• Valson Thampu

When controversies break out the need to think, and think radically, becomes imperative. That is all the more so, when controversies persist and refuse to settle down. The persistence of a problem issues from the vitality of the truth that is denied in the extant scheme of things. Controversies are to our religious life what pain is to our physical life. In pain, life cries out for help. Through controversies, truth clamours for re-examination and possible correction.
In the religious context, mutual association is the core experience. Association is the principle of life. Not any association; but association that is fortified with diversities and enlivened with contradictions. In contrast, death is hopelessly, undeviatingly homogeneous. For strange reasons, homogeneity becomes the prime value when it comes to organized religious life. This is the result, largely, of the dominance of law. Law is to life what rocks are to flowers in a rock garden. You cannot have a rock garden without rocks. But you cannot have flowers just because you have worked hard to create an elaborate, magnificent rock garden.
The all-important question to ask, vis-à-vis the Mass-controversy is: Why did Jesus institute it? Clearly, it was envisaged as a substitute for his continued physical presence. That was why the accent fell emphatically on the ‘memory’ part of it: ‘Do this in remembrance of me’. Memory comes after physical presence ends. But memory also implies continuity. The person to be remembered sacramentally was the one who had been with them, as well the one who had promised to be with them to the end of the world. Memory of this kind has profound life-renewing power. No religious experience can be sacramental that is not quintessentially aligned to the logic of life and is not nutritive to life. A sacrament as a mere ceremony preserved via repetition is a cheap, even specious, substitute for the banquet of life it is meant to be. A ceremony may be maintained as a topic for contestation; not life. The truth of life is not theoretical. It is experiential. Life is to be lived before it is comprehended. So, in all things vital, faith must come first; but reason must follow closely thereafter. Faith and reason together form the matrix of life.
The sacramental experience that Jesus envisaged was centred on life. Life implies a harmony, an integration, of the different and the contrary. Two men or two women cannot serve as vehicles of life, no matter how passionately and sincerely they love each other. The association of the male and the female, together with the tensions this implies, holds the promise of life. But a legalistically organized arrangement is just the contrary: it is predicated on sameness, allergy to the different and intolerance to the contrary. So, we can be very un-sacramental in our zeal for the sacrament! The sacrament, the Holy Mass, can be spiritually authentic only if it is aligned to life, not to law. Law mandates strict and punctilious adherence to whatever is prescribed. No deviation in detail is admissible. Life needs to be a celebration. Freedom, not conformity, is akin to life. What greater celebration can there be than the breaking of the body and the offering of one’s life-blood by the One who has nowhere to lay his head? The sacrament is the ultimate Festival of Life centred on the One to whom life is not a matter of abundance of possessions, and godliness not a mere submission to legalese.
All through the Last Supper, in every bit of its detail, the experience Jesus envisaged involved the correlation of opposites. The spiritual mode of ‘opposition’ is ‘association’ or communion (if you’d rather prefer the sacramental synonym), not conflict. There is no deeper, or more powerful opposition-as-association than that of the bread and the eater becoming one, as you’d see if you were that bread imbued with self-consciousness. Jesus associated by opposition the Jewish idea of Rabbi-disciple relationship with his own redeemed and liberating idea of it, with Peter as the point of its sanctified tension. He was the one who experienced, at least expressed, the ‘shock’ of feet-washing most. Jesus conjoined the idea of life and the idea of death; something that he had already anticipated in: ‘Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life’ (St John 12: 25).
But the strongest and most historical-existential of the associative oppositions in the heart of this Sacrament of sacraments is between faith and reason. It is only via faith that the disciples enter the sacramental mode of being. But, entering it implies the duty to understand it. So, Jesus asks: ‘Do you understand what I have done to you?’ At this stage of the sacrament, faith and reason are reconciled: a reconciliation that we still find hard to accept, much less practise. This disability issues, as noted earlier, from the tendency to homogenize and sanitize religion of its life-quotient. It does not take, alas, much to turn the Sacrament of Life into a desiccated experience of ceremonial lifelessness.
Much depends on what we understand by the ‘body-and-blood’ metaphor. To the Jewish worldview, it denoted ‘personality’; in this instance the personality of Jesus. And not just his flesh or physical life. That was why undertones of cannibalism were totally absent from their consciousness of the experience. The sacrament is far more than the institution of a religious ceremony. It is the benchmarking of what Christian personality should be. To ‘remember’ Jesus sacramentally is to ‘abide in him and he in us’ (St John 15:4). Whether or not that happens can be known only by the fruits this state produces: the fruits of Jesus-like-ness. Surely, that is not helped by the need to have police protection for celebrating the Mass as and when! Such a contingency violates the life-death conjunctive interface that Jesus envisaged as the soul of this sacramental experience. It is far easier for the Host to be transubstantiated than for the fallenness of human nature to be re-oriented to mutual love, as envisaged in the only Commandment Jesus has given us (St John 13: 34).
The bottom-line duty of the church is to be a manifestation of life. It is impossible to be credible witnesses to eternal life in Jesus, if we are poor witnesses to life in Jesus in the present. Sacrament is the spiritual nourishment to sustain us in this basic calling. Nothing that works contrary to this mandate, no matter how doctrinally hyper-charged or historically valued, has any spiritual or sacramental value. Jesus is the Light of Life. Remembering him can be no less than a celebration of life, with love as its festive light.