The Rituals of Dinner
by Andrew D. Ciferni, O. Praem.
Assembly Vol 18:3, May 1992
In 1977 Edward Fischer, then a professor of communications at the University of Notre Dame, published a little book entitled Everybody Steals from God, which has had a profound influence on my thinking and work, especially as it relates to liturgy as a challenge of design and to the effect of contemporary design and communications on liturgical renewal in our day. With humor and grace, Fischer makes the point that, more often than not, "secular" architects, designers, artists and writers point out a clearer way of proclaiming the gospel than do their professional Christian colleagues. Fischer made such a strong case for his position that ever since reading his work I have found myself looking to secular writers for insight into worship. What Fischer teaches from a communications viewpoint, Karl Rahner teaches from a theological one. Rahner's thinking about "the liturgy of the world" has recently—and masterfully—been set forth in Michael Skelley's The Liturgy of the World: Karl Rahner's Theology of Worship (1991). What Rahner proposes is a methodology of connections. The liturgy interprets our life outside the time and place of ritual, while our life outside the liturgy shapes and interprets our ceremonial ritual. Life and ritual become, in fact, one liturgy. As Rahner himself put it, "The world and its history are the terrible and sublime liturgy, breathing of death and sacrifice, which God celebrates and causes to be celebrated in and through human history in its freedom. . ." (Theological Investigations 14, p. 169).
In our time there is perhaps no place where this connection between life and ritual has been more evident than in the relation (or lack thereof!) between the eucharist and our meals. Anyone who has worked with religious educators or liturgy directors who prepare families for celebrating the sacraments knows that one of the most consistently asked questions is, "How do we teach the nature of the eucharist as a meal to families who never eat together?" This is a challenging question indeed. The Directory for Masses with Children (para. 10) indicates that religious educators should seek to have parents introduce their children to the basic human experiences which undergird the sacraments, e.g., to the meal in relation to the eucharist—especially if the parents are not actively engaged in the life of the parish.
In light of what appears to be the disappearance of the family meal one might well ask whether the eucharist is possible in our times. As so often happens in our history, however, extremes give rise to an opposite movement. In a world of shrunken baptismal symbols, for instance, we see more and more people making their bathrooms places of delight and beauty that far exceed the demands of mere functionality. Similarly, in a world where eucharistic "feasting" has shrunk to paper-thin wafers taken from the tabernacle, we are inundated by books, magazines, courses and vacation tours intent on communicating to us the intricate pleasures of food and wine. In this connection, Margaret Visser, a writer who combines a scholar's hunger for knowledge with a journalist's joy in sharing it, illustrates very powerfully what Ed Fischer meant by "stealing from God." Though her intentions are thoroughly "secular," Visser beautifully illumines the "sacramental" dimension of all human dining.
The central thesis of Visser's most recent book, The Rituals of Dinner , is that the elaborate etiquettes of communal eating present in virtually all human societies have as their principal purpose this basic goal: to keep the diner(s) from becoming the main course!
For this is the theme that underlies all table manners: we may be slicing and chewing; we may have killed or sacrificed to supply our feast; we may be attending to the most "animal" of our needs; but we do so with control, order and regularity, and with a clear understanding of who is who and what is what. We are neither beasts nor monsters with no manners, but men and women of culture. We do not treat people as though they were the swine or the oxen slaughtered for the feast: we do not get the guests mixed up with the dishes. For the point is that we so easily could. At table we are both armed and vulnerable; we are at such very close quarters (p. 93).
Visser's book is a reminder of the elemental fact that when we are engaged in the communion of sharing food and drink we are simultaneously engaged in violent activity. The vast majority of contemporary Americans are almost totally separated from the violence that makes our meals possible. When confronted with it we tend to blanch. Venison on a menu is greeted with cries of horror: we're eating Bambi! Rabbit cacciatore: the Easter bunny! The sight of a dead, unskinned animal or an unplucked bird hanging in the window of an ethnic butcher shop renders us weak-kneed. Do we think, seriously, that Mr. Purdue's chicken parts are hatched bloodless and pre-packaged in Saran-wrap? The communion of human eating and drinking is possible only because of violent acts of destruction. Perhaps that is why Jesus made the meal the bearer of the mystery of his life and ours, of his death and ours, of his rising and ours.
Every meal begins with an act of burial. Seed is buried in the ground, dies, then rises a fresh green sprout that matures into a golden stalk heavy with heads of grain. The stalk is then harvested, cut off from its roots; the head of grain is stripped from the stalk. The grain's protective outer layer is torn away, exposing kernels that will be crushed into fine flour. Then the flour "dies," too, as it is mixed with yeast and water, worked and kneaded and fired. The loaf which emerges from the oven is no centerpiece to be lacquered as a decorative table ornament. Instead, it disappears into our bodies. Destruction accompanies every stage of the process by which the elements of grain are transformed into the means of human nourishment.
Jesus' language of seed-burial and bread-breaking is paralleled by that of vine-trimming and cup-sharing. Our current fascination with fine dining has introduced us to the subtleties of varietal grapes, vintners, bottling techniques and descriptions of vintages which sometimes give the impression that wines are persons, not things. The vintner's language of grafting, pruning and training, of cutting and crushing, of fermenting and aging is as paschal a language as that of planting, grinding and baking. In fact, our tradition suggests that the metaphor of cup-sharing is one without which it is impossible for the Christian adequately to understand the mystery of Christ's "passing over."
In a recent article Shawn Madigan describes the "covenant nature" of liturgical spirituality in terms of the new and eternal covenant of the Lord's Supper. (See her "Liturgical Spirituality" in The New Dictionary of Sacramental Worship, pp. 1224-1231.) She shows how critical the five cups of wine were in the celebration of Jewish Passover—and how our sharing in them has shaped Christian understandings of the eucharist. In Judaism, the cup is always a cup of blessing. The blessing prayed over the cup, the ancient story recounted while drinking the wine within the vessel, the psalms sung at its final setting down—all these make the "taking of the cup" an essential condition for membership in the community of Israel. By identifying the wine of the meal with his blood—with his life force—Jesus makes sharing the cup a condition for membership in the community which is his Body. In so doing, Jesus commands that the eating of the diner (which all societies have sought to eliminate by their table manners and rules of etiquette) is now the necessary condition for our communion with him and with one another. The host has become food and drink; the diner has become our dinner.
A more thoroughly biblical understanding of the eucharist operative in the renewal of our worship since Vatican II makes it clearer every day that those who suggest restricting communion under both forms bear a much heavier burden of proof than those who have fostered its full and regular restoration. In fact, the very phrase "both forms" is a symptom of the problem, not the solution! Biblical and liturgical imagery define covenant communion in terms of reception of both bread and cup. It is extremely difficult—if not impossible—to understand how the Lord's Supper can be experienced as the "eschatological banquet" (GIRM, 240) without our taking up both the Cup of Salvation and the Bread of Life.
On this point, writers less disturbing than Margaret Visser can come to our assistance. Jeff Smith, the "frugal gourmet," has written a bestselling cookbook based on the traditional—if somewhat overlooked—truth that wine itself is indeed food. In all traditional societies which have cultivated the grape in order to make wine, the consumption of this beverage is virtually never separated from the act of eating. (See Jeff Smith, The Frugal Gourmet Cooks with Wine, p. 74.) More often than not we now see that authors of cookbooks and writers for culinary journals suggest specific wines as accompaniments to the dishes whose recipes appear in their books and articles; menus in many good restaurants do the same.
Such a convergence of evidence about eating and drinking from anthropologists, from contemporary gastronomes, and from our own biblical and liturgical tradition would seem to hold out the promise of a Catholic eucharistic practice marked as thoroughly by reception from the cup as of the bread. Alas, however, such is not the case. The question, of course, is why? Why is there so much resistance to the cup? Why is it routinely rejected as "impractical" or "unnecessary?" I would like to respond to these questions by sharing an insight that occurred to me one Sunday when I happened to be in the choir loft of a parish church during the celebration of the eucharist. As I looked down, I noticed that the closer people were to the front of the nave, the more likely they were to receive from the cup. I have continued to notice this pattern , consistently, in other Catholic parishes. The question it raises for me is this: Is it possible that the real issue here is engagement? Could it be that people who take a place closer to the front of the church are more engaged in the life of the parish and its worship? Does that engagement make these people more likely "to take part more intensely in a sacred rite in which the sign of the eucharistic meal stands out more explicitly" (GIRM, 241)? It strikes me that we need to investigate very closely the connections between 1) one's engagement in parish life, 2) one's freely chosen place in the liturgical assembly, and 3) one's choice to receive from the cup. We need to do this particularly because of the serious challenges to liturgical prayer and spirituality which have been created by the issue (indeed, by the crisis) of intimacy in American culture,
Those of us who thumb through Gourmet magazine or read Barbara Ensrud's Wine with Food for suggestions about what wine to serve with this evening's pasta are usually not doing so because we want to serve better meals at the local shelter for the homeless. Baked macaroni and cheese, with coffee, will do fine for the strangers we serve at the soup kitchen. Chutney-glazed Cornish hens with hazelnut and dried-fruit stuffing, served with Sancerre Rouge '89, is reserved for the kind of upscale dining we do in a small, close circle of family or friends. Recently David Power has alerted us to the contemporary liturgical danger of paying more attention to the circle than to what is being discovered within it. (See his "Worship in a New World: Some Theological Considerations," in The Changing Face of Jewish and Christian Worship in North America, pp. 175-179.) The renewed liturgy assumes—and seeks to express—our belief that the assembly itself is the primary liturgical symbol. Far too often, however, this is interpreted as a desire (if not a demand) that the Sunday assembly be a gathering of friends or a "family" where all know one another by face and by name.
True, family and friends are precisely those with whom we generally dare to share a drinking vessel—with strangers, never! But the Christ who turns upside down the table etiquettes of all societies also turns this assumption about intimacy and its expression on its head. "This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Happy are those who are called to his supper!" "Those" is so much wider a circle than "we." All creation is called to the table and all are offered the same food and drink. This is as disturbing to us as is serious reflection on the consequences of our communion in the body and blood of the host. When we partake of the host-become-the main-course and its accompanying vintage, we become the same sort of diner destined to be the dish and beverage for others. If the host does not hold himself back from being consumed by any and all then we are potential food and drink for any and all.
Perhaps the disappointment of some liturgical leaders at the seeming failure of this critical dimension of liturgical renewal betrays our too easy assumption that the requisite conversion which is expressed as well as shaped by the liturgy has already taken place. There is a radical conversion in accepting membership in an assembly of strangers who become friends not because we get to know one another's face, names, histories and socio-economic ranking, but because Christ calls us friends and makes us food and drink for one another. To be called into and to accept membership in that widest of circles is to be freed for banqueting that cannot but be expressed in the fullness of human celebration whose form is food and wine. The eucharist is not a soup kitchen dole; it is the wedding feast of the Lamb.
