A Body Broken, A Body Betrayed

Race, Memory, and Eucharist in White-Dominant Churches

Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Marcia W. Mount Shoop

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781620329047
  9781498290302
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498273534
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

Race and privilege are issues that cry out for new kinds of attention and healing in American society. More specifically, we are being called to surface the dynamics of whiteness especially in contexts where whites have had the most power in America. The church is one of those contexts--particularly churches that have traditionally been seen as the stalwarts of the American religious landscape: mainline Protestant churches. Theologians and Presbyterian ministers Mary McClintock Fulkerson and Marcia Mount Shoop invite us to acknowledge and address the wounds of race and privilege that continue to harm and diminish the life of the church. Using Eucharist as a template for both the church's blindness and for Christ's redemptive capacity, this book invites faith communities, especially white-dominant churches, into new ways of re-membering what it means to be the body of Christ. In a still racialized society, can the body of Christ truly acknowledge and dress the wounds of race and privilege? Re-membering Christ's broken and betrayed body may be just the healing path we need.

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Race, Memory, and Eucharist: An Introduction

Our stories tell us who we are, at least that is what Christianity tells us. Our salvation story, the stories of Scripture, and testimonies of faith define us and inform our religious identities. But what about when our stories are incomplete? Or worse yet, what about when our stories about ourselves are lies? What about when stories dis-member or contort part of the Body of Christ by denying truth, silencing dissonance, or ignoring wounds?

The communion table is set for us as a place where we come to be welcomed and reconciled to God. Scripture tells us that in God’s kingdom people from all nations, from all tribes and tongues will come to stand before the throne of God, singing praises (Rev 7:9). Jesus called himself the bread of life (John 6:48) and the true vine (John 15:1). Scripture tells us about Christ’s last supper with his friends in an upstairs room. There he called the bread they ate his body, he told them the wine was the new covenant sealed in his blood, and he told them to eat it and drink it all (Luke 22). There he named the betrayal that would condemn him to death: “But see, the one who betrays me is with me, and his hand is on the table” (Luke 22:21); there he told the truth about the friends who would harm him: “You will all become deserters because of me this night” (Matt 26:31; Mark 14:27). And “troubled in spirit,” he declared after washing his disciples’ feet that “one of you will betray me” (John 14:21). And Scripture tells us this is a meal that, whenever celebrated, is to be done in remembrance of him (1 Cor 11:23–26).

And our institutional memory sifts through these stories to further interpret what happens at Eucharist and how it is achieved. John Calvin articulated the Reformed formula that the mystery and power of the Holy Spirit assure us of the real presence of Christ in our communion meal, “as if Christ were placed in bodily presence before our view, or handled by our hands.”1 Calvin describes how we are nourished at the Table with words like “refresh, strengthen, and exhilarate.” Calvin basked in the mysterious efficacy of Eucharist, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to “truly unite things separated by space.”2 Somehow Christ dwells in us; somehow we, as gathered communities of disparate believers, are transformed into his body in the world.

Eucharistic liturgy and habit cultivate the expectation that we have a shared story and that we embody this shared story in our eucharistic practice. Yet when real bodies gather at the table there is a thoroughgoing dissonance that signals rupture and betrayal as well as particularity and possibility. Estranged relationships are allowed to splinter, and instead of seeing all nations and tongues represented at the table, often we look around and see people just like us. And many quietly partake of this feast we’re told reflects God’s hopes for humankind even as we are left thirsty and hungry for true communities of difference and reconciliation. We nibble at the bread of life and sip the cup of salvation. We keep our eyes down, wondering if we should taste more. With the echoes of an invitation to come and encounter the Body of Christ lingering in the air, we sit and wait for another day’s sensation.

For most Christians the failure to duplicate Jesus’ healing meals with outsiders is not intentional. Most churches understand themselves to be welcoming communities. “Inclusiveness” is a frequent descriptor in many church mission statements. Indeed, white-dominant churches have exorcised themselves of one of our nation’s most egregious forms of exclusion—the historic sin of racial segregation. Like most white Americans, predominantly white churches claim to be “colorblind.” That is, many predominantly white churches aspire to see all persons, regardless of color, as God’s children.3

A dominant contemporary white narrative is that of the church as a welcoming, colorblind community that gathers at the Table regularly to be reconciled with God as members somehow encounter the body and blood of Christ. The Eucharist is often equated with the social witness of the church: “Liturgy is social action,”4 says Stanley Hauerwas, and Bernd Wannewetsch asserts that “it is in worship itself that the ethical in-forming of human acting and judging comes about.”5 If this is so, what kind of “social action” is being narrated and performed by this purportedly welcoming colorblind table fellowship? Despite the well-meaning discourse, this is a narrative and practice in dominant populations that bears more scrutiny, especially if we take Calvin seriously that in communion it is “as if Christ were placed in bodily presence before our view, or handled by our hands.”6 If Christ’s presence has to do with bodies—his, of course, and ours as the “Body of Christ”—then the bodies at the Table matter.

To understand the function of Eucharist both in reproducing social brokenness and in potentially aiding in the transformation of our brokenness, we need a framework wise to the complexity of social trauma, race, and embodiment. We need more than the traditional visions of the past, whether that of Luther or of Calvin, of the early church or of medieval liturgy.7 We need greater attention to the connections between embodied practice and theological imagination.8 To identify and better address the “colorblindness” associated with much liturgical bodily practice, it is important to identify the nature of the problem as defined by bodies, social memory, and the ways that racialized injustices continue to impact our lives.9 These patterns and practices embody the marks of traumatic memory in the unruly ways racialized violence (both systemic and chronic) reiterates itself in trivialized practices and mentalities. We invite a re-membering of Eucharist both by interrogating colorblindness and by making space for acknowledging the traumatic imprint of race in our believing communities. These focal points allow us to point toward transformative capacity in the way we re-member our Eucharistic practice.

Embodied Re-membering: Social Trauma and Racialized Communities

The word trauma literally means “wound.” In Greek it refers to a wound of the body. Its contemporary use expands trauma to refer to “collective suffering,” a suffering given further nuance relative to different theorizations of trauma.10 Freudian theories around trauma shifted the focus on trauma’s wounds toward the mind.11 Many contemporary trauma theories are informed by Freud’s understanding that the mind is not able to take in the immediate force of trauma and also by developing understandings of how bodies hold trauma. Trauma is, therefore, not fully integrated into consciousness but “imposes itself again, repeatedly” in nightmares, in repetitive actions, and in habituations.12 Trauma is characterized by this simultaneity of deeply embodied impact and unassimilated experience. Cathy Caruth describes the dynamic of trauma as “complex ways of knowing and not knowing.” The wounds of trauma “cry out” in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available.13

The continued reality of trauma extends onto the larger template of history itself. History “bears the marks of trauma” in its endless repetition of violence.14 Such endurance also requires the emergence of ongoing cultural representation and structural support. Indeed, the actual public awareness of a group’s social suffering depends upon the successful distribution of these cultural representations and systems of support.15 Representation is key to whether a collective harm or trauma is recognized, how it is recognized or defined, and the degree to which wider audiences take responsibility.16 The “carrier group,” that is, those who are marked by racism and who try to communicate the nature of the harm and attribution of responsibility, have always had narratives of horrific oppression and lament over the centuries, “counter-memories” to the dominant ones.17 However, their access to modes of communication and to the power to persuade the larger population was of course profoundly constrained in the days of slavery.18 Despite improvement over time, the concealment of this social harm is complex and ongoing. Given the complexities of trauma, the history of race in American religious communities unfolds and conceals itself in ways that we cannot fully describe or control but that are deeply format...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Prolegomenon
• Chapter 1: Race, Memory, and Eucharist: An Introduction
• Chapter 2: Eucharist as Template: This Is My Body
• Chapter 3: The Wound of Colorblindness
• Chapter 4: Transforming Memory
• Chapter 5: Re-membering Eucharist
• Bibliography