So, how might we try to gather some of this together into a ritual, a performance, a remembering worthy of the rich tapestry of signs it suggests? I think, firstly, we have to humbly accept that we simply never will do this most mysterious meal full justice. But secondly, we must commit ourselves to trying. The bland, tasteless bread and wine that is served at many of the churches throughout the world is appropriate for the bland and tasteless act of weak theatre that communion has so often become. Here is a ritual, a commandment, an act of collective memory, an enactment that has so much power… and it demands that we don’t allow it to be neutered.

The memories that we are working with are loaded with paradox. We remember a man dying, a bloody sacrifice, an injustice… and commemorate the beginning of our reconciliation, the breaking of elements that draw us together. In these posts we have been thinking about the bread and wine acting as prompts for grief at our domestication of the earth, our spread of cultural mediocrity and blandness where there was such vibrant diversity. We have also seen how they suggest to us the breaking of the hunter-gatherer God. (Something I haven’t touched on is the symbolism of Jesus as the ‘lamb of God’ – Diamond makes the case for domestication of animals like sheep as a root cause of much human disease, and thus responsible for the wiping out of many times more indigenous peoples than European guns.)

I wonder then if the Hunter-Gatherer Eucharist ought to contain within it more ‘savage’ elements. Rather than eating fine bread, perhaps we might incorporate a battering of the wheat, a physical milling and breaking of the grain into flour. Rather than sipping fine wine, we might similarly trample grapes, and thus get back to the raw materials and processes involved in food production. Alternatively, we might celebrate with found or scavenged items. Freegans collect and eat discarded food from dumpsters behind restaurants. There is risk here, and dirt, and life.

The Hunter-Gatherer / Food Producer distinction does not simply exonerate the Hunter-Gatherer as some wild and truer way of life. Food production began in part because the hunters had exterminated most of the large, passive mammals that once roamed the earth. And food production has led us to have to get along, to be interdependent, rather than simply killing the stranger.

So we must also turn the Eucharist into a meditation on our own use of resources. Are we living lightly on the earth, or are we feasting from it? Are we drinking fine wine and ripping into fresh bread as exponents of a religion of power, or are we partaking in the body of Christ, the body of the hunted, the broken, the condemned, the poor, the misunderstood, the dying prophet who, like a grain of wheat, fell to the ground and had to be buried before bearing wild fruit?

I hope for one that my eating of this strange meal might lean more toward the latter, and somehow sow the seed within it, as Christ’s eating did, the downfall of power religion.

Thanks for journeying on this little series.

Technorati: Anarchy | Body of Christ | Guns, Germs and Steel | Hunter-Gatherer | Jared Diamond | Power | Agriculture

Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs and Steel, writes on page 273 that ‘With the rise of Chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encourage strangers regularly without attempting to kill them. Part of the solution to that problem was for one person, the chief, to exercise a monopoly on the right to use force.’

This is the double-edged sword of the rise of ‘civilization’: it was only through the formation of larger groups of people that humans began to experience ‘the other’ with wanting to end them, yet it was precisely these larger groupings that developed the technologies to colonize and destroy other groups. Much of the rise of ‘power religion’ can be seen as the deification of the chief who has a monopoly on the right to use force. And thus, with the rise of empires, it is God who is co-opted to excuse the exercise of massive force to subjugate others.

Into all of this comes Christ, and in his passion, the sacrament of the Eucharist. We have already seen in the previous post how “The Eucharist as we know it contains hidden within it symbols of our domestication of the earth and its resources and thus, connectedly, symbols of the domination of one life-style – settled food production – over another – hunting and gathering.” Now, we can see how it may also function as a critique of the co-option of God into justifying our empire-building. The ‘chief’ who has a monopoly on the use of force not only lays down that right, but experiences the full force of violence against himself by ‘the other’. The divine stranger came to us – the food producers, the settled city-dwellers, part of the Roman empire – and we killed him.

In the bread and wine then, we see this paradox: not only are the elements symbolic of our domestication of the earth’s resources, and thus a prompt for our grief at the subjugation of this planet we have been gifted, they are also symbolic of the breaking of Christ the divine hunter-gatherer. Hunted by us; gathering us back to himself.

At the beginning of Matthew 12, Jesus is castigated by the Pharisees for allowing the disciples to glean grain on the Sabbath. Gleaning grain was the right of the poor, a concession to the gatherers left marginalized by the farmers. At the death of this gleaner, the hunting of the gatherer by the powers-that-be, we see the Temple – the physical construction of the place of sacrifice, the locus of the chief who has a monopoly on the use of force – neutered by the ripping of the curtain.

The Hunter-Gatherer Eucharist is thus a complex meal that serves as a celebration of the deconstruction of the domination system that draws power and the use of force to itself, and an act of grief over our domestication of the earth’s resources, and simultaneously a celebration of the tearing down of that evolutionary reflex which demanded we kill the stranger.

I think there’s room for one more post: some practical ideas on how we might celebrate this meal in all its strange dimensions.

Technorati: Emerging Church | Eucharist | Guns, Germs and Steel | Hunter-Gatherer | Jared Diamond

“It was in the farm-based lands of Europe that technology was evolved more quickly, and, connectedly, monarchies and power-structures and empires began to grow…. and eventually develop ships that could sail to other lands to pillage them.”

And so, in this random series of musings bouncing off Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, we get to the Eucharist.

Diamond’s thesis is basically this: the reason that, to use one of his key examples, 160 Spanish could overthrow an entire Inca empire thousands of miles away, was because of the moves away from a hunter-gatherer to a crop/animal domestication system that led to developments in political organization and more advanced technology. (Poignantly, one of the key moments in the Spanish conquest of the Inca was when the Emperor Atahuallpa discarded a Bible offered to him by a Spanish Friar, who had insisted that they turn to Christ and learn how to live ‘properly’.)

As Diamond sets out, one axis of history has been of the displacement/domination of hunter-gatherers by those exploiting the land more intensively, whether that be for crops or precious minerals. As I was reading about the gradual intensification of food production, and the links this has had to empire-building and colonization, I began to wonder what the Eucharist meant in this light.

Bread is not the simplest thing to make. Leavened, it requires careful control of yeasts, and to make in any quantity, a good supply of grain and a means of controlled heat.

Wine requires more technology still. Large quantities of grapes need to be harvested, and these need proper storage to age and mature.

In other words, the Eucharist as we know it contains hidden within it symbols of our domestication of the earth and its resources and thus, connectedly, symbols of the domination of one life-style – settled food production – over another – hunting and gathering.

Perhaps this is benign, being so long in our history in the making, but I wonder if, in these times when our relationship to the planet is so fragile we might reflect on the Eucharist as a sort of lament for our abuse of the world, just as we might use it to lament for our breaking and slashing of God.

And I’ll try to expand on that in the next, and probably final, post in the series.

Technorati: Eucharist | Guns, Germs and Steel | Jared Diamond | Hunter-Gatherer

You might be wondering what the hell the last post was about, and where I’m going with this. Join the club.

In the previous post, I outlined Diamond’s basic thesis in Guns, Germs and Steel, and retold the story of Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca Emperor Atahuallpa. But what is the significance?

The pertinent question is this: how could 160 Europeans overcome 80000 Inca soldiers? The answer is simple: they’d domesticated horses, and had guns. But why had Europeans ended up doing this, and not the Incas? Were the Incas less intelligent?

Diamond’s answer is clear: absolutely not. Indeed, he contends that many ‘natives’ – in the way they interact with and understand their environments so intimately – are far more intelligent than the sedentary burger-munching Westerners who love to see themselves top of the pile. However, it is clear that different peoples have fared very differently in the 13000 years or so of human development. And the reason Diamond gives for that is simply this: some environments were more suited to domestication than others.

We all began as hunter-gatherers. But gradually, in some areas, some people began to domesticate wild plants and cultivate them, and domesticate wild animals to help with this work. Farming.

Once you begin to farm, of course, you pretty much have to become settled in one area. While hunter-gatherer communities had little need for political systems – everyone was pretty much in the same boat looking for food that didn’t store well – those in farming communities naturally developed political hierarchies. If you farm you can develop surplus, and this may require storage, or distribution, or communal work on irrigation.

And thus it was in the farm-based lands of Europe that technology was evolved more quickly, and, connectedly, monarchies and power-structures and empires began to grow…. and eventually develop ships that could sail to other lands to pillage them.

Which is where the Eucharist comes in in the next post.

Technorati: Agriculture | Atahuallpa | Civilization | Guns, Germs and Steel | Inca | Jared Diamond | Politics

The basic thesis, for those who haven’t read it, is that humanity, having developed out of the same group of lucky apes a long time back, has obviously developed in radically different ways in different areas, and, rather than attributing the fact that it was Europe that conquered Africa and the Americas (rather than the other way round) to innate racial differences, it is the environments that these peoples evolved in that led to the Europe being so ‘successful’ and powerful.

I’m not going to blog through the book, but one aspect of it – the link between the evolution of farming, food technology and power that Diamond establishes – has prompted in me a series of posts about this and the link to power religion, and the eucharist in particular. We’ll see how we go.

There is an extraordinary passage in the book detailing the meeting of the Spanish explorer Pizarro and the Inca Emperor Atahuallpa on 15th November 1532. Pizarro had with him perhaps 160 Spanish soldiers, and a priest. He was, of course, in the area on a mission from The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (King Charles I of Spain) and thus God’s missionary to this new world. Atahuallpa was secure in his position as undisputed monarch of the largest and most advanced state in this new world, and had perhaps 80,000 soldiers with him, all of whom were prepared to die for their God-King.

The accounts of the meeting were written down by the Spanish, and are thought to be pretty accurate. Inviting Atahuallpa to their camp, Friar Vicente de Valverde went forward and demanded that ‘Atahuallpa subject himself to the law of our Lord Jesus Christ and to the service of His Majesty the King of Spain.’ The text goes on:

‘Advancing with a cross in one hand and the Bible in the other, and going among the Indian troops to the place where Atahuallpa was, the Friar thus addressed him: “I am a Priest of God, and I teach Christians the things of God, and in like manner I come to teach you. What I teach is that which God says to us in this book.” Atahuallpa asked for the Book, and the Friar gave it to him closed. Atahuallpa did not know how to open the Book, and the Friar was extending his arm to do so, when Attahuallpa, in great anger, gave him a blow on the arm. [...] Then he opened it himself, and, without any astonishment at the letters and paper he threw it away.’

The Friar is incensed by this, and urges to Pizarro to attack, which he does. And those 160 soldiers, with their domesticated horse-steeds, and their guns, slay around 20,000 indians before sunset (see picture above), capturing Atahuallpa and murdering him after breaking a promise to free him.

How the hell did it come to this? I’ll try to get to that in the next post.

Technorati: Atahuallpa | Inca | Jared Diamond | Power | Guns, Germs and Steel | Spain