ex cathedra: Predictable

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Predictable

The irritable and fulsome Rev Joseph O'Leary opens his meditation "Rethinking the Eucharist" with these words:

Our Eucharistic thinking and practice has suffered greatly from tendencies to essentialism and reification that have occluded the creative significance of the Last Supper.

My response? I started laughing. "Hey, Jesus, be careful. Someday your disciples will occlude the creative significance of your Last Supper!"

Why predictable? Further down, we are amazed to find that it might be much more artistic to consider the "blood" in the chalice not as the essentialistically reified Christ's but as the pluralistically metaphorical blood of the victims of the Iraq war or the Latin American martyrs...both groups slaughtered by the hated USA.

I'm still laughing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: The eucharist "creates significance" -- 'significance' both as a sign system and as a sign system that gives existential meaning via created or poetized interpretation to a reality or essence (reification, essence) in which it is not implicated. Christian existence, then, is as Sartre proposes for existence: a mask with no essence, no substance. ...Does this differ from the Buddhist non-existence of the not-Self?; 7:28 PM, May 21, 2011

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