Eucharistic life (more than just “being thankful”)

It seemed appropriate to write about the word Eucharist since it means “thanksgiving” in Greek. As part of writing my ordination papers recently, I flipped back through Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World, which talks about Eucharist not just in the sense of the church ritual but as a way of life. To Schmemann, it is much more than just “being thankful.” He writes: “”We were created as celebrants of the sacrament of life, of its transformation into life in God, communion with God. We know that real life is ‘eucharist,’ a movement of love and adoration toward God, the movement in which alone the meaning and the value of all that exists can be revealed and fulfilled” (34).

I think it’s a good start for us to go around the dinner table on Thanksgiving and say what we’re thankful for, but that’s not the full extent of living eucharistically. It’s not just remembering that I’m supposed to appreciate good things that happen and making a list so that people can see how appreciative I am. The eucharistic life concerns how we value our minute-by-minute experience of our world. Are we able to actually enjoy the moments of our lives or are they all only means to another end? The best way to enjoy life richly is to live in a perpetual state of worship. I don’t mean literally singing hymns everywhere you go. That can certainly be worshipful as long as it isn’t done out of a sense of obligation or a need to impress others. But what I mean by worship is to delight in God’s creation as an expression of His love for us. God wants us to worship Him not because He has a fragile ego and needs to flattery of billions of people to keep going, but because He is full of joy and He wants us to experience the same joy with Him.

Children naturally live in a state of worship. They may not call what they’re doing worship when they get excited over what adults would consider trivial things and stare in wonder at natural objects that adults have long since consigned to the background of our lives. But they are able to embrace the world as a gift even if they cannot articulate who the Giver is. This is true until they lose their innocence. Until they start to worry about how many friends they have and whether they’re wearing the right shoes and whether they know how to play the cool video game that everyone else is playing.

We cannot enjoy life when we’re consumed with idolatry. By idolatry I don’t mean bowing down to statues (which nobody does anymore), but simply giving the ultimate importance to created things in our lives rather than to God. When we have made gods out of our careers, our bank accounts, our pursuits of a mate, our platforms, or our embodiments of coolness, we lose our ability to live eucharistically. This is not only a snub against God; it ruins our ability to be present within each moment. Idolatry is what makes us unable to give our undivided attention to the person across the table from us or the colors of the leaves on the tree when we’re walking in the woods.

And this lack of attentiveness is the reason that idolatry causes injustice. Most evil that happens in the world is a case of neglect rather than willful malevolence. Other people become an abstraction, part of the background in our lives, when there is an idol that has absorbed all of our focus. Even when we hurt other people directly in our lives, it’s not so much because we want to hurt them but because some idol in our heart has taken priority over their well-being. The ugliness with which we treat others is a measure of the degree to which we have become the absentee landlords of our own souls.

Nobody has escaped the fall into idolatry captured allegorically by the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (yes, I said allegorically; you can believe that they are historical figures if you want to). That makes it so that our “natural” state is to walk the Earth restless, unable to give our full presence or trust to any moment. We need to be delivered from this idolatry in order to be human again. That’s where Eucharist as a sacred act comes into play. The ancient Israelites would sacrifice animals in the Temple to God in order to purify their community whenever sin had occurred and their relationships had been polluted by its presence. They believed that the blood of a pure, unblemished animal was “life” (Leviticus 17:11) and this life could serve as a cleansing ointment on the altar (Leviticus 17:6). The Christian act of Eucharist is a continuation of the Israelite temple sacrifice in which Jesus’ blood purifies our community of sin and makes us capable of enjoying the glory of our Creator again.

Receiving the body and blood of Christ in order to become the body of Christ purified by His blood is the centerpiece of Christian worship and the source of eucharistic life. Unfortunately, many Protestants denigrate the power and importance of Eucharist. We have built our worship service around the word of the preacher, which essentially replaces Christ’s body and blood, an appropriate object of worship, with a cult of personality around the preacher, who becomes an idol. Obviously, there are many Protestants who experience eucharistic life because of the grace of God even though they seldom practice the rite of Eucharist. For those of us who have the privilege of presiding in the celebration of Eucharist, it’s worth thinking about whether we relish it as though the enjoyment of life were built around it, or are we anxious to get through it as quickly as possible. The turkey and dressing that I had yesterday were a great meal because I got to celebrate it with my grandpa, my sister, my parents, my wife, and my kids. But the meal that gives meaning to that and every other meal is the eucharistic meal that I will celebrate this Sunday and every other Sunday.