a communion of more than our bodies

Holy Thursday

Mass of the Lord’s Supper

 

Exodus 12:1-8, 11-14 
…this is how you are to eat it…

Psalm 116  
…our blessing cup is a communion
with the Blood of Christ

1 Cor 11:23-26  
…do this in remembrance of me…

John 13:1-15  
…I have given you a model to follow

The texts and sacramentals of Holy Thursday

speak so clearly of the connection between

sacrifice and service and meal  

In the face of this liturgical communication...a few extra-canonical voices;)

The nourishing quality of the eucharist, freely offered to anyone who's famished, has always been a central metaphor for me.  I don't partake because I'm a good Catholic, holy and pious and sleek.  I partake because I'm a bad Catholic, riddled by doubt and anxiety and anger: fainting from severe hypoglycemia of the soul.  I need food.

---from Nancy Mairs, Ordinary Time, 1993

(as referenced in Tridiuum, A Sourcebook p44)

People ask me:  Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking?  Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?

They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.

The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry.  But there is more than that.  It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.  So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and the warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it…and then the warmth and richness and the fine reality of hunger satisfied…and it is all one.

I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness.

There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers.  We must eat.  If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we’ll be no less full of human dignity.

There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.  And that is my answer, when people ask me:  Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?

---from M. F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating, 1990

(as referenced in Tridiuum, A Sourcebook p43)