Preface: What is the Landscape of Eucharist?
What is happening with the enactment of the Eucharist?
1. Is it the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ?
2. Is it something else, something about you and me, something that has to be both remembered and longed for?
Could be #1.
Is #2.
What to remember? What is longed for?
If once there was only "one" without the dividing and fragmenting that came naturally with the development of consciousness and mind, then perhaps we are attempting to "get back to the garden" -- return to the one.
If, alternatively, we are coming to see that long perceived ordinary dualities of rational consciousness are no longer adequate to advance us into a desired realm of unity and wholeness, some different way of approaching what is longed for is needed.
At the Mass (the Eucharist) we are invited to consider numbers 1 & 2 as non-competing possibilities.
1. If transubstantiation is looked at from a non-dualistic eye, one substance and another substance are not two substances. One is, so to speak, the other. Thus, the historical person Jesus of Nazareth is bread and wine, is of the same being with the elements of sun and earth, wheat and grape, word and thought, as well as the underlying wholeness of the entire cosmos, seen and unseen, known and unknown, felt and unfelt.
2. If the collective longings of the human being-in-the-world, as well as all the feeling/conscious/existing additional beings also here in this phenomenal and epiphenomenal world, were to be extrapolated from the movements, behaviors, and seeming inclinations of each, we would observe the desire for light, warmth, security, preservation, continuance, permission to be, right connectives, sustenance and harmony.
Conclusion: Eucharist, which translates from the Greek as "grateful/gracious offer," is a practice of remembering and longing for what we are. What we are is non-separate wholeness which does not exclude anything and includes everything.
Perhaps the language of the Christian metaphor, if seen and understood in a particular way, indicates this:
A) sin is taken away -- meaning that lseparation, the perception of separation, and behaviors related to believing in separation, are no longer the sole or even primary operating condition of the mind;
B. we are forgiven the very natural mistake of trying to obtain something at the expense of another -- meaning that treating others as objects for our use, or unworthy of respect, or not in our "tribe," not our kind, not as good as, not true, not valuable enough to love, etc etc, is an unfortunate conditioning that we are not aware of, or if aware, have not actively attempted to overcome;
C) Innocence, not knowing, is our continuing way of being in this world. We do not know. Some believe or have faith and claim this as a knowing, and perhaps it is, for them. Still, we are always innocent in that we do not know what the whole reality of life, cosmos, and existence is. We do not have a clear and unambiguous grasp of what is meant by "God" -- while at the same time longing for, praying to, and taking comfort in, this God.
D) Finally, what we call Christ-Reality or Christ-Mind is the metaphor of wholeness, unconditional love, safe passage into the unknown, beloved presence, and here-for-us, here-with-us, even here-as-us in this particular manifestation of the entire realm of What-Is. We are continuously in the process of moving-through, looking-as, and acting-with this metaphor of God-With-Us which is the heart of the story.
Epilogue: The phrase "with us" or "with you" is one of the holiest phrases of our language. It is holy in that it resonates both the remembrance and longing associated with the gracefulness and gratefulness we are invited to offer and capable of offering one to another.
