Divine Communion: A Eucharistic Theology of Sexual Intimacy
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Divine Communion: A Eucharistic Theology of Sexual Intimacy
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781596272521 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 10/20/2013 |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
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Divine Communion
A EUCHARISTIC THEOLOGY OF SEXUAL INTIMACY
By Jay Emerson Johnson
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2013 Jay Emerson JohnsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59627-252-1
CHAPTER 1
Creation
Sensuous Desire and Bodily Shame
In your infinite love you made us for yourself ...
—"Eucharistic Prayer A" The Book of Common Prayer
Food, sex, and, religion—these make human history possible to tell and to write, and not only because the human species would disappear without nourishing food and procreative sex. Human history has always dealt with more than merely surviving; human beings insist on making meaning from our existence. Religion in all its multivalent forms has been the primary way for humanity to hew meaning from both the triumphant glories and hard-scrabble conditions of human life. A failed crop, a successful pregnancy, abundant harvests, declining rates of childbirth—each of these has populated the explanatory and intercessory mechanisms of religion in various ways for millennia.
Some of the earliest religious rites in human history orbited around fertility and its twin expressions—the procreation of children and fruitful crops. Why religions have so often turned to progeny and food, or sexual intimacy and bodily sustenance, seems nearly self-evident when the conditions for the survival of a community hang in the balance. Food, sex, and religion all belong together naturally and even organically in societies with no guarantee of flourishing for their offspring. Those societies may or may not develop religious traditions that involve a Creator God, but they will undoubtedly generate rites that highlight the sensuality of human existence—tilling soil, planting seeds, eating food, bodily desire, sexual intimacy, giving birth, and, of course, dying.
The Book of Common Prayer retains traces of these ancient cycles of humanity's symbiotic relationship with Earth, with the wideness and depth of God's creation. Those roots stretch back to a European agrarian past and even farther back to ritual celebrations of agricultural fertility and sexual fecundity. Rural faith communities may appreciate that history more readily than today's urban or even suburban churches. Litanies and rites for "rogation days," for example, began in fifth-century France following a series of natural disasters, and evolved into liturgical occasions devoted to asking God for a healthy harvest from both land and sea ("rogation" comes from the Latin rogare, "to ask"). The 1979 Prayer Book expanded this "asking" to include those engaged in "commerce and industry" and more broadly still for all to renew our commitment to a proper "stewardship of creation." These relatively minor liturgical traces of humanity's reliance on earth, rain, and crops will certainly take on newfound significance in an era of global climate change. Addressing effectively our growing ecological crises will demand more from us, however, than expanding the scope of rogation day prayers. Healing the breach between humans and our planetary home can begin by bringing the sensuous and bodily rhythms of sexual intimacy with us to the Eucharistic Table, where we offer tokens of Earth's bounty—bread and wine.
Christian communities have always worshipped the Creator God, yet modern Western culture has made the earthy and bodily roots of religious rites seem rather quaint, if not irrelevant. A host of factors contributed to this liturgical ambivalence toward the sensual rhythms of planetary life, including greater efficiencies in food production, the European Enlightenment (with its stress on rationality at the expense of embodied affectivity), the industrial revolution that obviated the need for many children to staff the family farm, and, of course, rapid technological advances that continue to widen the gulf ever further between human habitations and "this fragile earth, our island home."
The seismic shifts in Western society over the last two centuries do mark a significant breach, not only with planetary rhythms but also and therefore with our sacred texts. The explosive growth of metropolitan centers far removed from the tilled soil that provides urban dwellers with food, for example, has distanced Christians from the earthy roots of the Bible. Few readers of Genesis today can imagine the intricate harmony portrayed in that ancient text between the first humans and a sensuous, paradisical garden. "Among the awakenings of our time," Diarmuid O'Murchu believes, "is the growing realization that we live far from where beauty first originates for us, namely in the earth itself." Alienation from that primal source of desire for "living beautifully" short-circuits our capacities for intimacy, not only with other humans but also other creatures and this planet that we all share. The "awakenings" O'Murchu imagines would surely include the proliferation of urban farmers' markets that feature regionally grown produce and the many websites devoted to rooftop gardens for city-dwellers. Michael Pollan would include the "slow food" movement on that list, with its emphasis on sharing both cooking and eating fresh food in the relaxed sensuality of delectable scents, tastes, textures, and human communion.
I started thinking liturgically about these bodily connections to Earth when the lure of sensuous worship prompted a curious mini-migration of Midwestern Evangelicals to the Episcopal Church in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Curious, because the words "sensuality" and "worship" did not often appear together in the spirituality of Evangelical Christians. My own Evangelical childhood, in the Midwestern college town where much of this religious migration was centered, promoted a subtle association between sensuality and the exotic, if not the more titillating aspects of the sexual. Sensuality teetered on the brink of too much bodily excess for a tradition and a community that preferred to consider the "spiritual" as superior to the merely "physical."
More than just curious, this mini-migration also proved illuminating. The "sensuality" of the worship to which so many were drawn consisted of liturgical colors for the seasons, candles on the altar, the sweet scent of incense, and the various bodily positions adopted during the course of a single liturgy (this included the moment of exchanging a "sign of peace" with others by actually touching them, either with a handshake or an embrace). These may seem rather modest markers of the "sensuous," yet they went a long way toward making sense, quite literally, of bodily human life. Bringing our senses into our worship of the One who creates us as bodily creatures and who also saves us with an act of incarnation made liturgical worship tangible and physical. But did this worship also bring bodily desires along with our senses? That question haunted me for years.
I was introduced to the Episcopal Church in the small Anglo-Catholic parish where many of those migrating Evangelicals congregated. My first Easter Vigil liturgy in that parish made a deep impression. I stood transfixed as I watched the presiding priest chant the Eucharistic prayer and invite us to join the "chorus of angels and archangels and all the company of heaven." That moment was accompanied by timpani and trumpets, not to mention a transformed human at the altar. The priest's face was flushed, a condition accentuated by the candlelight when he stretched out his arms and gazed slightly upward. I expected at any moment that tears would flow down his cheeks. I felt myself lifted up as I watched and sang, lifted to the tips of my toes, as if gravity had given way to the celestial insistence on God's victory of life over death.
I felt something else as well: discomfort. That moment disoriented my spiritual compass toward something that felt far too bodily to be genuinely spiritual even though I yearned to give myself over, body and soul, to the heavenly chorus. I had trouble gazing at that priest who appeared so clearly caught up in bodily ecstasy, especially when I started to wonder whether this visage resembled the throes of sexual passion. I quickly chastened myself and dismissed that idea as utterly impious; it felt vaguely shameful.
I no longer consider that thought impious at all, let alone shameful. To the contrary, musing on the sensuality of embodied desire can spark a profound spiritual insight: bodily ecstasy properly accompanies humanity's hope for divine communion just as much as timpani and trumpets. The fruitfulness of that insight, moreover, tends to wither on the vine in the presence of shame. Renewing our witness to the Gospel could begin just there, by noting whatever prevents us from embracing a deceptively simple affirmation—out of infinite love God made us for God's self. Recognizing ourselves and all others as made from the depths of unimaginable love sets a revolutionary agenda, not only for sensuous worship but also, and by extension, for Christian ministry and service.
Fully embodied, sensuous worship has not always seemed quite so extraordinary. In early Christian traditions, adult converts to Christian faith were baptized in the nude prior to receiving the Eucharist for the first time at the Great Vigil of Easter. After undergoing a rigorous course of catechetical instruction, these candidates for baptism stood in the midst of their newly adopted community, often on the bank of a river or on the lip of a pond, and stripped away their clothes. Upon rising from the baptismal waters, these newly minted Christians were anointed with oil from head to toe. I can scarcely imagine a more sensuous liturgical act; most Christians today would more likely associate it with a "spa day" than with worship.
Needless to say, Christians today attend worship services fully clothed, and for good reasons. Bodily protection and communal hygiene demand at least minimal clothing when gathering with other people in public spaces. Western cultural standards of bodily propriety would also render naked bodies far too distracting for traditional forms of liturgical worship. I suspect however that such distraction would have less to do with sexual titillation than with contemporary cultural obsessions over youthful, muscle-toned bodies. Even when fully clothed, most people today worry about whether their own bodies meet current standards of attractiveness; stripping away the veils of clothing would only redouble that anxiety. More than all of this, nearly everyone in a liturgical gathering of naked people would likely experience a residual sense of shame over being naked—shame, that is, over standing in the very condition in which their Creator made them.
Both cultural expectations and typical forms of modern religious instruction instill a deep sense of discomfort around unclothed bodies. Most Euro-American children are taught from an early age to keep their bodies covered, even in their own homes. "Wardrobe malfunctions" that briefly reveal a celebrity's breast sufficiently scandalize to make headline news. This posture toward the human body creates the suspicion that a naked human being, by definition, ought to trouble or disturb us—or perhaps excite with too much desire. The history of Christian art and iconography perpetuates that assumption by depicting Jesus as naked on only two, perhaps three, occasions: at the beginning of his life, as an infant in his mother's arms, and at the end, while dying on a cross. Some iconographers suggest nakedness at his baptism by John but rarely confirm it.
What might we learn about ourselves, about the world, and about God by addressing residual bodily shame in our Eucharistic liturgies? Could the Eucharist inspire renewed gratitude for the sensuality of human life? How might that gratitude reshape the implications of our personal intimacies for wider social interactions and more broadly still with our currently troubled relationship with Earth, with God's astonishing creation? Exploring such questions can begin with the kind of theological reflection that frequently escapes the gaze of Christian liturgical piety in at least two respects: the effects of bodily shame in human relationships and the image of an erotic Creator. Interrelated observations about both will suggest some vital retrievals of the Eucharist as fundamentally an erotic rite. After all, that rite invites Christians to commune with another's body—an invitation that shimmers with sensuous desire.
SHAMEFUL BODIES
What God creates is resolutely good. The biblical writer of Genesis insists on this in near mantra-like fashion. Why then do so many people treat their own bodies as a source of shame? I do not mean that so many of us feel guilty for having made an occasional mistake or a social gaffe; the offer of forgiveness can restore relationship when we inevitably do something wrong. Shame, however, differs significantly from guilt. While guilt usually attaches to particular things we do, shame attaches to who we are, and often to the bodily sense each of us has of the self.
The experience of shame can erupt from a wide range of diverse encounters and relationships, yet it seems remarkably universal. Shame can sometimes function in healthy ways—curtailing antisocial behavior, for example, or in helping us to refrain from unhealthy habits. Yet it also carries the potential to diminish the sense of self and curtail flourishing relationships. The unwanted experience of being seen most often triggers that sense of shame and the urge to retreat from view. Most people first experience this in their own families where "we learn to hide, to disconnect from ourselves, where we first feel divided from others and alienated." L. William Countryman would agree and describes those early experiences more simply as learning what one's family or the wider culture considers either "clean" or "dirty." While shame most often turns inward, it can also be directed outward and fuel cycles of domestic violence, social bias and discrimination, and even bellicose international relations.
The bodily effects of shame catalogued today by psychologists and sociologists resonate well with ancient Christian notions of the "stigmata," of being marked bodily by the wounds and scars of the crucified and publicly humiliated Jesus. Social stigma draws its power from that kind of bodily humiliation marking one's sense of embodied existence with experiences of marginalization, exile, and abandonment. Shame marks our flesh no less than a brand forged on cattle hide or a tattoo inscribed on skin or metal jewelry piercing body parts. Unlike most tattoos and piercings, however, the bodily mark of shame imbues our flesh with an aura of disgust and revulsion.
Drawing on all of these sources, from Biblical texts, theological traditions, and contemporary social analyses, I find it helpful to define shame as alienation from our own bodily goodness. When left unaddressed and allowed to fester, this alienation can spiral into an inward collapse on the self and breed ever greater isolation. "Alienated bodies" can exacerbate troubled interpersonal relationships but also wider social disintegrations, violent hostilities toward those deemed "other," social policies that stratify and divide communities, and even environmental degradations. Expanding circles of shame, in other words, often operate in scapegoat-like fashion to expel the "other" from community—or nailing that "other" to a cross outside the city gates.
The extensive and pernicious effects of shame punctuate the iconic biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This ancient story deserves renewed attention, indeed repeated and sustained attention, for reasons that have made it so iconic. The story captures remarkably well both the joys and the vexations of bodily human life experienced not only in ancient societies but equally by contemporary Western culture. Recall the third chapter of Genesis. There Adam and Eve eat some fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This was, of course, the one and only thing their Creator had told them not to do. Those familiar with shame will understand what happens next in the story, which otherwise seems quite peculiar. Immediately after their transgression, Adam and Eve cover their naked bodies with fig leaves. Peculiar, because being naked would seem to have little if anything to do with their act of disobedience. Yet their very first impulse is to hide themselves from each other, cover themselves up, and distance themselves from intimacy. Their transgression thus "sets in motion an unraveling of the connected web of relationships that God had woven earlier." By weaving fig leaves together as loincloths, they unraveled the fabric of intimacy.
The impulse to hide quickly recurs when they hear God strolling through the garden, "at the time of the evening breeze," as the storyteller puts it (Genesis 3:8). As the sun begins to set after a warm and humid day and the cooler winds start moving through the trees in the lush vegetation of this paradisiacal garden, the Creator takes a moment to enjoy the creation; God takes a stroll. Nothing seems particularly unusual about this endearing detail in the story. Strolling might have been a divine habit. We might presume that God looked forward to these evening strolls, that God enjoyed inviting Adam and Eve to join in, to relish the garden and their deeply intertwined relations with it. Perhaps this storyteller would have us imagine God looking forward to "spending some quality time" with God's beloved creation. But on this occasion something has gone wrong. Adam and Eve have not only hidden themselves from each other, they have also hidden themselves from God.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Divine Communion by Jay Emerson Johnson. Copyright © 2013 Jay Emerson Johnson. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
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Table of Contents
Preface v
Introduction: The One Story 1
The One Story in Western Culture 7
The One Story in the Bible 14
The One Story in Christian Theology 20
The One Story in this Book 26
1 Creation: Sensuous Desire and Bodily Shame 29
Shameful Bodies 35
The Erotic God 41
Fine Linen and Candles 51
2 Fall: Carnal Wisdom and Spiritual Folly 57
The Trouble with Sex 63
Sagacious Serpents 69
Pairing Food and Wine 73
3 Salvation: Bodily Glory and Religious Violence 83
Mother Earth and Father God 94
The Little Death 100
Breakfast on a Beach 106
4 Eucharist: Earthly Food and Heavenly Sex 110
Commodity Exchange 116
The Mysterious Stranger 123
Border Crossings 129
Conclusion: Covenants for the Beloved Community 137
Covenantal Creation 145
Covenantal Communities 149
Covenantal Households 152
Covenantal Couples 155
Appendix: Reading Biblical Sexuality for Mission and Ministry 165
Reading the Bible Responsibly 168
Reading the Bible Faithfully 171