Inversal Unity and The Divine Triple Descent
A Eucharistic Spirituality to Cultivate Humility Through Narrative Appropriation and an Analysis of Christian Power Dynamics
Introduction
The Inversal Unity in the Christian Power Dynamic
Prelapsarian Hierarchy: Threefold relationship
The Postlapsarian Inversion
Divine Descent and Christian Power Dynamics
The Divine Triple Descent and Humility
Prologue: Essence and Accidents
The First Descent: From God to Human
The Second Descent: God- Human Descends into Food
The Third Descent: Bread Descends into the Sinner
Narrative Appropriation of the Call of the Eucharist
Narrative Themes: Hiddenness and Humility
Narrative Appropriation Application Set-up: Mariology and the Third Descent
Narrative Appropriation Application: The Human who Presences God
Conclusion
A few months ago, our family was at mass. My children were being moderately well behaved. The three-year-old was looking at various religiously geared books. Just as the eucharistic prayers were getting going, a scuffle began. My seven year old decided he wanted to see the book that she was looking at. My three-year-old is rather strong-willed and began to speak at full volume, just under a yell. “NO! NO! THIS IS MY BOOK!” she pointed to the altar and in a rather cross tone said “YOU WATCH JESUS DO A TRICK!!” I’m still not one hundred percent sure where she got this particular theological knowledge, so well framed for a three-year-old mind. But out of the mouths of babes comes the truth.
The constant miracle of the Eucharist is the center of Catholic life. I was proud that my three-year-old was so in tune with the fact that something amazing was going on in the Eucharist, though her strategy was to use that as a distractor for her brother. My reflection for this treatise is, how much do we move beyond “watching Jesus do a trick” in the Eucharist? If the purpose of the Eucharistic miracle is to dazzle us, it is the poorest example for such a purpose. There is no tangible way to even know a miracle takes place. If the purpose is to test our faith, it certainly does that. But from the volumes written that speak in beauty of the experience of the Eucharist, a simple exercise of faith by believing beyond all evidence is rarely brought up. Usually, the reflections hit a much more profound depth than “watching Jesus do a trick” that can’t be verified. In this treatise, we will seek to develop one of almost infinite ways of finding meaning and impetus in the Eucharist.
The purpose of this treatise is to develop skills for Eucharistic devotion in order to cultivate proper Christian humility. The tools we will use will be narrative appropriation and an analysis of Christian power dynamics. The acquisition of the virtue of humility should allow the recipient of the sacrament better and more effective cooperation with the grace offered in the sacrament.
In the first section, we will lay the foundations for understanding the Eucharist as a tool for acquiring humility by exploring the nature of the cosmos and how the cosmos, as such, gives the need for a certain type of lesson on the nature of power and its exercise. We will explore power as it could be understood in prelapsarian reality, where the assumption is that the greatest serves the least. This service is experienced in a power structure that demonstrates inversal unity, where all positions of power are geared toward the same end, expression of love, all exercises of power are one, yet there are many varieties. The most obvious way this is true is to take the highest and invert it, make it (at the same time as it is the highest) the lowest. We will explore power as it is understood in post lapsarian reality where hierarchies are needed to maintain order, but because of human concupiscence invariably they lead to corruption. Lastly, we will explore power as it should be understood in postlapsarian reality or as it will be understood in the Eschaton. In this case, there is a return to a notion of the greatest serving the least as demonstrated throughout the Bible and as will be related in the divine triple descent.
In the second section, we begin a process that will allow for the skill of narrative appropriation garnering an experience of inversal unity from the sacred ritual of the Eucharist. In this section, we begin by pointing out some deficiencies that eucharistic theology has in supplying a Eucharistic spirituality. We will move beyond speculation concerning essence and substance toward narrative appropriation. We will then lay out our primary narrative, the triple descent of the Son of God. Each descent will demonstrate a new level of humility and reveal something new about the nature of Christian power dynamics. The first descent explored will be the divine to the human. The second descent will go from the human to food. The last descent will be from the food to the sinner.
The final section will be the practical spiritual application of narrative appropriation by exploring the themes of hiddenness and humility. After exploring these themes the treatise will offer a series of analogical applications revolving around the experience of the Virgin Mary.
The final hope of this treatise is that it will be useful to the reader. If one is dazzled by the sheer beauty of the liturgy and comes to an experience of Christ through that bedazzlement, then “watching Jesus do a trick” is certainly sufficient. But the myriad of spiritual ways to approach the Eucharist bear exploration such that all Christians can continue to sound the profundity of God’s gift of grace and cooperate with that grace towards God’s good effect.
The Inversal Unity in the Christian Power Dynamic
In this first section, we will lay the foundations for understanding the Eucharist as a tool for acquiring humility by exploring the nature of the cosmos and how the cosmos, as such, gives need for a certain type of lesson on the nature of power and its exercise. We will explore power as it could be understood in prelapsarian reality. We will see that though there is a hierarchy of God over humans, over Garden, at the same time God is the servant of the humans and Garden, and Humans are the servant of the Garden as well. We will see power as it is understood in post lapsarian reality, shot through with corruption, where humanity seeks to become tyrannical like we falsely imagine God to be. Lastly, we will seek to understand power as it should be understood in postlapsarian reality or as it will be understood in the Eschaton. This involves a reinstitution of proper power dynamics to the world.
Prelapsarian Hierarchy: Threefold relationship
We begin with power as much as we can understand it in prelapsarian reality. This is hard to reconstruct because the data is so sparse and when we seek to interpret that data we do so with the eyes and minds of postlapsarian creatures. The basics of Christian power dynamics were laid out in the treatise The Onesiman Interface,
Christian Power dynamics demand that the greater serve the lesser, and it is off this basic Christian teaching that Paul is offering his advice. It must be remembered that according to Paul in his letter to the Philippians, Jesus “ though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.” This is a high-christological reframing of Jesus’ admonition to the sons of thunder in Matthew chapter 20, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and the great ones make their authority over them felt. But it shall not be so among you. Rather, whoever wishes to be great among you shall be your servant;” This same sentiment is reiterated in 1Peter 5:3 and demonstrated by Jesus at The Last Supper in John’s gospel when he washes the disciples' feet.
These power dynamics express true Christian beatitude and will be present as the moral implementation and exercise of power from prelapsarian existence through to the Eschaton. One can be misled by the images one has of the hierarchies in heaven as they are popularly displayed artistically or even reviewing the first story of creation, where God is envisioned as the ultimate transcendence. We most certainly get a hierarchical sense from the first creation story and from the images of the Eschaton as they are relayed in the Book of Revelations. But it may be worth second glance at how and why those perceived hierarchies function so that we can move toward our goal of a deeper understanding of the Eucharist.
One way to view the first story of creation is to see it as working from simple to complex. God’s starts with the most basic division, light from darkness, and then God subsequently divides the heavens from the terrestrial plane and next the water from the land. Then God makes the most basic living beings, plantlife. Next God creates the most basic, clockwork-like, animated beings, the heavenly luminaries. Next God brings complex life into being, starting with the waters, the basic stuff of reality (Gen 1:2) then the sky and lastly the animals of the land. The final thing God creates is human beings, creatures made in his image and likeness. Our place in creation according to this story is laid out in the treatise Sacramental Cosmology,
A coherence theory of truth begs for teleology as opposed to validation. “Why everything?” is answerable in a sacramental cosmology in terms of communication. In the first creation story creation springs from the power of God’s Words. This implies that the thing made is a vast communication system. It speaks to a receiver of that communication built into the system itself, humans. Every aspect of this creation is built to communicate God’s love to a receiver of that communication and draw that receiver into a loving relationship with God. Every facet of our being as humans is constructed to receive the communication and activate the sanctifying grace by which the loving relationship becomes possible.
God then grants the humans “dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that crawl on the earth” In the second story of creation this dominion comes from the naming of the animals by the man. But in this second story of creation, we also learn that the “dominion” the man, Adam, has is one of “caretaker”, not the connotations of “lord and master”. Even in what seems like a straight hierarchy, God over man over animals and plants, there is a sense that the greater served the lessor. This begins with how God sets the environment for humanity to be sustained and in which humanity experiences love. The Christian power dynamics is driven home by the fact that in the second creation story, “The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and placed there the man whom he had formed.” This is the role of a servant, to plant a garden for someone else. The man is then placed in a position of service as well, “The Lord God then took the man and settled him in the Garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it.” This is interesting because the animated being, Adam, is caring for is the “lower life forms”, the plants, and those plants sustain him. This theme will need to be developed as we move through this treatise.
This awareness of the proper understanding and use of power fosters Christian beatitude. Where this beatitude is possessed; what is structurally a hierarchy is functionally a dynamic interplay of mutual service. God is over the humans because he creates and sustains them, but acts as a servant by planting a garden and creating companions for the man, who is a leisure to name them and reject them as his ultimate companion. The man is over the animals and Garden, but his job is to tend for the garden.
Functionally there is an inversal unity. This unity happens because the humans in the garden are cognitively and intuitively aware of the ontological worldview that was discussed in Christian Ontology. The humans experience the world as simple and manifold at the same time. Because they experience objects and relationships as equally real, and they have an objectively perfect loving relationship with God, each other and their environment. In such a world, leaders who are servants do not seem askew. With trinitarian ontology objects and relationships are seen as simple and manifold. The concept of a power dynamic that runs by inversal unity seeks to apply that ontology to power structures in order to demonstrate proper Christian power dynamics. All positions of power are geared toward the same end, expression of love, all exercises of power are one, yet there are many varieties. The most obvious way this is true is to take the highest and invert it, make it (at the same time as it is the highest) the lowest. This treatise will be an exploration of how the Son of God demonstrates the perfection of inversal unity as a lesson on Christian power dynamics, with a particular focus on eucharistic phenomenon. But in order to have the incarnation, we must first have the Fall.
The Postlapsarian Inversion
The treatise Compounding Concupiscence and Cross-Spectral Mutual Pedagogy discussed some aspects of the temptation story which may also be helpful for us here. That treatise discussed how tact the tempter took to distract eve was to paint God as a tyrant,
The cunning nature of the snake’s approach is to focus on the negative. God has forbidden the consumption of the fruit of The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but the snake attacks Eve with overbearing negativity, “Did God really say, ‘You shall not eat from any of the trees in the garden’?” God is seen as a tyrant who is filled with restriction. Eve counter’s with God’s goodness, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden;” and then reiterates God’s command, “it is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘You shall not eat it or even touch it, or else you will die.’” But an oft unnoticed detail here is that she is wrong. “The Lord God gave the man this order: You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden except the tree of knowledge of good and evil. From that tree you shall not eat; when you eat from it you shall die.” God did not say that they could not touch the tree.
It seems like an insignificant detail but it is of paramount importance to our purpose. Eve effectively doubled the burden of God’s command.
As noted, one thing that happens here is the conception of tyranny, a concept so foreign to the Garden of Eden that Eve can only go ever so very slightly down that road with the tempter. But once tyranny is an option it is an almost irresistible temptation even for the pure of heart, to grasp at an inappropriate authority out of a sense of wielding absolute power for “the greater good”. Adam and Eve seem to grasp at this fruit because, as Eve put is, “it is desirous to be wise”, but the implication is that this wisdom will be employed such that they can now be the tyrant who establishes the law for all of reality. Of course, in the actual state of affairs, there is no tyrant, only servants, but this is the deception of the tempter.
Once the Fall occurs, there is an inversion of reality. This inversion was noted in the treatise Corporeal Unitive Fulfillment in the Eschaton where we stated,
With the fall and the entrance of concupiscence there is a postlapsarian inversion. This postlapsarian inversion is easiest seen in the nudity of Adam and Eve, proper and appropriate in Paradise, and the nudity of Noah in Gen 9 which is improper after the fall. Or the fruitful tree of Life in Genesis becoming the dead wood of the cross in the gospels. In the case of eating and sex the postlapsarian reversal manifests as the socially applicable opposite of the purpose. The result of the Fall is death, thus the way eating abates death is on the opposite end of the human spectrum as its unifying purpose. It communally binds and individually sustains. In this individual nature of sustenance gluttony is more easily manifest as it ties food to an individual and therefore it more probably becomes a self centered activity. It is only secondarily that gluttony is a problem of pleasure, and that comes in the consummation of food and its enjoyment without gratitude. Gluttony is a far more serious spiritual danger than most are willing to admit in this day and age.
Lust is the capital sin that particularly relates to sexual activity. Once again the problem is not pleasure in and of itself. The pleasure of sex is a completely good thing if one expresses proper beatitude toward the appropriate partner and maintains the gratitude one owes to God for all his gifts. The fundamental problem of lust is objectification of the other. Sex is supposed to be one of the great unifiers as well as the multiplier human beings. Once again there is a postlapsarian inversion, the sin manifests as opposite of the purpose. In an objectifying relationship the procreative aspect of sexuality is ignored and instead of the unity of interpersonal being, one being treats the other as an alienated object of pleasure and/or subjugation. Again, the result of the Fall is death, the way sex abates death is on the opposite end of the human spectrum as its unifying purpose. It individually binds and communally sustains.
In the flow of salvation history, there was a turning away from the leader/servant after the Garden toward authoritarian monarchies and patriarchies that sought by strict discipline to order human civilization and culture. Much like how clothes are necessary in postlapsarian reality, though they were not in prelapsarian reality, hierarchies are necessary to keep order and peace, but they are not how God intended our relationships to be. Much like how clothes become a sign of status and divisiveness, think Joseph and his brothers, hierarchies are easily abused and though they are meant to serve order, they end up serving those at the top of the hierarchy. This is due to the aggregating effect of concupiscence into human structures of social sin. Our ontological view is thrown off and God, our neighbor, and our environment are all seen as only “other”. There is no communion. Because of this the hierarchies almost always end up benefiting the top in ever new and ever-evolving forms of tyranny. Sometimes this is even justified by claiming the tyranny of God as a source of the abuse of authority.
In the Garden, there would be no need of conception of a hierarchical structure. In postlapsarian reality concupiscence typically corrupts, the aid supplied by God. When humans willfully cooperate with concupiscence divine aid becomes a hindrance. We noted how the unity of sex is corrupted by the objectification of lust. The community of eating is ruined by the self-centered ingratitude of gluttony. Now we have the protection and order that is supposed to be offered by a hierarchy manifesting as social injustice, such that those who are meant to be the shepherds, protectors and servants of the people end up being the abusers and oppressors. Nowhere in the bible is this more clear than in 1 Samuel chapter 8 where Samuel offers a warning to the Israelites concerning their request for a king,
Samuel was displeased when they said, “Give us a king to rule us.” But he prayed to the Lord.
The Lord said: Listen to whatever the people say. You are not the one they are rejecting. They are rejecting me as their king. They are acting toward you just as they have acted from the day I brought them up from Egypt to this very day, deserting me to serve other gods. Now listen to them; but at the same time, give them a solemn warning and inform them of the rights of the king who will rule them.
Samuel delivered the message of the Lord in full to those who were asking him for a king. He told them: “The governance of the king who will rule you will be as follows: He will take your sons and assign them to his chariots and horses, and they will run before his chariot. He will appoint from among them his commanders of thousands and of hundreds. He will make them do his plowing and harvesting and produce his weapons of war and chariotry. He will use your daughters as perfumers, cooks, and bakers. He will take your best fields, vineyards, and olive groves, and give them to his servants. He will tithe your crops and grape harvests to give to his officials and his servants. He will take your male and female slaves, as well as your best oxen and donkeys, and use them to do his work. He will also tithe your flocks. As for you, you will become his slaves. On that day you will cry out because of the king whom you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you on that day.”
And with the Kings of Israel, the general trend follows his warning. The first king, Saul, becomes corrupted and quickly follows this pattern. The second King, David is not perfect, but he is humble before God and has a sincere heart, he is the greatest king of Israel. The third king starts off well, but sees political alliance and economic calculation as more important than God. The culture of his kingship leads Israel astray and ultimately leads to the civil war the splits Israel, from that point on the lineage of the kings is one more horrible than the last with a few rare exceptions.
Patriarchy and Monarchy themselves are not an end for God. The treatise The Dysfunctional Human Family and the Nontraditional Holy Family documented how the structures are not the important thing for the development of salvation history, the relationships are. These structures are a stop-gap measure for God to offer a safe social environment, but it is useful only in so much as it provides that security. The job of the prophets is the bring the monarchy to a sense of their mission. This tradition can be seen as beginning with both Samuel and Nathan reprimanding Saul and David.
These reprimands include crimes of injustice against the populace of Israel and misdeeds that lead the people astray, morally and religiously. It is through the prophets that God slowly prepares humanity for the coming of the King of Kings by guiding the leadership toward a sense of inversal unity. Their job is to bring the kings back to a sense that they are the servants of the people. With that lesson in hand, the Jewish people are ready to host the Messiah. The oppressive nature of the hierarchies of the successive imperial powers of the world has certainly made the mass populace ready to hear the good news. That good news is freedom from the powers of this world, and a God who expresses love and seeks to give us comfort and redemption.
Divine Descent and Christian Power Dynamics
Any religion teacher will point out that “the Jews expected a warrior king as their messiah, that’s why they didn’t recognize Jesus.” This may not be exactly true. With the coming of the messiah, they expect Israel to be a free functioning kingdom and the Gentiles to turn to a covenantal relationship with God because of the example set by the nation of Israel. When a person dies without this happening, they seem to be out of the running. The Christian tradition has clever and profound ways of answering this criticism, but this is beyond the scope of our present task. For now, it suffices to say, “when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to ransom those under the law, so that we might receive adoption. As proof that you are children, God sent the spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying out, ‘Abba, Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.” Paul is adamant that what we have in Christ is freedom, yet that freedom is not freedom from law or hierarchy, but freedom from oppression and tyranny.
Christianity is a religion of fulfillment. The structures we have now as stopgaps for keeping order will be fulfilled such that oppressive hierarchies will disappear and hierarchies that exhibit Christian power dynamics, where the greatest serve the least and there is no sense of pretension of superiority. How the messiah effects this is through a series of descents into created reality to demonstrate inversal unity, that power structure where the lesson of Christian ontology is applied, power is simple and manifold at the same time, it is distinguishable in function, but teleologically it all points to the same end, mutual service and mutual love.
It is through a series of humblings that the Son of God will teach us about humility. In these humblings, the Son of God will also effect in us a humility such that we ourselves can begin to demonstrate proper Christian power dynamics because we have an experience of that inversal unity through the Eucharist. The first descent will be from divinity to humanity, true God and True man. The second realm will be from humanity to the Garden, the environment, or the accidents of bread. The true body and blood but manifest as our nurturing environment, bread. The last descent will be into the sinner, the being who is wreaking such havoc on God’s plan. Through the Eucharist God communes with the sinner, sanctifies the sinner and makes the sinner his temple.
In this first section, we have sought to lay the foundations for understanding the Eucharist as a tool for acquiring humility by exploring the nature of the cosmos. We explored power as it could be understood in prelapsarian reality, as it is understood in postlapsarian reality, and as it should be understood in postlapsarian reality or as it will be understood in the Eschaton.
In the next section, we begin a process that will allow for the skill of narrative appropriation in order to garner an experience of inversal unity from the sacred ritual of the Eucharist. We will point out somehow often eucharistic theology fails to supply an adequate eucharistic spirituality. We will move beyond speculation concerning essence and substance toward narrative appropriation. We will then lay out our primary narrative, the triple descent of the Son of God. Each descent will demonstrate a new level of humility and reveal something new about the nature of Christian power dynamics. The first descent explored will be the divine to the human. The second descent will go from the human to food. The last descent will be from the food to the sinner.
The Divine Triple Descent and Humility
In the last section, we sought to lay the foundations for understanding the Eucharist as a tool for acquiring humility by exploring the nature of the cosmos and how the cosmos. We explored power as it could be understood in prelapsarian reality, as it is understood in postlapsarian reality, and as it should be understood in postlapsarian reality or as it will be understood in the Eschaton.
In this section, we begin a process that will allow for the skill of narrative appropriation. After pointing out some deficiencies that eucharistic theology has in supplying a Eucharistic spirituality we will lay out our primary narrative, the triple descent of the Son of God. The first descent explored will be the divine to the human. This descent will be demonstrated as familiar to humanity and graspable because of our unfortunate desire to be tyrannical gods ourselves. The second descent will go from the human to food. This descent is harder for us to grasp, but it will be demonstrated that even this reality was prepared for throughout human history by a pan-human ritual archetype. We will demonstrate how by this descent God brings together all aspects of Paradise, divinity, humanity, and the necessary environment of the Garden in order to demonstrate the perfection of inversal unity. After this, we will move to the last descent from the food to the sinner. By this descent, we will learn how the Eucharist is an invitation to the sinner and the world to the Eschaton. We shall also see how this descent facilitates the destruction of our sin upon the cross of Christ, preparing us to respond to that invitation affirmatively.
Prologue: Essence and Accidents
When Catholics discuss the Eucharist a primary assertion is that it is the true body and blood of Christ. When developing a spirituality revolving around the celebration of the Eucharist this fact is of supremative importance, especially since the Reformation when some varieties of Protestants have denied this. It seems to be important in modern western culture to philosophically and/or intellectually “understand” this mystery. This plays out in a very cognitive focused (as opposed to cultural and/or archetypal) exercise of conscious ritual investment. This need is possibly because of the vicious debates throughout the reformation. These debates were then appropriated by a subset of secular culture which has great disdain for anything religious and sees it as backward uninformed superstition. It seems a natural response to demonstrate the deep thought that tradition has brought to bear as it has reflected over two millennia on the nature of the Eucharist, not to mention some of the exciting recent frameworks for understanding.
The major line of thought concerning the transformation in the Catholic tradition concerns transubstantiation. This term was first used in the 12th century and finds its first major magisterial backing in the Fourth Lateran Council,
There is indeed one universal church of the faithful, outside of which nobody at all is saved, in which Jesus Christ is both priest and sacrifice. His body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been changed in substance [transubstantiated], by God's power, into his body and blood, so that in order to achieve this mystery of unity we receive from God what he received from us.
Thomas Aquinas then brings Aristotelian philosophy to bear and fills out what transubstantiation means in an organized manner using that cosmology. For Aristotle, everything has a “nature” or “substance” in it that gives it its identity as the “thing” that it is. This nature or substance is permanent and immutable. So a horse had “the substance of a horse”, a boat has “the substance of a boat”, a human has “the substance of a human, human nature”. This “inner substance” makes the thing what it is. The parts of any reality that we observe are mutable and ever-changing. So anything that is observable by the senses is not a nature or substance. The changeable things that we observe are the accidental or formal features of that individual things, not its nature. The fact that a person is fat or old or blond or has ten fingers could change, but that they are human could not. These changeable things are not the substance of the subject.
Transubstantiation is exactly what it sounds like. The substance of the bread changes to the substance of the body of Christ and the substance of the wine changes into the substance of the blood of Christ. But in this miracle, the accidents of bread and wine remain. So any observation of the sense cannot validate the miracle. It is a great test of faith. In Sum P3: Q75: A4 Aquinas sums up his position,
But God is infinite act, as stated in I:7:1; III:26:2; hence His action extends to the whole nature of being. Therefore He can work not only formal conversion, so that diverse forms succeed each other in the same subject; but also the change of all being, so that, to wit, the whole substance of one thing be changed into the whole substance of another. And this is done by Divine power in this sacrament; for the whole substance of the bread is changed into the whole substance of Christ's body, and the whole substance of the wine into the whole substance of Christ's blood. Hence this is not a formal, but a substantial conversion; nor is it a kind of natural movement: but, with a name of its own, it can be called "transubstantiation."
With the promulgation of the Council of Trent the concept of transubstantiation took on dogmatic weight
And because that Christ, our Redeemer, declared that which He offered under the species of bread to be truly His own body, therefore has it ever been a firm belief in the Church of God, and this holy Synod doth now declare it anew, that, by the consecration of the bread and of the wine, a conversion is made of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of His blood; which conversion is, by the holy Catholic Church, suitably and properly called Transubstantiation.
The educated catholic would be able to to give a rudimentary summary such as this on the meaning of transubstantiation (but, perhaps, without the citation). If one takes the time to educate oneself on the Eucharist as a Catholic, this idea is the one to get down. However, the entire exercise is based on a cosmology that is only possibly synchronistic with a Christian worldview and not an embodiment of it. The treatise Sacramental Cosmology conceived of a philosophical way of grasping transubstantiation, but through natural theology as opposed to Aristotelian philosophy. That treatise conceived of how there is a natural alchemy, a development and shifting from one form to another, from thing to thing.
First we will explore what we will call natural alchemy, that is, the way that in nature things seem to shift form constantly. In the beginning was water and God creates through his Word and draws all that is out of the water. Each other example of fundamental sacral matter naturally and scientifically has its origin in water. Humans spring not only from the water of the womb, but from the waters of the planet as well, as did all life. Water falls from the heavens, seeps into the ground, enters a seed and becomes grapes, olives, and wheat. Humans consume the bread, the water, the wine, the oil and it sustains their being and becomes one with them. Humans die and dissolve into the ground and into the water, and are consumed by the plants becoming them.
We distinguished natural alchemy from divine alchemy, carefully noting how neither is more “miraculous” than the other because when one has a sacramental cosmology all things are miraculous. We said that divine alchemy is when God works outside of natural expectation [natural alchemy] to change the form or nature of a thing. This phenomenon is not “explicable” and since the treatise was about sacramental cosmology (the entire universe) we spent our time relating the miracles of divine alchemy with tandem demonstrations of natural alchemy. In our examples of each, the transformations of bread and wine were discussed. We traced the shifting of body to bread and wine to blood according to natural alchemy,
The same dynamic plays out in the change from water to wine as well as the change from wine to blood. These miracles are quite common according to natural alchemy. Water falls from the heavens is drunk by the vines and becomes grapes, which, by the work of human hands, becomes wine. Wine is consumed by the human and becomes blood when the blood absorbs it . . .
This leads to the other species of the Eucharist and the center of the Christian faith, the bread, which is the Body of Christ. Once again, by natural alchemy, bodies do become bread in as much as in death we deteriorate into the ground and our dissolution feeds the wheat that is ground to become the bread. By this interrelation of life and death according to the natural alchemy, we are introduced to the miracle of divine alchemy, once again, a difference of time, timing and circumstances. It happens immediately as opposed to the normal span of deterioration, it happens in the context of the liturgical prayers and not in the ordinary circumstances.
The symbolic analysis given in that treatise concerned the deep meaning of life and death, theodicy and teleology. We sought to show that the miracles of divine alchemy cued us into mysteries we can also experience as part of the natural order. The grace of the sacraments effectively applied to our entire life. Our purpose here is to garner an experience of the inversal unity demonstrated in Christian power dynamics. Our methodology will be narrative appropriation through conscious ritual investment, which uses the skills of somnium spirituality. The readers may recall that somnium spirituality brings an awareness of the dream world into the waking world such that the symbolic language of calculated ritual will be more effective. Narrative appropriation recognizes that meaningful narrative invests the individual with meaning, purpose, character, and motivation in life. Narrative appropriation makes this investment regardless of willful participation, it can operate consciously or unconsciously. It is the skill of conscious narrative appropriation to be aware of the narratives one is buying into in order to consciously shape one’s life, much like it is the skill of somnium spirituality to bring consciousness awareness to the dream world and the meaning of the dream world to the waking world.
Given Christian ontology and the meaning of inversal unity, the effect of “communion” as a ritual makes absolute sense. For narrative appropriation through conscious ritual investment possessing one or two cognitive tricks is not quite enough to achieve the depths needed. Thus all the skills we have discussed in former treatsises are being brought to bear. This is fitting since the Eucharist is the source and summit of our religious life, thus any skill we garner can be applicable, and all avenues should be at least minimally explored by the spiritual seeker in order to get the fullest experience of the Eucharist possible.
For this the remainder of this section we will work on the cosmological end to fill out the overarching narrative required for a more effective experience of narrative appropriation through conscious ritual investment. In the next section, we will expand that narrative, especially as it concerned lucid waking techniques as we encounter them in the waking world by which one will engage the ritual of the Eucharist as it takes place.
First Descent: From God to Human
A major narrative that conveys how God demonstrates and effects the inversal unity of Christian power dynamics is the divine triple descent. The first descent is the descent from God to human. This is mind-jarringly contradictory for the philosophical mind to grasp but rather easy for the popular mind to grasp.
There have been a host of traditions in various religions paving the way for this reality such that most humans have no problem with gods descending to become human. In various mythological schemas of paganism, gods become human, losing their divinity because they are punished, gods take the form of humans in order to teach lessons, convey information, seduce the daughters of men etc. though in this case, they are still gods, not really humans. There are also a host of halfbreed heroes who have superhuman powers but aren’t quite a god or a human.
In the treatise Cosmic Evangelization we discussed how these stories and even possible realities they may indicate can be preparers for the coming of the Word through the incarnation. That treatise discussed three methodologies for cosmic evangelization by exploring three basic strategies, fulfillment, conversion and replacement. In this treatise, it is simply enough to note that the mythologies paved the way for the recognition of God incarnate, without much philosophical reflection. This is all the better because most people do not have the leisure of philosophical speculation. At the same time, a tradition must take the time to systematically analyze its beliefs and make sense of them.
In Christian History this begins to take place Christologically in the patristic period with the great debates and councils of that time. It is at this time that Christianity seeks to dogmatically cleanse itself from all the mythical varieties of god and human mingling related above. These myths became windows into who Christ is in the form of the Christological assertions of Apollinarianism, docetism, Arianism et al. Most of the language that takes place concerning Jesus as true God and true man takes place as structured by these rigorous debates. This puts the focus on the nature or essence of who Jesus is, keeping academic christological studies on the ontological level.
Often in Christian history, the focus has been on Jesus’ divine nature. This is an obvious focus because it is what makes him unique among beings. He presences complete and absolute divinity. He is not simply a garden variety hero. Yet this can be so central a focus as to allow the pious to lose any sense of Jesus’ humanity. It is the opposite problem that Pius XII notes in his encyclical Sempiternus Rex Christus,
While there is no reason why the humanity of Christ should not be studied more deeply also from a psychological point of view, there are, nevertheless, some who, in their arduous pursuit, desert the ancient teachings more than is right, and make an erroneous use of the authority of the definition of Chalcedon to support their new ideas.
These emphasize the state and condition of Christ's human nature to such an extent as to make it seem [2] something existing in its own right (subjectum quoddam sui juris), and not as subsisting in the Word itself. But the council of Chalcedon in full accord with that of Ephesus, clearly asserts that both natures are united in 'One Person and subsistence', and rules out the placing of two individuals in Christ, as if some one man, completely autonomous in himself, had been taken up and placed by the side of the Word.
A balance of study either way is important to keep in mind the fact that Jesus is one person. The treatise Christian Ontology worked from an ontological view to discuss how these two natures are truly one in will and in personhood through a particular understanding of ontology. It was stated in that treatise,
The Son of God, who is distinct from the Father but in the unity of the Holy Spirit is one with the Father, is from the beginning of his conception one with the human nature of Jesus of Nazareth in the union of perfect love that is the Spirit. These two natures are truly distinct, and actually have two distinct wills. But, the human will is completely subservient to the divine out of love making them act as one. With this knowledge you can hear Jesus say in John’s gospel I and the Father are one, but four chapters later say the Father is greater than I, and it makes sense, not in a switch hitting way where human Jesus is saying one and divine Jesus is saying the other, but because they are simultaneously true.
In this treatise, we wish to fill out the subservience mention in that treatise. Our goal is to be able to experience the Eucharist as a sacrament that gifts grace, the grace we will be exploring is humility. The perfect Christological passage for this development is Philippians 2:3-11
Do nothing out of selfishness or out of vainglory; rather, humbly regard others as more important than yourselves, each looking out not for his own interests, but [also] everyone for those of others.
Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus,
Who, though he was in the form of God.
did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.
Rather, he emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
coming in human likeness;
and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself,
becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.
Because of this, God greatly exalted him
and bestowed on him the name
that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
This passage lines up well with the Fall of Genesis 3, in that it reminds us of what “grasping” for equality with God can have happen. Jesus is the incarnate Word of God, yet Christian power dynamics are in play. The word comes to redeem humanity, he comes as a servant. This incarnation is the first example of such a dramatic display of inversal unity since the Fall.
The passage tries to strike a balance between the sheer humbling effect of taking on human nature yet at the same time retain, for the reader, the special nature of who Jesus actually is. This is the hard balancing act of humility even for a simple human, the sense of infinite worth as a creature made in the image and likeness of God, yet at the same time, compared to God a creature who measures up as almost nothing. For Christ, this balance is even harder struck, because he is God, not just an image and likeness, but as far as humans go, he is the lowliest. We pointed out the extremity of his humble circumstances as the opening salvo of the treatise Divine Gender Transcendence and Incarnational Divine Presence
The gospels make clear he was a born in poverty and spent his end years homeless. He was born in a conquered nation, and in that nation he was born in a province that was poorer and despised by the rest of Israel (Jn 1:46). He was conceived outside of wedlock and by the end of his life he was a legally convicted criminal, subjected to the harshest punitive measure, capital punishment. The day that he died his death was not noted by anyone who would be considered in anyway important to the wider dominant Roman society.
The best window into the humility of Jesus’ circumstances is the suffering servant song of Isaiah where it is very clear that “He had no majestic bearing to catch our eye, No beauty to draw us to him.” In Catholic culture, the academic focus on ontology when speaking of the incarnation, demonstrated throughout Pius XII’s encyclical, has its pious counterbalance in the popular devotions of the nativity during the celebration of the incarnation at Christmas. The humble prefer to celebrate the humble origins of the Messiah in Bethlehem rather than ontological parsings.
The contrast between his divine nature and his circumstances as a human in human society would take the most skilled practice of humility. The unity present in divinity taking on human nature in such a lowly fashion is the first descent of God’s triple descent in order to teach humility and effect inversal unity. Most of Christ’s life is not marked by dramatic miracles. These “hidden years” must have been noncontroversial and relatively uneventful such that they were not recorded. Once in his ministry, according to Mark’s gospel, even Jesus’ identity as the Messiah, much more his divine nature, is hidden by the messianic secret. Thematically, Mark does not want the people to know who Jesus is until his entire mission can be read through the lens of his most humbling death. Previous to his death he shared his last meal with his apostles. It was in this meal that the second and the beginning of the third descent takes place.
The Second Descent: God- Human Descends into Food
Though the first descent for God to human seems baffling, it is almost more acceptable than the second descent, from human to food. Since God is all powerful, he could conceivably become a sentient human, because we all want to attain some sort of all-powerful status as sentient beings. That disordered desire opens us to the possibility. But that a human could become inanimate food seems impossible and bizarre unless one is meditating on bio-death and decomposition, and no one wants to meditate on that. Also, why choose such a seemingly bizarre and disconnected reality in order to find the deepest communion? Since the ritual presents as so unusual the techniques for conscious ritual investment may be useful given intuitive ritual investment is lacking. It must be remembered that the technique of conscious ritual investment works on three levels a teleological level, a cognitive level and on the level of somnium spirituality. The purpose of this treatise is not to provide an in-depth analysis of the ritual of the Eucharist, but a foray into this technique may be helpful for a better-developed sense of the second divine descent.
The treatise Intuitive Ritual Investment and Conscious Ritual Investment applied the cosmological stage of conscious ritual investment to ritual itself, and how the ritual can allow the participant to transcend space and time. This would be true in our present ritual too, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says in article 1366,
The Eucharist is thus a sacrifice because it re-presents (makes present) the sacrifice of the cross, because it is its memorial and because it applies its fruit:
[Christ], our Lord and God, was once and for all to offer himself to God the Father by his death on the altar of the cross, to accomplish there an everlasting redemption. But because his priesthood was not to end with his death, at the Last Supper "on the night when he was betrayed," [he wanted] to leave to his beloved spouse the Church a visible sacrifice (as the nature of man demands) by which the bloody sacrifice which he was to accomplish once for all on the cross would be re-presented, its memory perpetuated until the end of the world, and its salutary power be applied to the forgiveness of the sins we daily commit.
But another cosmological avenue to be explored here is ontological, such as was discussed in the treatise Sacramental Cosmology. Here we have a cosmological adjustment, such as one needs for proper conscious ritual investment in the Eucharist. The distinction we made between natural alchemy and divine alchemy gives the scientifically geared mind access to the possibility that humans can become food, bread, and wine. The Eucharistic miracle, as an act of divine alchemy, takes place as part of a ritual where the participants consume the body and blood. Thus step two in the process of conscious ritual investment may yield some helpful symbology. In this step, the practitioner is called to research the symbolic structure of the ritual and similar instances of this type of ritual across human history and culture. This wide view approach allows the practitioner to measure repetitive symbology and approach the ritual from different angles.
In our case the question is not the practice or act of the ritual, it’s the effect, that body and blood become bread and wine. That seems oddly phrased, “isn’t it the other way around?”, but that effect is taken from the other direction and encapsulates the second descent. This descent happens the night before Jesus Dies, which is an inversion itself, by natural alchemy, we become food after we die. The idea that humans become food and that gods become food is not unique to Christianity. In his seminal work, The Golden Bough Sir James Frazer recounts,
the ancient Mexicans, even before the arrival of Christian missionaries, were fully acquainted with the doctrine of transubstantiation and acted upon it in the solemn rites of their religion. They believed that by consecrating bread their priests could turn it into the very body of their god, so that all who thereupon partook of the consecrated bread entered into a mystic communion with the deity by receiving a portion of his divine substance into themselves. The doctrine of transubstantiation, or the magical conversion of bread into flesh, was also familiar to the Aryans of ancient India long before the spread and even the rise of Christianity. The Brahmans taught that the rice-cakes offered in sacrifice were substitutes for human beings, and that they were actually converted into the real bodies of men by the manipulation of the priest.
He reaches these conclusions by a painfully details account of how these various cultures ritually enact this effect. There does seem to be a pan-human awareness of the possibility of gods and humans, through calculated ritual, becoming bread. Again, such an awareness should not cause dismay, but be recognized as a prefiguration, or queuing into necessary information such that humanity can recognize God’s approach in the Eucharist.
The last step of conscious ritual investment is the application of lucid waking. For our purposes, an analysis of the symbolism involved as we can garner it from the same analysis we would apply to the dream world may benefit.
Once I had a dream, a man was hanging from a tree like a piece of fruit and he was picked off the tree by his friends. Then they tore the man apart and came and gave us pieces to eat but when we ate and drank it, it was bread and wine. When I ate it I felt alive and free.
The tree is much like the trees in the Garden of Eden where grasping for the fruit caused the ruination of humanity. In this case, the tree offers fruit that gives life, not just biologically, which fruit usually does, but everlasting life. It seems odd to view be eating a human body as a good thing. But as was pointed out in Divine Gender Transcendence and Incarnational Divine Presence it’s not so odd taken from the correct prospective,
In John’s Gospel the fact is brought up in the eucharistic discourses, “The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us [his] flesh to eat?’ Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.” (Jn 6:52-53) The idea of Jesus giving his body to eat gave rise to accusations of cannibalism against the early church and today non-believers seeking to get a rise out of Christians jestfully call for defense against the same charge. It is a just question, men usually do not give their bodies for others to eat. But how typically masculine an outlook because, of course, women do all the time and a person aligned to the feminine would be keenly aware of how a person can give someone their flesh to eat, and why that would not even slightly conjure the image of brutal cannibalism, but instead an image of maternal nurturing.
As we discussed in Somnium Spirituality a lucid waking experience simply brings the practice of lucid dreaming to the waking world. When one brings knowledge of the dream world to the waking world, then many of the restrictions that the physical world places on the waking world are released, because strict empiricism is mitigated and applied only to it’s proper use as opposed to the entire waking world. As we encounter this ritual, the symbology of myth and dream are very present and entering into the rite with an eye toward lucid waking can be of aid.
In the dream world, gender when flip-flopped can be symbolic of life generation. To eat the body is what all children did before the use of bottles. To see the body as “food” in a dream and for it to be a body would resonate in all these ways given the general character of the dream. As was pointed out in Divine Gender Transcendence and Incarnational Divine Presence the exterior appearance of the eucharistic matter is masculine, bread and wine, relating back to the man’s purpose and life-sustaining ability in the Garden, tilling the soil. The substantial or essential reality is indicative of feminine creative capacity, eating the body, breastfeeding, and blood, menstruation. These powers are one way the man and the woman share in the image and likeness of God, who is the ultimate creator and sustainer.
When Christ becomes bread it is a great example of inversal unity. Food is non-sentient, thus it is most certainly “lesser” than a sentient being. For God to move from absolute sentience and power to the state of finite humanity is humble enough, but then to move to an instrumental object of sustenance seems beyond the pale of humiliation. To view food as simply an instrumental object is not new. It is the temptation of the villagers in John’s gospel after Jesus has multiplied the loaves. They desire to make him king because he can feed them. It is also a temptation of Jesus when the tempter comes to him in Matthew's gospel. The tempter asked him to command the stones to become loaves of bread. This temptation is not at all out of the realm of possibility. By natural alchemy, the tempter is simply describing farming. By divine alchemy Jesus, by his power, could do it immediately, and perhaps people would make him king, as the tempter went on to relay. In modern times we have come to worship both temporal power and our ability to produce food, reducing it to an almost medical instrument. But the miracles involving multiplication of loaves and transformation of bread to body are meant to convey deeper meanings, “Man does not live by bread alone. . . The Lord, your God, shall you worship and him alone shall you serve.”
By becoming food, The Son of God is not only cueing into the already existing pan-human ritual archetype of “the god becoming food” hinted at in The Golden Bough in order to facilitate evangelization of the Gospel. By Becoming food, the Son of God is taking another step toward humiliation so as to demonstrate inversal unity, that the greatest serves the least and in the beginning, we were all one level even though there existed a hierarchy. In effect, the first two descents drag divinity through the entire hierarchy, binding it all into the inversal unity of Paradise.
One can begin to see that the species of the Eucharist itself contains all elements of the original hierarchy of Paradise within it, yet it abides as one reality, a perfect example of the true inversal unity of Paradise. It contains the soul and divinity of Christ, thus it contains the nature of humanity and the nature of divinity. It also contains the accidents of the sustaining elements of the environment of the Garden that sustain humanity, bread, and wine, grain and fruit, which the man would gather from the soil. One will notice that at the reception of the Eucharist all elements necessary to sustain the Church is present according to how the matter was discussed in Sacramental Cosmology.
The physical things you need to continue Christianity are the things one needs to carry on the sacramental system of the Church. Church buildings and vestments, statue and icons, manuscripts and vessels, none of these things are necessary as they exist right now, for there was a time when Christianity did not have them. Instead what is needed is the deposit of faith, the basic information, which would include the narrative of salvation history, and the “form” of the sacraments, that is, the words spoken in conjunction with the matter that make the sacramental ritual effective. The only other thing needed is the “matter” of the sacraments, the physical things needed in order to make the sacral system function. Assuming the information is retained by memory or inspiration, the only thing left required to preserve Christianity is water, wheat flour, grape wine, olive oil and three humans; one female two males.
In mass the participants have heard the scriptures, rekindling the deposit of faith. The host is made of wheat flour, oil, and water. The wine has water poured into it. The priest is present, the community is present.
According to our sacramental cosmology everything you need is present in the Eucharist. This makes sense because the Eucharist presents Paradise. In Paradise the Garden of Eden is the matrix through which humans live out their relationship with God. This physical environment has a part to play in our relationship with God. The host itself is Paradise, the cup contains Paradise, yet they appear as the lowliest element of that Paradise. The greatest has become the least of Paradise and vice versa. With this descent complete the perfect inversal unity of Paradise is demonstrated The Son of God.
This looking backward, a perfection we cannot reach, jettisons the mind forward toward the Eschaton, a time to come when the kingdom of God is complete and again the perfect implementation of Christian power dynamics is once again experienced through inversal unity. The Eucharist is often noted as a “pledge and foretaste” of the life to come. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says in article 1402
In an ancient prayer the Church acclaims the mystery of the Eucharist: "O sacred banquet in which Christ is received as food, the memory of his Passion is renewed, the soul is filled with grace and a pledge of the life to come is given to us." If the Eucharist is the memorial of the Passover of the Lord Jesus, if by our communion at the altar we are filled "with every heavenly blessing and grace,” then the Eucharist is also an anticipation of the heavenly glory.
Given that the Eucharist presents all three parts of Paradise, God, Humanity, and the Garden, it presents the perfection of Paradise to us and invites us toward that perfection of the Eschaton. St. John Paul II describes how the Eucharist points to the Eschaton in his encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia,
The eschatological tension kindled by the Eucharist expresses and reinforces our communion with the Church in heaven. It is not by chance that the Eastern Anaphoras and the Latin Eucharistic Prayers honour Mary, the ever-Virgin Mother of Jesus Christ our Lord and God, the angels, the holy apostles, the glorious martyrs and all the saints. This is an aspect of the Eucharist which merits greater attention: in celebrating the sacrifice of the Lamb, we are united to the heavenly “liturgy” and become part of that great multitude which cries out: “Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Rev7:10). The Eucharist is truly a glimpse of heaven appearing on earth. It is a glorious ray of the heavenly Jerusalem which pierces the clouds of our history and lights up our journey.
His description is of the gathering in prayer and sacrifice of the Church, both terrestrial and celestial, at the moment of consecration. Our focus is on The Son’s descent from divine, to God-man, to accidents of the material of the Garden that present the essence of God-man and in that presentation, the species of the Eucharist presents the seed of the Eschaton. But now there is the desire of God to invite the entirety of postlapsarian humanity to the final Paradise of the Eschaton. Again, with this descent complete and the perfect inversal unity of Paradise demonstrated The Son of God descends one more time into an even further humbling situation in order to actualize that invitation.
The Third Descent: Bread Descends into the Sinner
The third divine descent is one that offers communion between the sinner and divinity. This happens during the eucharistic ritual. The members eat the body and drink the blood of Christ. General piety reminds us that this is a great sign of God’s sustenance, which is a humbling thing. This is true, bread is sustenance, just as God is. Even moderately reflected upon, these symbols make more sense and help one grasp one’s finitude and dependence. This helpful meditation is brilliantly demonstrated in the prayer that Jesus taught us. In the Lord’s Prayer we ask God to give us this day our “daily” bread. But the word for “Daily” or epiousian is practically unique to that particular passage of the scriptures. Daily is an acceptable translation, but it implies the process of “dailyness”. That is, it implies a sense of perpetual or continual sustenance as opposed to simply an instance each day. This connotation springs from the etymological roots of the term, epi- super or above and ousian- substance or essence (philosophically). The prayer seems to be pointing out the very special nature of the Eucharistic species.
The meditation on sustenance is a very helpful one when engaging in the Eucharist. However, in this treatise, our focus is on the lessons of the divine descent, how that relates to Christian power dynamics, how it demonstrates inversal unity and how we can use that information. The short explanation is that The Eucharist, as a ritual, effects the final descent. Again, we discussed in the treatise Sacramental Cosmology a constant divine alchemy in our sacramental ritual system whereby the form or nature of things changes. In this case, the simple change is summed up in the popular wisdom, “you are what you eat” which is both biologically and spiritually true. In The Eucharist, you consume the accidents of bread, it dissolves into your being and becomes part of who you are. The same is true according to grace and spirit regarding the natures of Christ’s person.
The Son of God descends into us, sinners though we are, to demonstrate something about the pledge and foretaste of the Eschaton. The foretaste is that we ingest every essential part of Paradise when we ingest The Eucharist. The pledge come through the transformation offered by the grace of The Eucharist and the effective communion with (identification with) the sinner. This is a perfect demonstration of Christian power dynamics as well as inversal unity, but in postlapsarian reality as opposed to the Garden or the Eschaton. The greatest, the sinless, serves the lessor, the sinner, and the manner of service is communion as an invitation to the Eschaton.
This communion has much to say about the nature of power dynamics and the nature of a Christian’s relationship to society and the non-christian world. The third descent of the Son reminds us that, though periods of withdrawal (such as Jesus often enjoyed according to Mark’s gospel) are helpful, the general stance of God and therefore the Christian in his image and likeness, is engagement. Christians watchwords such as fulfillment, atonement, redemption, incarnation, among many others, remind us that no person or peoples are beyond the reach of God’s grace. Thus, if one considers a position such as “the Benedict option” and by that one means complete withdrawal from a corrupt world, one cannot sustain, one would either be driven by the gospel to engage or abandon the gospel. A brief overview of the development of religious orders shows this very process play out over centuries.
When consecrated life first got underway, it was by means of hermits in the deserts of Egypt, they had a spirituality of withdrawal from the corrupt world and solitary existence. But unlike Buddhism, Christianity does not work in solitary. One at least needs Jesus, and also one needs the Church community. These hermits quickly realized this and bonded together and formed the first Christian cenobite communities. Even then they did not desire to engage the world, but rather escape the world and become experts in prayer. These cenobite communities became the great monastic structures of medieval Europe, gaining secular power by the acquisition of land and serfs. The spirituality of cloistered orders such as the Benedictines was one of escapism from the world and seeking the Eschaton by self-sufficient life according to a perfect rule. Then as urban centers grew there was a shift from monk to mendicant. The monk realized that walling themselves away from society was not truly fulfilling the great commision of the gospel. From this one sees the rise of orders such as the Franciscans and Dominicans, who see their job as preaching the gospel to those who are disposed to hear within Christianity and ultimately outside of it. These orders originally own no land and were located in the urban centers as opposed to the rural tracts of the monastery. The members begged their bread and engaged the populace out of a sense of evangelical zeal. Their attitude reflected the zeal of the Son who comes to sinful humanity, not escapes it. Once the New World was discovered there arose a host of missionary orders who engaged in the work of God. They went beyond the scope of reinvigorating Christian lands and missionized foreign lands. As the industrial revolution ramped up, they began to integrate into society completely on the secular level running hospitals, schools, serving the poor and orphans where they lived.
This development of consecrated life through history shows inversal unity at it’s best. The consecrated are those who are dedicated to the evangelical councils and are considered the elite of Catholicism by some. This elitism was certainly the attitude of the original hermits who withdrew because they felt the world was corrupt. By the end of the process, the communities had completely merged with the “outside world” in order to serve. The effect of the third descent of the Son from Bread to the sinner is this same communion. The absolute elite, the Son of God, communes with the sinner in order to be our servant, to offer us healing, redemption, atonement etc. One cannot admit to the first or third descent of the Son and maintain an escapist or rejectionist mentality toward anyone.
The effect of the descent of the Son from bread to sinner in terms of inversal unity is two-fold. There is a personal effect of communion between The Son of God and the individual, then there is the effect of communion between Christ and his Church. Through the Eucharist, Christ becomes one with the individual sinner who is a temple of the Holy Spirit through baptism and becomes a tabernacle of the body of Christ. Through the Eucharist, Christ becomes one with the Church which is his mystical body. Each of these communions has a particular effect. The effect of personal communion is that the sinner purified of the guilt of venial sin and becomes a living tabernacle. Christ is Physically present within them, and by that relationship, the sinner becomes a dwelling place of divinity. But the effects go deeper than even this.
Christ, the human, hangs on a tree like fruit. We pick that fruit under the accidents of bread and/or wine and ingest it and through that process, he becomes one with us. When speaking of the crucifixion Peter says, “He himself bore our sins in his body upon the cross, so that, free from sin, we might live for righteousness.” The Eucharist is a sacred ritual and it affects sacred time. As was noted in the treatise Intuitive Ritual Investment and Conscious Ritual Investment,
Sacred time is measured in the same way that distance is measured in the ritual, meaning it is not considered a separator but a unifier, sacred time transcends and binds all time into one. If someone can perform passover rites in Ephesus and be part of the same sacrifice as the one in Jerusalem, then one can perform rites in 2017 C.E. and they are participating in the same rite as the one done in 32 C.E. and these and all other passovers are the participations in the same rite done in 1446 BCE. For calculated sacred ritual, the divisive nature of time and space dissolves and one gains access to the myth and the heroes whose narrative give meaning to the ritual and to the participant.
How Jesus, “bore our sins in his body upon the cross” can be a very confusing concept, especially when one remembers that he is “one like us in all things but sin”. A way to make sense of this is the third descent in the Eucharist coupled with the fact that the Eucharist is a participation in the original sacrifice on Calvary through the very “time binding” mentioned above. Christ becomes one with the sinner across space and time through descending into the sinner’s body. Christ’s Body, the Church, which is composed of those same sinners, is united to his body on the cross by this same communion.
Because across space and time Christ’s body (as the Church), is composed of sinners and their sins one can see how the Eucharist is the matrix for a two-way flow of grace. Christ’s body is extended through space and time through the Eucharist makes the Church his mystical body. That extension is balanced by a backflow of sin gathering upon Christ’s body hanging upon the cross. Through the Eucharist the communicant is bound to Christ Body, specifically his body at the event of his sacrificial death, where he takes our sin upon his body and destroys it by his death. The effect of “communion” with his body is that, as part of Christ’s body, the venial sin of the communicant is destroyed with Christ Body through his sacrificial death (though not mortal sin, where one who is in open rebellion against God will accept the invitation to the Eschaton nor the forgiveness offered). Through the Eucharist, that mystical body is bound across space and time to his sacrificial death and at the same time, the individual sinners are purified of the guilt of venial sin. Thus in mass one can easily assent, “When we eat this bread and drink this cup we proclaim your death O Lord until you come again.”
The memorial acclamation hints at the two-way flow between the present time and Christ’s sacrificial death. This two-way flow is bracketed by the two perfections of creation, Paradise and the Eschaton. These two human situations give us an interpretive lens for the Eucharist. Because both the individual and the Church ingest God, perfect humanity and the environment of Paradise, Christ’s descent into bread truly gives us a taste of the Eschaton. The humility it takes for the Son of God to do this gives us an experience of inversal unity, the ontological beatitude of the Eschaton. This example and experience along with its invitation to the Eschaton despite our lack of worth should motivate us to live the Eschaton to the best of our ability now. Communion with him cleanses us of the guilt of venial sin and prepares us for abidance in the Eschaton. In all of this, there is a foretaste of the inversal unity of the Eschaton, the greatest goes step by step into further humility in order to bring inversal unity even now in this postlapsarian world by means of his church as a sign and sacrament of what is to come in the end. This leads us to the next section of this treatise which is a practical application of the connection between the divine triple descent and an experience of inversal unity.
In this section, we began a process that allowed for the skill of narrative appropriation in order to garner an experience of inversal unity from the sacred ritual of the Eucharist. We moved beyond speculation concerning essence and substance toward narrative appropriation involving the divine triple descent. Each descent demonstrated a new level of humility. The first descent explored was the divine to the human. The second descent went from the human to food. The last descent was from the food to the sinner. We ended this section with a reminder of how the Eucharist is an active call by God toward the Eschaton.
In the next section, we will explore practical spiritual applications concerning our narrative appropriation of the divine triple descent by exploring the themes of hiddenness and humility. After exploring these themes we will offer a series of analogical applications revolving around the experience of the Virgin Mary.
Narrative Appropriation of the Call of the Eucharist
In the last section we began a process that allowed for the skill of narrative appropriation in order to garner an experience of inversal unity from the sacred ritual of the Eucharist by exploring the divine triple descent. Each descent demonstrated a new level of humility. The first descent explored the divine to the human, the second the human to food, and the last descent food to the sinner. We ended this section with a reminder of how the Eucharist is an active call by God toward the Eschaton.
In this section we will explore practical spiritual applications concerning our narrative appropriation of the divine triple descent by exploring the themes of hiddenness and humility. After further defining the unique experience of narrative appropriation when applied to the divine triple descent we will explore how the theme of hiddenness allows for the appropriation of humility by means of biblical and traditional examples. Then we will offer a series of analogical applications revolving around the experience of the Virgin Mary. We will discuss her unique role in history as the Mother of God and symbolically explore the beautiful image of Mary with child as the theotokos in order to find personal meaning and utility in the Eucharist. Lastly we will use this imagery to develop what it means for individual Christians to be temples of the Holy Spirit and tabernacles of the Body of Christ in order to facilitate our cooperation with the sacramental grace offered.
Narrative Themes: Hiddenness and Humility
After a bit of abstraction some real world application always helps. When contemplating the Eucharist this is application is often the hardest part. One can study eucharistic theology and garner much about essence and accident, or symbolism in ritual, or dogmatic history. But how exactly to employ this information to one’s spiritual life is difficult. There is a certain type of person who simply finds learning spiritually stimulating and for this person education is sufficient to inspire. But most people are not spiritually inspired by facts and factual relationships alone. Nor does the average person have the time required to invest in higher level of education. It might also be admitted that not everyone has the capacity to intellectually comprehend. Because of how eucharistic theology is done, with a focus on ontology, dogma, and doctrine, there is the possibility of the miracle being understood “as” dogma and doctrine. Meaning, the communicant sees the assent of faith concerning seemingly disconnected radical assertions, “his death frees us from sin!” or “he became Bread!”, as the major conveyer of the experience. For many if not most, this turns the Eucharist into a distant and possibly confusing experience. We then retreat into “watching Jesus do a trick”.
Our task now is to take the all the information to this point and utilize it in order to give the communicant skills for placing themselves in the flow of salvation history by means of this ritual action. We have already begun this in our discussion above applying conscious ritual investment to the Eucharist. In this final section we will turn to narrative appropriation. The treatise The Dysfunctional Human Family and the Nontraditional Holy Family discussed how narrative appropriation is a far more common way humans sculpt a moral and/or spiritual awareness than intellectual grappling.
Narrative appropriation is one of the fundamental ways we as creatures find our meaning, individually and collectively, that is we garner meaning by stories and narratives. We seek them out, test them against our familiar stories, dissect them and in the end either accept and embrace them or eschew and reject them. Ultimately we appropriate the characters and stories into our personality (or culture on the collective level). Usually all of this is done outside the conscious realm, we garner morals and motives from the stories we subconsciously invest in absent our own consent. The narratives don’t have to be complex, simply bought into to be effective. Once they are bought into, then they have a real effect on how the person or culture thinks acts views itself, sets its morals. This need not be systematic, only keeping with the story. This is why when looking at a culture from the outside common stories in that culture often seem strange, choppy and not grounded in anything important. But to the culture itself, which has run a narrative over and over in multifaceted ways, the story makes perfect sense.
What conscious narrative appropriation allows the practitioner to do in a sacramental worldview is become a living Icon to an invisible reality or fundamental story. It differs from the lucid waking skill that culminates somnium spirituality. Lucid waking takes awareness of the dream world as a world where symbols and abstracts take form, and learns to apply the same awareness, through a multivalent epistemology, to the waking world so that one can approach the world and find meaning. Narrative appropriation takes the themes, symbols and meaning of a personally (or socially) formative story and channels those into the practitioner's life in order to form character, draw power and find meaning in one’s own life.
The basic narrative we are discussing here is the divine triple descent. In the treatise The Onesiman Interface we discussed one particular way to practice narrative appropriation, the christo-analogical interchange. Christo-analogical interchange is methodology for interpreting scripture where one interpretes a parable having one character represent Christ, then switch the character who represents Christ to get a thematically related meaning, that explores subtle nuances in the application of the text by comparison. One can applies this methodology for God or neighbor also. Once one applies it to himself the process of narrative appropriation has begun.
In the case of our narrative, the divine triple descent, we have a different situation from most of scripture. Scripture often gives narrative as historical account or in the form of parables or myths, but in this case the narrative is not just an abstract. The narrative of the divine triple descent is cosmological and the appropriator is actually in the story as part of the story by means of the perfect fulfillment of calculated ritual. The unfolding of this story moves from the grandeur of the celestial based christological hymns of John’s prologue or the prologues of Colossians and Ephesians, to the terrestrial birth of Jesus of Nazareth in the infancy narratives on Matthew and Luke. From there the narrative moves to the Last Supper of the synoptic gospels informed by the eucharistic discourses and passion of John’s Gospel. After that the Church is established and the sacramental system present in the pilgrim church is the narrative and the sinner is the main character.
The goal now is to learn to appropriate this narrative in order to foster a certain Christian virtue, humility. With the practice of humility one can better cooperate with the grace offered in the sacrament. There are two methodologies or themes that foster the skill needed to acquire this virtue contained in this narrative, the theme of inversal unity and the theme of humiliation through hiddenness.
Hiddenness as a key to humility can be traced all the way back to Genesis and the Garden. When the first parents felt shame the glory of their bodies, sculpted in the image and likeness of God was hidden with clothes. Thus begins a classic postlapsarian inversion where the world shifts from a place where nudity is glory and cloths are shame to a place where cloths indicate status and nudity is shame. Again, this postlapsarian inversion is reaffirmed when Noah causes humanity to“fall” a second time after the flood in a story that mirrors the first fall. With the first fall in Paradise, nudity was proper and cloths were a sign of damage to perfection. With Noah’s fall, clothing is the proper order and to be nude is considered too revealing and humiliating. The interplay between of clothing and nudity runs through the entire book.
As it relates to humility no where is this interplay more obvious than the story of Joseph. Joseph was the eleventh son of Jacob and an arrogant snitch who was employed by his father as an informant against his older brothers. His father arrayed him in a spectacular coat, a sign of favor. God also favored Joseph as a successful worker, all of his endeavors seem to be successful to a point. The point where his endeavors fail is when he is arrogant and not humble. When God gifts Joseph dreams concerning his greatness (dreams being private and hidden things themselves) he arrogantly brags to his brothers. Soon after he is stripped of his spectacular coat, his sign of status and favor. By this stripping he is humiliated. With each of Joseph's humiliations there is also a descent. When his brothers strip him they throw him into a well. He is the sent “down to egypt” as a slave.
Again God blesses his work and he quickly rises in rank in the house of his master Potiphar. His lesson unlearned Joseph becomes arrogant. Though he correctly rejects the advances Potiphar’s wife, he scoffs at her stating that he has greater status in the house than she does. She proves him wrong by stripping him of his cloths. When he runs out naked, she uses the cloths a evidence that he tried to rape her and Joseph descends again into the dungeon of Pharaoh. There his work is blessed again and he becomes chief trustee to the warden. When the baker and cupbearer of Pharaoh have disturbing dreams and fret that no one is present to interpret them, Joseph demonstrates that he has finally learned his lesson. He responds, “Do interpretations not come from God? Please tell me the dreams.” With that he is able to interpret their dreams. Even still he remains in the dungeon two years before he is called before Pharaoh to interpret his dream. His interpretation of the baker and cupbearer offers an interesting symbolic structure for the interplay between the Eucharist (bread and wine) life and death (the fate of the baker and cupbearer) and our situation as the pilgrim church waiting for the fulfillment of the Eschaton (Joseph’s further two years in prison, though his release has been promised).
When Joseph is summoned before Pharaoh he is given new clothes in order to appear before Pharaoh, a sign of new humility. When Pharaoh states, ““I had a dream but there was no one to interpret it. But I hear it said of you, ‘If he hears a dream he can interpret it.’” it is a perfect opportunity for Joseph to demonstrate his typical arrogance. Instead what we read is, “It is not I,” Joseph replied to Pharaoh, “but God who will respond for the well-being of Pharaoh.” With that he is able to successfully interpret Pharaoh’s dreams and rises immediately to status of second in command in Egypt. “With that, Pharaoh took off his signet ring and put it on Joseph’s finger. He dressed him in robes of fine linen and put a gold chain around his neck.” At this point Joseph, because he has learned humility is arrayed in all the finery befitting royalty.
In all of this a major hidden character is God himself. Joseph is not a patriarch, thus God does not speak directly to him. Joseph must find the hidden will of God through his wit and experience. He must learn humility by suffering the consequences of arrogance. Having learned this lesson he then uses this same hiddenness on his brothers when they arrive for relief from the famine. God does not tell Joseph that his brothers have reformed their jealousy or that their father has reformed his favoritism of Rachel’s sons. Joseph uses his position, appearing as Zapneth-Paaneah, great egyptian lord, in order to test his brothers, still clothed as humble shepherds. Through a series of extremely cleverly constructed situations he is able to discern that the brothers feel remorse for their crimes, he is able to draw his father out of his favoritism, and he is able to test whether his brothers would willingly repeat their crime given the chance. After all of this he exhibits true humility by striping himself of his lordly arraignment and presenting himself as the second youngest brother of the shepherds. He forgives them to such a degree and with such humility that he offer’s their crime as a justice of God. “God, therefore, sent me on ahead of you to ensure for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives in an extraordinary deliverance. So it was not really you but God who had me come here.”
This instance of how God can bring goodness out of human sinfulness projects all the way forward to the Cross, where Jesus is stripped of his clothes by humanity in the ultimate humiliation and how that evil brings the salvation of the world. At this point the glory of Christ’s divinity is completely hidden in his humanity, and even his humanity is hidden in humiliation so deep the essence of his dignity is questioned by scripture, “cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree”. After his stripping, Jesus descends into the tomb, only to rise again and become present to his church hidden in the accidents of bread, much like clothes hide the body and the body on the cross hides divinity, and just as this mutable world hides the eternal God immanently in plain sight. The story of Joseph shows us that clothes do not make the man”, in fact, they can be changed and rearranged just as any other mutual accident may dance upon the surface of its substance or essence. The unchangeable essence makes the man, or the God-man for that matter. And again, just as Joseph uses his mutable clothes to test his brothers, there is a severe testing that takes place in the Eucharist. One can see how this testing plays out in Thomas Aqunas’ Adoro Te Devote
I devoutly adore you, O hidden Deity,
Truly hidden beneath these appearances.
My whole heart submits to you,
And in contemplating you, It surrenders itself completely.
Sight, touch, taste are all deceived in their judgment of you,
But hearing suffices firmly to believe.
I believe all that the Son of God has spoken;
There is nothing truer than this word of truth.
On the cross only the divinity was hidden,
But here the humanity is also hidden.
Yet believing and confessing both,
I ask for what the repentant thief asked.
I do not see the wounds as Thomas did,
But I confess that you are my God.
Make me believe more and more in you,
Hope in you, and love you.
O memorial of our Lord's death!
Living bread that gives life to man,
Grant my soul to live on you,
And always to savor your sweetness.
Lord Jesus, Good Pelican,
wash my filthiness and clean me with your blood,
One drop of which can free
the entire world of all its sins.
Jesus, whom now I see hidden,
I ask you to fulfill what I so desire:
That the sight of your face being unveiled
I may have the happiness of seeing your glory. Amen
Thomas Aquinas certainly sees the hiddenness of Christ in the eucharistic species as some sort of test of the human ability to trust God. In this hymn all sense are deceived and one must rely on God alone for any sense of certainty.
Once one can accept that Jesus is truly present in the eucharistic species one can move to the most difficult encounter of Christ and encounter Jesus in the third descent, one can encounter Jesus in the sinner. Again, the Church is the mystical body of Christ, made up of sinners Jesus has entered and who are temples of the Holy Spirit and become living tabernacles of his divine presence and promises. “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am also.” This is true of the deeply sinful people sitting next to one at sunday mass or talking with one in the street. It is hard to see Christ in these people, but this is the test, can one be humble enough to see that Christ was humble enough to become one with these people.
When reflecting on how God is immanent and transcendent at the same time, one sees that God is hidden, absolutely transcendent. But God is also hidden in plain sight, so intimately connected to us that we cannot even see him before our eyes. God’s presence is absolutely taken for granted, the same way food is to a person who is lucky enough to never know hunger. The Eucharist contains all the elements of Paradise, God, Humans, and the Garden. This demonstration of inversal unity contains nothing but commonplace items. Food is commonplace, it springs from the ground, humans are common place, God is commonplace, imminent to his creation. In the third descent, this perfect Paradise enters another extremely commonplace reality, the sinner, and makes that sinner the presence of perfect divinity, perfect humanity and perfect creation.
All of this hiddenness relates to the theme of inversal unity because of our postlapsarian lens. Once one sees God as the ultimate power with a mind shaped by the fall, one can only see God as a tyrant. God uses the inversal unity of Paradise and the Eschaton to infect our hierarchically rigged postlapsarian world, where those in power lord their authority over one another as the Gentiles do. This infection sneaks divinity into our world through inversal unity so deeply it is impossible to see without faith in the possibility of inversal unity and the humility to believe it is possible. Once it is recognized the only thing left to do is to experience it by narrative appropriation, because you and the effect this narrative will have on you are the end of the narrative.
Narrative Appropriation Application Set-up: Mariology and the Third Descent
In the previous part of this section we ended with the need to experience the narrative. These last two parts are going to be dedicated to cultivating skills for that experience. We will begin by exploring some very complicated inversions that happen through the process of the first descent, the incarnation. We will then use the image of Mary with child (the theotokos) as a iconographic channel for utilizing the Eucharist as a demonstration of inversal unity and impetus for humility.
The treatise Corporeal Unitive Fulfillment in the Eschaton discussed how eating and sexual activity act as communions and sustainers in the human family, each in their own way. Sex unites microcosmically but sustains macrocosmically and eating is vice versa, uniting macrocosmically and sustaining on the individual level. We are now going to exploit the unity manifest in that reflective relationship in order to concentrate the divine triple descent into the image of Mary with Child (the theotokos). The treatise Divine Gender Transcendence and Incarnational Divine Presence explored how the Logos makes for a feminine aspect of God,
This leads us to another interesting piece of creedal information about the Trinitarian Godhead. According to the creed and the prologue of John’s gospel, the Second Person of the Trinity is the one “through whom all things are made.” This is extremely feminine in nature. So much so that after contemplating it one may wonder at the great wisdom of The Spirit and the Church fathers for calling the second person the “Son”. Otherwise a creator/consorte view of God would have been almost inevitable. From that husband and wife analogy the trinitarian view of the oneness of God would have been almost impossible for the human mind to accept because of the familiarity of husbands and wives as distinct co creators. Here gender norms are dramatically broken to throw us off the scent of any self marriage of God with the noble and good goal of avoiding the polytheism that would certainly follow. The analogical flip worked so well that the staunch feminine qualities of the Son are completely unnoticed by most Christians. Add to that the fact that God in “his” wisdom then became incarnate as a man, but the person that became incarnate was the feminine aspect and you have excess validation that gender and biological sex are in no way applicable to God. The amount of gender paradox involved throws the mind into a spin, and from the Christian point of view that is not a bad thing. God’s ways are not man’s ways.
For our purposes it may be helpful to image the Logos as the womb of all creation, “through whom all things are made”. Creation abides in this womb as it’s sustainor at the most fundamental level. This is balanced by images of the Father as transcendent. In our image, Mary with Child (the theotokos), that all encompassing womb, enters a womb and abides, not as a bio-female, but as a bio-male. In this situation you have two bio-organism that form one bio-organism. When a woman is pregnant with a male child, it is a curious symbolic phenomenon, given all we have discussed concerning somnium spirituality and narrative appropriation. Together as a single bio-orgasim, they are the generation of life, both female. In this bio-relationship the masculine transcendent resides within the inner sustainor in an inversal classic to the theme of this treatise. With Mary and Christ, one has a dizzying set of inversions from feminine logos, to male child (symbolic of the transcendent), residing within to belly of a woman. All of these things are hidden realities that cannot be boasted about, and that lack of claim offers the ultimate humility. Of course the other sustaining thing that resides in a belly is food, which the Logos will become in the second descent. To relate the indwelling of Christ in Mary’s womb to food seems like a stretch of a connection absent lucid waking and the ability through a multivalent epistemology to symbolically connect realities in this world. If one can invest in a multivalent epistemology, one can begin to see that the connection is not accidental, but according to God’s plan, such that all of these connections can have maximal effect in the calculated ritual of the Eucharist.
If one adopts Mary as a symbol of the Church from John’s gospel, then Mary with the Christ Child in utero can be conceived of as a meta symbol for all three descents. From that awareness one can begin to foster a spirituality that connects an internal reception of the life sustaining presence God into communion within one’s body to a marian spirituality that jettisons one toward a deeper meaning and practice of religion. Mary’s humble fiat, as one who is the most useless person on society, an unwed pregnant teen, allows for God’s entrance into the world. This belief couples with the Roman Catholic assertion of the Queenship of Mary to form a microcosm of Christian power dynamics, where the greatest is the least and the least is the greatest. This entire situation can be channeled by an individual who offers a fiat at each reception of the Eucharist as a sinner who is unworthy, yet is called to be a temple of Christ. To truly utilize the situation of Mary with child (the theotokos) as a narrative appropriation is perhaps doubly humiliating for a male to appropriate because he must channel a feminine image in order to participate in these extremely fruitful spiritualities. A male must take on what, in a misogynistic culture, is the lowest position imaginable to him. This will certainly allow for a misogynistic male to practice Christian powery dynamics, appropriating the lowest place in order to become an icon of the highest place.
Once one has begun to appropriate the narrative one can also begin to adopt all the titles of Mary that indicate the indwelling of Christ as personal titles for one’s self, or one’s fellow receiver of the Eucharist, because Christ dwells within them as well. For the remainder of this treatise we will contrast a way we have been exploring the indwelling of the Eucharist, making us Temples, with a Marian way of understanding the same idea. We will access this comparison by means of a pious title offered to Mary, The Ark of the Covenant.
Narrative Appropriation Application: The Human who Presences God
What is a temple? A temple is a place on Earth that presences God in a very geographically specific way. It is a place where there is a spot that humans can look and say, “there is where God is”. Because of this it is an extremely useful place for humans to engage in ritual activity in order commune with God. With the coming of Christ, the temple structure changes completely. Jesus’ body is the place where one can point on this planet and say “there is where God is”, Jesus himself, in his two natures, is the perfect communion of divinity and humanity. After Baptism, the Christian is a temple of the Holy Spirit for the rest of their lives, because of their indelible relationship to Christ and the Church. As we have said, with the third descent, the sinner becomes a temple of Christ, holding his presence within himself. This is a special physical relationship as well as a spiritual one.
The spirituality to be developed by out of this knowledge is to treat yourself as a temple. How do you allow others to Worship God? One must first presence God in such a way that show God dwells within you even before you can allow this, because God is hidden within in order to foster humility. Since God is present in the receptor as an example of inversal unity, the best way to demonstrate God’s presence within is by a clear demonstration of that humility.
There are two general ways that this fleeting physical presence of God can be utilized in order to facilitate cooperation with the sacramental grace offered. The first way is contemplative. That way is sitting in silent prayer, fear and awareness of the awesomeness within, like a woman who just discovered pregnancy. What is the potential of this reality of life, this person, that dwells within me? How will his development within my being change my life? What will it be like to jettison him from my body? Will he look like I expect him to? Once I have brought him into the world, how will he grow beyond my expectations? and on, and on. There is a deep eucharistic spirituality to be gleaned from the joy of expectant mothers that is waiting to be tapped by those not too proud to submit to the learning.
The second way is prescribed by the priest at the end of mass, “Go forth and announce the gospel of the Lord.” This proclamation is can be taken as cognitive instruction, but I prefer Matthews image of the methodology of this proclamation. After Peter Proclaims Jesus the Messiah the text says, “From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.” and then begins a series of statements by Jesus on how disciples suffer. It seems that these teachings are the “showing”, but it could be that he “showed” Peter and the others by giving them a foretaste of the passion. Perhaps his radical love elicited rejection, beatings and suffering far before the passion, such that explanation of what the messiah does and what his disciples can expect needed to be offered. This is especially pertinent considering it is in the third descent that we partake in his death.
The second way is a way of activity and haste. Go out, quickly, as of right now, you presence Christ within you pouring grace into your soul. You don’t have much time, the body is dissolving within you, hidden, but longing to be exposed. “Asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he said in reply, “The coming of the kingdom of God cannot be observed, and no one will announce, ‘Look, here it is,’ or, ‘There it is.’ For behold, the kingdom of God is among you.” Then he said to his disciples, “The days will come when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, but you will not see it. There will be those who will say to you, ‘Look, there he is,’ [or] ‘Look, here he is.’ Do not go off, do not run in pursuit. For just as lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be [in his day].” It is our job to cooperate with the grace offered in the sacrament and show the world love, show the world what a “place that God is” looks like and show the world what “human communion with God” looks like.
Thus for our Marian comparison we will shift from a Temple image (stagnant and stable) to an ark image, mobile and dynamic. From Moses to Solomon, God was hesitant to allow the Israelites to build a Temple. God must be mobile and available to move with the people. God’s presence cannot be tamed. When we image Mary, we image the Ark, we say yes to God, we give our fiat. We then move through the hill country of Judea, just as Mary did while pregnant, following the same journey the Ark did when lost in 1 Samuel 4-6. These Journeys mimic one another, and they must be mimicked by the receptor of the Eucharist. One must go to those who are not as far along on their spiritual journey, whether they are close (Elizabeth) or far (philistines in the temple of Dagon). One must be a light to these people.
At each descent Christ come closer to us. We are nowhere near to his spiritual perfection. He is also close to us in our neighbor. When our fellow Christians, who are sinner, receive the Eucharist, how well do we allow them to presence God for us? Here is another and possibly deeper humility. Can we see God as present is our fellow sinners? How much can we accept that they are as worthy as we are to practice these same spiritualities. This is perhaps the hardest practice, because we are able to justify our own sins through effective self righteousness. But we are more than aware of the sins of others (especially when they mirror our own) and we are more than aware of their own lack of worth when receiving this divine gift. We have a near impossible time accepting them as temples of Christ in any but the most abstract ways. It is at this point that we must seek the intercession of Saint Joseph, “[Mary] was found with child through the holy Spirit. Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly. Such was his intention when, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” Righteous though he was, Joseph was wrong in his calculation. We are most likely not as righteous as he and reflection on God’s transformative power does us well.
In all of the these narrative appropriation, the triple descent, participation in Christ's death, Mary With child (the theotokos) and summative life, Temple, Ark, we are presenting a hidden reality. It is hidden because it is an example of inversal unity, which is so contrary to the princes of this world, that no one can see on the face of it. This hiddenness itself fosters a deep humility disallows boastfulness and with inversal unity reminds us of our unworthiness.
In this section we explored practical spiritual applications concerning our narrative appropriation of the divine triple descent by exploring the themes of hiddenness and humility. After further defining the unique experience of narrative appropriation when applied to the divine triple descent we explored how the theme of hiddenness allows for the appropriation of humility by means of biblical and traditional examples. We offered a series of analogical applications revolving around the experience of the Virgin Mary and discussed her role as the theotokos in order to find personal meaning and utility in the Eucharist. Lastly we used this imagery to develop what it means for individual Christians to be temples of the Holy Spirit and tabernacles of the Body of Christ.
Conclusion
To conclude, the purpose of this treatise was to explore the Eucharist as a tool for developing proper Christian humility and in that I hope we have been successful. Far too often ponderings on the Eucharist are cognitively stimulation or piously emotive, but not effective at engendering an experience worthy of what it means to receive the Body of Christ. We cannot pretend to have been completely successful at that, but we can hope to have offered tools for further development.
In the first section we laid the foundations for understanding the Eucharist as a tool for acquiring humility by exploring the nature of the cosmos and how the cosmos, as such, gives need for a certain type of lesson on the nature of power and its exercise. We explored power as it could be understood in prelapsarian reality, where the assumption is that the greatest serves the least. We explored power as it is understood in post lapsarian reality where hierarchies are needed to maintain order, but because of human concupiscence invariably they ead to corruption. Lastly we explored power as it should be understood in postlapsarian reality or as it will be understood in the Eschaton.
In the second section we began a process that allowed for the skill of narrative appropriation garnering an experience of inversal unity from the sacred ritual of the Eucharist. In this section we moved beyond speculation concerning essence and substance toward narrative appropriation. We will then laid out our primary narrative, the triple descent of the Son of God seeking to demonstrate how with each descent a new level of humility is achieved and something new is revealed about the nature of Christian power dynamics. The first descent explored the divine to the human. The second descent went from the human to food. The last descent is from the food to the sinner.
The final section we attempted a practical spiritual application of narrative appropriation by exploring the themes of hiddenness and humility. After exploring these themes we offered a series of analogical applications revolving around the experience of the Virgin Mary.
Is the Eucharist simply an experience of awe or test of faith because we believe the doctrines and dogmas which tell us Jesus “did a trick”, even though there is no empirical truth? If such an experience is sufficient for an individual believer, then it is sufficient because the grace of God is sufficient. But we hope we have shown that in the quiet time after reception of the Eucharist there are a myriad of possible prayers and approaches one can take in order to experience the pledge and foretaste of the world to come.
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