Corpus Christi

Remember when I used to blog about the readings every single week? I haven’t psoted since April, because I got the feeling that my very few readers were just catching my work as it happened in real time. Today someone reminded me I have a blog so I will post the three reflections I have done this year (and soon I will post this Sunday’s too). This was back in June for the feast of Corpus Christi.

After some very spiritually focused big Sundays- Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity, we are reminded to come back to the material and every day, the stuff of real human life. Bread. Sharing food book-ends the passion of Christ. The events of Good Friday and Easter occur between the “Last Supper” and post-resurrection meals shared.

In a society where we have overabundance, I struggle with a tendency to overeat, to make every meeting up with friends centre on coffee or wine or a meal…but this is because psychologically and physically food is so central to life. We need food to live and it needs to be more than fuel for us. I would not see it as progress if we could simply swallow a nutrition pill each day, for all the hassle of growing or buying food, deciding, preparing, cleaning up, our senses blossom into joy at the scents, tastes, textures and colours of food, the sound of sizzling, the satisfying crunch of celery, the pounding together of spices with a mortar and pestle. Some people manage to make lifestyles where they escape ever working with food- such people are missing out.

Even ineptly and resentfully throwing together two-minute noodles is sacramental. Making food is providing self or others with life. Growing food is the same, the blush of tomatoes ripening or the full bushy greenness that shows the carrots underground are almost ready. The birds collecting nectar or fruit noisily from the trees know sacrament just as surely as my cat licking dew from the grass knows that water is life.

Melchizedek in the first reading knows that more than words are needed for blessing. Food seals the connection between people, invokes God’s everyday orientation toward blessing the world. Food speaks of earth and air and water, the fire of quickening, the elements and our own connectedness and dependency to the broader sweep of creation. Extinction Rebellion when they stop traffic sometimes give out cupcakes or bickies, treats for the drivers as an apology for the inconvenience, but also because if we want to keep enjoying cupcakes and breathing and having somewhere to go we need to cut out our dependency to fossil fuels.

We were wrong to let ourselves believe we could get mastery over creation. Jesus did not say “I am the plough or I am the goldmine” he said “I am bread”. Elsewhere he talked about grains of wheat- dying to give birth to many, falling on fertile ground, the wheat becomes bread, becomes more than the instrumental basics of life (hence wine too) but becomes connection and sharing and the Word that is more than words.

Sometimes there are people whose words or even more so whose listening to us is like bread, we walk away satisfied and hopeful and ready to be our best self. In the darkest hour Jesus doesn’t say “I will be your guilt trip, I will be your judge” he comes as servant, he comes as bread. Washing, feeding, making the quiet warm moment that allows us to go on, into the dark and shocking moments where his disciples will be ripped apart from everything they know. They would have been traumatised when he was seized but did they remember that he was bread, that he was wine?

After the resurrection he proved his real presence by eating, by preparing food for them. We celebrate this real presence by the way we celebrate Eucharist, by waiting for each other to eat together, by allowing some peace around our eating but also by having coffee and morning tea at Sophia every month. We bring Eucharist back out into our worlds of families we need to feed, work colleagues we share food with, friends we make time to have a glass of wine with. “I haven’t seen you for too long, let’s do coffee” is a way of saying “you are alive to me, I want to be alive to you”.

When we share food and friendship, when we listen to the wisdom of friend or neighbour, when we meet together to make the world a little bit better; may we be proclaiming the Risen One, the Wisdom who is Bread, the one who calls us to feed all bellies and comfort all hearts.

I invite you to take a moment in silence to reflect on where the Bread that feeds you comes from, then we will break the bread of our thoughts together, before moving on to breaking the bread of the Eucharist.

Microbes, stardust and the body of Christ

Cecelia Asberg and Rosi Braidotti ask us to consider that:

“…the sheer number of microbes that inhabit our bodies including bacteria, viruses, protists or parasites, exceeds the number of our bodily cells by up to a hundredfold.”[1]

We pray for a better world. We gather to share in the body of Christ and we ask God to deliver us from all the evils of the world- inequity, hunger, war, climate change, illness including mental illness. Atheist friends tend to portray prayer as escapism, asking to be saved instead of doing something about it. Personally I don’t think it has to be an either or.

Even though God is not magically going to fix everything, we have been told “ask and you shall receive” and in any case years of telling little boys to put their socks in the wash, telling students to hand up their papers, telling employers I need to be paid in a timely way, telling governments to fund things properly have trained me in the not-so-subtle art of nagging. Like all the others God too gets to hear my perspectives on what would make the situation better.

Like a mother nagging a seven-year old to put things in the wash, I need to be involved in the work I am promoting, and this I think is the point of the first reading. Being religious and going through rituals won’t in and of itself achieve either my personal holiness or the more crucial aim of a better world. Our hearts and our over-worked, over-fed, over-stimulated bodies are hurting and the first reading tells us how to heal. First attend to the needs of the hungry, the poor, the oppressed and then come to God. Not that God is demanding some sort of tit for tat, but like babies copying their parents’ facial expressions, in doing the things that are the work of God we identify with her. We become like her and she recognises us. I like to think that even for God love is more than duty-of-care, I like to think that God too feels the ecstasy of recognition when seeing a loved one.

God does not force herself on the world or onto our lives, we invite her in by collaborating in the agendas of the kindom, we show our desire for God’s love and God’s action and then prayer is connection.

Corpus Christi reminds us that the Word of God is embodied. Embodied literally, living with a body, in a body, as a body.

We’ve been affected by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and we try to spiritualise everything – men in the past idealised the triumph of mind or spirit over body, something that was harder for anyone born with ovaries and a womb. Some of us spend a large chunk of our lives bleeding monthly and end up expected to look after the bodies of everyone else. Is the work of the philosopher superior? Someone has to bake his bread and weave his clothes. People who “rise above” their own bodies end up exploiting the bodies of others.

Jesus’ last supper was physical- bread and wine shared by bodies gathered around the table. Hands touched the bread, feet were washed, eyes met. The smell of sweat, the fear of approaching death, the light-headedness of confusion. Each of them breathing, the physical act of forming words that hang in the air between them.

Even in what we think, what we know and how we feel our bodies are implicated-  the endorphins when we move capably, the oxytocin when we spend time with the people we belong with, the dopamine to help us still our racing thoughts. When our bodies or minds don’t get what we need they fail each other. Some people need medication for “mental illnesses” meaning the stresses of their actual, lived reality have drowned out the body-mind’s capacity to renew itself.

We all need food. We all need rest. Our ears need to hear bird-song and the voice of the beloved.

Like Jesus after the last supper, we don’t always get what we need.

The second reading debunks a “prosperity gospel”. Being a follower of Christ does not mean endless feasting and celebrating. If we are going to exclude then we may as well not bother (I suspect this goes for churches as well as individuals).

A sacrament is more than just a celebration, perhaps we don’t have to be ascetic but neither should we use religious reasons to overconsume. A sacrament is an interruption to “business as usual”, more than permission to feel good or to escape from our daily reality.

Jesus who had multiplied the loaves and fishes, who had provided the wine (echoing Wisdom in the Hebrew Scriptures), who had healed, and loved, called and sometimes condemned sits down to dinner, having completed the work asked for in the first reading. Sunday is a time to reflect on, feed and sometimes refocus the good we do in the rest of the week. We all have homes to feast in, yes, but God also notices the homeless person who is not feasting who we might walk past on our way to church. The body of Christ, broken, splintered by inequities.

We live on a planet that may be dying, and that also is the body of Christ. This planet gives us life- makes our breath and grows our food. We are, and we are called to be earthlings, bodily creatures of bread and wine and water (wind, and stone, and fire). Just as we are called to tend the humans who are missing out, we are also called to grow flowers to feed the butterflies and to refrain from plastic so that fish would have homes. Bodies move upon the earth and in the air and water. Bodies that are all kin to us, bodies that are Christ.

Bread comes from wheat, wine from grapes, food needs insects to pollinate it. Human lives need bread and roses. Christ’s body, like all bodies needs a complex eco-system to support it. We gather to celebrate Eucharist, to thank God for our lives, our bodies, the opportunity to restore right relationship with each other and our planet. We are able to break bread because of earthworms and bees and butterflies, because of the lifecycles of plants and animals, because of tides and weather patterns and our cosy, life-supporting atmosphere. We came from stardust but we are not ready as a species to return just yet.

We are here to share and heal. We are the body of Christ.

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[1] Åsberg, C., & Braidotti, R. (2018). Feminist posthumanities: An introduction. In A feminist companion to the posthumanities (pp. 1-22). Springer, Cham. 

What has this to do with the body of Christ? What has this to do with me?

This was a reflection that I was privileged to be asked to give at my church. I will be doing that tomorrow (ie Sunday). The relevant readings are here.

 

Have you ever dumpster dived? I am not referring to finding some discarded and vintage bits and pieces to trendily upcyle. I mean for food.

You probably all know that Centrelink has not been increased in real terms since 1996, that’s more than two decades. Think of all the changes in those two decades. I didn’t have a mobile phone, or even want one in 1996, these days it is mandatory to have one in terms of staying in touch with Centrelink so they don’t cut you off. Many other expectations and needs have also changed. As a result of all this low income earners and welfare recipients in 2019 are a lot poorer than they were in the late 90s, when I struggled to look after my babies on welfare payments.

So dumpster diving these days is quote common, getting in amongst the rotting fruit, veg and dairy products and finding unopened packets that are barely past their useby date, bakery items that are a bit stale or broken and all the rest of it. Supermarkets throw out so much! I was shocked to be told that sometimes you can find a whole pallet of bottled water. Why does water need a use-by date?

Supermarkets often respond to dumpster divers by increasing security, padlocking dumpsters, watering the bread, slicing open packaging and at times pouring toxic chemicals or even human waste in to make the food not reclaimable. Even though this is food they can’t sell  or use in any way, they stop people from reclaiming it if they can. Thankfully this is not something that happens across the board, and dumpster divers reclaim what they can, combine it with food they grow (if they are able) and then the interesting thing is how freely they share it. In my experience people who find a lot of food, or something particularly good, or something they can cook up will immediately look for opportunities to feed each other. The contrast between those who can afford to share but do not, and those who are suffering themselves but want to share what they have always staggers me.

Eucharist reminds me that the bread of life is necessarily the bread that is shared, before God there are not those who deserve it more or less, but each of us comes to be fed and then to participate in the work of feeding.

Sharing.

This is the body of Christ.

It was refugee week this week, and many people participated in the refugee ration challenge. I’ve been marking which makes me want to eat all the time so I did not, I merely donated some money. I saw the rations that people were given- here there is no generosity or abundance- only the basics. People were given what was barely adequate and would not be very interesting over time. Keeping the body functioning is one thing, but God’s abundance is more than rations, more than the efficient fostering of physical life. Think what a meal can mean- it is not just nutrition, it is a time to stop and share and care for ourselves. Think of the house being filled with the scent of spices and good things warming. Think of bread rising. Think of the freedom to step away from work and to come together in each other’s beautiful homes and in our lovely church. Meals are not just rations, they are humanising celebrations of life.

We need to do better for the refugees, many of whom have an ethic of sharing, this is part of the Christian heritage but also a Muslim value. Sharing, giving, abundance, equality. Nourishment for the soul and for the human family rather than merely the stomach of the individual.

The body of Christ.

It’s significant to me that we add wine. There was a time in my childhood, where wine was almost never used at mass because we were told bread could symbolise both the body AND the blood. In terms of anatomy this is quite sensible and logical, no living flesh body ever existed that wasn’t also composed of blood. But there is a symbolic richness to wine that adds something to bread, that gives us a fuller more whole picture of what it is that Jesus has given to us.

Wine, especially in is a luxury not a staple as is bread. We are so surrounded by luxuries that we easily lose sight of this fact, but wine is not just stuffing something hurriedly in our mouth so we don’t collapse (not that I am advocating for bread to be so reduced). Bread can be part of charity, we might give crumbs to the less fortunate from a safe distance, we might speak of “human rights” and sustain them in life. Bread can be reduced to rations, it shouldn’t be but it can be.

Wine is only for friends. We do not give wine to people we look down on. We do not give wine grudgingly, if we give it at all then we share it with joy. One of the ways I realised when some of my university teachers had transitioned to be colleagues and comrades and (I am honoured to say this) FRIENDS is when we began to share wine together. Wine symbolises the part of meals which is not merely necessary- the joy and companionship. We bring out our best wine for our most honoured guests, we give wine as a gift to people we appreciate and admire.

The blood of Christ, cup not just of compassion but solidarity.

Significantly, when swamped by the demands of hungry crowds (5000 clamouring) Jesus did not let his apostles off the hook. He didn’t put the responsibility for self-care back on each individual.

It’s significant how we read this miracle, what we see here will affect how we live. If we think that Jesus (being god) produced magical, miraculous bread from the sky and gave it out to everyone, then we might be tempted to think that it is God and only God who can solve all our problems. Perhaps then we will think that all we need to do is pray for climate change to be solved, for the refugees to be set free, for governments to become more responsive and compassionate. But where do I draw the line? Should I even try to do the morally right thing, or do I wait for God to change me? Should I go to work or should I just pray? These extremes are silly of course, but it’s very easy to believe that if I personally am a reasonably good and kind person, the world’s problems are not my problem. I can give toxic politics, growing inequity and the climate crisis all to God and keep planning a wonderful holiday for my own family.

In this way of thinking, the bread of heaven never grew in the earth, the wine we share was never worked by human hands. But…think of the liturgy (work of the people) that we all grew up with. We assert that the bread and wine which are transformed into Christ’s real and living presence are exactly that- earth and human work. There is no getting away from this. Jesus’ insistence that all were responsible of all might have called out of people whatever they had brought for themselves alone. Those with a surplus shared with those who had nothing without getting to judge them for being “lazy” or “less organised”. There is a redistributive power to Eucharist, this is not co-incidental it is at the heart of it. It comes from a God who became embodied and entangled in humanity. It comes from a Christ who says “I want everyone to be fed, I want all at the table” not with threats or rules or overpowering us but with a deep enough commitment to become bread for us.

The generosity of Christ is here. Eat. Drink. Be the sacrament.

So let us reflect on the table we are coming to. Let us reflect that around the table we are a circle, all equal, all welcomed. Let us take the sacrament when Christ offers it, let us treasure it, hold it within ourselves, and let us open our hands to give out the things we are called to bring to the world.

Bread to feed and strengthen life and community.

Wine for joy, affirmation and solidarity

The body, the life-blood of our own dear, Wise Christ.

Mandated this Thursday

Bread in a drought. We are overusing the earth and stealing from the rivers. We are feeding up animals just to slaughter them in horrible conditions. We are ripping out every other plant to grow more vines so we can drown our middle-class scruples and sorrows in wine (reduced when you buy by the dozen).

We don’t want to wash anyone’s feet, we Christians, unless we have chosen them for their likeness to us. We don’t want Muslims and we don’t want trans disciples, we don’t want inconvenient voices calling out for a stop to rape and toxic masculinity, we don’t want vegans or cyclists, we don’t want unionists. We want a small, narrow, white and bland kingdom of a three-word-slogan God who will medicate us back to sleep.

Thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and prayers. It’s all too hard. God save us. This is a test of faith and we cry when a great cathedral burns (and well we might). But the birthing trees are bulldozed on out and we don’t care. Brown children are trapped in factories with no water but overpriced, plastic packages sold back to them despite their tiny wage. Monkeys in metal collars are forced to harvest coconuts for smug minority world festival goers. Mea culpa, I love a festival and coconut water too.

We care more for who gets into Eurovision than who gets into parliament or what their policies will mean. We want gross domestic product…and the word “gross” really is apt! Wellbeing be damned we want measurable outputs to prove we are winning.

But then it is lent and we are called to become aware of the wilderness we are wandering in, the barren emptiness of lives focused on having not being, focused on distractions not deeds, on status not right relationship. It’s been lent and yet we can so easily sit in out “sty of contentment” as Eliot put it, or in some close approximation. And now it is the eve of Maundy Thursday. “Maundy” because there is a mandate here (the words are related) but the mandate is not just to be the king washing the feet of the properly submissive beggar but to wash the feet we would rather not touch.

I grew up with a liturgical foot-washing, a bishop with many attendants serving him pouring some water over feet of 12 respectable men in suits. As an adult I found more inclusive places, the washers and the washed were varied but still it was the respected and the respectable performing ritual. Noone’s foot was actually very dirty and the symbol was mildly uncomfortable rather than wildly destabilising.

But now our refusal to be destabilised may cost us our lives. We are facing climate change, and the main argument is still over who to hate, who to blame, who to exclude. My former partner told me that I have learned nothing through the years and I still don’t love myself and I felt angry and started to argue. “No but really” he said “I want you to hear me”.

It’s Maundy Thursday and I am still not hearing people. I am still busy trying to be the Martha at the table of grace and afraid to be the Mary. I want to be “good” and “kind” and “wise” and “worthy” so someone will love me, to take away from me the burden of having to love myself. I want to make a bargain with God, shake hands on a deal where I will not have to confront things anymore. I am like my corflute after all, flat and polished and smiling on demand.

There is some sort of sacrament here, and I need it and I hunger for it but I don’t know how to receive it. How can I be so dark and disillusioned on this weekend in particular? If there is meaning and I have strived for it then why don’t I feel it? Why does the love of my friends, and especially of my children reduce me to tears? If I am loved after all, cannot that be a sign?

Many years ago, when I was pregnant with my third child I had lunch with a friend of mine, an ordained minister. He spoke to me about the desire to over-eat, that he prays “only you can fill me God” before every meal.

I sit here full of chips and migraine, politics and study, the housework I should have done and the sleep I wish I could get. I sit here full of performative faith: “Don’t you dare leave me God”. I sit here with leftover suicidal ideation I have learned to control but not really to forgive or heal. I am full of fear and sadness and resentment. I know that I will more than likely be a failure and if I succeed that I will be attacked. I know myself to be lazy and a coward. I worry that I might sell my beloved for 30 pieces of silvered silence away from the struggle.

I don’t know how to be empty so that I can be filled by Godde

I see people’s faces turned toward me, seeing something more heroic and strong than I feel myself to be and I know that I have made idols of others to avoid having to be responsible. I feel Godde’s presence with me, tolerant, but it is not Godde whom I have harmed. Those people I admired, did they feel the weight of my worship? How could I expect them to be so much more than I was ever prepared to be? When I have thought leaders to be pompous and arrogant, even narcissistic was it their shield against my need for them to be gods?

Who was Jesus at the last supper? Did it hurt to be bread and wine? How much did he consent to and how much was he created by his followers?

It sounds like blasphemy to say that Jesus was “only human” and yet if he wasn’t then what is this for us? We do not have another millennium to wait to be saved from our need to create church as institution and ritual as hiding. Jesus did not say “cringe and cry to me”. He did not say “avoid anyone different”. He did not say “I will save you from yourself”. Jesus said “I am the least of your siblings”. He said “take up your cross and follow me”. He said “you can’t be part of this unless I wash your feet.”

So much of the world is crying for the bread they don’t have and for the wine that is never shared with them. Factory and field workers collapse too exhausted to hope. Refugees share inadequate meals in uncomfortable buildings behind wire. I have pedicured my feet ready to seem clean when I am washed. I turn up for religion, but hide from the Holy Spirit.

Like an anorexic I turn away from the Bread of Heaven.

I am addicted to the hunger.

“Gifting”, power and the celebration of privilege

I have already written enough about creeds for the time being (and will probably return to this topic), and so I skipped ahead to intercessions. So now I turn to the Preparation of the Gifts -partly to open up the privileged-centre of this liturgical moment to a multiplicity of possible symbols that can authentically be “bread of life” and “spiritual drink”. The particularity we are told we are not allowed to move away from (bread and wine, and then even particular set-apart versions of “bread” and “wine” that are divorced from the every-day materialities they symbolise are Eurocentric as well as having become “owned” and controlled by the male-stream clergy.

There is firstly the “material” reality of “gifts” the bread and wine and the ecological significance of “earth” being named as a donor of those gifts but voiceless earth’s generosity is presumed upon as we often violently wrest wheat and grapes from inappropriate or at least over-farmed soil. Eating of course is not likely to be something we can ever evolve beyond- but our habits of demanding specific foods at will without dialogue with the environment are problematic toward with our (first world) excesses. We are a people who eat too much, drink too much and even when we try to curb our over-consumption we tend to starve ourselves in ways that harm our bodies and fragile psyches without material benefit to the planet.

Then of course there is the invisible labour that goes into producing the real, material food that in an overly religious interpretation of Eucharist becomes mere “symbol” or a privleged “spiritual reality” while the “gifts” of the workers underpaid time, the sometimes starving third-world producers that are behind so much of our consumption do not figure in our celebration of “gifted” blessedness that we thank God for.

If God specifically guided this slice of bread (or bowl of rice or quinoa) into my hand and into my open mouth, then that same God must have consigned the underpaid laborers behind my bowl of food to starve and watch their own children fail to thrive. Thus we construct God as white and relatively wealthy and actually sort of middle-class. We can “choose” ethical things and make our peace with our consciences, but the fact is we don’t really think about the global implications of out gluttony when we say that through “God’s goodness” we have this bread to offer.

To offer?

We offer it as a symbol and then we take it back again and distribute it to people who look and sound like us and make us feel comfortable. Which is a good in some sense of course but what if we were to really offer the bread of our lives to deeper love of the voiceless earth and the invisible human struggling labourer and her family?

“Which earth has given and human hands have made.” What do we then give to the earth and place into the emptied human hands as a true “offering” to a God we say is love.

Even in less extreme ways, I have a feeling there is a classism within most versions of formalised spirituality. We tend to invite into our midst only those who are beautiful in performative middle-class ways, who have as little first-hand experience as possible of being “othered”, even in feminist circles we make light of the difficulties others experience because we blithely trust that the “system” does what it says it does and distributes basics like food, medicine, health-care, counselling, education, etc to anyone who needs it. It is not a perfect system but it is reasonably functional. That idea circulates even in groups that are dedicated to social justice. Real poverty, real suffering happens “over there, far away” and we live in a largely enlightened society. If someone who has less comes to our church then this is an isolated case and we can help them, without opening our eyes to the need in our own society.

Privilege is ignorance of course, always, always ignorance and when we dismiss the claims of people who have been wronged by the system without having time to waste on getting into the whole story that is perfectly understandable.

But like the earth that “gives” and the “human hands” unconnected to voices or faces (or gender for that matter) what is invisible to us seeps into the bread of our lives and the oppressions we casually consent to by our inability or refusal to see and hear them seep into our spiritual drink. After all the “body of Christ” is a crucified, bleeding, beaten body and the “blood of Christ” is flogged out of him in violence and with mockery. Easy to think that he suffered and died “for us” like the endlessly “giving” earth, because our good and ease is more important than any other concern.

When the priest washes “his” hands, this is symbolic of washing away sin. The idea of washing used to seem to me to be a liberating idea. We travel through life, we get soiled, it is all washed away through sacraments of one sort or another and we continue. If “Sin” is a personal failing and a slight hiccough in our generally well-meaning and caring movement through life then this still makes sense.

But what if with the traces of sin, our awareness that something has been soiled, we are washing away only the evidence, and not the fact. Just as overly harsh soaps and chemicals can wash away “good bacteria”, “necessary oils” our own skin along with the dirt we are trying to escape, so our spiritual “washing” needs not to be a brainwashing into an ecstatic “new reality” where whatever we did yesterday or five minutes ago no longer happens.

I want to find something positive in all this, so I will return to the idea that gifting goes with feeding and allow us  a measure of “becoming-ness” like the babies whose meal-times I also help to preside over. The babies begin in the simplest way, by crying when they are hungry or wish to be held, within a few months they are sitting up and looking at each other’s faces at the table, they are tapping their spoons together and giggling and generally reacting to the “humanness” of each other, then they begin to invite teachers to sit and eat with them and gradually they learn that there exists a kitchen from which the food comes and to say “thank you” to the kitchen staff and teachers who make it possible. Over the next few childcare years they learn to participate in cooking, cleaning and even in the kitchen garden, their sphere if understanding slowly widens from just demanding the gifts of the meal to learning how to participate- to receive with gratefulness and to give to each other and to the adults.

In the same way, our smug words of feeling “blessed” and “gifted” as the haves of the planet, do need transformation, however there is the beginning of understanding in the fact that the earth and humans are at least mentioned as part of how “God” gives to us. We cannot be more than we are and we must love ourselves and each other as we develop more aware ways of taking what we need and truly “offering” to others (all others) in a more meaningful way.

I return then to an old favourite Proverbs 9:1-6 

Blessed are you Wisdom, caller to the table of all creation. Through your goodness we will learn to build your house and set your table with you. We will leave our toxic ways of being behind along with our ignorance. We will eat your bread (rice) and wine (soup) and we will learn to walk softly upon the giving earth and touch with love and abundance every human hand. Your bread and word are our life.

May God accept our desire to share in the abundance of creation, in ever widening circles of welcoming and gratefulness, may we seek our good entwined with the good of our neighbour.

Ways of (not)Knowing

Is it good to bite into

the crusty, doughy wheatiness

of Word made Flesh made Bread;

to drink the cup- the complex bouquet

of birth and stars and long roads,

friends, stories, long roads,

betrayal, suffering, short road to death

but also hearth-fires and washed feet?

 

Is it good to remember

that love had courage

to speak out, stand tall,

stand with, be told;

learn and grow;

to hold firm and die?

Dare we shed a tear?

 

Is it “him” and is it even me?

Where is the place on earth

where love bakes, breaks bread

and wine is shared;

where suffering is acknowledged?

What does it mean

to have “life”?

Some of us have run out of wine

I have run out of wine! I started this blog because my heart was heavy with the burden of a ministry I had failed to realise. I was full of negative feelings such as guilt, anger, blame toward both myself and the church(es) that had not nurtured me better. For a while I felt that me blogging was a pointless exercise, and yet it was an outlet for feelings and thoughts which needed to be expressed and served also as a spiritual discipline focusing me on lectionary readings each week whether I liked them or not and forcing me to engage with them either adversarially or in an attempt to glean something of value.

I was grateful for the very, very small number of friends who made it obvious they had read my blog entries and encouraged me to persist. And as I put my words out there, I came to see that it was not all just about “preaching” in the narrow sense, where I think I have something of value and others need it but it was about my own struggle with my faith journey and engaging in that struggled moved me back toward church: surprisingly enough to the church of my childhood (though a transformed and transformative community). Once I was “back” in the church there was no fanfare or immediate reifying of my ministry and I am ashamed to have felt so anticlimactic about the whole thing but there were crumbs of encouragement in liturgies, in things that were said and in the readings themselves.

I was asked to preach one day and I felt euphoria and joy as if that one event was some sort of realisation, and end of a struggle (but of course it was not). From that event, and from my now more frequent attendance at church as I am relearning that maturity means sometimes honouring the community not just acting like a selfish individual has grown an opportunity to participate in writing, collating and delivering liturgies and the desire to make them meaningful and affirming is still strong in me. I have learned that there may be more readers of my blog than is obvious to me week to week and have laughed at myself for still being weak and childish enough to need people’s approval and “praise”.

This journey is mirrored by the progress I have made in my professional and in the beginning steps of my academic life too. I have learned much, changed and grown and begun to experience a hard-won success.

I have identified a purpose and a direction to my life and all should be as a wedding feast. I ought to feel full of confidence and energy to extend hospitality to people and to bring the best of my inner gifts to the table for sharing with people who bring so much to me! “Ought to” I say, as though I hadn’t learned by now that the world is not governed by “ought tos” and “shoulds” and that whatever deeper reality we feel is possible and right is always one we need to struggle for (and forgive ourselves for frequently failing).

If we can reclaim Mary, not as a hyperfeminine vessel for the patriarchy of the church but as first apostle and nurturer of all that is Christ-like and wise then perhaps she at this time in my life, in all these times in all our lives turns a motherly glance at me/us. “Poor darling” she might say, “you have run out of wine”; and then the good advice has to follow (I did say motherly) “Do whatever he tells you”. “He” in this situation meaning Christ, meaning the God who has embraced and lived humanity but somehow at times transforms and transcends the exhausted and uncertain humanity that is all we know.

How then does Jesus respond to us running out of the “wine” of our ministry, the “wine” of our wisdom and the “wine” of our energy for goodness and beauty? Does he say “that’s ok then you rest and I will do everything?” It is tempted to read a God of miracles in this way. To see us as able to do nothing more than ask for grace and wait patiently for Jesus/God to accomplish all. But Jesus demands a more exhausting collaborative approach. You have run out of wine, out of the good stuff? Alright then bring water. Bring the mundane stuff of your labour and good intentions to me. That is so unbelievably unglamorous to do isn’t it? To spend long stretches of time bringing nothing but our ordinary labour and out common place accomplishments to God. These times lack the euphoria, the deep feeling of connection with God or the universe, the lightning-bright glint of revelation and the winged-feet feeling of success. We simple plod and plod and plod and bring boring old water to God to be blessed.

That is the “coal face” of faith, the place where the euphoria ends and we are still our own boring and fallible selves with our own boring and somewhat (at times) unfulfilling lives struggling to make meaning and struggling to grasp the moral politics of the reign of God from a place of exhaustion and uncertainty and surrounded by less than ideal understanding and nurture.

So when at Jesus’ word we give a taste of the water to the “chief steward” to those who are able to receive, judge and distribute our ministry and when the chief stewards of our ministry tell us that our ministry is the “good wine”, they may tell us we are good at preaching or good at counselling or good at leading- the temptation after all our hard work and despair is to feel pride, not just a healthy sense of accomplishment but an identifying of the self with the accomplishment. Then it is easy to get fancier and fancier, to fall in love with our own cleverness and success and perhaps popularity too and to lose sight of the need to be bread broken, not just a fancy and overly rich gravy.

And this happens to me.

Because of the depth of despair and cowardice and emotional pain and failure that I have experienced, when I begin to succeed then I want to see myself as forever transformed into a “wine maker” that can do no wrong. My pride in this situation holds many dangers, the obvious one is the narcicissm of forgetting to self-question and assuming your own infallibility. In the past I have been very critical of this lack of reflexivity in successful and charismatic others, so I need to keep that in my own mind as I at times experience success.

Other dangers are the loss of empathy and kindness as I become impatient with those who do not understand what I am saying, or who think differently. There is also the very great danger of despair when I fail to live up to unreasonable standards within myself- there is the all-or-nothing approach where a bad day or a bad week or a misstep damns me right back into perpetual failure and self-hate. All of these are the blights of pride, if I see any part of my ministry as bigger than it is, or as all my own work.

In preaching for example, it is entirely possible that my words could be wrong and therefore others who hear them need to always be free not to agree with me. But it is also possible when others gain something of value from my preaching, that the water was only water but that God turned it into wine not at its source, but somewhere between me and the person who heard the words. The wine might only become wine in the chief-steward’s mouth for all we know.

So in this grey time, when I cannot seem to put a foot right; when I have become addicted to a spiritual feeling of connection and euphoria which I ought to have been experienced enough to know was unsustainable; when there are simply not enough hours in the hot and sometimes lonely days and old anxieties resurface to drive a wedge between me and my support networks. When the temptation once again is to “drop out” of studies and church and even of my friendships and simply go to work and read novels. In this grey time all I see before me are water jars to do very ordinary tasks. I have run out of wine for others, for myself.

I have nothing to give.

I will continue to bring water then, since I don’t have wine remembering in the words of the second reading that my gifts were “for the common good” not for my own ego or individual success. I will follow the apostles like Mary, who point me toward Christ to take my cues from the one who makes meaning from my mundane, who changes my water into wine.

Sometimes the best wine comes much, much later than we would expect.

“Come eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed”

I know this is an idealised account of Solomon and we could read him in the context of his patriarchal world and the patriarchal text as a whole, but I want to consider this idealised image in and of itself. I have a romantic liking for ideals, sure I fall short of mine but I can’t help always thinking it is good to have them and when I don’t get everything I want out of life it is comforting at times to have lived by ideals- hedonism in my experience only leads to emptiness and doesn’t stave off disappointment and hardship.

So Solomon realises his privileged position, and the fact he has it by fortune, not merit (which is a lot more humble than you would expect from one of those larger than life Old Testament figures). He asks for wisdom and understanding. If only he was able to take the tiny extra step of realising that the understanding that privilege must ask for is the understanding of the “other” the ones who are not the king, not wealthy, free or male but we can insert that into the story when we remember that for us the “other” the “least of our siblings” is always Christ. So to ask for understanding from God is to seek to listen to those with less privilege than we do.

The overtone of judging and discerning in 3:9 then becomes a matter of justice and advocacy. Solomon is often presented as wise and unbiased but God in Jesus in fact never presented as unbiased. God is constantly biased toward the poor and oppressed. For us first-world, relatively comfortable people this may be a hard pill to swallow- we often try to present a “balanced” God. But to act is to be biased and God takes the part (consistently throughout many biblical texts) of the widow and orphan (and refugee).

The alternative first reading (I realise I am not using the lectionary correctly here but I don’t really care) has Wisdom inviting us to her house for a party. It’s a party with food and wine in a house with seven pillars (I guess a nice house then) but it’s a party that will change you forever. You go in to eat her food and drink her wine and you leave your old foolish ways and become irrevocably enmeshed with her (she’s upfront about that at least). It’s a pity you have to choose between these two first readings if you are running an actual church (as opposed to ranting online) because they are actually beautiful read together. Solomon has been seduced by wisdom, she invited him in and he can’t lust for anything else.

I want to be in Solomon’s shoes and as I read the readings I feel that even wanting to be there is a good thing – it’s not everything because there is still the old immaturity that must be laid aside when entering Wisdom’s house, but desire is the beginning of such an intimate and life-changing relationship.

I’ll ignore Ephesians because even though it basically says the same thing it couches it more negatively “stop drinking and having fun and instead do what is right” whereas I prefer the Old Testament version which was “come and get drunk and be seduced and you will begin to want to do what it right”. The beer o’clock Wisdom is a lot more enticing than the grumpy preacher/ schoolmaster Paul.

In the gospel, Jesus echoes Wisdom, offering himself now not only as the hostess with the mostest but as the food and drink in itself. This is more than life changing, this gives us life forever. I find it hard to know what to make of the “life forever” imagery all through John to be honest. As a child I thought there is this place called heaven where we all end up and then when I got older I thought – it’s not a physical place but our internal essence and personality is somehow preserved in relation to God and everyone. And now I just don’t know. I don’t know about “live forever” when even things that are good in this life never last forever. The weather or your mood changes, the people you love move away or get busy, you find you have to be preoccupied with new concerns. The positivity and optimism with which I begin any project, endeavour or relationship at some point begins to flag.

We eat the bread that we believe is Jesus and even if we get on some sort of a spiritual high (and in the past I have done just that) then we return to real life, to ordinary life and not only is life mundane but we are still flawed and mundane too. So is Wisdom a liar? Is it really just a one night stand? At times I have felt that as well, I have felt that this whole “faith” deal that I have been seduced into is a huge con and I have felt very angry. And when we read on about Solomon, sure he did some impressive things but he’s not perfect ever after.

But then when we get back to Wisdom she asked us to leave aside that immaturity; the need for constant reassurance and convenient on-demand grace, the expectation that God will take all the responsibility for this relationship and we don’t have to work at it at all. If I am honest I don’t always “work at it”; I used to dutifully “pray” every day, by set formulas that I was taught and that I did to prove my commitment and I used to beat myself up about how much my mind wanders during those times. What I did I did out of guilt and feelings of unworthiness, out of a commitment that was more fear than love.

Now as a border-line atheist…well not a very good one…I rarely force myself to pray. Now prayer is more something I fall into when I walk in nature, or at work when I am patting the children to sleep or late at night at my best friend’s house when my head is spinning with the wine the writer of Ephesians doesn’t think I should be drinking. And at church too when the vibe happens to be right. I fall into a prayer which may be hard to give words to- or which might just quote words of songs or bible texts, poetry or something I read. I fall into prayer that says “I am here, please help me find meaning in that” prayer that says “please let me feel that you are here”, prayer that says “I want things to be different” “I want to be different” and lately preciously “I now know you love me and I want to weep with relief at that knowledge”

And from moment to moment I have not always been able to find traces of grace in my life, I have not always felt the transformative presence of God and I will still have the grey empty days of weeping and the night terrors of God’s absence. Part of any relationship is absence, emptiness and disconnection after all (it took me a long, long time to accept that). From moment to moment I can’t and don’t believe that I have eaten something remarkable, the bread of life. But when I fall into prayer (like falling in love) then I trace the eternity within that moment not only as an ecstasy or euphoria (which marked more of my “spiritual” experiences early in life) but as a quiet acceptance of self and other and a quiet dissatisfaction with injustice that I feel was planted in me the first time I met Wisdom and now makes up most of what I acknowledge as my identity (even though I don’t always know what to do about it).

And when I look at the journey of my 3 year old self, my childhood, adolescence, turmoils of my early adulthood to middle-aged me – at the same time that the aging process begins to make ideas of “eternity” more ridiculous than ever there is some sort of faithfulness and stubbornness by the presence of God that makes me cautiously hope there is meaning somewhere in the journey. And why would an eternal God be faithful to a slow-learning and non-eternal me? So I am always up for some of Wisdom’s bread and wine and transformative possibility.