The Integrated Organism and Behavior
Here’s my latest. The title is weird but I haven’t been able to think of anything better. Any suggestions?
Back in the fall my friends Brandon and Rachel asked for something on baptism and communion. I toyed around with cliches: cups and pieces of bread floating around in a really “spiritual” abstract cloud, or a glowing still life, but started feeling like that hardly has anything to do with the actual experience of baptism and communion. A bit facetiously I imagined how funny it would be if instead of the glowing goblet, I painted the plastic shot glass, and instead of a luscious hunk of homemade bread, the minuscule powdery wafer. But I didn’t just want to focus on the elements. I didn’t want to forget that this is something people do together and in some ways to each other.
It’s not a bad thing for sacraments to be recognized as social phenomenon and experienced, not in the ideal, but in their idiosyncrasies. It’s not a bad thing for sacraments to be less-than-transporting or even downright awkward and mundane. In fact it’s good and honest and maybe less manipulative. Because no matter how we feel about our participation in these social enactments, if we are Christians, we know that something beyond our corporate or individual perception is factually occurring. When we value these practices in their every-day actuality, I wonder if it makes it harder for us to compartmentalize them into the “spiritual” or “moral” realm. These experiences of water, food and drink are material just like our bodies and the rest of the world.
I used a biology textbook as the background type because I wanted to emphasize how we live in the factual physical world of our biological processes, of our cells and bodily functions and our mundane and complex social and behavioral environments. We wash, we drink, we eat. Then we do these things as Christians called the sacraments which are not some moral gloss on our real lives, but actually change the very cells of our bodies. That’s what we believe. We believe that in a mystical but completely factual and real way, when we are baptized we somehow are raised into a new kind of life (both biological and spiritual; bios and zoe), and when we take communion we actually ingest immortality and become part of a new social organism. In fact, we believe that some day we are going to get new physical bodies to live in a healed world. When we wash with this water, eat and drink, the cells of our bodies are different. Our behaviour is different…and we have a new kind of physical and social life together. This life is from God and to God but that doesn’t make it “out there” and unscientific. And it sure doesn’t make our day to day life ideal or grandiose. In fact it makes it more corporate and more engaged with the world around us because our materiality is grounded in it’s ultimate source and end. That’s what I think the sacraments are supposed to speak into being, that God became flesh and redeems our bodies to a new physical and social life. The the fact that it is from God is what makes it “spiritual,” not its immateriality.
