The Eucharist and The Incarnation
In in almost every facet of
human community there is a temptation to pride and sanctimony. We follow what
we believe is right (why else would we follow it?), but “being right” becomes
an attitude of judgment almost before we realize it. Protestantism is perhaps
no worse in this aggravation of self
than Orthodoxy or the Church of Rome, but it does have the unique quality of
asserting an individual's worthiness by self-assessment—that
is, by an intuitive grasp of one’s own "adequacy" before God. I had
long ago deemed myself quite adequate, if not a little better than adequate. I
was unequivocally a Christian. Who could deny it? I had done the right stuff,
prayed the right words, read the right books, but most importantly (underneath
it all), I did mostly love God. I
didn’t always know how to show it, but I was trying my best, and I knew God
would honor that. So when I looked to Rome or to Orthodoxy and found myself
barred from communion with them, I thought who
are they to judge my heart?
In truth, my objection to
being excluded from full participation in other communions grew out of my own
sense of self—especially where I was more knowledgeable and mature in my
philosophical reflections. In my heart I thought, I’m at least as deserving as most of these perfunctory adherents or
perhaps, I know more about their faith
than they do! It is likely that both
Rome and Orthodoxy can be much too eager to boast of their historical,
apostolic claims, treating as divine approval what is primarily divine
blessing. However, the converse error of my inherited Protestant culture has
been not to stress historical claims so much as to resent that anything should be asked of a believer
but to be himself—as-is—covered no
less under some abstract panacea known as "Grace," or, alternatively,
to regard some percentage of mental agreement with the doctrines broadly characterizing
the tradition in question as sufficient for full participation. What such
notions meant for me (I cannot say Protestants in general), is that I wanted
full acceptance within a community either unconditionally or without more than
a partial commitment to its unique life, mutual involvement, and shared
practices. This is, frankly, why Anglicanism is so attractive. You can believe
almost nothing about historical Anglicanism and yet engage in any and every
aspect of communal life, for you are yourself the only proper assessor of
sacramental unity. What it means to be the Church for Anglicanism, and
Protestantism more generally, is to have an internal, invisible union,
mystically conferred by God. All external, physical aspects and actions are
therefore downgraded to “outward signs of an inward grace,” which (in a modern
context) implies that the outward part is less important; sacraments are merely
representative (rather than actually constitutive)
of communion with God and one another.
With just such an
understanding, I failed to see the rationale for my exclusion from the Holy
Mysteries. I didn’t want to jump through their
hoops to get something I believed I already had, but I simultaneously wanted
them to recognize I already had it. Yet how could I expect them to know? How
did I expect them to evaluate this inner sense of belonging? This is about the
time I realized that, in spite of my intellectual convictions, my subconscious
beliefs were still telling me that being the way I was was good enough for any
church. In other words, I wanted unconditional approval—not real love or unity.
So when the Church responded to this attitude by saying, "You need to
adopt a whole life where you actually change—a life of transformation," my
vain heart said, Why do you think you're
better than me? I've done my homework.
I know as much as you do. But this response was not only to mistake understanding
for mere “head knowledge” (see earlier remarks on this distinction), but also to
project my own arrogance on to them. Basically, it proved that I had no
business sharing their table.
Truly, I had yet to realize
that there is nothing in Eucharistic exclusion to deny another's Christianity,
sanctification, or individual life within the kingdom of God. Rather, the
exclusion assumes the importance of shared understanding, mutual practice, and
due reverence for the implicit reality. In short, it relies on the ordinary
fact that one's disposition matters—not just one's doctrine or one's good will
toward a community, nor even one's private love for and commitment to the
triune God, but one's readiness to live
and work for union with His embodied Church. Humility will not seek
vindication, but submission, and my psychological or emotional perception of
being rejected eventually had to give way to fresh attempts to understand the
sacraments from an insider’s perspective.
A helpful (but by no means
perfect) analogy for me has been the study of martial arts: Suppose that I am
healthy and athletic; I appreciate the principles of self-defense and have a
general appreciation of the historical forms. Perhaps I’ve also developed a degree
of proficiency in one form by watching YouTube videos and conducting my own
research. Would these personal qualifications allow me to walk into a dojo or gym
and demand a black belt? No. Unless I enlist to train in and practice a form,
say jiu jitsu, with an instructor who
is himself trained in jiu jitsu, not
only do I have no business asking for a black belt, I have no business asking
for a white belt. Suppose moreover that I have actually learned jiu jitsu on my own, or from some
independent institution, and I'm even better at it than some of the
instructors—would even that justify such a demand? I think not. Until I adopt
their particular life, the training regimen—become a student and learn their
practices—I have no basis for asserting my place among them or judging them for
their lack of acceptance. But if I refuse to join, why am I so insistent that
they treat me as if I had? To put it more simply, we can only be unified if we
are actually unified.
There is no inherent enmity
in requiring conditions. God's love
is unconditional but greater intimacy with Him is not. Marriage is itself a
conditional relationship. A covenant is precisely the statement of those
conditions that will bring about the proper state of unity. In marriage, we
take vows to be loyal, trustworthy, and honorable. Implicit to such vows is
more than the technical execution of our “duties,” but a humble commitment to
greater and greater intimacy. If we are to be Christ's body and his bride, we
ought to be at least a bit more attentive to the factors by which we are made one flesh. Fr. Stephen Freeman speaks
frankly on this analogy concerning the Eucharist:
As
recently as the 1960’s, “closed communion” (so-called) was the normative
practice across all denominations with only minor exceptions. And it had been
the single practice of Christians since the beginning.
It is not a denial of union – it is the profession of belief in union.
If there is no true union, then there is no danger in the Cup. Indeed, the
modern practice of “open-communion” is a denial of union and of any possible
danger in the Cup. It becomes the anti-communion. This same understanding of
union is also inherent in Christian marriage. A man and a woman “become one
flesh.” That union is sacramentally consummated in their sexual union, and seen
as fruitful and particularly blessed in the conception of children. And the
marriage union has boundaries. The communion of a man and a woman in marriage
is not open to “hospitality” or “sharing.” Their union is guarded by chastity,
by faithfulness and by steadfast love. In the practice of “open communion,” no
chastity is required (any doctrine may be held by the one who approaches the
Cup); no faithfulness is required (people may come and go at will and accept no
mutual responsibility or discipline); no steadfast love is expected. Communion
becomes ecclesial politeness."[1]
Again let me say: none of
this is intended to deny the legitimacy of another person’s faith in God. It is
an affirmative stance, not a negative one. The Orthodox are fond of saying “We
know where the Holy Spirit is, but we do not know where the Holy Spirit is not.” God looks upon the heart of man, and may He have mercy on mine!
Nevertheless, the Eucharist matters deeply—indeed it is another revelation of
Christ’s incarnation. That the Word was made flesh has long been a point of difficulty for the human intellect.
We like things to fall neatly into one category or another, in this case spiritual or physical, immaterial or material. But the Eucharist, Christ’s
Church (His Body), Christ Himself—these are all One, and they unify (and yet
defy) these categories. They are spiritual and divine, yet not ethereal or
abstract. They are physical and concrete, yet not reducibly so. It is a mistake,
therefore, to separate the human and divine in our ecclesiology. We must get
away from metaphors and abstractions and learn to accept the challenging
mystery that Christ has a real body,
and He makes us His real body by
feeding us His real body.
For many of you this may be challenging and offensive.
I hope not. The reason, I think, that closed communion seems so scandalous is
precisely because it is connected deeply with “being the Church.” When you
exclude someone from communion, you imply that he or she is not fully part of
Christ’s Body. That’s a tough pill to swallow. But the alternative is to dilute
and spiritualize the concrete, visible reality established by Christ Himself.
Within Orthodox Christianity, one cannot speak properly of the “merely human”
or “merely symbolic,” for the Incarnation renders such distinctions fallacious.
What is sym-bolic (“thrown together”) cannot be separated in Christ. What is
human (flesh and all) has been made divine, for the divine became human. To use
Milton’s words again—God speaking to His Son:
Thy
Humiliation shall exalt
With thee thy
Manhood also to this Throne;
Here shalt
thou sit incarnate, here shalt Reign
Both God and
Man, Son both of God and Man,
Anointed
universal King.
We all affirm the Incarnation in our theology and our
conversations, but we struggle to hold onto it in our hearts because we still
doubt that all this mess we call the physical world can really be part of the
Ultimate Reality. Relegating God and The Church to the invisible realm, even
unconsciously, allows us a degree of comfort with the division, ugliness, and
incongruity of our ordinary experience. But it is this ordinary experience that
Christ came to redeem. The Church may be as ugly or as beautiful as any human
marriage, but like marriage, it cannot be simply ideological. At some point
bodies must join other bodies and live together under the same roof.[2]
[1]
Fr. Stephen Freeman “Un-ecumensim and the Saving
Union”
[2] I wish to mention that when I ran this segment by my
friend, himself a convert to Orthodoxy from Buddhism, he noted that it is mostly
impossible to separate Eucharist from the entire sacramental life. All of it is
interrelated. The Eucharist combines and fulfills all the prayer, worship,
confession, fasting, etc.—and in some mystical fashion Eucharist is also within
all those things—Thanksgiving in its
most holistic sense. This is what my martial arts analogy attempted to capture,
but keep in mind that I am offering only a very rough sketch about something
nearly impossible to articulate. One might as easily write a love poem in
differential equations.
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