QUOTE:“Man is what he eats.” With that statement the German materialistic philosopher Fuerbach thought he had put an end to all idealistic speculations about human nature. In fact, however, he was expressing, without knowing it, the most religious idea of man. Man must eat in order to live, he must take the world into his body and transform it into himself, into flesh and blood… this image of the banquet remains throughout the whole bible, the central image of life. (For the Life of the World, Alexander Schmemann, ca. 1963)
COMMENTARY:
The basic imprint of the living God is so marked upon the human psyche that we cannot avoid uttering the most basic truths of God. Even when we desire to suppress His very being, His truth still comes out of us. The plain fact is that Man was made for God, and is only restored to wholeness when he takes God into himself, and makes this God his very flesh and blood. It is in the communion banquet that we feast on the Lord Jesus Christ, God of all creation, into our being.
A mentor of mine relayed an experience he had while meditating on the meaning and significance of the eucharist. He came to love the Episcopalian liturgy later in life as his spiritual journey led him from being a vice president of the second largest Fundamentalist Evangelical denomination in the US to a lay member of St. Michaels Church in Jackson Hole Wyoming.
ReplyDelete"What happens to the bread and water after it is eaten and drunk?"
He realized in a flash.
"It becomes so much a part of me one can no longer tell where the bread and wine begins and I end."
Modern Science has another name for that state.
Comprehansive Superposition.
Superposition. Everywhere at once.
"In him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily", Paul writes."And through union with Him, you too are filled with it."
Christ is in a state of Superposition within His church, and in each child of God. There is no place within or without, Immanent or Eminent, where He does not dwell.
The eucharist is the Living symbol of that.