Tomorrow’s Ritual
October 10, 2006
or, perhaps, yesterday’s ritual: I’ve been mulling over Bowie’s proposal for tomorrow and have been repeatedly struck by how similar it is to early church practice. The early church was pretty much a bunch of folks getting together in a home with food, telling stories about Jesus. Eventually these stories were told often enough that they became pericopes, and after that the gospel redactors took the pericopes and compiled them into Gospels. We’re kind of doing the opposite: having heard the gospels piece-meal in pericopes every week for so long, we’re turning them back into stories. Sweet.
Anyway, I came across an appropriate bit from Tom Driver’s book, “The Magic of Ritual” which is a book EVERYONE needs to read. Right now. Seriously - don’t finish reading this post until you’ve ordered a copy online…
Driver ends his book by examining how a truly liberating and liminal Eucharist might unfold, and this excerpt is especially pertaining:
14. Telling stories together. Traditionally, the story of The Last Supper is told before the bread and wine are served, during the prayer of consecration and just before the elements are distributed. I suggest here three innovations:
1) Place the story after the food is consumed. This gives it a more convincing location, because it follows our usual sequence of interpreting actions after they occur. It also follows the more likely sequence of early Christian worship, which was to let the common meal evoke stories about Jesus, not holding the meal in obedience to a specific story. Now that the meal has been taken and the people are still gathered at the table, it is story time.
2) Let the story be told by the people, using their own words, one person starting it off, telling just a part, then letting someone else pick it up, then another, and so on until the story’s end. This time-honored way of telling a familiar story expresses community and builds collective memory.
3) Let other stories be told, too. It is unrealistic, and perhaps a denial of the action of God’s spirit, to imagine that at the communion only one story is being remembered. The emergence of others should be encouraged.
15. Sharing Christ Together. As the bread is the broken (shared) body of Christ, so the sharing of Christ can be done sacramentally by the people’s sharing their experiences of Christ with each other. Before the people leave the table, let each turn to a neighbor and each ask the other, “Who is Jesus Christ for you today?” Let each in turn answer this question, speaking to the neighbor who has asked it.