Book Review
The Sacred Meal, by Nora Gallagher.
I remember when chicken tasted like chicken. It has been so long that I can barely remember the taste, but I miss it. In the same way, I miss books about faith that are truly books about faith. Usually, books billed as being about faith are really books about belief overly seasoned with worn out words and phrases that conjure memories I have of litmus tests and classes of Christians. Through that wall of earned (for the most part) cynicism, I reluctantly dared to engage the pages of Nora Gallagher’s The Sacred Meal.
What Nora presents is a refreshing alternative to platitudes and words that have no edge. Instead, she breaks apart the objective religionism with fixed dogmatic beliefs that so many of us have grown to detest by granting us entry into the personal dialogue she experiences in the sacraments. (A sacrament is the outward and visible sign and an inward and spiritual grace). She mixes history with her story and how her story and history engage with the other faithful (but not so faithful) informs her own faith experience. As a person whose faith type is clearly ontological sacramental (experiencing the Holy through symbols and rituals), she gives a perfectly valid and balanced description of the sacrament of the Eucharist. She understands and articulates practice of communion in the context originally instituted, as the last of many meals Jesus had with his disciples. Then she calls us to practice this meal with the gathered Body of Christ that is the very members, seen and unseen, of the Church.
What Nora has done in the book for the sacred meal of communion is to free it from the bondage of being an objective institution that it was never intended to be. Like religion in its original meaning, the practice of Eucharist is supposed to be a verb, “giving thanks”. The Eucharist is a “doing” in which the Incarnation of God is reenacted and celebrated as history, as the very present, and as the hope for the promised age to come.
I would recommend this book as one that promotes a healthy dialogue of the internal and external aspects of faith. Her approach is blended, symbolic, and subjective… like the sacrament she successfully portrays.
bude
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Monday, September 7, 2009
In beginning: the first step of a life long journey.
Growing up in a family parented by survivors of the Great Depression of the 20th Century had it own set of challenges. My dad's grandaddy lost the family farm in foreclosure and yet the bank that took the land ultimately offfered it back to my grandaddy since they had no way to sell it or to work the land. So my dad and mom grew up in a time when it every pair of hands and feet and every able frame had to pitch in and work from an early age. In matters of food, shelter, clothing level survival, they had to grow up much faster than what we would consider age appropriate today.
In my case, this reared its head somewhere around my seventh birthday. My dad had a construction business and had just acquired a new farm with losts of rocks to remove from pasture lands, mile sof fence to build and acres of woods to convert to productive crop land. So, at that tender time of childhood he decided to motivate me by waking me early and saying "every boy in town's got an hour's head start on you." That voice repeats itself as regularly as Sonny and cher singing "I got you babe" on the movie Groundhog Day. But I do not write this to elicit your sympathy or to criticize my dad, it was how he thought he could shape me into a man.
I learned a great deal about how to work, about people who do manual labor for a living, and, maybe most importantly, how absolutely essential age appropriate thinking by the adult population is for the formation process that happens in adolescence.
At the suggestion of my therapist, I have spent the last couple of years noting the age of children and observing their attention spans, choices, capabilities and attitudes. As a chaplain at a middle and upper college prepartory school I have paid particular attention to what types of activities, groups, and motivations work and do not work in bringing 6th to 8th grade students or 9th to 11th grade students into active engagement. And I realize that I am not alone in wanting to comprehend and communicate the dire need in our culture to find a way to celebrate adolescence and to nurture in the adult community an awareness of the simple truth that life at each age is whole, it is not a lesser state until another is reached. Being a 6th grader, and being celebrated as such in that particular present moment in life is a counter intuitive way of behaving in a culture that is so obsessively focused on preparing candidates for college. The more organic ground of nurture would be to shift our view of students as temporary residents of a transitional imperfection to perfectly whole inhabitants of the present moment.
Now! Here is the kicker in terms of what I hope to do with this blog. I do not presume to fix the world, any culture or even any institution with the thoughts I will offer into the blogosphere. Instead, I hope to use this as a journal of my personal journey into the depths of awareness, and I hope to be able to discern the truth and integrity of my journey in the commmunity of anyone who reads any of this by asking you to comment in terms of validation or clarification or even contradiction of what I offer into this group's conscience.
Bude+
In my case, this reared its head somewhere around my seventh birthday. My dad had a construction business and had just acquired a new farm with losts of rocks to remove from pasture lands, mile sof fence to build and acres of woods to convert to productive crop land. So, at that tender time of childhood he decided to motivate me by waking me early and saying "every boy in town's got an hour's head start on you." That voice repeats itself as regularly as Sonny and cher singing "I got you babe" on the movie Groundhog Day. But I do not write this to elicit your sympathy or to criticize my dad, it was how he thought he could shape me into a man.
I learned a great deal about how to work, about people who do manual labor for a living, and, maybe most importantly, how absolutely essential age appropriate thinking by the adult population is for the formation process that happens in adolescence.
At the suggestion of my therapist, I have spent the last couple of years noting the age of children and observing their attention spans, choices, capabilities and attitudes. As a chaplain at a middle and upper college prepartory school I have paid particular attention to what types of activities, groups, and motivations work and do not work in bringing 6th to 8th grade students or 9th to 11th grade students into active engagement. And I realize that I am not alone in wanting to comprehend and communicate the dire need in our culture to find a way to celebrate adolescence and to nurture in the adult community an awareness of the simple truth that life at each age is whole, it is not a lesser state until another is reached. Being a 6th grader, and being celebrated as such in that particular present moment in life is a counter intuitive way of behaving in a culture that is so obsessively focused on preparing candidates for college. The more organic ground of nurture would be to shift our view of students as temporary residents of a transitional imperfection to perfectly whole inhabitants of the present moment.
Now! Here is the kicker in terms of what I hope to do with this blog. I do not presume to fix the world, any culture or even any institution with the thoughts I will offer into the blogosphere. Instead, I hope to use this as a journal of my personal journey into the depths of awareness, and I hope to be able to discern the truth and integrity of my journey in the commmunity of anyone who reads any of this by asking you to comment in terms of validation or clarification or even contradiction of what I offer into this group's conscience.
Bude+
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