabeth A. Johnson, CSJ
Distinguished Professor of Theology, Fordham University, and former president, Catholic Theological Society of America
An excerpt from the 1993 Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality, “Women, Earth, and Creator Spirit,” reprinted with permission of the publisher, Paulist Press.
It is an interesting point, and one of the saving graces of the religious patriarchal tradition, that in addition to the natural world women’s reality is also thought suitable to image the Spirit. The most extended biblical instance of female imagery of the Spirit occurs in the wisdom literature where the Spirit’s functions are depicted as acts of Woman Wisdom. The female figure of Wisdom is the most acutely developed personification of God’s presence and activity in the Hebrew scriptures. Not only is the grammatical gender of the word for wisdom feminine (hokmah in Hebrew, sophia in Greek), but the biblical portrait of Wisdom is consistently female, casting her as sister, mother, female beloved, chef and hostess, teacher, preacher, maker of justice, and a host of other women’s roles. In every instance Wisdom symbolizes transcendent power pervading and ordering the world, both nature and human beings, interacting with them all to lure them onto the path of life.
Early in the book of Wisdom this female figure is identified with spirit, a people-loving spirit: “Wisdom is a kindly spirit” (1:6). In a subsequent passage the metaphor shifts slightly to say that Wisdom has a spirit. Her spirit is then described in glorious vocabulary with twenty-one attributes, or three times the perfect number seven. She is:
intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted, distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible, beneficent, humane, steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating through all other intelligent spirits (7:22-23).
Poetic parallelism clinches the Wisdom-Spirit equivalence: “Who has learned thy thy counselcounsel, unless you have given Wisdom, and sent your Holy Spirit from on high?” (Wis 9:17). These and other allusive wisdom texts point to the fittingness of speaking about the Spirit in female imagery, given Sophia’s undoubted female symbolization.
Understanding this equivalence, we read the wisdom texts and find magnificent renderings of creation and redemption themes in female symbols. As the Nicene Creed would later say of the Spirit, these texts say of Wisdom that she is the giver of life, she is a tree of life, “she is your life” (Prov 4:13). So intimately is the divine blessing of life associated with her that she can proclaim “whoever finds me finds life” (Prov 8:35). All life is a gift and Woman Wisdom, a personification of the Creator Spirit, gives that gift. She is the “fashioner of all things” (Wis 7:22), responsible for their existence and therefore knowing their inmost secrets. She knows the solstices and changes of the seasons, the constellations of the stars, the natures of animals and the tempers of wild beasts, the variety of plants and the virtues of roots, and the ways of human reasoning (Wis 7:17-22). This passage from the book of Wisdom contains a poignant aside. Solomon, while rejoicing to learn about these things from Wisdom, admits “but I did not know that she was their mother” (Wis 7:12).
Spirit-Sophia fills the world
It is not just individual creatures who are the subject of Spirit-Sophia’s life-giving knowledge, but the world as a whole is shaped harmoniously by her guidance: “She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and she orders all things well” (Wis 8:1). This ordering is a righteous one, inimical to exploitation and oppression. Sophia hates the ways of arrogance and evil but works to establish just governance on the earth: “By me kings reign, and rulers decree what is just” (Prov 8:15). Indeed, the echoes of the prophetic promise of shalom sound in her self-description: “I walk in the way of righteousness, in the paths of justice” (Prov 8:20).
Spirit-Sophia’s presence fills the world: “For Wisdom is more mobile than any motion; because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things” (Wis 7:24). This is the same divine presence spoken about in the Jewish rabbinic tradition of the shekinah, the female symbol of God’s indwelling, the weighty radiance that flashes out in unexpected ways in the midst of the broken world. Most significant is her work of accompaniment, for “Wherever the righteous go, the Shekinah goes with them.” No place is too hostile. She accompanies the people through the post-slavery wilderness, and hundreds of years later into exile again, through all the byways of rough times. “Come and see how beloved are the Israelites before God, for withersoever they journeyed in their captivity the Shekinah journeyed with them.” In other words, God’s indwelling Spirit was with them and this accompaniment gave rise to hope in their suffering. Virtually every aspect of the Creator Spirit’s activity in the world, as delineated in doctrine and theology, is depicted in the wisdom literature in female symbolism. When things become damaged, the power to refresh them pours out from her: “while remaining in herself, she renews all things” (Wis 7:27). This renewing energy profoundly affects human beings in their relation to divine mystery and the rest of the world, weaving them round with a web of kinship: “in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets” (Wis 7:27). One aspect of Wisdom has not been seriously appropriated by Christian doctrine of the Spirit, but its time may be coming. The great creation poem of Proverbs shows us creative Wisdom actually playing in the newly minted world, delighting in it all, especially in those intelligent creatures called human (8:22-31). In addition to the texts about Wisdom, biblical books hold a constellation of maternal images that delineate the Spirit’s work in the world. Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, for example, carries a clear presentation of God the Spirit as mother. A person must be born anew in order to enter the reign of God, Jesus insists, to which Nicodemus queries, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” (Jn 3:4). Jesus’ reply keeps the metaphor of physical birth and amplifies it to speak of Spirit: “No one can enter the reign of God without being born of water and the Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit” (3:5-6). Creator Spirit is here likened to a woman giving birth to offspring who are henceforth truly identified as “born of God.” Other fragments of women’s experience of mothering also provide biblical writers symbolic material for Creator Spirit. Like a woman with her knitting needles she knits together the new life in a mother’s womb (Ps 139:13); like a woman in childbirth she labors and pants to bring about the birth of justice (Is 42:14); like a midwife she works deftly with a woman in pain to deliver the new creation (Ps 22:9-10); like a washerwoman she scrubs away at bloody stains till the people be like new (Is 4:4; Ps 51:7). Divine activity in female form The early Christian centuries carried forward explicit use of female imagery to characterize God’s Spirit. In Syriac Christianity, for example, the Spirit’s image was consistently that of the brooding or hovering mother bird tending to her chicks. This symbolism of the motherhood of the Spirit fostered a spirituality characterized by warmth which expressed itself in private and public prayer. In one prayer the believer meditates: As the wings of doves over their nestlings, And the mouths of their nestlings toward their mouths, So also are the wings of the Spirit over my heart. In another prayer spoken in the context of liturgy the community implores the Spirit: The world considers you a merciful mother. Bring with you calm and peace, and spread your wings over our sinful times. In time most of this maternal imagery migrated away from the Spirit and accrued to the church, called Holy Mother the Church, or to Mary the mother of Jesus, venerated as mother of the faithful as well. The symbol of the maternity of the Spirit was virtually forgotten, along with the capacity of images of Wisdom and Shekinah to evoke divine presence and activity in female form. But this resonance abides in the texts of scripture and tradition, and can be retrieved. Looked at against the background of hierarchical dualism, female and cosmic symbols of the Creator Spirit and the insights to which they give rise have unique potential to heal divided consciousness. The One who blows the wild wind of life, who fires the blaze of being, who gives birth to the world, or who midwifes it into existence does not stand over against it or rule it hierarchically from afar but dwells in intimate, quickening relationship with humanity and the life of the earth. The female symbols in particular dramatize that being women and being fertile is not a dangerous, polluted state but a participation in the fecundity of the Creator Spirit and, conversely, a sign of her presence. Dismantling dualism Enfolding and unfolding the universe, the Spirit is holy mystery “over all and through all and in all” (Eph 4:6). Remembering Creator Spirit this way dismantles the theological dualism that sets God apart from the universe, thus removing one of the pillars of support for dualism within the human community and between human beings and the earth. We are all woven into the fabric of the one cosmic community. Indeed, God is not far from any one of us, for in her we live and move and have our being, as some of our poets now say (cf. Acts 17:28). © 1993 by St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Ind.
When we say the word "eucharist," what we automatically think of is Eucharist with a capital "E." That is our tradition. Another word for it, for us Catholics formed by Vatican II, is "Liturgy" with a capital "L." An earlier word many of us remember is "Mass" with a capital "M." All three words identify the same tradition - the designated rite, the Eucharist of the Christian community and the Catholic Church. But today my focus will ultimately be eucharist with a small "e." The word eucharist - capital "E" or small "e" - comes from the Greek word eucharistia, meaning "giving thanks," and that is the heart of what eucharist is.
Today I want to go back to the historical roots of both Eucharist and eucharist. In particular, I want to try to establish with some clarity the existence of, and the legitimacy of, an alternative tradition of small "e" eucharist that goes all the way back to Jesus and was present in the earliest days of the church in Jerusalem.
There are two distinct traditions of eucharist embedded within the New Testament texts. The one with which we are most familiar is known by biblical and early church scholars as the Pauline tradition. Our Eucharist, in interpretation and in theological shape, goes back to Paul. It appears very early on, but earlier still, there was a pre-Pauline tradition as well.
Paul's tradition is embedded in his First Letter to the Corinthians, a very early text, and is traced through the Synoptic Gospels. The other even earlier tradition is reflected in the Book of Acts, chapter 2. The distinction between them is that Paul's eucharist has the elements of both bread and cup and an emphasis on remembering the death of Jesus until he comes again. The earlier eucharist of Acts 2 is a eucharist of bread only. There is no mention of the death and its essential characteristic is joy. Both eucharistic practices existed in the primitive church. The Pauline tradition continues even to this day in the Eucharist of the West. The other tradition continued for about three centuries and moved on into the East. It actually gives distinct characteristics to the Liturgy of the Eastern Church. Let's take a closer look at each of these traditions.
We glimpse the pre-Pauline eucharist in a few lines of Acts 2. (And it's amazing what biblical scholars can get out of a few words!) Acts 2: 42 gives us one of the very few descriptions of liturgy or worship in the early church: "They (the early Christians) devoted themselves to the Apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and the prayers." Characteristic of this Jerusalem church eucharist is the breaking of the bread. Verses 46 and 47 continue with this description: "Day by day (meaning every single day) they spent much time together in the Temple (they are still part of the Jewish tradition) and they broke bread at home, and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the good will of all the people." Then there is a little tag line that we ought to keep in mind if we ever get back to this approach. "And day by day, the Lord added to their number those who were being saved."
Our texts say they celebrated with joy in their hearts. But if you look at the original Greek, our translations are just too soft. It was overflowing joy, ecstatic joy, euphoric joy. They were beyond themselves, really, really excited - which isn't the feeling you get when you "remember the death of the Lord until he comes again." Now why would this be, this spirit of rejoicing? This is the Jerusalem community. Jesus had died, and yes, they knew it, because they had lived through it. His condemnation, suffering and death had happened in Jerusalem. Many of them had been there - at the wayside or outside the High Priest's house. All those who had been following Jesus in and around Jerusalem during the High Holy Days knew first hand what had happened, and they suffered deep anguish when they knew he was gone. They had put all their hopes in him, not only spiritually, but even sociopolitically. For many of them, he was the one who was going to begin the revolution against the Roman occupation forces, not unlike national independence movements today. But it wasn't going to happen now. He had died, and they were filled with sorrow. I suspect they came together to mourn, but very soon, say the biblical accounts, Jesus appeared, and suddenly, everything changed.
Now I ask you to consider this. Someone you love dies. You feel the terrible ache of sadness and loss. So how would you feel if that person suddenly shows up again? There he is, the one you love! If you have come together with family and friends to remember and to celebrate, what are you going to remember? What would you celebrate? The death? The funeral? The burial? Or the fact that the one who supposedly died is right there in your midst. And so it was. He is risen! they shouted. I mean, everyone dies, but this guy came back! Now that is reason for absolutely ecstatic joy. So a little later, when they gathered in Jerusalem to remember, they were remembering the resurrection! Yes, he died, but he is back with us. He has not left us. And one day he will return, and he will take us with him. The one who was with us physically at meals before he died, and then with us in spirit after he rose, will come and take us to that heavenly banquet. Their sense of meal, and of Jesus' presence, was at the center of their consciousness.
Meals and the Risen Jesus
Furthermore, their sense of celebrating the resurrection and Jesus' presence at a meal and around a table with overflowing joy was deepened by the fact that most of the resurrection appearances of Jesus, except for those to Mary Magdalene and to the women on the road, involved coming together with the community around a meal. Remember the couple on the road to Emmaus? They recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread and sped back to Jerusalem to tell the brothers and sisters waiting there that they had seen him. Then, sure enough, he shows up there and asks for something to eat. Always the physical connection to food, emphasizing: here I am, it is really me. You can watch me eat this bread, this fish, and know I am really here. From the shore of the Sea of Galilee, where Peter, James and John are out fishing, Jesus fries fish for their breakfast and calls to them to come and eat. Back in Jerusalem, they are in the upper room, including Thomas, who hadn't been with them in Galilee. He had said he wouldn't believe Jesus was risen unless he saw him. And sure enough, when they are gathered around the table, there is Jesus again, saying, "Peace be with you." The earliest Christians began to associate deeply that sense of the real presence of Jesus in Spirit with coming together at a meal.
Many scholars remind us that there were far more meals in the life of Jesus than that one final supper we like to remember. There are many references in the Gospels to the meals Jesus shared with others. And so often he dined, not just with disciples, but with people who were vastly different from himself. He would be the first one to go out of this hall to the people picketing this CTA conference and say to them, "Come on. Let's sit down together. Let's have a hotdog." And rather than preach to them, he might listen to what was on their minds, inviting them into fellowship as he did the tax-collector, and Simon the Pharisee, and Simon the leper, and all those people he wasn't supposed to hang out with. There were such strict purity laws against sitting down at table with those considered sinners. In defiance of those laws, Jesus ate with anybody and everybody. He chose an egalitarian table fellowship that treated everyone as equal. Yet we are so careful about who is going to eat at the table we are guarding in memory of Jesus. You'd better have your act completely together, not be even a tad less than perfect. And the list of those who shouldn't even come up the aisle keeps getting longer and longer.
The attitude of Jesus in the Gospels is exactly the opposite of our praxis. We are to come to the table of Jesus in order to learn how to love one another, how we can fail less. It's not a spiritual reward for those who are perfect. As Marcus Borg says (Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, 1994), Jesus preached a politics of compassion that invited everyone to come. Those who found themselves included at table with him experienced a grace, a fire of the Spirit, an energy. They were drawn in. No doubt many left saying, there is something about this man. So we have a tradition in the Gospels and in the life and ministry of Jesus that tells us: when we are at table, we should invite not only our friends but people we don't agree with. It's an opportunity to hear one another into truth, hear one another into life, to discover that in this place where two or more are gathered sincerely trying to know more about the God who loves us all, God and Jesus and the Spirit of Jesus are present there with us.
So we have this early Jerusalem community, which had experienced those inclusive meals with Jesus. You can be sure his reputation for such meals went far and wide: this man eats with the outcasts. It was one of the reasons why he got himself killed so soon. He was hanging out with, empowering and affirming, all the wrong people: women, tax collectors, sinners. Now, after the resurrection appearances end, the Jerusalem community continues to come together with great joy, they break bread (there is no cup), they experience the presence of Jesus, and they have a true fellowship. The Greek word is koinonia. It means a real bond. Not just a collection of strangers, but true friends. In those days, they came together to break bread. "To break bread" meant to eat a meal. It meant, let's have supper. But as it evolved, it also came to mean, in a more specific sense, to have eucharist. So to break bread, to have a meal, to have eucharist were all wrapped up together. The distinctions were not as clear then as they are now for us. In fact, the very earliest eucharists, for a significant period of time, were right there at the dinner table. A distinctive way of the breaking of the bread as eucharist came later. In the beginning, eucharist was part of the Jewish tradition of what we would call grace before meals. The breaking of bread was the blessing before the meal.
Now let's look at the tradition we are more familiar with, the Pauline tradition, which goes back to the Last Supper. In Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, chapters 10 to 14 are all about the eucharist. Remember, Paul hadn't been at the Last Supper. He wasn't even a Christian then, but he says, "I received from the Lord .." He has a sense of having received a revelation. "I received from the Lord, and what I received, I hand on to you: that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed, took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, broke it and said, 'This is my body. Do this in remembrance of me.' And in the same way he took the cup after supper, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in memory of me.'" (11:23-25) And then Paul calls on us to remember the death of the Lord until He comes again. That matches our liturgical practice almost verbatim, doesn't it?
Less than 20 years after the Last Supper, Paul is writing this correction to the community in Corinth. The important word here is correction. This group of converts to Christianity were celebrating the eucharist, but they had never had the experience of the death of Jesus. They had just heard about this man who had risen again. They hadn't gone through the death, and they were in a different culture, speaking Greek rather than Hebrew or Aramaic. They were not focusing on Jesus' death but on his resurrection, which they were celebrating, and it was getting a little too exuberant. So Paul was reminding them: yes indeed, this is cause for rejoicing, but do not forget that Jesus also died for us. There is significance both in the death and in the resurrection, not either-or, but both-and. Paul was giving a corrective to their community. In effect he was saying: You are right to celebrate the resurrection, but pay attention also to the death.
However, historically we have taken this corrective and developed it in such a way that it changed the whole nature of the meal. You can trace this Pauline perspective through the Synoptic Gospels, through Justin, through Hippolytus, and into the whole tradition of the West, with its emphasis on the death of Jesus. Very soon, the meal became a ritual meal, and then a sacrificial meal, remembering one who was sacrificed for us, broken like bread for us, whose blood was poured out for us. Instead of that earlier experience of the meal as eating with Christ and feeling his presence, we eventually, much later, get to the idea of eating Christ himself. Instead of Christ as victor, we have an emphasis on Christ as victim. It was a profoundly different theological development, one that I can't begin to synthesize here. But my point is, there was a significant change of mood, of emphasis, and of praxis. We took what was for Paul only a corrective and made it the major theological emphasis of our eucharistic practice.
Paul linked the Last Supper with the Lord's Supper, reminded us it was the new covenant, put a focus on the elements of bread and wine, and stressed the sacrificial death. But he also gave us something else: a real emphasis on the body of Christ.
Let's go back and look more closely at the Last Supper. By the way, there has been a difference of opinion about whether or not this was a Passover meal. Most scholars now say that it was a seder or Passover meal. After years of study, I myself no longer question whether there were women present. If it was a seder meal, a Passover, the very nature of the Jewish seder was a family gathering - men, women, and children (the youngest asking the question, etc.). Women would have been there and not just to cook the food, although that can be considered. If there were no women at the table, it was the rare seder meal in which women were not welcome. Jesus came to Jerusalem, and so did the entire company of disciples, both women and men, and so did his mother. Jesus didn't say: Excuse me, Mom, I'm going out to have the seder meal with the boys, and you can't come. It would be unheard of not to celebrate seder all together. In fact, after the death of Jesus, notice how they are gathered in the upper room, not only the men, but the women, including Mary. Women were at the cross and at the tomb. Were they everywhere else, but not at the meal? Where would they have eaten? They were Galileans. They came to Jerusalem together as a community to celebrate the feast. Why would they separate at seder time?
There is an elaborate scholarly argument that says that Jesus had a company of men, a haburah, like a traditional Jewish minyan of men who gathered to pray, and once a week this community of men would celebrate Shabbat. So Jesus would have had his seder meal with them. But I ask you: even if Jesus had a haburah, why would he be bound by a male-only tradition when he didn't feel bound by so many other traditions? He would have included women, for sabbath and seder.
But back to Paul's emphasis on the body of Christ. Here is an idea for which I am indebted to Joachim Jeremias in his book on the Eucharist (Eucharistic Words of Jesus, 1974). He didn't put it quite this way, but let me express it in contemporary language. We are a visual people. Our video cameras are everywhere. Now if we had a videotape of the Last Supper, how might our understanding of its meaning be different? When Jesus broke the bread, he said, "This - my body." All scholars agree on the words: "Take, eat. This - my body." But wouldn't it make a big difference where he was looking when he said that? We say, "Take, eat. This is my body" and we are looking at the bread. But what if Jesus was looking at his disciples? Take, eat. This - all of you - (are) my body. We have an unbroken tradition of being identified as members of the body of Christ. It starts at the very beginning and continues uninterrupted through history. Paul expressed this theologically and he wasn't even at the Last Supper. He was out there killing Christians once they began acclaiming Jesus as Lord. Yet after his massive conversion, when he came into the Christian community, what he immediately began experiencing was more than koinonia, more than community. He experienced himself as part of the extended body of the Christ. In modern times we use the phrase "mystical body." We have the papal encyclical, Mystici Corporis, and we take this image for granted. We are all members of the body of Christ, every one of us, women as well as men. (Except that if you are a woman, we're told we can't resemble the physical body of Christ. But we are the body of Christ mystically. Well, are we the body of Christ or aren't we? But that is a topic for another lecture!)
The extended body of Christ
This sense of being the extended body of the Christ is there from the beginning. As you look at the extant texts and the evolving tradition, you sense how strong it is, especially in John's treatment of the last Supper, which consists mainly of his memories, his memoirs, of Jesus' homily or sermon, the words he left with them.You are now going out into the world, and the Spirit will be with you. I am in you and you are in me, and God will be in you, and we are one. We are all one. I am the vine, you are the branches.
It is all about being the extended body of Christ. As you go through the other extant texts of the first four centuries, you find the same sense: when we come together to eat, to experience the real presence of Christ, the Holy Spirit is called down upon the community that we might be changed into the body and blood of Christ. Later on the Spirit is called down upon the bread and the wine to be changed into the body and blood of Christ. But the earlier emphasis is upon transforming those who eat the bread to be the body of Jesus, so that we might act more like Jesus.
The words of institution, "This - my body, this - my blood" are there from the beginning. But what exactly did they mean to the people who experienced them and who for decades lived this out? There is a lengthy period of eucharistic development. Even the so-called words of consecration undergo development. They are somewhat different in Luke from the version in Matthew/Mark: a different handling of the bread and cup and a different interpretation of the bread. John doesn't even mention these words for reasons of his own.
There is something powerful here. As Paul reminded the Corinthians, we who come together for a meal eat and drink condemnation to ourselves if we are not sensitive to those in our midst who do not have as much as we have. Paul's corrective not only addressed their being too euphoric and not remembering the death. They were also pigging out on the food they had brought with them, while others in the same room were going hungry! The "haves" were eating and not sharing with the "have-nots". Paul said: you eat and drink condemnation if you do not share. Why? Because, do you not know that we are all the body of Christ?
When we come together around a meal - with anyone - let us be conscious, as we share, that the Spirit is within us (another Pauline theme: do you not know that your bodies are sanctuaries of the Spirit, and that the Spirit dwells in you?). Let us evoke Spirit from one another, God's Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus, who said: where two or three are present, I am right there in your midst. Is that not eucharist? Real presence? One body? This is small "e" eucharist. I am making a clear distinction. There is a tradition of big "E" Eucharist. Not only is it legitimate. I stand in that tradition. But I am distinguishing this Eucharistic and Sacramental tradition from another, alternative, eucharistic (small "e") tradition, which is sacramental (small "s"), which is liturgy (with a small "l").
I want to say more about the word "eucharist." The heart of the word eucharist - eucharistia - is charis: grace, or gift. Charism. As soon as Paul in I Corinthians finishes talking about the meal, he takes the whole of chapter 12 to talk about gifts of the Spirit - charisms. He is saying: each one of you has the Spirit, and each has gifts. Different ways, different gifts, different ministries. Not everyone is head honcho. (How many ordained priests can we handle anyway?) Each of us has a gift, a function, a call, a work to do. We are all out there ministering. It is a grace to give thanks. It is a grace to claim one's gifts, and to know that the Spirit is within us. But all the gifts are for the building up of the body, which is the church, the community.
Then comes chapter 13 on the gift of love. You can have everything, but without love, you have nothing. For Corinth, for us, the bottom line is love. Do we love one another? Can we act lovingly even in the face of opposition, even when the dreams we dare to dream never seem to come true, at least not in our lifetime?
Then comes a little vignette, a profile of a liturgy (chapter 14), one of the few we have in Scripture. I love the part that says, when you come together, everyone brings something. One brings a hymn, another has a revelation. One has an insight, another interprets. There is no pre-printed bulletin to guide the order of service. It just happens. And there is that phrase we jokingly attribute to the Presbyterians: as long as "everything is done decently and in order." As Oscar Cullmann has explained (Early Christian Worship, 1953), there was a spirit of free expression in early Christian liturgy. It happened within a fixed form, but the form was not too rigid. What was fixed was the fact that we come together, we have koinonia - fellowship - that builds up the body, we hear the word of the apostles and the teachings, we break bread, and we pray the prayers.
But that was back then. What about today? I would love to take the word "transubstantiation" and apply it to ourselves. We need substantial change. Significant, systemic change. And it all begins at home, with ourselves. We need to be changed, to say: what is the vision God has for the universe? And within that, what vision for us as Christians? And within that, for us as Catholic Christians? And what is my role? Meaning: what are my gifts? My charisms? If we each put in our small part, it will be enough.
Everyday meals and moments
I think we should begin to have alternative eucharistic meals. It should be any time we sit down to table with anyone, even in a fast food situation. Maybe we could have a mnemonic device. Think "food," and immediately think, "real presence of God." We need an awareness-raising any time we eat. In the Jewish tradition, you couldn't eat anything without a little ritual. Every time you broke bread, had any food, you said, "Blessed be God, King of the Universe, for the food that we have received." We hardly ever do grace before and after meals anymore. The point is, stop and be aware of the real presence. When we gather with our children, with our families at the end of the day, we can evoke the presence of God and talk about ourselves and our life. And believe that this is eucharist, because it is!
Besides eucharistic meals, we need to be sensitive to eucharistic moments. Going back to the Pauline tradition of the Last Supper, we have the words, "Do this in remembrance of me." Most scholars agree that Jesus probably didn't say those words. It is a Pauline rubric. It represents the community's sense that Jesus told us to do something: "do this." But what was the "this" that Jesus told us to do? Just keep having eucharistic celebrations? If we read John, chapters 14 to 17, and especially chapters 16 and 17, Jesus was reminding us that he wouldn't be in the world much longer, that there is a lot of work still to be done in the arena of justice. A lot more compassion and love are needed. And he was charging us as his extended body: I can't do this any more, so you do this in memory of me! Matthew concurs. You feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, visit the imprisoned. You hang out with the outcasts, do the unpopular thing, challenge those laws of purity that would dare say some people are better than others. Jesus challenged those rules, those structures. There is a sense that doing this is what he meant by "do this in memory of me."
A gay-lesbian caucus
About five years ago I was invited to Los Angeles to spend a long weekend with a gay-lesbian caucus. They had been using a lot of my liturgical material and my music. They asked me to preside over their Sunday worship in a Presbyterian church. I agreed, but I made it clear that I am not an ordained person, I am a Roman Catholic woman, and I don't have authority to celebrate Eucharist. I was sitting in the chancel before the service, just reflecting, with my eyes closed. They had pushed the communion table back against the wall of the sanctuary. When I opened my eyes, a shaft of light from the window was shining directly on the words on the front of the communion table that had been pushed aside: "Do this in remembrance of me." That shaft of light went right to my heart. As the service began, I said to them, "As a Roman Catholic sister, I ask your forgiveness for all the pain that has been caused you because of homophobia and ignorance and misunderstanding of what Jesus would have us do."
I found out later that nearly three-fourths of that congregation were former Roman Catholics. They lined up to greet me after the service, and the tears were streaming down their faces. They told me: it's been 20 years. I still cherish my Catholic roots, I love the liturgy. I miss it so much. That was a eucharistic moment: the forgiveness and the real presence of Jesus. No Eucharistic ritual could have made him any more real. In the Spirit, you too have these moments, and can be aware of them, and tell the stories of them. They happen often. They happen everywhere.
I shared some of these thoughts in a recent book (The Singer and the Song: An Autobiography of the Spirit, 1999), and I would like to read a few passages from it:Tradition traces eucharist back to the last meal of Jesus with his disciples in Jerusalem just before he died. But there are also other meals that give us a glimpse of the preferences and the passionate concerns of Jesus. He preferred mixed company. He favored diversity. He broke bread, ate and drank even with those diametrically opposed to his fundamental values. Mealtime was an inclusive time. His was a welcoming table. He sought out the unimportant ones - the crude, the crass, the criticized, those who were impoverished, those who were oppressed, those considered outcasts - and spoke out on their behalf. He confronted assumptions, broke rules, took risks, refused to conform, all in pursuit of a God-given vision of a new way of being in the world, a way that was fully inclusive, compassionate, and just. The particulars of this impossible dream were shared with those who were with him at table. No boring chit-chat there. No esoteric enclave. He chided and he challenged, called people to conversion and reconciliation, to personal and systemic justice, all in the name of God. There must have been times when he was applauded for his unconventional teaching and disconcerting ways, times of fierce and furious debate, and times of light-hearted laughter. A dynamic table fellowship, to be sure, one that continued up to and even beyond his death. But was this eucharist? If these meals with Jesus were not eucharist, then I do not know what is. Bread was broken, good news shared and interpreted. Jesus the Incarnate Word, bread of heaven, bread of life, was really and truly present. Bit by bit, in the heart of the individual, within an emerging community, and systemically in the wider world, there was substantial change. What a powerful paradigm for eucharist, a eucharist for the new millennium. It is a traditional eucharist, one with roots we can trace back to the mission and ministry of Jesus, and one that can proceed parallel to and in addition to the ecclesiastical, sacramental praxis of the Church.
In other words, while we are waiting for the day when we will be welcomed inclusively into the full designated sacramental ritual of Eucharist in the Church, especially women and married men in roles of leadership, there is something we can do. When the early Church was waiting for Jesus to return, and he didn't come, and he didn't come, eventually they had to do something besides wait. As we wait for the changes we long for, maybe we can go ahead and do something parallel, creating a climate of love in presence of Jesus through an alternative eucharist.
What would the world be like if we recovered that ancient practice? Personally, I was substantially changed in my understanding of eucharist when I spent time in refugee camps, where people are desperately hungry. I learned there that eucharist is all about assuaging the hungers of those in need, those hungry for physical food or opportunity, for equality, compassion, a place at the table. We have a lot of work to do. Every time we reach out and assuage someone's hunger, and do that in memory of Jesus, a sense of eucharist will bring to consciousness the Spirit and the real presence of Jesus - in us, through us, among us. That Spirit alone is capable of transforming us and the world.
Except for some minor editorial adjustments, this article is a literal transcription of an oral presentation given from a single page of notes and not from a written text. Therefore, the style is reflective of an extemporaneous talk and not a scholarly work.
Miriam Therese Winter, a Medical Mission Sister, is Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Spirituality, and Director of the Women's Leadership Institute, at Hartford Seminary in Hartford, Conn.