It’s a Meal

James Jordan has often said that Protestants regard the Lord’s Supper as a sermon cleverly disguised as a meal, and that Catholics see the Supper as a prayer cleverly disguised as a meal. There are sermonic features to the Supper, and aspects of prayer as well. But Jordan is right that Protestants and Catholics both tend to ignore the obvious: At the Lord’s table, we eat bread and drink wine.

That has come home to me afresh as I’ve thought about some of the responses to my recent posts and articles on Catholicism, Protestantism, and the Eucharist. Some Catholic critics have objected to analogies I’ve drawn between common meals and fellowship at Christ’s table, stressing the great distance between them. Those criticisms assume a sharply defined sacred/secular, natural/supernatural dualism that I had hoped (after the nouvelle theologie ) was dying in Catholic theology.

We would all do well to re-group, take a breath, and start our distorted Eucharistic debates over again. We would make better progress by taking our cues from the great Orthodox theologian, Alexander Schmemann, who begins his prose-poem on the Eucharist, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy , with affirmations like “Man is what he eats” and “Man is a hungry being” and “All that exists . . . is divine love made food, made life for man.”