PARTICIPATION

I saw a headline last week alerting me to “ World cup fever” What can account for it? Why do Brazilian adults still weep over a single goal made decades  ago? Maybe it has to do with our innate human need to identify with something bigger. We must be part of a greater whole. We want to participate. This word, part has opposite meanings. It can mean something separate and cut-off – something apart, till death us do part – or it can mean something that is not alone and cut off, but part of whole, as our various body parts are part of the body. [We also call these different parts members – hold on to that for later]. So a part is something small and cut- off, but it is also something that participates in that of which it is a part. Maybe that’s why people get world-cup fever or go to concerts in the same sports arenas. Or go to Church.

Participation, likewise, has a couple of senses. It can mean taking part in some activity – as a player participates in a performance, playing her part, or a soldier participates in a battle. But it can also mean something deeper, more abstract: something having to do with who or what the participant is.  The world-cup fans participate not merely in that they attend or listen to the games, but in that they identify themselves as fans of particular teams. That’s who they are. The notion of participation as shared being is ancient and important and very much with us. If we participate in a community of any kind, we identify ourselves as members of it. In some way, we share in the being of the community.

In Church, we call this Communion, and it means participation, in the sense of being part of the Body of Christ. Members of His Body. I think it instructive that in some languages, the word for receiving Holy Communion is participation. Indeed, Holy Communion is all about participation. In both senses: we participate by action of eating and drinking, and thereby we become participants in the Divine Life. Our separate life is incorporated into the shared Life of the Most Holy Trinity. The consecrated elements of Bread and Wine make it so. Let us consider them.

We make bread from flour and water and yeast. The flour is lots of grains of wheat, which we grind up and mix with water and yeast and then bake. The finished loaf participates in the species of wheat, water, and yeast.  But the countless grains of wheat that make up a loaf also participate in the plants that produced them, and these plants participate in the nutrients they drew from the soil, and in the seed that sprouted them in the first place. But that wasn’t really the first place, because those seeds were grains from other wheat plants and so on back to pre-history, as wheat gradually evolved – under human cultivation. Wheat doesn’t occur in the wild. In a sense, wheat and humanity evolved together. Wheat participates in human civilization. So, more obviously, do bread and wine.

I once saw a brewmaster wearing a T-shirt that said fermentation is a sign of civilization. And that is true. Nomads and hunter-gatherers don’t have bread and wine. They are the product of cities, the fruit of complex systems of human co-operation. Bread and wine are human artifacts. They are not found in nature. But they are more than signs. They not only signify civilization, in the sense that they are evidence of it, but they are part of it, in the sense of belonging to it. Bread and wine belong to civilization. Signs they are, but they are more, because bread and wine participate in the life of the City.

It is easy to see that the ingredients of bread represent the three kingdoms: animal, vegetable, and mineral. Wheat represents the vegetable kingdom, water the mineral kingdom, and yeast the animal kingdom. They are not, however, only representatives, but participants in their respective kingdoms in the sense of shared being. The water we add to the flour comes out of the ground or river, having fallen as rain somewhere else, maybe thousands of years ago. The microbes of yeast have their own chain of evolution, sharing in millions of years of life. Human art puts them together to make something new, something not found in creation, the product of the City.

But not only the City: bread and wine are the products of agriculture, the prerequisite for civilization, and they also participate in the evolutionary chain of plant life going back before the appearance of humankind. Bread and wine participate in that too. As do we. A human being participates in the life of her parents and also in the lives of her children – speaking now in the biological sense, and not only in the social. In that sense we all participate in the life of our original ancestors and in the earlier life-forms from which they emerged. And so we also participate in the biological lives of all other human beings – indeed of all life on the planet. This is not merely symbolic; it is the reality the ancients called participation.

So the bread and wine that Jesus took as supper was ending are representatives and signs of the whole created order and of human civilization – but more than signs, more than representatives, they are participants: they are the natural creation as molded by human civilization. The Divine Word that called them into being in the beginning now speaks again, calling them His Body and Blood. In so doing, the Godman does not merely apply a new label, but He changes them in the essence of their being. The Bread and Wine now participate in His own Body and Blood. They participate in His Life. And since His Life is divine as well as human, the Bread and Wine are too. This is more than symbolism: it is sacramental Reality, because sacraments participate in the Reality they symbolize.  By His Word, God re-created the cosmos – by virtue of participation, He incorporated all that is into His own Divine Life. This happened before He gave His Body and Blood to the Apostles to eat and drink.

Our personal participation in the Sacrament  –  our Communion – is something additional. We call it the pledge of our redemption. In this sense, perhaps, it is a sign. Our eating and drinking of His Body and Blood signifies to us the stupendous and incomprehensible Reality of the Redemption of the world, and of ourselves as part of the world. He gave His Body and Blood to us with the commandment to “Do this in remembrance of Me.” As Dom Gregory Dix observed, never has any commandment been so widely obeyed – to the extent now that there is probably not a moment in any Day – with the possible exception of Good Friday and Holy Saturday – in which it is not fulfilled on earth. God’s kingdom come on earth as in heaven.

When we eat His Body and Drink His Blood, He lives in us and we in Him – we participate in Him and in one another consciously. To some extent, we are also conscious of this incomprehensible new Reality. And that, perhaps, is what our personal participation adds to the objective Redemption of the New Creation. All creation and all people participate in the New Creation by His pronouncement that Bread is His Body and Wine His Blood. We who eat and drink, however,  enter eternal life here and now in the sense that we are conscious of it.

This may be what He meant by saying Do this in remembrance of Me. Remembrance, anamnesis, amnesia negated, unforgetting – these all have to do with consciousness. We may not be able to comprehend what we are doing when we consume his Flesh and Blood, but we can be conscious of it. In any case, the commandment of anamnesis  - to unforget Him - is not a commission to form a historical society. This memorial is vaster, a kind of mystical consciousness that has to do with participation, conscious participation. 

It is tempting to pun on the English word remembrance, which sounds like it might have something to do with members­ or parts of the Body, but it doesn’t.  Too bad, since that is what memorial means in the context of the Holy Eucharist – it means calling to mind the fact that we are participants in the life of Christ. We also participate in creation and in civilization. Through us, all that is participates in that Divine Life. We eat His Body and drink His Blood so that , as He said, we “will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”