Reinterpreting the Eucharist

Explorations in Feminist Theology and Ethics

Anne F. Elvey, Carol Hogan, Kim Power, Claire Renkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781845537715
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317544074
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

The Eucharist continues to be central to contemporary Christian religious tradition and to be the focus for a wide range of assumptions and disputes. Chief amongst these disputes is the role of women in the theology and the ritual of the Eucharist.Reinterpreting the Eucharist brings together a diverse range of voices with each using their own marginalized experience to explore other ways – indigenous culture, medieval and contemporary art, social history, and environmental ethics – of engaging with the Eucharist. Presenting new forms of theological and ethical engagement, the book responds to the challenge of reconsidering the meaning of the Eucharist today.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Kim Power and Carol Hogan

It has taken many grains to produce this one basket of bread, each loaf unique to its author, but all equally nourishing and transforming. The first seeds were sown when Carol Hogan, a woman who has dedicated herself to becoming a eucharistic woman, chose a seminar on Eucharist to celebrate her Golden Jubilee with the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. Each of the editors presented papers that were the first provings of the loaves they offer here today, and the prayer that introduces Anne Elvey’s essay was especially written for the Eucharist celebrated that day. Such was the response to the seminar that the idea of a book took root. Although a critique of established positions is integral to these contributions, the editors envisage this work as participating in what Mary Grey has termed a ‘reconstructive moment’ when ‘key doctrines are re-envisioned, factoring in life experience, dreams and critical reflections of women from diverse contexts’.¹

These essays offer a new symbolic or world view, drawn from women’s experience and research, as they speak their truth. The intention is not to replace men’s discourse, or even to displace it, but to enter into conversation with it. Generations of research have exposed the gendered nature of symbolic worlds—how our experience as gendered beings in androcentric and often patriarchal cultures creates different symbolic worlds for each sex: one public, normative and respected, the other private, alien, ‘Other’, and often trivialized. As Caroline Walker Bynum established, symbols may function for men and for women in radically different ways, though, as women were educated to see the world through masculine experience, women are better at speaking both languages of gender.² In androcentric symbolics and cultures, women internalize masculine values and raise their children according to them, to see the feminine as ‘less than’, subordinate and inferior. In Claire Renkin’s and Kim Power’s conversations with art, we see gendered interpretations of symbols most clearly in this collection.

A prime consideration for women is to develop a ‘divine horizon’, that is, to establish for themselves conceptions of what a divinized woman might look like. Of course, this requires imaging God as female as well as male, and certainly, Scripture offers myriad examples. Not just God as mother, weaver, midwife, but in the Hebrew Bible, God also speaks in female grammar (Jer. 31).³ These essays offer rich pickings, which challenge both women and men to contemplate their unconscious assumptions and beliefs about gender and spirituality in the light of their experience. In such a renewed world, a richer symbolic meta-order will emerge from the dialogue between the sexes, should each respect and engage the symbolic world of the other.

These essays are open to new readings of Scripture and Tradition and, in general, embrace multi-disciplinary approaches, drawing on philosophy, social science, Indigenous culture, ecology, art and history to enrich eucharistic theologies that are both thought-provoking and stimulating. As Carol Hogan’s research establishes, the kind of eucharistic theology we hold and the context in which we celebrate it, generate an intricate and intimate dynamic between personal and communal identity and praxis. The kind of eucharistic theology we espouse will shape our theologies of Baptism and Confirmation, Marriage, Orders, Reconciliation and the Anointing of the Sick. For example, if one holds that the power to consecrate the host requires a different order of humanity to the power to create life, then one will privilege priesthood over procreation. In such contexts, it is easy to overlook the reality that though many denominations do not ordain women, women are experiencing and even celebrating Eucharist in many ways—not just as people in the pews or even filling liturgical roles such as lector, but embodying eucharistic praxis, as these essays demonstrate. They offer theologies of Eucharist grounded in ethics as well as mystery, able to embrace diversity in a unity which privileges the discipleship of equals over clericalism and hierarchy. The authors recover and reinstate women as bearers of authentic meaning: in biblical narrative, in culture, in art, in ritual and in spirituality. Both explicitly and implicitly, they ask the question, ‘Whose voices are privileged and whose have been silenced?’ This volume represents women’s voices in the liturgical domain, addressing the dearth of women’s scholarship in the field of sacramentality.⁴

Embodiment and the land are privileged themes in these explorations of different facets of Eucharist. These themes are intimately related, for women are traditionally identified with matter, earth and flesh, as opposed to spirit, heaven and soul.⁵ These essays underline that the physical and symbolic landscapes in which we encounter Christ in the sacraments are crucial, from the central desert of the Anangu and Arrernte women in Lee Miena Skye’s essay, to the conventual enclosed garden of the Song of Songs in Carol Hogan’s early experience. Furthermore, when authors explore concepts such as Luce Irigaray’s ‘sensible transcendental’⁶ or Anne Elvey’s ‘material transcendence,’ they remind us, with Louis-Marie Chauvet, that we do not come to the sacraments despite our bodies and the earthly environments in which we live, but precisely through them. Our only experience of sacrament is in the body, on this earth.⁷ Thus, the theologies presented here are deeply incarnational. As divine love was poured out in the incarnation and paschal mystery to renew the earth, so it pours out in Eucharist as a source of transformation for the human person, the body-mind,⁸ on this earth once graced by God. Shared questions of presence and absence have congregated around the topics of transubstantiation, the real presence and the relationship between spirit and matter, as authors grapple with concepts of transformation in the embodied self and the shared community. This argument has a particular poignancy when we focus on the bodies of women.⁹ Even today in liturgical and sacramental discourse, many denominations do not accord women’s bodies the same status as image of God, as that accorded to men. Several essays address this question, especially those by Veronica Lawson and Elizabeth Dowling, Kath Rushton, Carmel Pilcher, Claire Renkin and Kim Power.

In the church, tensions often arise between clergy and female laity over the New Testament call to inclusiveness and clerical need to control the mediation of the sacred. When clericalism surges, modes of subversion arise as Claire Renkin demonstrates in her essay on the medieval world. Today, under similar circumstances, the authors offer a more direct critique of sacramental theologies and their concomitant church structures, order and ecclesial practices and processes. Theologies of atonement have been found wanting, though the suffering intrinsic to evolutionary processes and human experience must be addressed. If there is no resurrection without the cross, likewise, without the cross there is no resurrection. But how is that suffering to be invested with meaning and redeemed through the death and resurrection of Christ? And what is the meaning of the earth’s suffering and how are we to care for the earth as part of the ethical stance that flows from Eucharist? Several essays address the issue of suffering and Anne Elvey’s addresses the second part of the question in persuasive detail.

It is fitting that Carol Hogan’s rich essay, ‘Eucharistic Metamorphosis: Changing Symbol, Changing Lives’ opens this book. This essay maps the journey of a small, dying women’s congregation—the Australian Servants of the Blessed Sacrament—as they wrestled with the challenge of the Second Vatican Council’s theology of Eucharist to initiate their renewal as a religious community. Using the Sisters’ story as a foundation, this chapter demonstrates how the symbol of Eucharist has the power to give direction not only to a community’s identity, but also to a believing person’s commitment, choices, values and relationships. It expertly explores the theological and anthropological assumptions and understandings that underpinned the congregation’s life pre- and post-Vatican II and the ways in which changes in such assumptions had the capacity to engender radical transformations in the community’s spirituality, life-style and ministry. In so doing, it invites us to reflect on our own potential for metamorphosis as it provides us with a context in which to read the following chapters.

Carmel Pilcher then thoughtfully treats the prophetic role of the Eucharist in contemporary Australia. The Eucharist demands no less than for the baptized to be a sign and sacrament of Christ in the marketplace. Following Chauvet’s sacramental theology, Pilcher argues that to become such a sacrament, it is imperative that the assumed right of the baptized, to ‘conscious, full, active participation’ in the liturgy, is respected. She emphasizes the presence of Christ in the Word, and the imperative that women’s voices be heard in the interpretation, if this participation is to be meaningful. She tackles the conundrum of sacrifice and atonement, by understanding such suffering through the lens of Trinitarian theology, which enables the gift of self modelled on Trinitarian perichoresis, the divine dance of love and mutual self-giving. Sacrifice is less about ‘giving up’ or ‘doing without’ than an act of deep and fully loving response to the source of love.

The ‘conscious, full, active participation’ in Eucharist that Pilcher describes occurs through the process by which Australian Aboriginal Christian women embed Eucharist in the land, as Lee Miena Skye shows in ‘How Australian Aboriginal Christian Womanist Tiddas (Sisters) Theologians Celebrate the Eucharist’. In her challenging essay, Skye explores the inculturation of Eucharist from two disparate viewpoints: colonial missionaries and Indigenous Christian women, whose theologies and spiritualities she has documented in several regions across denominations. She demonstrates the imperative women experienced to inculturate Christianity into their Indigenous spiritualities before it could become relevant and effective in their lives. These women are Creation theologians who are Christocentric in their views and beliefs that link all of Christianity to the Land. They understand that the celebration of the Eucharist nourishes that spiritual essence which dwells within us as the Spirit of God.

In the following chapter, Elizabeth Dowling and Veronica Lawson take us back to the ‘beginning’ of the Christian movement, when women and men shared the proclamation, interpretation and celebration of the Word as they did with the koinonia (communion), both hosting the assembly and sharing life in the breaking of the bread. These two celebrations evolved into the Eucharist. However, very early in the life of the church, women’s roles were subordinated to those of men and have remained so. Engaging a persuasive, ecofeminist hermeneutical framework, this essay explores the potential of the Christian scriptures for the reclamation of an equal partnership between women and men, as well as the particularity of women’s contribution in the contemporary celebration of Eucharist.

Kathleen Rushton continues the interrogation of liturgy and scripture, questioning the contemporary ritual for Holy Thursday, which currently implies that only men shall have their feet washed during the Eucharist. The reason given is that Jesus washed the feet of his twelve apostles. The priest represents Jesus; twelve men represent the apostles. In asking, ‘Whose Feet May Be Washed On Holy Thursday Night?’ Rushton returns to the biblical tradition for the meaning of the ritual in John’s Gospel. Her interpretive lens is The Constitution on Divine Revelation (#9), which addresses the mutual relationship of Scripture and Tradition so essential to Catholic teaching. Rushton draws on Joseph Ratzinger’s (now Benedict XVI) 1967–1969 commentary that criticizes the Constitution because it does not acknowledge ‘the place of Scripture as an element within the Church that is also critical of tradition’. By examining the washing of the feet (Jn 13.1–15) in the Johannine symbolic world, this chapter cogently argues that Christian tradition concerning foot washing has been ‘distorted’ by the innovation that only men may have their feet washed.

Frances Gray also looks at a distortion of tradition. Just how a simple Jewish meal became the stuff of some of the most elaborate meta-theological speculation is the question Gray provocatively poses to tradition, when she engages the meaning of Transubstantiation. This chapter is an exploration of the gradual ecclesial appropriation of what Gray terms the natural mystery of being, which is intrinsic to meal-ness in the Jewish Passover, an appropriation which is either accompanied by or a consequence of the systematic exclusion of women from the politics of the Eucharist. She argues that there is a correlation between women’s exclusion as eucharistic celebrant and the meta-theorizing of the Eucharist that reached its culmination in scholastic philosophy. She engages the recent work of Catherine Pickstock, who has argued for an orthodox reading of the Eucharist as a ‘mode of presence’ which is ‘action rather than extra-linguistic presence’.¹⁰ Gray places this argument in conversation with Chauvet and Dominic Crossan’s model of Transubstantiation, wherein the transubstantiation of the bread and wine evolves into the ethical transformation of both communicant and community. Gray challenges Pickstock’s defence of a transubstantiation that can be enacted only by a man, arguing that it reduces the meaning of the mystery of the Eucharist, to a masculine paternal re-symbolization of the essential meal-ness of the Eucharist, occluding the natural mystery of being which subtends all human thinking.

Claire Renkin’s essay returns us to the medieval world of scholastic theology from quite a different perspective. In a non-literate society that was being distanced from the sacrament by the clergy, the increasing need to experience and access the sacred visually was met by a variety of liturgical objects and practices, which helped make a remote ritual more accessible. Renkin demonstrates that divergent theologies of Eucharist co-existed in the late Middle Ages by exploring four medieval works, which offer an alternative imagination about the Eucharist, and the idea of real presence associated with it. They invite multiple interpretations, some of which challenge clerically controlled theologies and practices of the late Middle Ages.

Also drawing on artistic sources and John’s Gospel, Kim Power explores the Johannine use of childbirth as a symbol of Eucharist, but from a radically new perspective; that of The Christa (where the crucified Jesus is represented by a woman). Taking John Paul II’s argument that art is a medium of revelation, she proposes therefore that we must take the Christae seriously, particularly where they evoke the imagery of John’s Gospel. In her discussion, she establishes criteria for the representation of women, incorporating key arguments from Luce Irigaray; especially that any divine horizon for women must be able to embrace women’s bodies, especially their fluidity (for example, their menses, pregnancy and childbirth), their capacity to image the divine and to mediate the sacred. In doing so, she argues that women’s suffering is capable of bearing the weight of redemptive suffering and that their willing, painful labour to bring forth new life offers a theology of Eucharist that acknowledges the reality of suffering yet posts an alternative to traditional theologies of atonement and appeasement.

Our book concludes with Anne Elvey’s elegant and poetic essay, which employs ecological theology as a lens on Eucharist. The result is a penetrating analysis of Eucharist as hospitality, a hospitality that embraces all of creation, because, Elvey argues, humans are part of a more than human Earth community that is relational and interdependent. This relationality (in the mode of sacrifice and hospitality) is a vocation to respond to others, with the same kenotic hospitality that characterizes creation as eucharistic. These others embrace individuals but also human communitie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Eucharistic Metamorphosis: Changing Symbol, Changing Lives
• 3. The Sunday Eucharist: Embodying Christ in a Prophetic Act
• 4. How Australian Aboriginal Christian Womanist Tiddas (Sisters) Theologians Celebrate the Eucharist
• 5. Women, Eucharist, and Good News to All Creation in Mark
• 6. Rediscovering Forgotten Features: Scripture, Tradition and Whose Feet May Be Washed on Holy Thursday Night
• 7. Mystery Appropriated: Disembodied Eucharist and Meta-theology
• 8. Real Presence: Seeing, Touching, Tasting: Visualizing the Eucharist in Late Medieval Art
• 9. Embodying the Eucharist
• 10. Living One for the Other: Eucharistic Hospitality as Ecological Hospitality
• Subject Index
• Name Index