by Richard Rohr
Humanity has always been receiving the Christ in every culture and age, and women are most naturally imaged as the receivers of the Divine Gift: Think Willendorf, Ephesus, Constantinople, Ravenna, Mt. Carmel, Black Madonnas, Valencia, Walsingham, Guadalupe, until every country of the world eventually had its own feminine image, of one who has received the Christ in her very body (not in her head!). And also note the rather universal pronoun “our,” always “Our Lady,” never “my Lady.” This is a sure giveaway that we are dealing with a Corporate Personality (one who stands for the whole) and a collective understanding of salvation. Same with “Our Lord” or “Our Father.” I never hear official liturgical prayers speak of “my Jesus” or “my Lord.” God and Mary are always addressed as a shared experience, at least in the historic churches, and before our later individualization of the whole Gospel message.
I find it interesting that male gods tend to come from the heavens, and are usually associated with the sun, sky, power, and light. But in most mythology and fairy tales, feminine gods tend to come out of the earth or the sea and are often associated with fertility, subtlety, good darkness, and nurturance. Invariably “Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon,” except in German! If creation is indeed the first Incarnation and the “first Bible” (Romans 1:20), if mother precedes child, then it is not at all surprising that the physical, earthly, and embodied symbols would be recognized in mind, art, and tradition as “Mother Earth” (never “Father”). From this intuition the first fourteen hundred years of Christianity, East and West, made an easy transference to Mary, who was invariably clothed in flowing beauty and color, often crowned by Jesus, and was no longer the simple, poor maiden of Nazareth.
Another important nonbiblical emergence was the widespread belief that Mary’s body was taken up into heaven after her death. (This is the only example I know of the Vatican actually taking a survey before it proclaimed the doctrine, in 1950. They found that most of the Catholic world already believed this to be true without it ever having been taught formally, which is called the sensus fidelium.) Accounts of Mary’s Assumption aren’t found anywhere in the Bible—unless you want to read Revelation 12 in that archetypal way—but they circulated among Christians as early as the fourth century. And by the time the Vatican formalized the doctrine, Carl Jung considered the confirmation “the most significant theological development of the twentieth century” because it proclaimed that a woman’s body permanently exists in the eternal realms! Wow. The pantheon of male god images was forever feminized, and even more, it was declared that human bodies, not just souls or spirits, could share in the process of divinization. This is hugely important. The Mary symbol brought together the two disparate worlds of matter and spirit, feminine mother and masculine child, earth and heaven, whether we like it or not. The unconscious got it, I think. Consciously, many fought it—to their own loss, in my opinion. Now much of the world sees Christianity as hopelessly patriarchal.
Saying Yes to God
The point is that in some ways, many humans can identify with Mary more than they can with Jesus precisely because she was not God, but the archetype for our yes to God! Not one heroic action is attributed to her, only trust itself. Pure being and not doing. From her first yes to the angel Gabriel (Luke 1:38), to the birth itself (2:7), to her last yes at the foot of the cross (John 19:25), and her full presence at fiery, windy Pentecost (see Acts 1:14, where she is the only woman named at the first outpouring of the Spirit), Mary appears on cue at the key moments of the Gospel narratives. She is Everywoman and Everyman, and that is why I call her the feminine symbol for the universal incarnation.
Mary is the Great Yes that humanity forever needs for Christ to be born into the world. Even Paul McCartney immortalized this idea in his song “Let It Be,” although on the first level he was talking about his own mother, Mary:
Mother Mary comes to me,
Speaking words of wisdom, “Let it be.”
That’s why people in the first thousand years loved her so much. In Mary, we see that God must never be forced on us, and God never comes uninvited.
If Christ and Jesus are the archetypes of what God is doing, Mary is the archetype of how to receive what God is doing and hand it on to others. In art, she is invariably offering Jesus to the observer or inviting us to come to him. “To Jesus through Mary” we Catholics used to say in the 1950s. Again, very poor theology but very effective psychology and pedagogy for many.
In Mary, humanity has said our eternal yes to God.
A yes that cannot be undone.
A corporate yes that overrides our many noes.
This is why Mary was commonly called the “New Eve,” who undid the corporate no of the first Eve, and is invariably pictured in art stepping on the snake that tempted Eve (Genesis 3:15).
Today on many levels, we are witnessing an immense longing for the mature feminine at every level of our society—from our politics, to our economics, in our psyche, our cultures, our patterns of leadership, and our theologies, all of which have become far too warlike, competitive, mechanistic, and noncontemplative. We are terribly imbalanced.
Far too often the feminine has had to work in secret, behind the scenes, indirectly. Yet it can still have a profound effect. We see Mary’s subtlety of grace, patience, and humility when she quietly says at the wedding feast of Cana, “They have no wine” (John 2:3b), and then seems totally assured that Jesus will take it from there (John 2:5). And he does!
Like the Christ Mystery itself, the deep feminine often works underground and in the shadows, and—from that position—creates a much more intoxicating message. While church and culture have often denied the Divine Feminine roles, offices, and formal authority, the feminine has continued to exercise incredible power at the cosmic and personal levels. Most of us in the American Catholic church feel that the culture of faith was passed on to us much more from the nuns than from the priests. Feminine power is deeply relational and symbolic—and thus transformative—in ways that men cannot control or even understand. I suspect that is why we fear it so much.
* After the sixteenth century, when Westerners became more rational and literate, most of us stopped thinking symbolically, allegorically, or typologically. But in so doing, we lost something quite important in our spiritual, intuitive, and nonrational understanding of God and ourselves. We narrowed the field considerably and actually lessened the likelihood of inner religious experience. The Bible became an excuse for not learning how literature “works.” Catholics were on symbolic overload; Protestants reacted and became symbolically starved.
11
This Is My Body
Life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die.
—W. H. Auden, “For the Time Being”
In my fifty years as a priest, I would guess I have celebrated the Eucharistic Meal (also known as the Lord’s Supper) thousands of times. I cannot say it was the center of my life, although presiding over the liturgy surely gave me many wonderful occasions to serve people in different settings and cultures, and, I hope, to preach an enlivening word in that context. Most often it was a true experience of “communion,” as ordinary Catholics usually speak of it—communion with God and with God’s people, and often with myself. I knew and accepted the orthodox theology of Eucharist and offered the prayers gladly, although I often changed them when they implied the wrong thing. It was all good, something that I took for granted as part of my work and my faith.
But a few years ago, a new and compelling message made its way into my mind and heart and body. I realized that Jesus did not say, “This is my spirit, given for you,” or even “These are my thoughts.” Instead, he very daringly said, “This is my body,” which seems like an overly physical and risky way for a spiritual teacher, a God-man, to speak. Indeed, Jesus’s raw proclamation did shock its first hearers. As John reports, “Many left him and stopped goin
g with him” (John 6:66). Incarnation is always somehow a scandal, “too much” for us to deal with!
For most of us, “giving” our body to another person connotes something intimate, deeply personal, and often sexual. Did Jesus know this? Why would he talk this way and bring his spiritual message down to such a “fleshly” level? “My flesh is real food, my blood is real drink,” he insisted (John 6:55). Frankly, even today it sounds naïve, off-putting, and even cannibalistic. The very word John uses here, sarx, is the same word Paul uses throughout his letters to describe the opposite of spirit. He does not use the softer word for body, soma. This is quite amazing to me.
I have come to realize that, in offering his body, Jesus is precisely giving us his full bodily humanity more than his spiritualized divinity! “Eat me,” he shockingly says, eating being such a fundamental bodily action, more basic and primitive than thinking or talking. The very fleshly humanity that Paul later presents negatively in his usage, Jesus presents positively.
Because of my education, I am aware of the theological distinctions and clarifications about what Jesus’s words are supposed to mean: he is giving us his full Jesus-Christ self—that wonderful symbiosis of divinity and humanity. But the vehicle, the medium, and the final message here are physical, edible, chewable, yes, digestible human flesh. Much of ancient religion portrayed God eating or sacrificing humans or animals, which were offered on the altars, but Jesus turned religion and history on their heads, inviting us to imagine that God would give himself as food for us!
Further, some of us might know how to receive another human person. But God? This is a plunge that most cannot make early in their journeys, except perhaps in a highly intellectual way. In our hearts, we have a hard time believing we’re worthy, which is probably why we create intellectual and moral reasons for disbelieving or excluding ourselves and others from the Eucharist. In the Roman Rite, we all publicly say before coming to the altar, “Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof.” Then those of us who come forward to receive are supposed to pretend that we are indeed worthy, it seems. And the message that everybody knows is that the “unworthy ones” (variously defined) should not come forward! A very mixed and contradictory message right in the heart of the liturgy.
One helpful piece of the Catholic ritual, however, is our orthodox belief in “Real Presence.” By that we mean that Jesus is somehow physically present in the sacramental bread. This sets the stage for recipients to experience what I like to call “carnal knowledge” of God, who is normally assumed to be Spirit. It seems that mere mind-knowing is not enough, because it does not engage the heart or soul. The mistake happens when those who cannot make this mental assent are deemed “unworthy” to receive. But your only real prerequisite for participation or “worthiness” is in fact your capacity for presence yourself. This is not accomplished just in the head. Presence is a unique capacity that includes body, heart, mind, and whatever we mean by “soul.” Love affairs never happen just in the mind.
Only presence can know presence. And our real presence can know Real Presence.
When Jesus spoke the words “This is my Body,” I believe he was speaking not just about the bread right in front of him, but about the whole universe, about every thing that is physical, material, and yet also spirit-filled. (Thus the name of this book.) His assertion and our repetition resound over all creation before they also settle into one piece of bread. And you know what? The bread and wine, and all of creation, seem to believe who and what they are much more readily than humans do. They know they are the Body of Christ, even if the rest of us resist such a thought. When we speak these sacred words at the altar, we are speaking them to both the bread—and the congregation—so we can carry it “to all creation” (Mark 16:16). As St. Augustine said, we must feed the body of Christ to the people of God until they know that they are what they eat! And they are what they drink!
Honestly, and without any stretch, my dog Venus taught me more about “real presence” over a fifteen-year period than any theological manual ever did. Venus taught me how to be present to people and let them be present to me through the way she always sought out and fully enjoyed my company for its own sake. She was always so eager to be with me, even if I interrupted her in the middle of the night to go with me on a sick call. She literally modeled for me how to be present to God and how God must be present to me: “Like the eyes of a handmaid fixed on the hand of her mistress” (Psalm 123:2), Venus’s eyes were always fixed on me. If only I could always have been as loyal, eager, and subservient to her. But she taught me how.
Presence is always reciprocal, or it is not presence at all.
The Universal Incarnate Presence
As if eating his body weren’t enough, Jesus pushes us in even further and scarier directions by adding the symbolism of intoxicating wine as we lift the chalice and speak over all of suffering humanity, “This is my blood.” Jesus then directs us, “Drink me, all of you!” Pause for a moment and try to step outside the domestication of the Eucharist that has occurred in the churches. Remember, contact with blood was usually ritual impurity for a Jew at that time. Is it just me, or is this beginning to have a Count Dracula feeling? Or is it supposed to? Is it supposed to be scandalous and shocking?
One of the things I’ve learned from studying male initiation rites is that startling, vivid rituals are the only ones that have much psychic effect—things like symbolic drowning, digging your own grave, rolling naked in ashes, or even the now outdated slap that the bishop used to give at Confirmation, which shock us into realization. Anything too tame has little psychic effect, at least for men, but I suspect for women too. There’s a real difference between harmless repetitive ceremonies and life-changing rituals. Scholars say that ceremonies normally confirm and celebrate the status quo and deny the shadow side of things (think of a Fourth of July parade), whereas true ritual offers an alternative universe, where the shadow is named (think of a true Eucharist). In the church, I am afraid we mostly have ceremonies. Most masses I have ever attended are about affirming the status quo, which seldom reveals and often even denies the shadow side of church, state, or culture.
Many mystics and liberation theologians have further recognized that inviting us to drink wine as his blood is an invitation to live in bodily solidarity “with the blood of every person whose blood has been unjustly shed on this earth, from the blood of Abel the Holy to the blood of Zechariah” (Matthew 23:35). These are the first and last murders noted in the Hebrew Bible. In the act of drinking the blood of Christ at this Holy Meal, you are consciously uniting yourself with all unjust suffering in the world, from the beginning of time till its end. Wherever there was and is suffering, there is the sympathy and the empathy of God. “This is all my blood!” Jesus is saying, which sanctifies the victim and gives all bloodshed utter and final significance.
I think of this often as I pronounce these same words looking out over a congregation that barely seems interested in the message. Seeing it as a miracle is not really the message at all. I can see why we celebrate the Eucharist so often. This message is such a shock to the psyche, such a challenge to our pride and individualism, that it takes a lifetime of practice and much vulnerability for it to sink in—as the pattern of every thing—and not just this thing.
The bread and the wine together are stand-ins for the very elements of the universe, which also enjoy and communicate the incarnate presence. Why did we resist this message so much? Authentically Eucharistic churches should have been the first to recognize the corporate, universal, and physical nature of the “Christification” of matter. We must continue to offer humanity this wondrous homeopathic medicine, which feeds us both the problem and its cure. While Catholics rightly affirm the Real Presence of Jesus in these physical elements of the earth, most do not realize the implications of what they have affirmed. The bread and wine are largely understood as an exclusive presence, when in fact their full f
unction is to communicate a truly inclusive—and always shocking—presence.
A true believer is eating what he or she is afraid to see and afraid to accept: The universe is the Body of God, both in its essence and in its suffering.
As Pope Francis insists, the Eucharistic bread and wine are not a prize for the perfect or a reward for good behavior. Rather they are food for the human journey and medicine for the sick. We come forward not because we are worthy but because we are all wounded and somehow “unworthy.” “I did not come for the healthy, but for the sick,” Jesus said (Mark 2:17). One wonders how we were so successful at missing this central point. God gives us our worthiness, and objectively so!
“Given for You”
The other momentous phrase that Jesus repeated at the Last Supper is the phrase “for you.” In the accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke—and in Paul’s too (1 Corinthians 11:24ff.)—Jesus says, my body “given for you,” “broken for you,” and my blood “poured out for you.” Anyone who has ever enjoyed lovemaking knows that the thrill comes not just from the physical sensation but from the other person’s desire to be specifically with you, to be naked for you, to delight in you, to pleasure you. You always want to say, “But why me?” And you hope the other says, “Because I love you!” It is the ultimate and very specific I-Thou experience of Martin Buber.
I was also told by a young woman on staff at our center that she believes women’s menstrual cycles have given women, in particular, an experiential and cellular understanding of this experience. Because they shed blood monthly for the sake of life, and also give blood and water at birth, just as Jesus did on the cross (John 19:34). Of course! This “water and blood” had always struck me as strange symbolism. But maybe not for a woman, who knows the price of birth. How daring and shocking it was for Jesus to turn the whole tradition of impure blood on its heels and make blood holy—and even a point of contact with the divine! This deserves a whole book of commentary, and is supposed to be a stun-gun experience, which all true sacraments should be.