Akili Ron Anderson


“When in doubt, say Mass.”  So said a wry old Catholic priest to me many years ago at a hastily arranged Eucharist after some national horror I can’t even recall.

He was referring to the Catholic tendency to slap a Mass on every occasion. If something noteworthy happened, joyous or devastating, local or global, Mass was the way you marked it. The Eucharistic liturgy was the vessel that held what needed holding, the grounding and clarifying act by which the community steadied and oriented itself.

“When in doubt…” It was a cheeky quip, but the priest who said it wasn’t being entirely facetious. If nothing else, a reflexive recourse to the liturgy is a way of persisting, the kind of repetitive showing up that’s easily dismissed as rote, but is rather (potentially, anyway) a training in perseverance. And God knows that showing up, persevering, is no mean thing in the face of evil’s demonstrated determination not to go away easily or any time soon. “Saying Mass” at every turn was a way of declaring “We’re not going away either.”

But even more, “Saying Mass” was testimony. Every time the church sat down at the Table, it engaged in a public counter-liturgy (in William Kavanaugh’s words) to all the liturgies of doubt, anger, upheaval, fear, cruelty, violence, and injustice celebrated daily by the world’s powers.

As such, “saying Mass” when in doubt, or in any other human circumstance, was not merely a way to strengthen, ground, steady, and orient the community; it was justice-doing itself. Taken together, the various movements of the Communion liturgy are a defiant refusal to accept the world’s claim to be “real” and an assertion that the real “real world” shows up, a real presence, in all the just things we say and do at the Table:

We gather, we don’t divide.

We welcome and bless, we don’t condemn, exclude, or curse.

We attend to a true Word, not a false narrative.

We give thanks, we don’t claim and assert self-authorship.

We share equally in the earth’s gifts of food, we don’t grasp and hoard.

We honor bodies and recognize their labor, we don’t exploit.

We distribute food to all, we don’t withhold it from some.

We welcome a real presence, not create a real absence.

We do not erase and falsify, we remember, we remember. We refuse to forget.

In Anglican theologian Kenneth Leech’s words, the Communion liturgy is “the weekly meeting of rebels against a Mammon-worshiping world order…, a freak event in a world where bread and wine are hoarded, not offered; concentrated, not divided; unequally distributed, not commonly shared.”” And we could add:

Because Communion is freely available to all, and all are fed according to their need, Communion enacts a counter-politics to the politics that says hunger is necessary. It’s an economic confrontation with the entrenched assumption that for some to have, others must not.

Because Communion is sheer gift, it enacts a non-shaming reality in a world where the powers decide who is worthy to eat.

Because Communion makes one Body, we are each other’s flesh. Communion enacts a new social space wherein bodies are sacred, of infinite worth, not dispensable on a whim.  

And in our current context of reprisal and revenge, of getting even as a way of life and as a way of governing, Communion enacts mercy, for the Body it makes is the body of the Victim who returned to those who disappeared him without a word of retribution on his lips. And with him, every disappeared victim, all the marginalized, poor, and oppressed, also materialize, for he is eternally and absolutely identified with them: “Whatever you do to the least, you do to me.” And we see them.

We shouldn’t politicize the sacraments. But the Eucharist is already politics just by being bread. And just by refusing to forget. And just by materializing disappeared victims. And just by being open to all. And just by hallowing created things. And just by being a feast of persevering and resilient joy. And just by being a communion, a new and just human polity, a new social order that denies the very premises on which the old order runs.

And because it recognizes no legitimacy whatsoever in that system, the Communion liturgy is provocative and dangerous. If, as Paul contends in 1 Corinthians, Communion wrongly practiced can make you sick, rightly practiced it can get you killed. (Ask Oscar Romero about that.)

In the progressive circles I run in, we don’t have much of a liturgical reflex. Only rarely do pastors and people go first to the Table and then to the march or set a table in the streets “in the sight of our foes…”

Only rarely is the Eucharist taught and celebrated in our congregations as the church’s most fundamental and effective source of transformation for communal witness and justice-doing.

Much less have we cultivated in the faithful a strong sensibility that it is through this ritual activity that the world we are fighting for “out there” materializes every time we gather “in here,” and we can touch and taste it and lend ourselves to its transforming grace.

And it can transform us. By faithful Eucharistic engagement over time, we can become one Communionized Body, enacting in the world the justice we embody at the Table.

We should “say Mass” more often. Yes?

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For Holy Communion as Testimony, Justice-Witness

When We Assemble

LM

Words: Mary Luti

Tunes: ACH BLEIB BEI UNS (Lord Jesus Christ, with Us Abide), HERR JESU CHRIST DICH ZU UNS WEND (Lord Jesus Christ, Be Present Now)

*
When we assemble, we say no

to pow’rs that scatter and divide.

To gather is the way we show

that none of us belongs outside.

*

When we say thank you, we say no

to pow’rs that tell us we’re our own.

Our grateful praise is how we show

we owe our lives to God alone.

*

When we remember, we say no

to pow’rs that lie to leave no trace.

Refusing to forget, we show

their victims cannot be erased.

*

When we are sharing, we say no

to pow’rs that take and hoard and keep. 

To feed each other is to show

that everyone deserves to eat.

*

When we assemble, break the bread,

remember bravely, share, and bless,

we say the nos that Jesus said;

and then to Love we say our yes.

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For more on Communion and Justice, see UCC Stillspeaking Writers Group, “Do This: Communion for Just and Courageous Living,” available from the Pilgrim Press.